Last Gasp (72 page)

Hegler sipped his coffee and paused to belch softly. “Whatever it is, it goes on night and day,” he said, as if inwardly musing.

“At least it’s not alien,” Chase said, trying to lighten the mood. There had been a rash of UFO sightings over previous months and he’d even heard a few people speak seriously of an “invasion.”

“The source is southwest,” Hegler said, leaning over the desk and jabbing a stubby finger at the map. “I can’t pinpoint it exactly, but I’d say between two and three hundred miles.”

“Anything in that area?”

“Yosemite National Park, Death Valley, China Lake Naval Weapons Station, Fort Irwin, Las Vegas. Take your pick.”

“So there is a military presence near the source of the signal,” Chase said thoughtfully.

“Is. Was. Who knows what’s there anymore?”

“And what about Emigrant Junction?” Chase said, studying the map. “Is that an actual location or just a call sign?”

Hegler shrugged again. “If it exists I can’t find it.”

Chase listened for a moment to the remorseless beeping coming over the speaker. “Does nothing in the message make sense? I thought I heard the word ‘island.’ Did you get that?”

“Comes up pretty often. That’s in plain English, but then it’s followed by a string of characters and digits.” Hegler glanced at him sideways. “If you think you can crack it you’re welcome to try.”

“I’ll leave it to the experts,” Chase said, smiling and shaking his head. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to deprive you and Ron of hours of harmless amusement.”

Art Hegler reached out to fine-tune the dial. Chase admired his persistence. It had been sheer accident that the signals were detected at all: Ron Maxwell had picked them up on a random sweep several months ago, and ever since he and Hegler had spent countless hours monitoring them and trying to crack the code. Why they went to all this time and trouble wasn’t clear—even to them, Chase suspected. Like most activity in the Tomb it had taken on the form of ritual, a way to get through the day.

They were all, himself included, on a journey with no destination. There was a time bomb ticking away inside every brain. The trick was to ignore it, to swamp it with ceaseless activity so that the ticking faded until it was no more intrusive than the background hum of the filtration plant. Of course one day—one
day
—the ticking, like the filtration plant, would stop and the bomb would explode. But he didn’t want to think about that. Neither did Hegler nor Maxwell nor any of the others, which was why they carried on obsessively with futile tasks.

“Hear that?” Hegler said suddenly.

Chase paid attention, but the Morse sounded the same as before, garbled and indecipherable. “What is it?”

“Answering message. They gave the call sign: Island-whatever-it-is to Emigrant Junction and then the coded message follows.”

“Can you locate the island? If we knew who they were talking to—” Hegler waved his pudgy hand impatiently. “It’s a random signal, could be coming from practically anywhere, and we only have one directional fix on it. There’s more than one island though,” he added, frowning at the console.

“How do you know that?”

“The messages overlap. Emigrant Junction talks to three, four, or more simultaneously. Goes on nonstop without a break. Damn windbags.”

Islands in different parts of the world? Was that where people had run to? Or were these military bases reporting to and receiving orders from HQ? It was bloody infuriating not to know what was happening elsewhere. Communication with the outside world had dwindled as everyone withdrew into secrecy and suspicion, as remote and isolated from one another as tribes of headhunters in the depths of the Borneo jungle. The global village was no more. The Tomb itself never transmitted for fear of hostile outsiders locating their position.

Ron Maxwell came in carrying a stack of magnetic tapes. Tall and thin and buzzing with nervous energy, he was Stan to Hegler’s Ollie. He wore a brown one-piece coverall with an oxygen counter on the left breast pocket: Below a certain percentage it turned blue, then purple, then black. Some had audio circuits attached that trilled like songbirds.

“When are they due back?” asked Maxwell, dropping the tapes with a clatter onto his half of the console. He peered amiably at Chase through tinted spectacles.

“The deadline is nine o’clock tonight,” Chase replied. Maxwell’s daughter Fran was with the reconnaissance party that Dan was leading. “I should think they’ll be back before then. Art’s been telling me about your daily soap opera; pity we can’t follow the plot.”

