Colony, page 34
Her eyes searched his face. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
Laughing, “Why d’you think we’re up here in Island One, with all these fancy biology labs? If they can tinker with genes and make a kid who’s physically perfect, they can help an old man get young again.”
“They can?”
“They will,” Garrison said, all traces of humor gone from his voice.
~~~
Dr. Cobb welcomed us personally to Island One and spoke to each of us individually for a while. Of course, in the case of Ruth and me, he spoke to the two of us, together. He got a priority call through to California and helped us to track down Ruth's parents, who are okay and living with relatives for the time being up near Santa Cruz. L.A. is a mess.
Most of us were pretty scared and glum about the rebellion back home, but Dr. Cobb tried to cheer us up by pointing out that Island One is our home now, and we have a very bright future ahead of us.
He advised Ruth and me—in our private talk with him—to start reading up on the asteroids. He said there were gold mines waiting for us out beyond Mars. And not just gold, but minerals and metals that would be far more valuable and important. I told him I was a farmer, not a miner, but he laughed and asked me if I didn't think miners would need food to eat while they're out there nearly four times farther away from the Sun than we are now.
—The journal of William Palmquist
~~~
THIRTY-THREE
Evelyn burst through the double metal doors with the rest of the crowd and headed down the flagstone path that led toward the dock. It was beginning to drizzle and the gray clouds were getting thicker, but no one seemed to mind. Already she could hear the footsteps of the foremost in their group clumping on the wooden stairs that scaled down the riverbank’s steep side and connected with the dock.
Evelyn stopped at the top of the stairs. The boat was already tied up at the end of the dock and its passengers were walking slowly up toward the laboratory.
Hamoud was striding alongside a small, slim, dark woman. Scheherazade, Evelyn knew. Hamoud wasn’t touching her, but it was obvious that he claimed her for himself. His attitude toward her was something Evelyn hadn’t seen in him before: no longer the surly, moody, domineering Moslem male. He was nodding and speaking with her, teeth flashing in a boyish smile, shoulders slightly stooped in deference to her diminutive stature.
But where was David? A huge black man walked behind Hamoud and Scheherazade, so big that the dock seemed to bow under his weight.
And beside him... Evelyn stared. It couldn’t be David. But it was! Lean, bearded, his face colored a darker brown than she would have thought possible. And his hair was dyed brown, too.
But Evelyn knew that walk, the way his arms swung at his sides. It has to be him. He looked up in her direction, and even at that distance she could see that he was indeed David—but changed. His face was haggard, and his eyes had lost their innocent sparkle. He looked straight at Evelyn without showing the slightest sign of recognition.
Then she noticed the two black youths walking behind David, with rifles in their hands, and remembered that David was their prisoner.
David saw her standing up at the top of the stairs and recognized her honey-blonde hair. Evelyn! What's she doing here?
He flicked his eyes back toward the massive form of Leo, who had just reached the bottom of the stairs. Is she a prisoner, too? How'd she get here? David wondered.
Then he saw Bahjat and her friend, her countryman, her fellow guerrilla, her lover climbing the stairs together, side by side. He looked again at Evelyn. She was staring at him, waiting tensely as he came up the stairs toward her.
If she’s a prisoner, would they let her out here to watch us land? Nobody seems to be guarding her, or even looking in her direction. Could she be one of them?
He reached the top step, and she was standing there.
“David?”
“Evelyn,” he said.
“It is you!”
He reached out his hand and she took it, stepped next to him, and slid her arm around his waist. Up ahead of them, neither Bahjat nor Hamoud saw what they were doing.
“What’s happened to you? How are you?” Evelyn asked. David said, “I was going to ask you the same thing. Are you... on their side?”
“A bit,” she replied. “I was actually trying to get to you. How did you get away from Island One? What have you been up to all these weeks?”
He laughed. “Believe it or not, I was looking for you.”
She clung closer to him and smiled happily. “Tell me all about it.”
Nodding, he answered, “It’s a long story.” And there are parts of it that I can’t tell you, he realized.
Looking up at the laboratory building, David saw that it was a low, ground-hugging, two-story structure. Strictly efficient, with no decorations marring its sleek, window-walled sides. Flat roof with a yellow windsock drooping from a short mast. Helicopter pad up there, David concluded.
Evelyn chattered about Hamoud and the worldwide PRU organization as the group went inside the building and walked into the large, open central area where long cafeteria tables were set up in perfect rows. Stainless-steel counters and serving trays, hot plates, coffeemakers, and grills stood off to one end of the big, two-story-high area. The entire far wall was a window that looked out on the drizzling gray landscape of bare trees and a nearly empty parking lot.
Leo and Hamoud stood off in one corner with Bahjat between them. The huge black man made the swarthy Arab look stunted, and Bahjat looked like a waif beside them. It quickly became apparent that the two men didn’t agree on something or other.
Power struggle? David asked himself as he sat at one of the tables. Evelyn went off and came back a moment later with stale sandwiches and tepid, synthetic coffee. David ate gratefully, but he kept his attention on Leo and the Arab.
“The Arab... he’s the one they call Tiger?”
