The Shadow of Alpha, page 7
“Maybe,” Parric said, “they’re sick and don’t know it yet.” He tried not to sound smug, but Lupozny was getting on his nerves. “I may be dumb, but I’m not all that stupid. Coates said there was a spillover. If that thing has a life of, what did he say, less than forty-eight hours? Well, incubation might be at least that. The androids started acting strange yesterday morning—”
“So long ago,” Jessica said quietly, not interrupting.
“—and their insides are a great deal more sensitive than ours. According to Floyd, we’re fairly well protected, but if those people out there haven’t been attended to, then they’re dying on their feet and don’t know it.”
There was nothing for Lupozny to say, but his face left little for translation. Even if they had the opportunity to escape, they dared not; infection was still too dangerous a possibility. He grumbled, began complaining that he had left his camera outside, and started making noises about fetching it until Jessica told him to shut up and find a place to sit and count the blades of grass in the lawn.
Parric walked out to the kitchen to escape their bickering. Standing at the slit of a window, he tried peering through the deep and thick undergrowth that carpeted the hill beneath the trees, looking for signs of movement that might betray his … what, he wondered, should I call them? Attackers? Not likely, since they could hardly do much damage as long as the barrier remained powered. In a distorted sense, they might be called his guardians, keeping him inside, stifling any temptations he might have had to leave the Town and thus expose himself to the plague.
He chewed on his lower lip, then fisted a hand and scraped his teeth with one knuckle.
What if he were wrong in estimating the time of the plague’s effective infection? What if the androids had exhibited the only signs of disturbance there would be in this area?
Then they were trapped. Those men wouldn’t fall ill and leave them alone. Trapped. He thought it ironically funny that up until now he had never had any desire to return to something that once promised nothing more than the same drab passing of hours; but once his way out was taken from him, it was all he could think of.
I wish I were smarter, he thought. Maybe I wouldn’t be so confused.
“Trouble?”
It was Lupozny, standing on the far side of the back door, his eyes narrowed in an attempt to follow Parric’s line of sight.
“No, no trouble. Just thinking is all.”
“Relax, brother Parric,” Ike said. “There’s not much any of us can do about it. We’re all of us stuck. Us with our funny dummies and them with their fear and pride.”
Parric looked at the smaller man, but Ike found nothing fascinating in staring at trees and left the room.
Fear. Sure, he thought, that’s it right in the head. The question is, who’s afraid the most? Or did it really matter?
He watched the morning glare into noon, shrink the shadows toward him. He tried keeping his mind a blank to goad the time into moving faster toward night, but images of maps with spreading red, mourning black, intruded and made him think in spite of himself of the disasters his people had inflicted upon themselves in the name of faith, salvation, and the glory of the greater good.
If there was anything that should have truly united the race, it was the Alpha, but starships take too long going and coming. Though the crew was multinational, all countries claimed it for their own, the idea of sharing nebulous glory apparently as alien as the stars Alpha would hopefully visit.
There had been a few moments in the past thirty-six hours when Jessica had almost made him feel wrong in his condemnation of the race’s failures, but those times were scattered and bitterly interrupted by her continuing puzzling attitude toward him. She had almost solved his riddle when the Oraton men arrived, and he considered confronting her again before deciding against it. If it were important, he thought, she would tell him sooner or later.
Moving away from his post, he rubbed his eyes and stretched, not realizing how stiff he had become, how still he had remained throughout the afternoon. He was surprised, then, to see it was dusk.
“Yes, sir,” he said as he rounded the table, “the faithful watchdog. Arf.”
Chapter 6
Jessica was crouched on the lounge. The drapes were tied to one side and she was staring intently out into the street. Ike sat beside her, using the second window to watch the opposite end of Town. Parric stood in the entryway, frowning, thinking that perhaps they had fallen into the same dreamlike state as he, but their attitudes were wrong. Jessica was holding tightly to the edge of the lounge with one hand, the other working monotonously at the shank of hair she had fastened behind her head. It was an awkward position, but she seemed oblivious to discomfort. Ike, on the other hand, could not keep still. He bounced one foot on the floor, shifted his buttocks continuously as he ducked his head and stretched his neck as though trying to get a closer look at what he was watching.
