Doomsday Warrior 19 - America’s Final Defense (11 page)

A door opened. Lights flashed on—long fluorescent lamps set high above. “Behold the Goddess Millie,” the queen said, bowing. With final kisses and breast squeezes, Rockson and his men walked on toward the huge rocket. “Bless you. Bless the progenitors,” the Millie tribeswomen chanted over and over as they withdrew from the Goddesses’ presence.

The rocketship loomed before them.

“What do you think, Scheransky? How does that baby look to you?”

“She looks fit! And her launch track and all the boosters look good.” The Russian ran up to the white steel of the giant horizontal spacecraft and banged a hand on her hull. It rang. “She’s a beauty. Best that NASA ever built.”

Rockson didn’t like the look of the rails. He bent and with a finger rubbed one. Too rusty. “The rails need work,” he stated flatly. “Heaven knows what we’ll find inside the rocket.”

There was a commotion behind them. The Millies had returned, pushing the nuke-device-laden chariot. “Here,” announced the Queen, “is your great dark present for the goddess.”

“Thanks,” Rock said, “you girls are stronger than horses.”

That set them to giggling like schoolgirls.

When the girls left, Scheransky said, “True, these rails will have to be restored a bit. But the rocket is air sealed, or should be. Give me a hand.”

They popped the door at the front end of the rocket with some difficulty. A wind rushed out—hot, moist air. Air that smelled like mildew and dry-rot.

“Shit, it’s too warm in there. Something gone bad in there. I hope it’s not anything that can affect its operation.”

“Right,” Rock said. “Let’s have a look inside.” Rock twisted the airlock door handle, and the door swung open wider. The stale, rotten smell grew worse. They entered, flashlights in hand, and saw ten dusty seats, and then a door. “Into the cockpit,” Rock ordered. “You first, Blondie.”

With a cough, Scheransky quickly went forward and entered the cockpit. Rockson followed on his heels. The Russian technician carefully looked over the controls, now covered with dust. He consulted several crumbly manuals on a console and then took notes on an old pad with a crumbling pencil. Mold covered the cabin walls.

As the Russian worked, Rock told the four technical men they’d brought to check the wiring, and main rocket boosters, and so on. The rest of the team poked around in a desultory way.

It took hours to check everything out. Finally Scheransky went over his notes for Rockson: “What we have here, Rock,” he said gloomily, crushing the dry plastic handle of a control lever in his hand, “is a rotted out museum-piece, not a space vehicle. She won’t fly.”

Rockson shook his head in dismay. With ultimate sadness in his tone, he muttered, “She certainly won’t fly the way she is, I agree with that. And we don’t have the equipment to make her fly, either. What the
hell
is that sour smell, though?”

“It seems that the Millies just maintained the outside well,” Scheransky said, “but the natural decay of insulation and so on, inside, in the sealed rocket, did too much damage. That’s the main odor. If only they’d aired her out once in a while.”

After they’d opened several air vents, Rockson sat brooding and dejected for a long while on the cracked leather of the pilot’s seat. He studied the dials again and again. “This gizmo looked different than anything I’d ever flown before, anyway. Even if she’d been in working order, I’d have had a fit figuring out this stuff.”

He heard Detroit’s heavy footfalls, and a hand on his sagging shoulder. “Rock, what do we do now? I figure it was worth a try to see if anybody back in C.C. had any answers for us. I’ve activated the old radio. Doc Schecter is advised of all the problems we have. He has no solution. By the way, he wasn’t shot. Schecter got a medal for taking decisive action to save the earth, from the
new
council chairman.”

“Who’s that?”

“C.J.! The election was yesterday. McGrugle died of a heart attack when he found out it wasn’t us he had trapped down in the mines.”

“That’s nice,” Rock said gloomily. “But it won’t matter in two weeks. Schecter, and us too; everyone dies.”

Then Rockson pounded the dusty console with his fist. “No!” he exclaimed, “There
has
to be a way. If only someone could repair the main thrusters and its wiring, then we could jerry-rig the rest of the stuff.”

“Who the hell could do that?” Detroit replied. “It would have to be welded in a million places, by lasers, probably. You can’t just
wish
things like that to happen, can you?”

Rockson snapped his fingers. “Some beings can just wish things to happen. The Glowers!”

“The Glowers?” Detroit’s jaw dropped. “You mean Turquoise Spectrum and his weird bunch?”

“Yes. We have to contact the Glowers. It’s the only way. Listen: they can hear my weak-powered ESP calls; I’ve done it before. But I need to be alone, away from everyone. I will try to use all my psi powers. We are a lot closer to the Glower City out here than back in C.C., assuming the Glowers are in about the same location where we last saw them.”