“Yes,” Evelyn said. “His real name is Hamoud, and he’s Kurdish, not Arab.”
Leo’s been the boss in this area, but Hamoud is higher in whatever internal organization the PRU has, David thought. He thinks he’s the boss.
“Be careful of him,” Evelyn said in a low voice. “He enjoys killing.”
David nodded, then turned and counted the others sitting or lounging on their feet in the cafeteria area. Looks like more of Hamoud’s people here than Leo's. It's going to be an interesting time.
Then he noticed that Bahjat had started to do the talking. She spoke more and more, and both men lapsed into silence.
Despite himself, David grinned. She's going to be the boss, after all. I’ll be damned. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised.
Their meeting finally broke up as David munched the soggy sandwiches. Bahjat went off with Hamoud, and David felt his innards burning. But Leo was heading for him like a brooding black mountain looming closer and closer.
“Okay, spaceman, we gonna find you a safe place to stash your ass.”
Evelyn got to her feet beside David. “I’ll see you later,” she said.
David nodded and followed Leo.
Not so bad, David decided after a shower and shave. Some people on Earth live pretty well.
The laboratory’s upper floor included a few one-room apartments. Whom they had been built for, or why, was a mystery to David. But they were comfortable and frilly furnished, with a bathroom full of soaps and shaving gear, a tiny refrigerator/freezer-stocked with frozen foods, a microwave cooker, and even a TV set.
A knock sounded at his door. He crossed the carpeted room in four strides and grasped the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn. Locked from the outside.
“Who is it?” David called.
“Evelyn.”
“The door’s locked.”
A key scraped in the lock and the door swung open. David saw that an Arabic-looking youth held the key. And a carbine. Evelyn was empty-handed.
David reached for his shirt, took it off the bed where he had dropped it, and pulled it on.
Evelyn smiled at him. “I thought you’d want to come down to the cafeteria for dinner. Some of the local people just brought in a whole carload of pizza and beer.”
Tucking the shirt inside his pants, David said, “Would you rather eat here? There’s food in the freezer. We’d have some privacy.”
The guard slammed the door shut without waiting for Evelyn’s answer. They heard the rattling of the lock.
She laughed. “I suppose that decides the matter.” She was wearing a simple light green dress that showed off her coloring very well. She watched David carefully, as if seeing him for the first time.
“You look more like your old self,” she said. Instinctively, he put a hand to his chin. “Oh, you mean... I shaved.”
“And your skin and hair are back to their old colors, almost.”
“I washed off the tint. No need for a disguise now, I guess.”
“You’ve lost weight, though. You look... harder.”
“Yes, I suppose I do.” He gestured toward a sling-back chair near the window. “Sit down and enjoy the sunset while I pop something into the cooker.”
Going toward the chair, Evelyn said, “This is like old times—up in Island One.”
“Old times,” David echoed.
“A lot has happened since then,” Evelyn said.
“Damned right,” he agreed fervently.
Turning back toward him, Evelyn said, “Tell me about it. I want to hear all of it.”
“Sure,” he said, trying to sort out in his mind how much he actually could tell her. Stalling for time, he asked, “But tell me, how did the PRU arrange to make this research laboratory its local headquarters? How well organized are these people? What are they planning to do with us?”
Evelyn sank back into the chair. “I don’t know what Hamoud’s going to do next. I doubt that he knows himself. Except that it will have to be something bigger, more spectacular, than Leo’s urban offensive.”
“Bloodier, you mean,” David said from the tiny kitchen alcove.
“Most likely,” Evelyn said. “He’s in love with headlines, Hamoud is, and he feels that Leo and Scheherazade have had all the publicity. He wants his share.”
“God help us.”
“Exactly. He’s a born killer.”
“This research lab—it seems to be part of Leo’s setup.”
“It is,” Evelyn replied. “This laboratory has been supplying him with drugs that he needs.”
“Narcotics?”
She shook her head. “No. Hormones, steroids. I don’t know the chemistry, but apparently he’s been using them since his college days to maintain his size and strength. Now he needs them just to live. He’ll collapse without them.”
“So that’s why we’re here,” David said.
“But there’s a fly in the soup. The laboratory has been closed down. And all the drugs that Leo needs have been carefully removed from here. The place has been stripped of everything that Leo needs—deliberately.”
David slid two frozen dinners into the microwave cooker and let the door slam shut.
“He’s been tricked,” he said.
Evelyn nodded. “He’s been assassinated. Without those chemicals, he’ll die.”
Leo stalked down the aisle between the lab benches and advanced on the terrified technician.
“Whaddaya mean, they took it all?”
The technician was a Cuban, almost as tall as Leo, but not even one-third of his girth. His face was long and droopy, like a hound’s. His skin was the color of cigar leaf. He had been the PRU agent inside the laboratory for many months.
“They took out most of the medical supplies when they closed the laboratory Wednesday,” he said in the unaccented English he had learned at the university. “All the steroids, the adrenocorticals, the whole stock of hormones—all of it.”
