Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta (5 page)

Strange shadows leaped and shrank in the blood-red moonlight. Equally strange sounds were carried by night winds—sounds of animals and soughings of trees, boomings as of distant surf, as if ancient Lake Michigan had become a huge inland sea, and vague noises that might have been made by manlike beasts or beastlike men somewhere in the dark.

Theopolis tried futilely to speak through the clogged speaker of his box. Buck Rogers reached into the speaker-enclosure and removed the impromptu gag. “What is it?” the spaceman demanded in a soft voice. “And be quiet or I’ll jump up and down on you.”

Theopolis took the warning. “I said, where are we?“

“Anarchia.”

“You are not allowed in Anarchia, Captain Rogers. It’s dangerous.”

“Huh!” Buck grunted. “You call this dangerous? You should have seen this city when I was a kid. Chicago—or Detroit—or New York! Now,
the
y were dangerous!”

Theopolis fell silent. Twiki was silent, but his scanner lenses flashed up and down, back and forth.

Buck, too, scanned the scene, from where they stood out to the horizon. In the distance he could make out a campfire of sorts. Mutants were standing and sitting around it, trying to keep warm in the chilly night air near what had once been Lake Michigan. Ancient ruins surrounded the campfire.

Buck propelled the landcar forward. As he drew nearer to the encampment a pile of rubble, disturbed by some force-effect emanating from the groundcar, tumbled across the pathway. Buck swung the landcar desperately away from the tumbling debris, found the car headed toward an even worse obstacle, hit the brake sharply and swung back barely in time to avoid a crash, but as he did so the vehicle’s engine coughed and fell silent.

Buck struggled with the unfamiliar controls, trying to restart the futuristic vehicle.

As he did so, the mutants clustered around the campfire began to advance toward the landcar.

Buck flipped the main power control of the landcar, hit the automatic starting control, fed power to the vehicle’s mechanism.

The mutants advanced, growing more confident as the landcar failed to respond.

Finally the landcar returned to life, but by now it was completely surrounded by hulking, menacing figures, the red light of the distant campfire and the baleful moon reflecting like gore from their bleary eyes.

They circled the landcar, reaching tentatively to pat and feel its surface, then reaching more boldly toward Buck or Theopolis or Twiki. They spoke no language recognizable as such, but grunted and mumbled a patois of half-articulate noises more akin to the mouthings of animals than the speech of men.

Buck tried slowly to back the landcar away from the mutants, but they had surrounded it entirely by now. He wasn’t ready to ram them and run them down—perhaps later he might wish that he had, but for now he still regarded them as humans, however degraded, and he couldn’t bring himself to crash into them coldbloodedly.

Instead he tried a contrived expression of friendly cheer; he spoke in hopes that they might understand his tone of voice if not his words: “Uh—hi.” Buck ventured, “You, uh, guys got a really nice place here, don’t you?”

He attempted again to edge the landcar through their ranks without maiming or killing any of the threatening mutants. “Uh, hate to eat and run like this.”

He tried once more to back the landcar away from the others, but only succeeded in moving it a short distance.

“Uh, listen, if you’re ever in the neighborhood, look me up.”

He backed the car a bit more, but the mutants began to cluster behind the vehicle, clearly beginning to understand Buck’s attempt to ease his way through the thinnest portion of their ranks.

“Maybe you’d like some silk stockings? Chocolate bars?” The mutants continued to gather in the rearward path of the landcar, ignoring Buck’s distracting banter. “Would ya?” he tried again. “No? Huh, guess not.”

By now almost all of the mutants had clustered behind the landcar. “Well, that’s okay,” Buck told the mutants, “ ’cause I don’t have any anyway. Heh-heh,” he laughed nervously. Twiki squealed.

The mutants were now concentrated at the rear of the car. As if at some unseen and unheard signal, they launched themselves toward the car in a murderous, concerted rush.

