The Chromosomal Code, page 3
“Okay,” Jason said, “Then he was telling the truth. Come on, let's get back to the ship; I'm getting cold.”
“Sissy,” Jim muttered.
“Come on, Johnny,” Joey said, gesturing to Stark-man.
“Where to?”
“To the ship, of course, so we can take you back to Brazil.” He evinced surprise, but no trace at all of annoyance or hostility.
Peculiar as the search party's behavior might be, there was no sign of coercion, no implication of force; Starkman felt sure enough of himself to ask, “Why?”
Totally befuddled, Joey replied, “Why what?”
“Why do you want to take me to Brazil?”
“Because that's what we're here for!”
“But why should I come with you? Why would I want to go to Brazil?”
“Huh?” Joey stared at him. “I don't know; 'cause it's warm, I guess, and there's other people.”
“What if I don't want to go?”
All six were staring in open-mouthed amazement. “You've gotta go!” Joey yelled. “You're supposed to want to! Don't you want to see Brazil?”
“Not particularly.”
“Look, you gotta come with us! If you don't we'll get in trouble, and I bet you'll get in trouble, too.”
“Get in trouble with whom? Who sent you here?”
“God, you're suspicious! The Galactic Empire sent us, of course, and we could get in trouble with the Governor. Who else?”
“I never heard of the Galactic Empire, and I don't know what governor you're talking about.”
“Oh.” Joey was momentarily silenced.
“Well, yeah,” he said after some thought, “I guess you wouldn't, living out here in the snow like this. I guess you haven't even got a TV, or anything, do you?”
“Not one that works.” Starkman's throat was beginning to feel dry and tired; he hadn't spoken so much in several years. Joey's voice seemed unnecessarily and painfully loud, as well.
“Well, see, the Galactic Empire runs everything. They run the whole world here on Earth, and all the rest of the galaxy, too.”
“But who tells you what to do?”
“Us? Oh, we work for the Governor!”
“Who's the Governor?”
“He's the boss of Earth, of course! He runs everything here. It was the Governor who brought us all to Earth in the first place.”
“What's this governor's name?” Starkman's continued questions served two purposes; he was gradually compiling Joey's story, in order to have some idea what he was up against and to be able to spot contradictions, but he was also delaying in hope that something would arise to prevent his abduction – despite their outward innocence, he had little doubt that he faced abduction.
“I don't think he's got a name; he's just the Governor.”
“Everybody's got a name,” Starkman insisted.
Joey looked puzzled. Before he could come up with a response, Mike spoke for the first time.
“I'm gettin' cold, Joey,” he said. He had an unpleasant tenor whine.
“So'm I,” Jason agreed.
“I'm goin' back to the ship,” Mike said. He turned and began trudging off through the snow.
“Hey, come back here!” Joey yelled.
“If he don't want to come, I'm not gonna stand around and argue,” Mike called back. “He can stay here and freeze if he likes!”
“Oh, hell.” Joey looked about and saw that his four remaining companions were obviously on the verge of following the deserting Mike. “Mister Starkman, you gotta come with us!” he pleaded.
“Nope,” Starkman replied. “I'm staying here.”
“Maybe we should drag him,” Bobby suggested.
There was halfhearted agreement from the others.
“Okay, you guys grab him,” Joey said.
Starkman braced himself for a struggle, but no one moved.
“Come on!” Joey insisted. No one moved, himself included.
“You do it,” Bobby said at last. “He's bigger than me.”
This was not at all obvious. Starkman would have guessed that Bobby was a pretty even match for him, perhaps as much as two kilos heavier than himself, with similar height and build but better fed. He suppressed a grin; he might, he thought, have a chance after all.
“Yeah,” Joey said, “but there's five of us!”
“You do it,” Bobby repeated.
Joey looked around and saw no sign of cooperation; the others averted their eyes rather than meet his gaze. “Okay,” he said at last, “but you guys have to help me drag him.”
There was a lukewarm chorus of agreement. Joey stepped forward and reached out for Starkman's arm.
Starkman pulled the arm away and brought his other hand up in a fist. Without really meaning to, he caught Joey with a good solid blow under the chin, knocking the young man backward; he landed hard, sitting in the snow.
Starkman stepped back and raised both fists, ready to strike out when the others jumped him, but the attack he expected never came; instead the other four backed off and watched.
Joey sat rubbing his throat; he looked up at Starkman, and his expression shifted from astonishment to rage. “You hit me!” he said.
Starkman said nothing.
“I'm gonna kill you!” Joey screamed; he surged up onto his feet and charged forward, both fists swinging wildly at air.
Starkman laid him out flat on his back with a simple punch straight to the nose, and felt a twinge of pity and guilt; the kid had left himself wide open, putting up no defense at all. Joey's own blows, the very few that landed, had no power behind them; Starkman had been hit harder by the snow that fell on him from the pines.
Joey sat up again, a trace of blood running from his nose and vanishing into his bristling mustache. “I'll get you!” he whined. “I'm gonna go and tell the Governor and come back here and kill you! You shouldn't've hit me like that!”
