Forever Free (17 page)

There were only two allowable landing paths, dead east and dead west, both fenced off from horizon to horizon. That wasn't out of fear of crashing, although that might have occurred to somebody. Its primary function was to protect people from the shuttle's gamma-ray exhaust, taking off.

The horizontal landing was smooth. Not a peep from the control tower. No floater came out to greet us, surprise. I popped the airlock and a light staircase spidered down.

Gravity was both reassuring and tiring. Our flight suits were not quite thick enough for the damp cold, and we were all shivering—even the genetically perfect sheriff—by the time we'd covered the kilometer back to the main building.

It was almost as cold inside, but at least there was no wind.

The offices were deserted and dusty. As far as we could tell, there was no power in the building. There was little disorder, just a few paper spills and drawers left open. No sign of panic or violence—no unsightly clutter of bodies or bones.

No notes written in the dust either: BEWARE, THE END IS NIGH. It was as if everybody had stepped out for lunch and kept going.

But they had left their clothes behind.

All along the corridors and behind most of the desks were tired bundles of clothing, as if each person had stopped where they were, undressed, and left. Flattened by years of gravity, stiff and dusty, most of the clothing was still identifiable. Business clothes and work coveralls, and a few uniforms. All of the inner and outer clothing piled on top of shoes.

"This is … " For once, Charlie was at a loss for words.

"Scary," I said. "I wonder if it's just here, or everywhere."

"I think everywhere," the sheriff said, and squatted down. He came up with a gaudy diamond ring, an obvious Earth antique. "No scavengers came through here."

Mystery or no, we were all famished, and searched out the cafeteria.

We didn't bother with the refrigerator and freezer, but found a pantry with some boxes of fruit, meat, and fish. After a quick meal, we split up to search the place for some clue as to how long it had been deserted; what had happened,

The sheriff found a yellowed newspaper, dated 14 Galileo 128. "As we might have guessed," he said. "The same day we started back, allowing for relativity."

"So they disappeared the same time that our antimatter did." My watch beeped, reminding me that it was almost time for Marygay to pass overhead. The three of us were just able to push open an emergency door.

The sky was slightly hazy, or we might have been able to see the escape ships as three close white spots drifting across the sky.

We were only able to talk for a few minutes, but there wasn't that much to say. "Two unexplainable things happening at the same time most likely had the same cause."

She said they'd continue a visual inspection from orbit. They didn't have anything sophisticated, but Number Three had powerful binoculars. They could see our shuttle and the line it had made in the snow, landing, and the other shuttle, conspicuous under a snow-shedding tarpaulin.

The escape ships would have to land on their tails, so there had better be no one living within a few kilometers of where they came down—else there would be no one living. Our shuttle's gamma-ray blast wasn't 1 percent of the larger ships'.

It looked like that wouldn't be a problem.

If there were people living in town, we'd have to go out into the country and find an alternative landing spot big enough and flat enough. I could think of a couple of farms I wouldn't mind seeing put to that use, just for old times' sake.

We found cold-weather gear in a locker room in the basement, bright orange coveralls that were lightweight and oily to the touch. I knew that it wasn't oil, just some odd polymer that trapped a millimeter of vacuum between the suit's layers, but they still felt greasy.

Hoping against hope, we went into the service garage, but the vehicles' fuel cells were all dead. The sheriff remembered about an emergency vehicle, though, that we found parked outside. Designed to work in situations where power wasn't available, it had a small plutonium reactor.

It was an ungainly garish thing, a bright yellow box set up for firefighting, remote rescue, and immediate medical aid. It was wide enough inside for six beds, with room for nurses or surgeons to move around them.

Getting into it was a problem, the doors locked shut with ice. We got a couple of heavy screwdrivers from the garage and chipped our way inside.

The lights came on when the door opened, a good sign. We turned the defroster on high and looked around—a handy mobile base of operations, now and when the rest of the crowd came down, as long as the plutonium held out.

