Colony, page 42
Garrison stumbled on a twisting root, and Arlene grabbed him by the shoulders before he could fall.
“Guess you think I’m some kind of sombitch, heh? Those were the guerrillas I helped to arm. It’s my money that got them here.”
“You’re not the only one who pumped money into the PRU,” Arlene said.
“I thought we’d be safe up here,” he mumbled, “away from them. Let ’em tear down the World Government... that was all happening down there. Couldn’t bother us, not up here....”
“It’s all right,” Arlene said. “They’re gone now. Maybe they won’t come back.”
“They’ll be back,” Garrison answered. “They’ll be back.”
“You were pretty damned wonderful back there,” Arlene said, holding him tighter. “You were willing to give them your art treasures in exchange for me.”
“I...” He glanced up sharply at her. Her face was glowing. Looking away, Garrison grumbled, “I lost my head for a minute. That’s all. Wouldn’t have done it if...”
“You did it,” she said. “You were willing to let them have your most precious possessions just to save me.”
“Don’t get maudlin about it,” he snapped.
“Of course not.” But she was beaming at him.
“Stop that smirking!”
Arlene laughed. “You’re not half as bad as you like to think you are, you know that?”
“Not half as smart, either,” Garrison said. “I was a stupid fool—a cold-blooded, stupid jackass of a fool. It’s one thing to watch them killing each other... but when they come up here and break into your own home...”
“We’ll be ready for them now,” Arlene said. “We’ll be protected.”
He shook his head wearily. “But there’s no place to hide! Where can we go that they can’t find us? There’s no place to hide, no place at all....”
~~~
A half-million years of experience in outwitting beasts on mountains and plains, in heat and cold, in light and darkness, gave our ancestors the equipment that we still desperately need if we are to slay the dragon that roams the earth today, marry the princess of outer space, and live happily ever after in the deer-filled glades of a world where everyone is young and beautiful forever.
One final doubt mars this vision of paradise. The hunters who killed the mammoths and outwitted the beasts were young men, in their prime. Few lived to be fifty. Those who reached that ancient age spent their days by the campfire while their sons and grandsons carried in the meat. Their business was to teach young men the wisdom of ancient ways.... They did not need flexible minds.
Their descendants do. The graybeards who sit around the council fires of nations today need more than ancient wisdom. They must be able to shed the thought patterns of their youth as quickly as an Ona drops his robe when he kneels to shoot....
Cannot these old men bring themselves to realize... that the passport to a new life is theirs for the asking, but only if they will discard the traditional caution of statesmen... and develop minds as bold and flexible as that of a hunter tracking a bear?
Can they not realize that the alternative to cultural change is not a perpetuation of the status quo, but the failure of a cosmic experiment, the end of man's great adventures?
—Carleton S. Coon,
The Story of Man, Alfred A. Knopf, 1962
~~~
FORTY-TWO
David stepped out of the monitoring office and walked along the spidery, steel catwalk that snaked between bubbling retorts the size of fuel drums and gleaming metal pipes that glistened with moisture.
Dim all working-area lights to one-third normal, he subvocalized into his implanted communicator. The light panels dimmed, turning the crystal wonderland of the laboratory apparatus into a shadowy, haunted forest.
All radio and phone communications outside this pod are forbidden, he ordered the computer.
Listening to the tinkling singsong of the computer’s response, David nodded to himself, satisfied that he could control all the pod’s systems with his implants.
The lights in the office gondola still burned at full brightness, and from his place among the shadows of the catwalk, David could easily see through the wide office windows.
There they are.
Leo, Evelyn, Hamoud, and Bahjat entered the office from the airlock hatch set into the ceiling. As they slowly climbed down the ladder to the office floor, David thought, So anxious to get the cure for themselves they brought no one else with them. They probably haven't even told the other PRU troops that they’ve been infected. Trying to avoid a panic.