Starkman remained silent. He stood, fists clenched, almost trembling with an unspent rush of adrenaline, as Joey got to his feet and limped off toward the ship. The remaining four looked from Joey to Starkman and back; it was plain that they would soon follow their comrades and leave him alone. Starkman could see that Mike had almost reached their immense vessel. He intended to stand where he was and watch them leave, like any animal defending his territory; once they were all back on the ship he could relax.
Before any of the four could take a step, however, a voice spoke from somewhere, saying calmly and clearly, “Wait, please.”
Startled, Starkman looked about wildly. There was no sign of anyone but himself and the search party.
The voice spoke again, still calm; it had an air of careful control, and was pitched so that he could not decide if it was male or female.
“Mister Starkman, please reconsider.”
“Who's speaking?” he demanded.
“This is the ship's commander.”
“Where are you?”
“I am on the ship.”
Starkman relaxed slightly, and chided himself for reacting so strongly to what was apparently just a sophisticated public address system. The speaker could hear him, so there was some sort of directional microphone involved as well, but it was still nothing supernatural.
“What do you want of me?”
“We want you to come aboard the ship and accompany us to our headquarters in Brazil. We mean you no harm.”
The voice was inhumanly placid. Starkman wondered what kind of person the commander was – if it was actually the ship's commander speaking. He had a moment of wild fancy that the commander wasn't human at all.
“Why?”
“We are carrying out our instructions. I do not know the reason we were so instructed. I do know that no harm will come to you if you cooperate. Our superiors do not wish to harm any human being. However, we have been instructed quite emphatically that we are to bring back every person we find in this area, with no exceptions. If we allow you to remain here we will not have done as we have been instructed.”
Starkman was sure that the speaker's native language was not English; either that, or he or she had been reading from a prepared script. No one accustomed to speaking English would have phrased his speech so precisely and delivered it in so steady a way.
“I don't care whether you do as instructed or not,” he retorted.
There was silence; the voice did not answer him.
When the silence continued and became awkward, the four remaining young men began shuffling their feet, snuffling and glancing at one another, but none of them made a move either toward Starkman or toward their ship.
Finally Starkman's patience ran out. He turned away and started to leave.
Before he had completed his first step there was a fierce hissing, and a cloud of steam rose around him. He froze, then looked at the ground whence the steam had come.
Two neat grooves were cut in the snow, one on each side of his feet. Each was a centimeter or so wide, and deeper than he could see readily. Tracing the lines forward they ran on into the row of pines; he could see a wisp of smoke curling up where one intercepted a low-hanging branch. Following them back they ran straight through the group of strangers, dividing them two to each side, and pointing directly back toward the ship.
The calm voice spoke again. “We cannot allow you to leave, Mr. Starkman. That was a warning shot. If you attempt to depart again I will be forced to use the same weapon on your feet. I have been forbidden to kill any human being, but I am no longer forbidden to injure or incapacitate if necessary. Please do not continue to be uncooperative.”
Starkman looked at the slices through the snow. He had seen no light, but he guessed that they had been made by a high-powered laser or something very similar. Even if his feet were more durable than snow, he suspected that they could be very effectively flash-fried.
“What about my home? Can I bring my belongings?” If he were allowed to move beyond the pines, on any excuse, he thought he might be able to make a break for it and get beyond the weapon's range.
“I am sorry, Mr. Starkman, but we cannot take the time to fetch your belongings. I am sure that no one will disturb them, and I have no reason to believe that you will not be permitted to return here in the future. Should you prefer not to return in person, perhaps someone could be sent to fetch them. At present, however, we cannot do so.”
Frustrated, he turned back toward the ship. He was not accustomed to being thwarted; for several years now he had lived alone and always had his own way. It was aggravating to realize that he could no longer rely on ever again having his own way.
“Damn,” he muttered. He began stalking through the snow toward the ship, taking what amusement he could from stamping in the grooves the weapon had cut in the snow for as far as they ran. Twenty meters from where he had stood they rose up out of the snow and vanished, and he was left without even that inadequate outlet for his emotions.
The four young men followed him, floundering in the snow.
Joey and Mike had already gone aboard, and the other four were unable to keep up with him, so Starkman found his way by following their tracks rather than being guided. He did not pause when he first reached the side of the ship; he was in no mood to admire the immense machine that towered over him. Instead he marched on, glowering down at the snow. He followed the tracks for the entire length of the craft – it was at least two hundred meters, he judged – and on to the base of a ramp that hung down from the underside of the ship's bow.
At the foot of the ramp he paused, and it sank in for the first time that the ramp itself was immense, in proportion with the ship. It was a dozen meters across and twenty meters long. Since the main body of the ship was lying flat on the ground, not raised up, only the curvature of its hull raised the ramp's upper end above the lower. This provided an extremely shallow slope. There were no joints, seams, welds, or rivets visible anywhere. The upper surface was flat, a single sheet of grooved metal, and the underside was curved so that when the ramp was raised it would blend evenly into the hull; as a result its thickness varied from half a meter to more than a meter, yet it all appeared to be a single solid chunk of metal.