A quick, second-thought look at the wall showed Parric the comunit was still on but the volume gone, the picture yet gray.
“Jess,” he started, but she hushed him and beckoned quickly.
Instinctively bending low, he almost crawled on his knees until he was able to squeeze next to her between the window and the lounge. She pointed, but he could not take his eyes from her face: white, her cheeks indenting as she sucked at air, her jaw thrust out, then in toward her chest.
“It’s happened,” she whispered, and Parric immediately thought the Oraton men were succumbing to the plague. When he looked outside, he wondered how much more wrong he could get.
Across the street in the yard directly opposite were Dorski and Fabor, struggling. They were standing, their arms clasped tightly around each other’s waists. Their faces were dead in the dimming light, as expressionless as the androids now lying impotent behind the clinic; yet he could sense the straining of manufactured muscles, the tearing that must be going on at joints and meticulously soldered junctures of intricate wiring.
“How long?” he asked, not realizing he was whispering, too.
“At least half an hour,” Ike said, his orator’s voice hoarse as if he had been screaming. “That’s when Jess first saw them. They came out of the house—”
“And just stood there,” Jessica finished. “All of a sudden they just grabbed and that’s all they’ve done since.”
“They’ll destroy each other,” Parric said, standing.
“What do you think you’re going to do, walk right up and separate them? Maybe talk to them like you always do?” Ike turned his head to let Parric see the full range of his contempt. “Sit down, brother doc. There’s nothing you can do but watch. You want to bet a little on the outcome? A week’s credits on the skinny one.”
Parric hesitated but Jessica lent him no guidance and it wasn’t long before he crouched again.
The androids had dropped to their knees, their balance threatened as they swayed from side to side, barely righting themselves to sway again. Searching further along the street, Parric saw the Warners standing with Mrs. Keller on her porch. They were in shadow, but their heads were turned toward the struggle.
Gone, he thought. I should have tried harder to get them to the clinic instead of letting them go.
Suddenly there was a report Parric first thought was a rifle firing at the fighters, but when his scanning of the hillside was fruitless and he returned his gaze to the lawn, he saw. Fabor bending Dorski backward. Jessica shuddered, turned away when Dorski’s clothes pulled out of his trousers and Parric could see the ripping split along his stomach.
“Broke his goddamn back,” Ike said. “Damn! I should have made that bet.”
Fabor let the still-moving Dorski drop to the ground, then paused only a moment before plunging his hands into the fallen android’s abdominal cavity, yanking fiercely until gleaming threads of three centuries of science spilled to the grass.
Parric heard a choking behind him, grimaced at a whiff of acrid nausea. He was sympathetic to Jessica’s reaction but could not let himself dismiss what had happened quite yet. He leaned as close as he could to the window, trying to see through the hazy darkness exactly what Fabor was doing. The android was still on its knees, pulling, examining, tossing away. Ike was swearing.
And suddenly Parric got to his feet.
“Now what?” the cameraman said.
“The clinic,” Parric said, heading for the kitchen. “Fabor’s indulging in a little self-realization. He’s learning in a few minutes what most of us couldn’t understand in a lifetime.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Ike followed him; Jessica, though still trembling from her shock, hurried after.
“If he learns too much about what makes himself tick, Ike,” Parric said, turning out all the house’s light from a main switch in the kitchen, “then he might try to activate the rest of the Town.”
“I thought they knew all there was to know about themselves.”
Parric shook his head. “How much do you know about the way you function? Not a hell of a lot, I imagine, but more than the average man; and that’s what those things are supposed to be, remember?”
