05-A Gift From Earth (6 page)

Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size. Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis.

Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.

They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships' hulls. Some would be power stations, others  — he couldn't guess. Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest reached across the rock to touch the Hospital.

All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had Implementation left that one stretch of trees?

A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic. A sonic stun-beam For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake.

It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the 1-3 throttle all the way in. The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the void edge of Alpha Plateau.

The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn't move. The car dropped, sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void.

The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but a twitch. Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He thought he knew why. He was outracing the police because they did not care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge. That was a game for the desperate.

Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to see the cars dropping after him. They must know they'd lost him, but they wanted to see him fall.

How far down was the mist? He'd never known. Miles, certainly. Tens of miles? They'd hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist. He couldn't go back to the Plateau; they'd stun him, wait, and scrape up what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go now.

Matt flipped the car over on its back.

The police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight, upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone.

"Hell of a way to go," someone said. It went over the intercom, and there were grunts of agreement.

The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite. Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau to prove their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dropping his car with the fans set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses whistling around the door, before he had had to stop. He had been lucky enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero.

Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come apart in the air!

But that wouldn't occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery. Earth's strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs that did not have to be made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators, razors, or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines, and the crew were wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery as they had was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was a bicycle. A car wasn't meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done it.

He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The faster he fell, the farther he'd leave them behind.

At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about one-and-a-half Mount Lookitthat gravities. The wind rose to a scream, even through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something unusual, but he didn't know how unusual. When the wind resistance started to pull him out of his seat, he snatched at the arms and looked frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened; they reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose.

It was getting dark. Even the sky beneath his feet was darkening, and the police cars were not to be seen. Very well. Matt pushed the fan throttles down to the Idle notches.

The blood rushing to his head threatened to choke him. He turned the car right side up. Pressure jammed him deep in his seat with a force no man had felt since the bruteforce chemical rockets, but he could stand it now. What he couldn't endure was the heat. And the pain in his ears. And the taste of the air.

He pulled the throttles out again. He wanted to stop fast.

Come to that, would he know when he stopped? This around him was not a wispy kind of mist, but a dark blur giving no indication of his velocity. From above, the mist was white; from below, black. Being lost down here would be horrible. At least he knew which way was up. It was fractionally lighter in that direction.

The air tasted like flaming molasses.

He had the throttles all the way out. Still the gas crept in. Matt pulled his shirt over his mouth and tried to breathe through that. No good. Something like a black wall emerged from the mist-blur, and he tilted the car in time to avoid crashing against the side of Mount Lookitthat. He stayed near the black wall, watching it rush past him. He'd be harder to see in the shadow of the void edge.

The mist disappeared. He shot upward through sparkling sunlight. When he thought he was good and clear of the foul mist, and when he couldn't stand to breathe hot poison for another second, he put the window down. The car whipped to the side and tried to turn over. A hurricane roared through the cabin. It was hot and thick and soupy, that hurricane, but it could be breathed.

He saw the edge of the Plateau above him, and he pushed the throttles in a little to slow down. His stomach turned a flip-flop. For the first time since he'd gotten into the car, he had time to be sick. His stomach tried to turn over, his head was splitting from the sudden changes in pressure, and the Implementation sonics were having their revenge in twitching, jerking muscles. He kept the car more or less upright until the edge of the Plateau came level with him. There was a stone wall along the edge here. He eased the car sideways, eased it back when he was over the wall, tilted it by guess and hope until he was motionless in the air, then let it drop.

The car fell about four feet. Matt opened the door but stopped himself from getting out. What he really wanted to do was faint, but he'd left the fans idling. He found the "Neutral..., Ground ... Air" toggle and shoved it forward without much care. He was tired and sick, and he wanted to lie down.

The toggle fell in the "Ground" slot.

Matt stumbled out the door ... stumbled because the car was rising. It rose four inches off the ground and began to slide. During his experimenting Matt must have set the ground altitude, so that the car was now a ground-effect vehicle. It slid away from him as he tried to reach for it. He watched on hands and knees as it glided away across the uneven ground, bounced against the wall and away, against the wall and away. It circled the end of the wall and went over the edge.

Matt flopped on his back and closed his eyes. He didn't care if he never saw a car again.