“Maybe we can’t,” Maxwell said, brandishing one of the tape reels, “for the simple reason that it’s in another language.”

“What?” Chase stiffened. Surely they weren’t back to the nonsense about aliens again? And why hadn’t Hegler mentioned this? He got the feeling that private lines of research were going on all around him that he knew nothing about.

“Computer-speak.” Ron Maxwell flipped the reel and caught it in his bony fingers. “We dusted off the weather-modeling computer—it hasn’t been used for three years—and ran some of the tapes. Had to teach it Morse code first, and we’re dealing with an unknown program, yet the computer recognized a distant cousin when it heard one. Overjoyed to hear a friendly voice. You could almost see its diodes glowing with pleasure.”

“It was able to interpret the tapes?”

“Ah—no,” Maxwell admitted, perching himself on the corner of the desk and swinging a lanky leg.

Hegler said tartly, “It didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”

“If it didn’t break the code, what did it do?” Chase demanded.

“That’s not so,” Maxwell objected, carrying on the conversation over Chase’s head. “We know—” He broke off, sighed, and spoke instead to Chase. “The messages from Emigrant Junction to the islands appear to be coded binary data: a master computer instructing other computers what to do. The answering messages are the computers feeding data back to the master computer.”

“Data about what?”

“We don’t know. Highly technical information for sure, but until we understand the program we can’t say.”

“As I said, we’re no nearer interpreting the messages than we were before,” Hegler put in, sounding pained and weary. “They could be military, scientific, or a new recipe for hamburger.”

“Do you think you’ll crack it eventually?”

“Bound to,” Maxwell asserted, full of confidence. “All we need is time and that’s one thing we’ve plenty of. Come back in three months and we’ll have the answer.”

“Might have,” Hegler rejoined, twiddling the dial.

Chase stood up and eyed them both keenly. “You do realize this is absolutely vital. You’ve
got
to crack that code!”

Hegler looked over his shoulder and Maxwell stopped his leg in midswing.

“Why’s that?” Hegler said.

“So we can start up in competition to McDonalds,” Chase said. When he told Ruth about it later, her reaction was, “I don’t see the point, Gavin. What are they hoping to prove?”

“They don’t want to prove anything. They’re investigating a problem, or more accurately a mystery, that’s all.”

They were sitting in the recreation room that they shared with ten others, Nick Power and his family among them. There was no shortage of living space in the complex—in fact there was too much of it— though communal sharing of facilities was necessary in order to save energy. There had been a suggestion to depressurize the corridors and stairways, but Chase thought it might be too dangerous. Most of the available energy went toward maintaining a breathable sealed environment; it was their most worrying problem.

“We know things are getting worse,” Ruth said drably. “We don’t need instruments to tell us that—just step outside.”

“You don’t think we ought to continue our investigations?”

“What for? To leave as a legacy for those unborn who never will be?” Ruth’s complexion had always been fair, but now it was very pale, emphasized by the crooked pink scar on her forehead that intersected with her right eyebrow, giving her a perpetually quizzical expression. The strain of living underground had told on them all. Everyone was pale because the sunlight was too fierce on the unprotected skin; everyone was subdued because of the inevitability of what was to be—had to be. Hence Ruth’s skepticism about the work that still went on regardless.

“Art Hegler’s doing the job he was trained for; it occupies his mind,” Chase said mildly. “Would you rather he took up embroidery?”

“Art’s harmless enough, I guess.” Ruth sighed. “I just don’t see the purpose, the reason behind it all—Maxwell and Hegler and all the others beavering away on their own crackpot schemes like a pack of mad scientists.”

“Does that include me?”

“It includes all of us. We must be crazy.”

“We could always leave, if you want to. The question is—”

“I know what the question is, Gavin. Why leave when there’s nowhere else to go. At least we’re safe here.” She laughed shortly. “Safe to rot. Safe to die. Safe from everything but...” Her voice sank to a rasping whisper and she closed her eyes.

Chase looked at her for a moment and then took her hand. It felt limp and lifeless. “What about you,” he said, “writing up medical research notes from ten years ago? Some might find that rather strange and pointless.”

“It’s for my own amusement.”