“My god, what a fine bunch of idiots they were that turned those things loose.”
“Maybe,” Parric said, knowing he was stalling but unable to take the final step, “but we can’t argue about that now. You stay here with Jessica and for God’s sake don’t let any of them in. So far, Fabor’s the only one that’s gone bad. The others, though, aren’t or can’t be far behind. I’ve got to stop them from getting a tidy little army together.”
“What are you going to do?” Jessica said.
“Destroy the diagunit.”
“Hold it, brother,” Ike said, spitting a gum wad into his palm and tossing it into a corner. “If you do that, you won’t be able to put the rest out of commission.”
“Tell you what,” Parric said, “you go out there and order them down to the clinic, okay? You tell them old Doc Parric wants to see them and see how far it gets you.”
They were silent, then, and Parric used it to break away from Ike’s grip on his arm and open the door. “Wait for me,” he said, “but not for long. If they come at you, go for their eye first, then their hips.”
Not waiting to see if they understood, he closed the door and dropped to the grass, pressing tightly against the house as he crawled to the end of the house. It would be a few minutes more before the streetlamps snapped on, and in the fuzzy distortion of not-quite-evening, he hoped the hunters still prowling the hills would not be able to notice him. Plucking at his shirt absently, he silently thanked Fate for allowing him to keep his black clothes on. For once, they didn’t make him seem overly morbid.
He listened, then eased over to look out across the street. It was difficult to see anything clearly, but there were figures moving and the crackling of metal rubbing fragilely against itself. Still learning, he thought and pushed himself to his feet. He waited a second longer, then dashed across the lawn, hurdling a small bush, not stopping to see if he had been spotted. Ducking low, sprinting after a spill over an unseen obstacle, it was three blocks before his chest began to ache, his side beginning a throbbing he knew would soon twist into rippling pain. At the fourth block he pulled up to a walk, paying no attention to the houses since these no longer served as dwellings, watching instead for long minutes the street that had finally broken into islands of light. There were still no sounds of pursuit though he was positive his clumsy running had more than served as a beacon for those who had once been his friends. With one hand pressed tightly against his waist, he rested against the last house and stared across the side-street to the clinic yard. There was no movement that he could see, nothing besides the coursing of his blood that his ears could hear. Faintly the images of the deadened androids strewn in the yard became recognizable and, after telling himself that if he didn’t move now it was all over but the screaming, he ran for the back door.
Down the curb, over the thin layer of tarmac, up again, and he stumbled over a leg, sprawled with hands groping toward nothing. His shoulder struck a head. There was a century of panic as he struggled to release himself from the corpselike grip of one of Coates’ children, standing, stepping away, and falling again, this time to reach out and grip the unyielding breast of someone’s android wife. His palms, lips, forehead slick with perspiration as he rolled over onto his hands and knees and crawled to the door, unlocked it, and fell inside into a deeper blackness. He sobbed once, pulled his legs under him, and used the inner wall to prop him to his feet. Instinctively, he extended a hand to switch on the light, then checked himself and felt his way to the front.
There was nothing that he could see that might have been threatening. The Keller house was too far away and back in shadow, and he couldn’t tell if the porch was still occupied. The immediate area was deserted, however, and he gave himself a moment’s rest before working his way back into the office. Time, he realized, was not about to freeze the universe and pave his way to safety unaided. With motions he had thought many times he could do with his eyes closed, he dragged the diagunit from the closet and began feeling for the hatches that led to its heart. A simple matter of extracting a few wires, he thought, and tearing loose some circuitry. Simple. Too simple.
He heard the humming, realized he had been listening to it for too long without understanding what it was.
In the front, and its monotonic relentlessnes prevented him from guessing how many were coming.
Stepping back, he considered trying to escape at once, and the grinning lips of Lupozny burst from some barrel in his mind. Banging once against the side of his desk, he reached around and picked up the chair he had used when he spoke with Jessica the day she had arrived. He hefted it over his shoulder, waited until its weight began to pull it down, then forced the momentum with a push/pull of his arms.