The motion sickness, the sonic aftereffects, the poisoned air he'd breathed, the pressure changes ... they gripped him hard, and he wanted to die. Then, by stages, they began to let go. Nobody found him there. A house was nearby, but it had a vacant look. After some time Matt sat up and took stock of himself.

His throat hurt. There was a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth.

He was still on Alpha Plateau. Only crew would go to the trouble of building walls along a void edge. So he was committed. Without a car he could no more leave Alpha Plateau than he could have arrived there in the first place.

But the house was architectural coral. Bigger than anything he was used to, it was still coral. Which meant that it should have been deserted about forty years.

He'd have to risk it. He needed cover. There were no trees nearby, and trees were dangerous to hide in; they would probably be fruit trees, and someone might come. apple-picking. Matt got up and moved toward the house.

The Hospital was the control nexus of a world. It was not a large world, and the settled region totalled a mere 20,000 square miles; but that region needed a lot of control. It also required considerable electricity, enormous quantities of water to be moved up from the Long Fall River, and a deal of medical attention. The Hospital was big and complex and diversified. Two fifty-six-man spacecraft were its east and west corners. Since the spacecraft were hollow cylinders with the airlocks opening to the inside (to the Attic, as that inner space had been called when the rotating ships were between stars and the ship's axis was Up), the corridors in that region were twisted and mazelike and hard to navigate.

So the young man in Jesus Pietro's office had no idea where he was. Even if he'd managed to leave the office unguarded, he'd have been hopelessly lost. And he knew it. That was all to the good.

"You were on the dead-man switch," said Jesus Pietro.

The man nodded. His sandy hair was cut in the old Belter style, copied from the even older Mohawk. There were shadows under his eyes as if from lack of sleep, and the lie was borne out by a slump of utter depression, though he had been sleeping since his capture in Harry Kane's basement.

"You funked it," Jesus Pietro accused. "You arranged to fall across the switch so that it wouldn't go off."

The man looked up. Naked rage was in his face. He made no move, for there was nothing he could do.

"Don't be ashamed. The dead-man switch is an old trick. It almost never gets used in practice. The man in charge is too likely to change his mind at the last second. It's a — "

"I fully expected to wake up dead!" the man shouted.

" — natural reaction. It takes a psychotic to commit suicide. No, don't tell me all about it. I'm not interested. I want to hear about the car in your basement."

"You think I'm a coward, do you?"

"That's an ugly word."

"
I
stole that car."

"Did you?" The skeptical tone was genuine. Jesus Pietro did not believe him. "Then perhaps you can tell me why the theft went unnoticed."

The man told him. He talked eagerly, demanding that Jesus Pietro recognize his courage. Why not? There was nobody left to betray. He would live as long as Jesus Pietro Castro was interested in him, and for three minutes longer. The organ bank operating room was three minutes walk away. Jesus Pietro listened politely. Yes, he remembered the car that had tauntingly circled the Plateau for five days. The young crew owner had given him hell for letting it happen. The man had even suggested--demanded — that one of Castro's men drop on the car from above, climb into the cockpit, and bring it back. Jesus Pietro's patience had given out, and he had risked his life by politely offering to help the young man perform the feat.

"So we buried it at the same time we built the basement," the prisoner finished. "Then we let the house grow over it. We had great plans." He sagged into his former position of despair but went on talking, mumbling. "There were gun mounts. Bins for bombs. We stole a sonic stunner and mounted it in the rear window. Now nobody'll ever use them."

"The car was used."

"What?"

"This afternoon. Keller escaped us last night. He returned to Kane's home this morning, took the car and flew it nearly to the Hospital before we stopped him. The Mist Demons know what he thought he was doing."

"Great! 'The last flight of — ' We never got around to naming it. Our air force. Our glorious air force. Who did you say?"

"Keller. Matthew Leigh Keller."

"I don't know him. What would he be doing with my car?"

"Don't play games. You are not protecting anyone. We drove him off the edge. Five ten, age twenty-one, hair brown, eyes blue — "

"I tell you I never met him."

"Good-by." Jesus Pietro pushed a button under his desk. The door opened.

"Wait a minute. Now, wait — "

Lying, Jesus Pietro thought, after the man was gone. Probably lied about the car too. Somewhere in the vivarium the man who really took the car waited to be questioned. If it was stolen. It could equally well have been supplied by a crew member, by Jesus Pietro's hypothetical traitor.