The four of them looked around the office, Hamoud in obvious fury, Evelyn looking pale and exhausted. Leo slumped in the nearest chair. Only Bahjat was smart enough to peer out the windows, into the maze of tubing and hardware that filled the laboratory’s working area. She looked weak, bedraggled. But David saw that she noticed her pistol lying next to the phone console, and she picked it up.
Seal the airlock, David instructed the computer. Signal the spacecraft control center to retrieve the commutersphere.
Automatically, with only a few clicks and vibrations that none of the others paid any attention to, the pod was sealed and the spacecraft headed back for the main cylinder.
There’s no escape now, David thought, for any of us.
“Where is he?” he heard Hamoud shout.
Stepping out into a pool of light along the catwalk, David called, “I’m right here.”
Hamoud’s first reaction was to smash the window glass with his pistol. But the explosion-proof plastiglass merely bounced his hard-swinging arm back at him, nearly wrenching his shoulder.
“Leo!” David called. “You’re the man with the biggest problem. Come out here and let me show you where the drugs you need are produced.”
The black man was off his chair and at the catwalk door instantly. Hamoud raced over and tried to stop him, but Leo shoved him away and came out on the catwalk. The rifle was still in his hand.
“Better be the real stuff, man,” he rumbled.
“It is,” said David.
Hamoud stood framed in the doorway. “The cure! We want the cure!”
Half-turning so that the rifle held so casually in his huge fist just happened to point in Hamoud’s direction, Leo shouted back, “Me first, brother! I got worse problems than any of you!”
“Stay in the office,” David called to Hamoud. “I’ll bring you what you need when I come back.”
Leo shambled up beside David. “Okay, where’s my stuff?”
“Down this way,” David said.
He walked alongside the big man, carefully watching his sweating face and the tremor of his hands. It still won’t be easy to overpower him, David realized.
Deep into the crystal fairyland they walked. The steel catwalk twisted past towering stainless-steel cylinders, metal domes that hummed and radiated heat, strange glass tubes and twisting shapes that murmured and shimmered in the shadowy half-light.
“Here it is,” David said at last. “This is the section where the hormones are manufactured.”
Leo stood like a dark mountain and gazed all around him. His feet were planted solidly, spaced slightly apart, unconsciously prepared to move instantly in any direction. The rifle was pointing downward, but David knew he could swing it up and empty its magazine with the twitch of a finger.
“This is it?” Leo asked, his voice hushed, awed.
Metal and glass shapes twined around them. Plastic tubes of a dozen colors ran over their heads. Far below the catwalk’s narrow steel plates, huge open vats churned and bubbled. The whole area vibrated, gurgled, steamed. The air was thick, hot. Even David was sweating here.
David nodded. Prepare for emergency spin reduction, he subvocalized. Reduce pod spin to one-tenth current value on my mark.
Leo’s gaze settled back on David. “What you mean, this is it? This is what? How’m I gonna get this stuff into me... go take a bath in the vats down there?”
“No. The hospital will give you what you need,” David said. “That’s in the next pod over from here. I wanted you to see that we have the drugs. You can have them... after you’ve handed that gun over to me.”
Leo snapped the rifle up to point at David’s chest. “You tricked me.”
“I’m going to save your life, Leo. But you’ll have to surrender first. That’s why I wanted you away from Hamoud and the others.”
Leo cocked the gun with a heavy thumb. “I’ll shoot if I have to.”
“You’ll be killing yourself,” David said. “There’s no way out of this pod. It’s sealed tight and the sphere you rode over on has been sent back to the docks.”
“You white-assed son-of-a-bitch!”
Leo swung the rifle at David’s head. He ducked and dived into the black man’s legs, sending Leo sprawling. The gun went off. Glass shattered and bullets whined off metal.
Reduce spin to one-tenth. Mark! David commanded as he rolled to his feet and vaulted over the catwalk’s railing. Leo was on his knees, turning toward him, the rifle in both hands now.