Simultaneously with the move of the half-men, Buck slammed the landcar from reverse into forward gear. The car lurched forward. Buck shouted an ancient battle cry. The vehicle slammed into the debris of centuries.

It was a desperate risk. If the debris had slagged into a solid mass with the passing decades and centuries, there was no way that the landcar—or its occupants!—could possibly survive the impact. But if the debris had instead undergone a sort of dry rot, slowly disintegrating into a weakened mass of material with the alternate expansion and contraction, soaking and evaporation of rain and snow for the past five hundred years—then the landcar could plow through it like a motorcyclist sloughing through a mountain of shaving cream.

There was a terrific sense of impact and a sound like a
whumpf!
—and then the landcar was through the debris. Shards and fragments of accumulated junk cascaded through the air behind the landcar. The mutants, outwitted and outmaneuvered, shouted their frustration and defiance, shaking fists and futilely hurling missiles after the landcar.

Safely beyond the mutant encampment, Buck pulled the landcar to a halt. Its formerly smooth and handsome surface was now crumpled and covered with muck and fragments of debris, but its engine continued to run. Buck slumped in his seat, catching his breath and regaining his composure from the nearly fatal encounter with the mutant band.

Theopolis took advantage of the momentary calm to plead once more with the spaceman. “You should go back,” the computer brain initiated his appeal, and Twiki emitted a series of clicks and one squeal while the computer brain’s voder spoke.

“I can’t,” Buck snapped back before the machines could go on. “I’ve got to track down my family.”

“You won’t find out anything,” Theopolis argued. The lights behind his plexiglass covering flashed dismally. “Give up and go back, Rogers. You barely escaped with your life. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

“That wasn’t luck,” Buck cracked in reply, “it was skill, intellect, and pure animal magnetism.”

“And
a lot of luck,” Theopolis insisted.

But the exchange was over. The computer had made his appeal, the spaceman had rejected it, and now Buck set the landcar to rolling forward once again, rolling cautiously but steadily through the rubble-littered streets of Anarchia, the dismal hell that once had been Chicago.

In the distance Buck could hear the waves of Lake Michigan hissing and crashing against the shore. The Chicago River bridges had all fallen long ago, but Buck managed to find a sort of accidental bridge formed by the crash of the ancient IBM Building, which threw a dam of rubble across the river. The water had made its way through the cracks and submerged gaps in the debris, so pressure had never built up and swept away the dam, and Buck was able to pick his way across the runneled surface, the dark, oily waters of the poisoned river to either side of the landcar.

“Oh, be careful, will you, Buck,” Theopolis pleaded.

The drone Twiki squealed.

“Yes, Twiki, of course Buck is a good driver,” Theopolis soothed. “I’m sure he won’t dump us into the river.”

Again the drone gave its characteristic, high-pitched sound.

“Yes,” Theopolis told the drone. “I’m sure that Buck understands that we’d sink. Why, if we were to rust away there beneath the water he’d lose the two best friends he has in the world. Now, just be calm and we’ll be on the other side in a few seconds.”

The landcar rolled from the impromptu dam onto the ground on the other side of the Chicago River. Buck breathed a sigh of relief. “Theopolis,” he said, “do you really understand those clunks and squeals that Twiki makes, or is that all some sort of put-on for my benefit?”

“Why, Buck!” the computer’s lights glowed indignantly. “How could you even accuse me of falsifying data in that fashion? It would blow half the capacitors in my monitor to do such a thing!”

Buck drove through an open area that might once have been a grassy municipal park. He brought the landcar as close as he could to the remnants of an immense structure, then turned off its engine. “If I haven’t forgotten the layout of this burg in the past five centuries, this is City Hall. I’ve got some checking to do inside, and I don’t want to leave the landcar unguarded. Do you think you can handle the job, Theopolis? Twiki?”

The drone made a terrified-sounding squeal and began to rock from side to side in its seat.

“Now stop that!” Theopolis ordered.