So it was that Rockson went out alone into the wilderness. He climbed a lonely butte and sat cross-legged lotus position on the top as the sun went down. Breathing short yogi breaths—ten in one nostril, ten in the other—then sucking all the air into his diaphragm, Rockson brought all the chi energy into his blood veins. And then he steered it into his hypothalamus gland. Soon he felt the joining of his right and left brain parts in the center of his forehead. Then he felt that peculiar magnetic feeling he always felt when he used his psi powers. Rockson tried to reach out over the lonely, cold miles, out to other minds. To the strange, alien, somewhat frightening minds that he had touched briefly, once before.

Would the Glowers answer? The Glowers were quixotic. They did the things they chose to do, and nothing more.

Rock repeated the psychic message until midnight . . . until he was dizzy from trying; until his bones ached with the cold. He was finally answered. Rockson felt it in a peculiar way: he groaned and twitched, like a medium, as a voice spoke to him out of his own lips: “ROCKSOOON. IT IS REMMMMMERRROOOO. I AM THE LESSER OF ALL THE GLOWERS, SO I CAN READ YOUR PETTY, WEAK MIND CALL. I HAVE TOLD THE OTHERS. THE ONE YOU CHOOSE TO CALL, THE TURQUOISE SPECTRUM, IS NO LONGER OF THIS WORLD. DEAD FOR A LONG TIME, NOW. HE IS IN THE OTHER PLACE. BUT THE ELDERS SAY YOU MAY COME TO US, AND TELL US YOUR PROBLEMS . . . WE WILL SEE IF WE CAN HELP YOU.”

Rockson tried to tell Remaroo the nature of the problem, but he just got one message: “COME TO US. ALL WILL BE DISCUSSED. WE WILL COME FOR YOU . . . ROCKSON . . . IN OUR SANDSHIP. YOU WILL BOARD IT ALONE. THE ELDERS AWAIT YOUR VISIT. ALONE . . . ALONE.”

There followed a short burst of instructions indicating that Rock should be a mile north from the hangar at dawn. The location was burned into Rockson’s mind until he screamed, so he couldn’t forget. Then contact was broken.

Rockson’s spasms stopped. And Rockson vomited, and took in deep, heaving breaths of icy air. To be in contact with a Glower’s mind is a terrible, awesome thing.

And a holy thing, too.

Ten

E
arly in the morning Rockson returned from his night of solitary meditation. He informed the other men of the message he’d received from the Glower called Remaroo.

“I don’t like it,” a trembling Jacob Cohen snapped out. He and the other technicians the Rock Team had brought along had endured a few too many shocks on the trek. They all now voiced the opinion that they didn’t want Rock, their leader, to disappear on them. “You going out there among those ghouls alone,” Detroit agreed, “especially since Turquoise Spectrum is dead, could be a bad thing.”

Archer had been slow to get the upshot of what Rockson had said, but now he too piped up. “Alone? You go out there all alone? No take me?”

“Sorry, Arch. Though I’d like to take you, I need the Glowers’ full support. If, in order to get that help, I have to play by their rules, I will. Besides, I wouldn’t worry. The Glowers, strange and ghoulish as they are, have always helped us before, saved my life several times, as a matter of fact. It’ll be all right.”

Chen nodded, but added, “If the Turquoise Spectrum was still heading the Glowers, I’d be sanguine about all this. But who the hell is Remaroo? He’s not among the Glowers I’ve ever met.”

“Evidently,” Rockson said, “Remaroo is a member of some secret society within the Glowers. I got an impression from Remaroo that he has stayed apart from the other Glowers for . . .
religious
reasons. Now that Turquoise is gone, Remaroo was sent for, to lead the Glowers in some sort of mourning.”

Cohen added, “You mean the Glowers are sitting
shiva?”
(the Jewish mourning period during which the mourners cannot travel).

Rock nodded.

“You sure,” Detroit asked, “that there wasn’t some kind of coup that replaced Turquoise?”

Rockson shrugged. “Who knows? But there’s really no choice. The Glowers run this show. I go there alone.”

By the time the sun was high up in the purple-tinged sky, Rockson had ridden Snorter out to a few hundred yards from the designated spot for pickup. The others of his party, riding more slowly, followed him up onto a ridge. Down in the valley, Rockson could see no sign of the Glowers, even though it was the exact time for his rendezvous. Rockson was told to come alone. Literally, that meant no horse. Therefore he dismounted his sturdy ’brid, handing the reins to Chen. “Take good care of her ’til I’m back.”

“When will that be?”