He had often wondered why the crew would not supply him with truth drugs. They would have been easy to manufacture from instructions in the ship's libraries. Millard Parlette, in a mellow mood, had once tried to explain. "We own their bodies," he had said. "We take them apart on the slightest pretext; and if they manage to die a natural death, we get them anyway, what we can save. Aren't the poor bastards at least entitled to the privacy of their own minds?"

It seemed a peculiar bleeding-heart attitude, coming from a man whose very life depended on the organ banks. But others apparently felt the same. If Jesus Pietro wanted his questions answered, he must depend on his own empirical brand of psychology.

__________

Polly Tournquist. Age: twenty. Height: five one. Weight: ninety-five. She wore a crumpled party dress in the colonist style. In Jesus Pietro's eyes it did nothing for her. She was small and brown, and compared to most of the women Jesus Pietro met socially, muscular. They were work muscles, not tennis muscles. Traces of callus marred her hands. Her hair, worn straight back, had a slight natural curl to it but no trace of style.

Had she been raised as crew girls were raised, had she access to cosmetics available on Alpha Plateau, she would have known how to be beautiful. Then she wouldn't have been bad at all, once the callus left her hands and cosmetic treatment smoothed her skin. But, like most colonists, she had aged faster than a crew.

She was only a young colonist girl, like a thousand other young colonist girls Jesus Pietro had seen.

She bore his silent stare for a full minute before she snapped, "Well?"

"Well? You're Polly Tournquist, aren't you?"

"Of course."

"You had a handful of films on you when you were picked up last night. How did you get them?"

"I prefer not to say."

"Eventually I think you will. Meanwhile, what would you like to talk about?"

Polly looked bewildered. "Are you serious?"

"I am serious. I've interviewed six people today. The organ banks are full and the day is ending. I'm in no hurry. Do you know what those films of yours imply?"

She nodded warily. "I think so. Especially after the raid."

"Oh, you saw the point, did you?"

"It's clear you have no more use for the Sons of Earth. We've always been some danger to you — "

"You flatter yourselves."

"But you've never had a real try at wiping us out. Not till now. Because we serve as a recruiting center for your damned organ banks!"

"You amaze me. Did you know this when you joined?"

"I was fairly sure of it."

"Then why join?"

She spread her hands. "Why does anybody join? I couldn't stand the way things are now. Castro, what happens to your body when you die?"

"Cremated. I'm an old man."

"You're crew. They'd cremate you anyway. Only colonists go into the banks."

"I'm half crew," said Jesus Pietro. His desire to talk was genuine, and there was no need for reticence with a girl who was, to all intents and purposes, dead. "When my — you might say — pseudo-father reached the age of seventy, he was old enough to need injections of testosterone. Except that he chose a different way to get them."

The girl looked bewildered, then horrified.

"I see you understand. Shortly afterward his wife, my mother, became pregnant. I must admit they raised me almost as a crew. I love them both. I don't know who my father was. He may have been a rebel, or a thief."

"To you there's no difference, I suppose." The girl's tone was savage.

"No. Back to the Sons of Earth," Jesus Pietro said briskly. "You're quite right. We don't need them anymore, not as a recruiting center nor for any other purpose. Yours was the biggest rebel group on Mount Lookitthat. We'll take the others as they come."

"I
don't
understand. The organ banks are obsolete now, aren't they? Why not publish the news? There'd be a worldwide celebration!"

"That's just why we
don't
broadcast the news. Your kind of sloppy thinking! No, the organ banks are not obsolete. It's just that we'll need a smaller supply of raw material. And as a means of punishment for crimes the banks are as important as ever!"

"You son of a bitch," said Polly. Her color was high, and her voice held an icy, half-controlled fury. "So we might get
uppity
if we thought we were being killed to no
purpose
!"

"You will not be dying to no purpose," Jesus Pietro explained patiently. "That has not been necessary since the first kidney transplant between identical twins. It has not been necessary since Landsteiner classified the primary blood types in 1900. What do you know about the car in Kane's basement?"

"I prefer not to say."

"You're being very difficult."

The girl smiled for the first time. "I've heard that."

His reaction took Jesus Pietro by surprise. A flash of admiration, followed by a hot flood of lust. Suddenly the bedraggled colonist girl was the only girl in the universe. Jesus Pietro held his face like frozen stone while the flood receded. It took several seconds.

"What about Matthew Leigh Keller?"