Twiki calmed down—a little.

“Of course we can, Buck,” the computer said. “You go attend to your business, and we’ll be here in the landcar when you get back. We don’t get bored, you know—I can always fill the time by calculating the lunar ephemeris for arbitrarily selected periods a few billion years from now. You never know when that information is going to come in handy.”

F I V E

The once-imposing great doors of City Hall had long since fallen in on their hinges, leaving easy access to the main vestibule of the building. Here Buck found a larger-than-life, awesome pedestal marked with the name Richard Daley, and the feet of a statue still on the pedestal. Buck looked above the metal feet, visualizing as best he could the invisible man who stood smiling benevolently at long-dead voters.

As he stood contemplating the ruined monument he became aware of a sound—the sound of breathing, suppressed, shallow, nearly inaudible. Nearly: but not quite.

He cocked his head, zeroed in on the source of the sound, yanked a shard of fallen wainscotting away from its place and saw—an impromptu shelter holding two children in tattered rags. There were a boy and a girl. They stared up at Buck in abject terror, making no attempt to escape or to attack. They merely crouched, trembling, awaiting his reaction to them.

“I won’t hurt you,” Buck said to the children.

There was no response.

“Can’t you talk?” Buck asked.

“I can talk,” the girl said at length. She pointed to the boy. “He can’t talk. I can.”

Buck looked at the boy crouching mutely beside the girl.

“He your brother?” the spaceman asked.

The girl pondered. “Maybe. Who are you?”

“I’m from the Inner City,” Buck said.

The statement brought an unexpected reaction. The girl’s eyes widened in terror. Without a word she bolted from her hiding place, dodged past Buck’s surprised arms and bolted across the vestibule.

Buck took off in hot pursuit.

The girl headed up a flight of broad marble stairs heavily choked with fallen debris.

Buck lunged, caught her by one filthy, naked ankle. She struggled until it was clear that Buck had no intention of letting go and she had no chance of breaking his grip. Then the girl subsided into resigned passivity.

“I said I won’t hurt you,” Buck told the girl again. “Why are you so afraid of the Inner City?”

“I’m not afraid,” the girl exclaimed defiantly, “I’m not afraid of anything!”

The silent boy emerged from his hiding place and timidly approached Buck and the girl. He was unarmed and apparently harmless. Buck decided to permit him to stand by while he interrogated the girl.

“Do you live here?”

“Yes,” the girl conceded. “This is our home.”

Buck looked earnestly into the girl’s face. “Now this is very important. Please. Do you know where the Hall of Records is? A huge room full of files, birth certificates, things like that? You know, just mountains of paper.”

“Oh yes. Sure, a big room full of papers. I’ll show you.”

The two children led Buck up the flight of marble stairs, down a dark hallway choked with the dust and trash of five centuries. The spaceman jumped when a huge shadowy shape appeared, then ran silently across their path: a gigantic rat. The children took the event as a matter of course and continued to lead Buck along the hallway, through broken doors.

They stopped where a cable ran through a hole in the ceiling. The girl first, then the boy, jumped from their feet, caught the cable and began to shimmy up it as confidently and easily as two monkeys climbing a liana-vine in some tropical jungle.

Buck grasped the cable, preparatory to lifting himself after the children. “Are you sure this is the best way?” he called up to them. “How about the stairs?”

“The stairs are sealed off,” the girl called back down to him. “This is the only way.”

The cable brought them into another echoing, dusty chamber. Buck followed the children along another corridor, wondering momentarily if he was being led into an ambush. But at that moment there opened before him the prospect he had been seeking: one of the largest rooms he had ever beheld. It was nearly as large as the launching bay of the now defunct starship
Draconia,
as large as a starfighter hangar at the Inner City spaceport, as large as the old Vehicle Assembly Building at old Cape Canaveral, back during Buck’s first lifetime in the twentieth century.

And it was filled with a five-hundred-year-old shambles.