“Son-of-a-bitch.” Leo’s fist closed around a section of metal tubing standing on the lab bench at his side. The tubing bent, then cracked. “I gotta have that stuff! Got to!”
“I didn’t know,” the technician said, his eyes on Leo’s massive hand, his voice trembling. “We got orders to ship everything out. It was all sent to Island One. Half the staff is going up there, they told us.”
“Island One? They shot my stuff off to Island One?”
“The orders came from Mr. Garrison himself.”
“From Houston?”
“No, from Island One. He’s up there now.”
“That bastard!” Leo swung his tree-trunk-sized arm through the metal-and-glass spiderwork that covered the lab bench. It shattered. The technician hopped backward, away from the spraying shards of glass.
“That mutha-fuckin’ bastard!” Leo roared. “You know what’ll happen to me in a couple of days if I don’t get those steroids? Garrison knows! He set me up! That muthafuckin’ son-of-a-bitch! He let me do the fightin’ for him and then he figured he’d just let me die by turnin’ off my supply!”
Bahjat sat in the cafeteria and tried to eat the doughy, spicy pizza. But like the other two dozen men and women there, she was watching the big, wall-sized TV screen and the Slaughter of the Innocents.
The TV cameras were cutting from Los Angeles to New York, stopping briefly at every beleaguered city along the way. The guerrillas were being hammered into a bloody pulp everywhere. The real, organized battles had already ended in most of the cities. Now it was the local police, the National Guard, the regular Army, and hordes of tightlipped vigilante mobs, their faces stark with hate and anger, rounding up every non-white they could find.
“Suspected guerrillas are marched off to a detention center,” the unseen TV commentator said cheerfully as the screen showed lines of black youths city blocks long, hands on their heads, trudging the rubble-filled streets between bayonet-wielding men in uniform and heavily armed tanks and armored cars. The picture cut to the Kansas City Municipal Stadium, filled with blacks of all ages, mothers with babies trailing after them, weary old men sitting with their heads between their knees.
“All across the nation,” the commentator went on, “the forces of law and order have reestablished themselves. How many revolutionaries have been killed in the battles is not yet known, although casualties among police, National Guard, and Army units have been very high. Civilians, too, ordinary citizens, have been murdered by the thousands....”
Bahjat got up from the table, left the unappetizing mess in its plastic wrapping, and headed for the room where they had locked up David.
David and Evelyn were sitting together on the soft, wide foam couch, watching the TV set that had been built into the plastic-paneled wall. The Battle of New York was now on the screen. Regular U.S. Army units were grinding through Manhattan, street by bloody street, building by burning building.
Teams of infantrymen were pulling kids out of the doorway of a building where they had been crouching. The soldiers prodded the kids into the middle of the street with their bayoneted carbines. A massive olive-green tank poked its gun barrel toward the building and fired point-blank. The wall exploded and collapsed in a billowing cloud of dust that filled the screen.
“They’ll kill everyone in the city,” Evelyn said, her voice hushed with shock.
“They’re taking some prisoners,” David said. “Not many. But they’ll want some for interrogation, to find out how this whole thing could have started.”
Evelyn stared at him, ignoring the firefight now on the TV screen. “You were there when it began?”
Nodding, “We had just flown into New York. The PRU isn’t much on organization, but they have people all over Latin America... and in the States, of course.”
“And how did you get to the boat?”
David told her in as few words as possible. The TV kept claiming his attention. He realized that they were not showing any scenes in which Army soldiers were hit or killed. It's not being shown live, he knew. The government must be editing every centimeter of the tapes, letting the public see only victories.
“My God, what you’ve been through!” Evelyn said.
He turned to her. “You told me to see the world. I’ve seen some of it.”
She reached up and touched his jaw lightly with her fingertips. “And it’s changed you. You’re not the same person you were on Island One.”
“How could I be?”
Her sea-green eyes were searching his. “You’re... harder, but not bitter, I don’t think. You... you’re like a piece of forged steel now. You’ve been through the hottest flame and you’re stronger for it.”
David shook his head. “I don’t feel any stronger.”
Her hands slipped over his shoulders and twined in the hair on the back of his neck. “You are, though. I can sense it.”
As if of their own volition, David’s hands went to her waist. She slid closer to him, her body touched his, and he could smell the faint salty tang of her unperfumed skin, feel her breath on his neck.
“We’ve both come a long way,” Evelyn whispered, her voice husky and trembling. “We’ve found each other, at last.”
“It’s too late for that, Evelyn,” he said.
A hint of pain crossed her face. “No, don’t say that....”
He kissed her, gently, because he didn’t know what else to do. She clung to him, locking herself against him.
“If you knew what I’ve been through...” Evelyn was nearly sobbing.
David heard something scratching somewhere—a metallic sound, just barely audible over the shooting and explosions flickering across the TV screen. He pulled away slightly from Evelyn and turned to see...
Bahjat was standing in the doorway, staring at them, her expression unreadable, a flat mask of self-control that turned her beautiful face into the cold, dead features of a bronze statue.
David started to get up from the couch, but Bahjat turned and swept out of the room. The grinning Arab guard out in the hall pulled the door shut and locked it.
~~~