Outside, the small rockets that corrected the pod’s spin flared brightly. The pod’s rotation suddenly jerked down to one-tenth of its previous level. The effect inside was to have the gravity suddenly reduced to a tenth of normal. It was like stepping into a high-speed elevator and having it suddenly drop out from under your feet.
David had planned his route well. He vaulted over the catwalk railing and fell in a long, dream-like arc until he reached out and grabbed one of the supporting beams that jutted out far below the catwalk’s surface. Hand over hand he made his way, monkey-like, scrambling up to the other side of the catwalk.
The sudden drop in gravity had lurched Leo completely off his feet. He went sailing off the catwalk and into empty air.
David hauled himself across the catwalk and launched his body after Leo’s. The black man saw that he was going to crash into a massive glass-walled retort and his old football instincts made him lower his head and hunch his shoulders. He banged into it heavily and bounced off, legs failing. But the rifle was still solidly in his hands.
David—practiced all his life in low-gravity games—pushed off the glass retort as easily as a swimmer reverses direction at the end of the pool. He sailed out after Leo and banged into the big man’s back.
“Let me help you, for God’s sake,” David said.
Leo was gulping for air, struggling, twisting around, trying to get the gun between himself and David.
“Ain’t never been a white-ass son-of-a-bitch a black man could trust!”
But David clung to his back. “I don’t want to kill you. You saved my life more than once. I want to save yours. If you don’t let me...”
Suddenly Leo screamed a blood-chilling animal howl of agony and fear that echoed off the shadowy glass and metal shapes that loomed all around them. He doubled over, blood bursting from his nose. The rifle spun away.
My God, he's having a heart attack!
David saw that their long leap through the empty air was taking them down into one of the boiling vats below. Leo was oblivious to everything except the pain torturing him. He thrashed madly as they fell, tearing at his chest and shoulder with his right hand.
Twisting their twined bodies around, David kicked hard enough to alter their trajectory slightly. They hit the side of the vat heavily, with David sandwiched painfully between the hot steel and Leo’s pain-wracked body. They slid the rest of the way down to the floor plates.
Leo lay there sobbing with agony, every muscle in his body knotting. David wormed out from under him, his own back bruised and stiff.
He could hear the rifle clattering as it still fell in a long, low-gravity glide. He needed that rifle.
But Leo was dying. He writhed on the metal flooring, nothing but a low, breathless moan escaping from his gaping lips.
I'll have to find the rifle later. With his communicator, David located the nearest first-aid station, raced along the dark, looming vats to yank it off its wall stanchions, and ran back to Leo. The communicator linked him to the pod’s emergency medical computer, and David quickly slipped an oxygen mask over Leo’s face, hyposprayed the proper drugs into the black man’s arm, and then snapped pressure cuffs over his legs to help pump the blood back up from his extremities.
“You’ll be all right,” David kept muttering. “You’ll be all right.”
“Damn... honkie bastard,” Leo gasped.
“Damned foolish black man,” David whispered back at him. “All this killing... what did it get you?”
“Its... our country, man.” Leo’s voice was muffled by the oxygen mask, but David was bent low enough over the black man’s face to hear him clearly as he injected more medicines directly into his chest. “Our country... not just theirs. But they wouldn’t let us have our share. We wanted... t’get... what’s ours.”
“By tearing everything apart? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Whaddaya know... about it... white-ass? You try... bein’ black... a couple hundred years...”
His voice faded away. His eyes closed. David never noticed as he continued to work feverishly over Leo’s prostrate form.
Bill Palmquist stood by the living room window and stared out at the neat rows of furrows that stretched as far as the eye could see. The tilled land was just starting to turn green with new shoots of corn. But the fields were untended. Not a person or a machine moved along the long, cultivated rows.
“Come back to bed, honey,” Ruth’s voice called from the bedroom. “You haven’t slept all night.”