“What Art and the others are doing is probably for theirs—and who knows, they might come up with something.”

Ruth opened her eyes. “If they do,” she said, pressing his palm to her breast, “I hope they won’t expect the Nobel Prize.”

Night enveloped them with the dramatic abruptness of the desert. Above them the stars wavered and blinked with the rising heat, like a purple sequined cloth shimmering in the breeze. Except there was no breeze: The desert was inert, silent, pulsating heat in waves so that it was like walking through hot sticky syrup.

They had abandoned everything but their weapons. Hours spent scrambling over rocks and fighting their way through thorny brush in the searing sunlight had taken all their strength and there was none left for anything that didn’t contribute directly to their survival.

Dan pretended to drink, merely moistening his lips, and gave Jo the last few drops from the canteen. He estimated that they had crossed the border and were back in Utah. The nearest access point to the tunnels could be only two or three miles away, but that still left an underground walk of perhaps ten miles before they reached the Tomb. Was it better to go underground or continue on the surface where they could make good time? Three hours steady march would see them back at the Tomb, whereas it could take at least twice as long in the tunnels.

There was, however, a bigger dilemma than that. Were they being followed, and if so, by whom? At Echo Canyon, a few miles back, he thought he’d glimpsed movement behind them. Had the mutes picked up their trail? If so, they were leading them back to the others, revealing the Tomb’s location. And what had happened in the tent? Those white grubs ... where had they come from? He shuddered at the memory.

Jo screwed the top on the canteen and slung it around her neck. “Will they have lights?”

“What?”

“If they’re following our trail they’ll need lights, won’t they, to see by? So we should be able to see them!”

That hadn’t occurred to him. But see whom, for God’s sake? Mutes? Prims? Men with guns in Sherman tanks? Or somebody else. Something else ...

They had both stopped and were straining their eyes to penetrate the dense velvety darkness that seemed almost palpable. “I can’t see anything, can you?” Jo said, sounding relieved.

“No. What if they can see in the dark?”

“You mean like cats?”

“It’s possible.”

“How?”

Dan looked at her, seeing the polished glint of her eyes in a smudge of pale yellow, which was the barrier cream caking her face. They had removed their gauze masks and goggles the minute the sun had dipped over the horizon. “Most of the mutes have impaired faculties, but some of them have developed heightened senses to compensate. There was one I came across near Adamsville last year who could actually smell water, you know, like animals can. And somebody else I heard of who had infrared vision. If they’ve got that they won’t need any light.”

“You’d make a great morale officer.”

“Sorry. Thinking out loud.”

“Then think of something cheerful and let’s keep moving while you’re doing it.”

Ten minutes later they heard what sounded like a cry in the distance. Human or animal? Was there any animal life left in the desert? They listened intently but heard nothing more.

Dan flicked on a pencil flashlight and, shielding it with his body, squinted at his wrist compass. They were heading northeast. At this rate they couldn’t be more than an hour, perhaps less, from the nearest access point. He’d made up his mind to enter the complex and not risk being overtaken by whatever, if anything, was following them. He prayed he could find the concealed entrance in the darkness. It was hard enough in daylight, searching for the triangular markers.

He moved on, having taken a dozen paces before he realized that Jo wasn’t beside him. Dimly he made out her slight figure standing rigid, head raised, and beyond her saw the reason for it: five blue-white spheres ascending in perfect formation against the blaze of stars. They rose from the southwest in total silence and arced across the sky, gradually fading and becoming lost somewhere in the region of Draco. “What are they?” Jo said in a hushed voice. “Are they terrestrial?” It was the first time either of them had seen the UFOs, and Dan for one hadn’t believed in them until now. He said, “You mean our spacecraft? From Earth?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Well, they sure as hell weren’t meteorites,” he said tartly.

Again they heard the cry, like a lost bird, nearer now, and Jo clutched his arm. “They’re still following us! I bet you were right, one of the bastards has infrared vision.”

“I wish I’d never mentioned it,” Dan said gloomily. “That was an animal, a gopher out hunting.”

“I never knew gophers cried like babies.”

“A baby gopher then. Satisfied?”