"Who? I mean — "

"You prefer not to say. Miss, Tournquist, you probably know that there are no truth drugs on this world. In the ships' libraries are instructions for making scopolamine, but no crew will authorize me to use them. Hence I have developed different methods." 'He saw her stiffen. "No, no. There will be no pain. They'd put
me
in the organ banks if I used torture. I'm only going to give you a nice rest."

"I think I know what you mean. Castro, what are you made of? You're half colonist yourself. What makes you side with the crew?"

"There must be law and order, Miss Tournquist. On all of Mount Lookitthat there is only one force for law and order, and that force is the crew." Jesus Pietro pushed the call button.

He did not relax until she was gone, and then he found himself shaken. Had she noticed that flash of desire? What an embarrassing thing to happen! But she must have assumed he was only angry. Of course she had.

Polly was in the maze of corridors when she suddenly remembered Matt Keller. Her regal dignity, assumed for the benefit of the pair of Implementation police who were her escorts, softened in thought. Why would Jesus Pietro be interested in Matt? He wasn't even a member. Did it mean that he had escaped? 

Odd, about that night. She'd liked Matt. He'd interested her. And then, suddenly ... It must have looked to him as if she'd brushed him off. Well, it didn't matter now. But Implementation should have turned him loose. He was nothing but a deadhead.

Castro. Why had he told her all that? Was it part of the coffin cure? Well, she'd hold out as long as possible. Let Castro worry about who might know the truth of Ramrobot #143. She had told nobody.

The girl looked about her in pleased wonder at the curving walls and ceiling with their peeled, discolored paint, at the spiral stairs, at the matted, withered brown rug which had been indoor grass. She watched the dust puff out from her falling feet, and she ran her hands over the coral walls where the paint had fallen away. Her new, brightly dyed falling-jumper seemed to glow in the gloom of the deserted house.

"It's very odd," she said. Her crewish accent was strange and lilting.

The man lifted an arm from around her waist to wave it about him. "They live just like this," he said in the same accent. "Just like this. You can see their houses from your car on the way to the lake."

Matt smiled as he watched them walk up the stairs. He had never seen a two-story coral house; the balloons were too hard to blow, and the second floor tended to sag unless you maintained two distinct pressures. Why didn't they come to Delta Plateau if they wanted to see how colonists lived?

But why should they? Surely their own lives were more interesting.

What strange people they were. It was hard to understand them, not only because of the lilt but because certain words meant the wrong things. Their faces were alien, with flared nostrils and high, prominent cheekbones. 
Against the people Matt had known, they seemed fragile, undermuscled, but graceful and beautiful to the point where Matt wondered about the man's manhood. They walked as though they owned the world.

The deserted house had proved a disappointment. He'd thought all was lost when the crew couple came strolling in, pointing and staring as if they were in a museum. But with luck they would be up there for some time.

Matt moved very quietly from the darkness of a now doorless closet, picked up their picnic basket, and ran on tiptoe for the door. There was a place where he could hide, a place he should have thought of before.

He climbed over the low stone wall with the picnic basket in one hand. There was a three-foot granite lip on the void side. Matt settled himself cross-legged against the stone wall, with his head an inch below the top and his toes a foot from the forty-mile drop to hell. He opened the picnic basket.

There was more than enough for two. He ate it all, eggs and sandwiches and squeezebags of custard and a thermos of soup and a handful of olives. Afterward he kicked the basket and the scraps of plastic wrap into the void. His eyes followed them down.

Consider:

Anyone can see infinity by looking up on a clear night. But only on the small world of Mount Lookitthat can you see infinity by looking down.

No, it's not really infinity. Neither is the night sky, really. You can see a few nearby galaxies; but even if the universe turns out to be finite, you see a very little distance into it. Matt could see apparent infinity by looking straight down.

He could see the picnic basket falling. Smaller. Gone.

The plastic wrap. Fluttering down. Gone.

Then, nothing but the white mist.

On a far-distant day they would call the phenomenon Plateau trance. It was a form of autohypnosis well known to Plateau citizens of both social classes, differing from other forms only in that nearly anyone could fall into such a state by accident. In this respect Plateau trance compares to ancient, badly authenticated cases of "highway hypnosis" or to more recent studies of "the far look," a form of religious trance endemic to the Belt of Sol. The far look comes to a miner who spends too many minutes staring at a single star in the background of naked space. Plateau trance starts with a long, dreamy look down into the void mist.