A "remaining hours of operation" readout said 11,245. I wondered how to interpret that, since it probably used more power charging up a mountainside than sitting here with its lights on.

When the windshield was clear, the sheriff sat down in the driver's seat. Charlie and I strapped ourselves into hard chairs behind him.

"The enabling code for emergency vehicles used to be five-six-seven," he said. "If that doesn't work, we'll have to figure out a way to subvert it." He punched those numbers into a keypad and was rewarded with a chime.

"Destination?" the vehicle asked.

"Manual control," the sheriff said.

"Proceed. Drive carefully."

He put the selector on FORWARD and the electric motor whined, increasing in pitch and volume until all six wheels broke free of the ice with a satisfying crunch. We lurched forward and the sheriff steered the thing cautiously around to the front of the spaceport, and took the road toward town.

The spongy metal tires made a sandpapery sound on the icy road. My watch beeped and we stopped long enough for me to step outside and give Marygay a progress report.

There weren't any suburbs on this side of town; no building was allowed in the direction of the spaceport. Once we passed the five-kilometer limit, though, we were in the city.

It was an interesting part of Centrus. The oldest buildings on the planet were here, squat rammed-earth structures with log framing on the doors and windows. They were dwarfed by the brick buildings of the next generation, two and three stories high.

One of the old houses was standing with its front door open, hanging loose on one hinge. We stopped, and walked over to take a look. I heard the sheriff unsnap his holster. Part of me said What the hell does he expect to find? and part of me was reassured.

Dim light came through the dirty windows, revealing a horrible sight: the floor was scattered with bones. The sheriff kicked at a few and then squatted to inspect a pile of them.

He picked up a long one. "These aren't Man or human bones." He tossed it away and stirred the pile. "Dogs and cats."

"With the open door, this was the only shelter for them when winter came," I said.

"And the only source of food," Charlie pointed out. "Each other." We'd brought dogs and cats to this place knowing they'd have to be dependent, parasites, for most of the year. They had been a welcome link to the chain of life that began on Earth.

And ended here? I felt a sudden urgency to get on into town.

"Nothing here for us." The sheriff felt it, too; he stood up abruptly and wiped his hands on the greasy coveralls. "Let's move on."

Interesting that we had instinctively assumed that I was in charge from the time the shuttle left orbit, but now the sheriff was in the driver's seat, figuratively as well as literally.

As the sun rose higher, we drove down Main Street, steering around abandoned vehicles. The road and sidewalks were badly in need of repair. We lurched over a choppy sea of frost heaves.

The cars and floaters were not just abandoned; they were piled up in knots, mostly at intersections. People go off automatic inside the city limits, so when their drivers disappeared, the vehicles just kept going until they ran into something heavy.

Most people's homes were open to the sun. That was not reassuring, either. Who leaves for a long journey without drawing the curtains? The same people who leave their floaters in the middle of the street, I guess.

"Why don't we just stop at random and check a place that's not full of dog bones," Charlie said. He looked like I felt: time to get off this rocking boat.

The sheriff nodded and pulled over to the curb, in case of a sudden onrush of traffic. We got out and went into the closest building, a three-story apartment cluster, armed with our big screwdrivers, to pry open locks.

The first apartment on the right was unlocked. "Man lived here," the sheriff said, betraying some emotion. Most of them didn't need to lock their homes.

It was functional and plain past austerity. A few pieces of wooden furniture without cushions. In one room, five plank beds with the wooden blocks they use for pillows.

I wondered, not for the first time, whether they had pillows stashed somewhere for sex. Those planks would be hard on knees and backs. And did the other one and a half couples watch while a couple was coupling? Adults always lived together in groups of five, while children lived in a supervised crèche.

Maybe they all had sex together, every third day. They didn't differentiate between homo and het.

The place was completely devoid of ornament, like a Tauran cell. Art belonged in public places, for the edification of all. They didn't keep souvenirs or collect things.

There was a uniform layer of dust on every horizontal surface, and Charlie and I both sneezed. The sheriff evidently lacked that gene.