Starkman looked at the ramp and found himself remembering old pictures of tanks being unloaded from landing craft, and jeeps driving out of the noses of aircraft. The hatch at the top of the ramp was in scale with the rest, and more than wide enough for such vehicles. A small army could march up and down such a ramp and through such a hatchway without breaking formation.
He recalled his earlier guess that the vessel might be a warship of some kind. What but a military transport, he asked himself, would need so massive a ramp and so broad a hatch? The laser weapons that had boiled the snow around him were proof that the ship was armed.
What, he wondered, was he getting into?
The four others came up behind him. One of them – he had already forgotten their names, but he thought it might be Jason – said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Get on board!”
Reluctantly, Starkman walked up the ramp, looking about himself.
The well into which the ramp would lift was all smooth, bare metal; there were none of the labels or machines he had half expected, nothing to give a human scale anywhere, nor any sign of the builder's nature or native tongue. He felt dwarfed by the blank, shining expanses. The ship could have been built for elephants as easily as for humans, from what he could see of it.
The hatchway at the top slid open as he approached, revealing Mike and Joey waiting in the corridor beyond. As Starkman walked deliberately close to him, Joey shied away as if expecting another punch in the nose; Starkman resisted the temptation to shout “Boo!” in his face and watch him jump. Mike noticed the action and gave his companion a look of disgust.
“Wipe your nose,” he said; then he turned to Starkman and gestured. “This way,” he commanded.
Starkman wondered how Mike had so quickly become Joey's superior; he watched as Joey awkwardly brushed at a slow oozing of blood that was clotting in his mustache.
With Mike in the lead and Joey bringing up the rear, he was escorted down the vast empty corridor. It was six or seven meters high and almost as wide; Starkman wondered why so much space had been wasted on a simple passageway aboard an airship – if that was what this was – where weight and space were presumably at a premium.
The floor and walls were all bare metal, completely unadorned; light was provided by three strips of glowing white plastic, one along the center of the ceiling and one along the top of each wall. Starkman was unable to determine the nature of the light, whether the plastic strips were merely covers or whether they themselves glowed; they were all far overhead, where he could not get a good look at them.
There were hatchways along each side of the corridor at infrequent intervals, and one formed the end of the passage; each was, like the corridor, six or seven meters in height and five or six meters in width. Starkman had a curious feeling of having shrunk; he imagined himself a mouse in a warehouse as he passed by the first of the gargantuan portals. If he had not already convinced himself that his captors were as human as he was, he might have believed that this ship was designed for aliens – very large aliens.
As they approached the second hatchway on the left it slid aside, though he had seen neither of his two escorts do anything that might have triggered it. Mike stopped before the open door and gestured for Starkman to enter.
He stopped and gazed in.
The room beyond the hatchway was large, easily a dozen meters square, and its high ceiling, fully as high as the corridor's, gave an impression of vastness. The walls were more of the bare, plain metal, and strips of plastic provided light on all four sides; ceiling and floor were lined with a thin layer of something slightly spongy. There was a door in the center of each of the four walls; though only the one through which he peered was so absurdly large, the others were not quite normal, each being about four meters square. The remaining wall space was lined with ordinary steel-frame, black-painted cots, and two neat rows stood in the middle of the chamber as well, for a total of thirty or forty beds. About a third showed signs of recent use; the rest were all neatly made up with taut white sheets and drab gray blankets. The room was as colorless as the landscape outside.
It was occupied, however, and by people nowhere near so drab.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, clustered on three or four of the beds in the center; Starkman had just begun to look them over when Mike, in the proper Hollywood-movie storm-trooper fashion, ordered, “Get inside.”
Starkman stepped into the room with only a brief glance in Mike's direction; the door slid shut behind him, leaving Mike and Joey in the corridor outside and himself in the room with a group of complete strangers.
They looked nothing like the uniformed and healthy young men of the search party; for one thing, none of them were in their twenties. Starkman counted five children, ranging from an infant at its mother's breast to a girl of about thirteen; there were eight adults besides himself, five men and three women, all at least thirty-five, he guessed, and one old man who appeared to be well into his eighth decade. That made Starkman the youngest adult present by a year or two, he judged.
The gathered people wore a motley assortment of clothing, much of it as battered and worn as his own decrepit coat, and hair styles tended toward the disheveled and uncut. Starkman was pleased to see that one of them was a black man in his forties; it appeared he need not have worried about genocide – at least, not so far as blacks were concerned.
There was a moment of awkward silence, broken at last by the black man. He rose from where he sat and said, “Hello; my name's Jerry White.”
“I'm John Starkman.” He took a cautious step forward.
White met him halfway, and they shook hands.
“I guess the zombies picked you up the same way they did the rest of us?”
“Zombies?” The term obviously referred to the uniformed young men. “I guess so. Why do you call them that? They don't look dead to me.”
“It's not my idea, it's Jenny's.” He gestured toward one of the women. “They're about as stupid as zombies, and they all look alike, and we haven't got a better name for them.”