“Can’t say. Very soon, I expect. We have to get the Milis rocket up within the week, if there’s to be any chance of saving Earth. Remaroo is aware of that.” Rock shook everyone’s hand. Then he walked down the rubble-strewn slope onto the barren valley floor. The others watched from the distance as Rockson reached the center of the valley and waited a long time.

Nothing happened. A half hour passed with Rockson just sitting cross-legged on a man-sized boulder, meditating. Finally they could see a dust cloud forming on the north horizon. Something was coming, something
huge.

“There it is!” exclaimed Detroit, pointing from his perch on a rock outcropping at the very apex of the hill. “I can see their sails. It’s that big job of a sandship that the Glowers took us to Century City in, once.”

As the great sandship arrived in the valley, first one sail and then the other two were lowered. That seemed to have the effect of slowing the impossible floating galleon’s progress. It slid to a silent halt within a hair’s-breath of Rockson, who never stirred.

Rock opened his eyes, stretched, and then looked up at the ship as a long pink net, kind of like a rope ladder, was lowered by one of the Glower crew above. Rock climbed on board. There he nodded to the inside-out, blue-glowing beings. There was no touching of the five Glowers. They just stood there, nodding their welcome.

“I AM REMAROO,” came the thought message from the taller one, the Glower with the green finlike appendages around his neck. Rock had never seen that kind of variation before. He tried to broadcast a greeting to the Glower but gave up and said, “Glad to see you.”

Remaroo reached into Rock’s mind to say, “WELCOME ABOARD. WE GO NOW.”

The great ship silently turned to the northeast. The sails went up: first the solar-powered sail, then the huge wind-sail, by manipulation of the long pink ropes. The sails seemed to catch the sunlight as well as the wind. When the jib was turned, the ship pointed its prow high and headed off at an ever-increasing pace.

As they sped away from the valley, Rockson stood on the aft deck watching the third “star grabber” sail being raised into place. The ship lurched to an impossible speed, perhaps 150 miles an hour, sending up waves of sand and dust behind them, obscuring the somber men waving to Rock from the distant hill. Rock’s friends were quickly lost in the distance. The red sun—red because of the dust the ship raised, partly obscuring it—seemed to burn on Rockson’s skin. Or maybe it was some sort of energy field in the atmosphere of the ship itself that gave him that skin-crawling feeling. Who knew? Rock noted an ozone-like smell he’d never detected before. But then again, he’d never been on the ship when it went this fast. The last time he’d traveled with the Glowers, it had been a winter day, with deep snow. Now, there was scarcely a patch of white here and there.

He felt lonely, very lonely, standing there. Sure, Rock was among other beings. Perhaps the Glowers could be called people. But because they talked in his mind, and because they never, never could touch him, he felt very alone.

As the crew labored at their mysterious tasks, he stood on the bow, watched a stormcloud forming ahead.

Soon it was raining hard, but no rain touched the deck, he noticed. It was held away by some field of power. The ride got rough, but the ship never slowed. What it did do was to yaw and pitch as the storm raged, and the lightning hit the tallest mast again and again, without effect. Rock held on for dear life. He felt like he’d never survive this trip.

Hours went by. Thoughts of the asteroid crashing into the earth flashed through his mind every time a bolt of lightning hit the mast.

Finally, as the storm subsided, the setting sun sent its last red rays up among the mountains ahead. The stars blazed forth in the clearing, vermillion sky. Rock soon saw the domes of the Glower settlement dead ahead. Their lonely blue glow did little to assuage his feeling of total, absolute aloneness.

Eleven

R
ock was silently directed to disembark via the pink ropes, climbing down after Remaroo. The rest of the Glower crew stayed aboard, perhaps to “park” the huge galleon. A voice out of the sand winds said, “WELCOME, ROCKSON. WE GREET YOU IN THE NAME OF THE PASSED-OVER ONE, TURQUOISE SPECTRUM, NOW KNOWN AS THE TURQUOISE GHOST.” He was promptly informed that a wake for the dead Glower leader was going on, and his own participation was mandatory in keeping with Glower etiquette. Several sips of a green liqueur were offered to him the minute he entered a domed building. Rock partook. Then Remaroo told a story, remembering the time the Glowers had saved Rockson’s life by joining their minds with the minds of his teammates. “I WAS BUT A JUNIOR MEMBER THEN,” Remaroo’s mental voice said, “THUS I WAS NOT WORTHY OF ACTUALLY BEING THERE. NOW I AM ELECTED LEADER IN PLACE OF THE TURQUOISE GHOST. I SALUTE HIM WITH THIS GREEN LIQUEUR. DO YOU REMEMBER HIM WELL, ROCKSON? ARE YOU SEALED TO HIM? DO YOU DREAM OF THE TURQUOISE GHOST?”