“Okay,” he said. But he couldn’t move from the window.
Then she was beside him, her plain pink housecoat around her shoulders. She rested her head against his shoulder and he could feel the soft warmth of her body.
“Come on, honey. You know they told us to stay inside until the trouble was over.”
Bill shook his head. “But we can’t just let the crops sit there. We’ve got work to do. This is an important time in the growing cycle.”
“You wouldn’t leave me here all alone, would you?” Ruth asked.
He slid an arm around her. “Of course not. But...”
“Nobody else is going out to the fields,” she said.
“I know.... Look!”
Her body stiffened as she saw what he was pointing to. A terrorist, dressed in olive-green fatigues, was sauntering along the dirt lane that bordered the cultivated fields. From their fourth-floor window it was hard to tell if the guerrilla was a man or a woman. But they could see very clearly the long-barreled automatic rifle slung over the guerrilla’s shoulder.
“He’s heading for our building!” Ruth whispered, terror in her voice.
Bill held her closer, his mind cataloging everything in the apartment that could be used as a weapon. Nothing much against an automatic rifle.
But then he said, “Look, he’s staggering.”
“Drunk?” Ruth wondered.
“He doesn’t... he looks like he’s in pain. Maybe he’s hurt.”
The guerrilla suddenly sprawled facedown on the dirt lane. The rifle slid partway off his arm. He didn’t move.
Bill headed for the door.
“Lock yourself in behind me,” he said to Ruth, “and get on the phone to everybody in the building. I’m going to get that gun. Maybe we can at least defend ourselves.”
Bahjat awoke to a blazing headache. When she tried to sit up, the office swam wildly around her until she let her head sink back.
She had slept on a desktop with a thick notebook for a pillow. She felt hot, burning, the way she had felt back when she and David had been fugitives in Argentina—could it have been only a few months ago? It seemed like years. He had saved her life then. He had risked his own to save hers.
And now here she was, sick again. Dying. This time because of David. Lovers and enemies, Bahjat thought. Instead of bringing life to each other; we bring death.
Wearily, she sat up and swung her legs over the desk’s edge.
Evelyn was stretched out on the floor, asleep, breathing heavily, her face shining with perspiration. Hamoud sat in a chair, pistol in hand, and stared blankly out through the office windows to the maze of laboratory apparatus below them.
“How long did I sleep?” Bahjat asked. Her throat felt raw and dry. Tendrils of fire laced through her body.
“Several hours,” Hamoud said, not taking his eyes away from the windows.
“Still no sign of him?”
“Nothing. Not a sound, even, since the shots and the screams.”
Very carefully, Bahjat got down from the desk and stood on her feet. When the gravity had suddenly changed, the three of them had been flung across the room. Walking had become difficult; an ordinary step tended to lift one right off the floor.
“How do you feel?” Bahjat asked him.
Hamoud grunted. “I have a fever. But it is not serious. I am stronger than most... even stronger than the giant.”
“Perhaps he killed David.”
“No. David has killed him. That was the giant screaming, not your precious David.”
“What shall we do?” Bahjat asked, leaning back against the desk. She felt too weak to move far.
“You have a gun, don’t you?”
Bahjat nodded and put her hand on the holster at her waist.
“Well?” Hamoud insisted.
“Yes, I do,” she replied, realizing that he was not watching her.
He got to his feet, slowly, carefully, like a brittle old man. “I am going out to find the blond one. Whatever this disease is that he has infected us with, it has not hurt me as much as you others. I will find him and bring him back here.”
“Alive,” Bahjat added.
Hamoud’s lips twitched in a momentary smile. “If possible.”
“Otherwise, we will die.”
“You guard the Englishwoman. She might still be useful to us, once I capture him.”
Bahjat nodded again, even though it made her head thunder with pain. Hamoud stepped to the door and went through, out onto the catwalk. Holding the railing with one hand and his gun with the other, he started slowly along the metal walkway.