"We might be able to tell more from a human place," I said. "More disorder, more clues."

"Of course," the sheriff said. "Any other one, I'm sure." The population of Men was spread uniformly through the city, a magnanimous gesture.

The one next door was locked, and so were the other seven on the floor. We didn't have any luck with the screwdrivers.

"You could shoot the lock off," Charlie said.

"That's not safe. And I only have twenty cartridges."

"Somehow," I said, "I think you'll find boxes and boxes of them at the police station."

"Let's go outside and break a window," he said. We went out to the ruined street and he picked up a fist-sized piece of it. He had a pretty good fastball for someone who'd probably never played the game. It starred the glass but bounced back. Charlie and I did the same. After a few repeats, the window was almost opaque with a craze of cracks, but it still held.

"Well … " The sheriff extracted his pistol, pointed it at the center of the window, and fired. The noise was astonishingly loud, and echoed wavering down the street. The bullet left a hand-sized hole in the ruined glass. He aimed a meter to the right and fired again, and most of the window collapsed in a satisfying cascade.

It was time to make contact again, so we rested for a few minutes while I gave Marygay a summary of our disturbing observations. We agreed that they should put off landing until we knew a little more. Besides, the last people to be revived were still a little bit weak for the stress of landing.

We didn't have to clear away the glass fragments that still clung to the bottom of the frame. I could reach through and unlatch the window, and it swung out to make a large, if inconvenient, portal. The sheriff and Charlie sort of heaved me through it, and then we pushed and pulled until we were all inside. Then I realized I could have gone around and unlocked the door.

The place had been a mess even before we started shooting it up. City folks. There were piles of books all around the room, most of them with bindings from the university library, now eight MF years overdue.

I checked a diploma on the wall and was mildly surprised—the woman who lived here, Roberta More, was a mathematical physicist who had come out to Paxton to talk to a couple of my students about doing graduate work in Centrus. The four of us had had lunch together.

"Small world," Charlie said, but the sheriff pointed out that it wasn't all that unlikely that one of us would know a random resident here, since we both taught and this was a university neighborhood. I could have argued with his logic, but over the years have learned to find more pleasant ways to waste my time.

Dust and cobwebs everywhere. Four large oil paintings on the wall, not very good to my eye. One, improved by an off-center bullet hole, was signed "To Aunt Rob with love," which probably explained all four.

The chaos in the room seemed natural. Subtract the dust and cobwebs and it would be the typical lair of an academic who lived alone.

It looked like she had been in the kitchen when whatever happened, happened. There was a small wooden dining table with two chairs, one of them piled high with books and journals. One plate with unidentifiable remains, which was, perhaps, a clue. The kitchen was otherwise neat, in contrast to her working room; all the dishes but that one cleaned and put away. In the center of her table, a porcelain vase with a few brown fragile sticks. Whatever it was, happened in the middle of a meal, and she didn't have time or inclination to finish or clean up. No abandoned clothes, but a person living alone doesn't have to dress for dinner.

Her clothes were laid out on the bed, which was neatly made, its coverlet rich burgundy under the dust. Two paintings by the same artist faced each other from the exact centers of opposite walls. A dresser had three drawers: blouses, pants, and underwear, all precisely folded and stacked. There were two empty suitcases in the closet. "Well, she didn't pack," Charlie said.

"Didn't have time to. Let me check something." I went back into the kitchen and found the fork she'd been eating with, on the floor to the right of the chair.

"Look at this." I held up the fork, which had a twist of dried something in its tines. "I don't think she had any warning at all. She just plain disappeared, in mid-bite."

"Our antimatter didn't," the sheriff pointed out. "If we're still thinking about a common cause."

"You're the physicist," Charlie said. "What makes stuff disappear?"

"Collapsars. But they reappear somewhere else." I shook my head. "Things don't disappear. They might appear to, but they've only changed state or position. A particle and an antiparticle destroy each other, but they're still 'there' in the photons produced. Even things swept up by a naked singularity don't actually disappear."