Shattering.
He was thrown back against the wall as the diagunit’s power source protested the invasion, sparked, and popped in a dizzying array of minor explosions. Not waiting to see if he had been completely successful, Parric ran out the back, his way over the bodies of the androids sporadically lightened by the unit’s convulsive dying. Caution then dropped behind him when he heard a shout, another and another. Veering around the corner, he raced along the street, believing the hard surface would do him better than the give of the ground. Something hissed past him, struck a tree trunk, and clattered into his path, causing him to leap higher than necessary. He stopped, turned, and picked up a metal leg torn from a chair. He brandished it and turned to run again, stopped when he saw the Keller boy standing in front of him.
“Hi, son,” he said, “It’s only Doc Parric.”
The android didn’t answer, and Parric could hear the others running closer behind him.
“Only Doc Parric,” he said again, took two steps forward, and lunged, plunging the leg into the boy’s right eye. The android reached up, too late, to grab the weapon and Parric swung it against the other lens before jumping out of the range of its grasping.
As he had run from the men of Oraton, he now used the trees to protect himself from the fiercely thrown objects the androids had picked up. But he was twice struck in the back, a third time threw him to the ground. He called out, rolled onto his back and, without thinking, kicked out at the diving figure of Fabor. The android was thrown to one side but was on its feet before Parric could shake off the stinging that temporarily immobilized him. Dragging himself, tense against anticipated blows, he called out again, heard a door slam, and saw Ike race from the porch.
“Come on,” the cameraman said, blowing out breath as he tried to help Parric to his feet. “Come on, damn it, come on!”
After slipping once and nearly going down, Parric finally managed an arm around Lupozny’s waist and they stumbled in a three-legged race to the front door.
“Fabor,” Parric said when they reached the steps. “Be careful…”
Ike pushed him ahead and turned around. “Nothing. They’ve stopped.”
Parric wanted to argue, but Jessica had already come outside and was pulling him hysterically. A final shove from Ike and they were inside, dropping to the floor.
“Damn,” Ike said, shaking his head as he pulled himself to sit against the wall. “I don’t believe what I just saw. I don’t believe it.” He looked as though he were about to cry, but Jessica had already begun, tears washing her face, hugging Parric until he thought he would have to strike her to make her release him.
“Relax,” he finally gasped. “I’m all right.”
“I know,” she said, still crying.
“Brother Parric,” Ike said, “we’ve got to get out of here.”
“No. We can’t leave. Not now.”
He ignored Lupozny’s protests as he disentangled himself from Jessica’s arms and hurried into the living room where he dropped to the floor and looked out.
“But why?” Ike demanded, crouching beside him, tugging at one shoulder.
“You saw, idiot. We wouldn’t get two steps from this house before they’d be on us.”
“Listen—”
“Shut up and look.”
Mrs. Keller was standing on the sidewalk, her hands limp at her side, her face turned toward the house, leaving no doubt that she was watching. On the left-hand corner was Mr. Warner, on the right was his wife. Watching, unmoving, remaining far enough from the light to appear as though they were garbed in black. A smaller figure, Mrs. Keller’s son, wandered along the street, arms, hands, fingers wavering in front of him, a low wail trailing. Mrs. Keller didn’t move, and the boy passed on.
“He’ll hit the barrier,” Parric said, his voice low, “and probably get turned around. Unless one of them guides him, he’ll be completely helpless.”
Ike only grunted. “Say,” he said suddenly, pointing, “looks like you did all right for yourself.”
“I didn’t—” And Parric stopped, spotting the twisted Fabor sprawled where they had fought. “I couldn’t have, Ike. I only kicked at him once, and I was lying down.” He put one hand to the glass, wiping, hoping the movement would bring him an answer, but the android remained as he saw it, the clothes shredded at the hips, its head ripped off.
