Nest of Worlds (16 page)

Through the pulsing roar, which at times was like a series of explosions, he heard a voice. In the rubble he could make out the shoulders and head of Saalstein.

“Are you all right?”

“My left arm, it hurts, hurts badly. I can’t move,” Saalstein answered, cogent.

“Lie still. You may have broken bones,” said Gavein and set to work. He removed pieces of sheetrock. He was afraid the man’s spine might be injured.

“That was a quake and a half,” said Saalstein. “It began the moment Barth gave you the third injection. Everything went head over heels.”

“I thought it was my brain doing somersaults.” Gavein finished his digging. “Try to get up on your own, Saalstein. I don’t want to make you a paraplegic if your back is broken.”

The biologist moved an arm, a leg, then awkwardly began to scrabble out.

“Not so terrible,” he said. “The pain in my left arm goes right through me, but I think my back is all right. Help me up, Throzz.”

Gavein lifted him.

“We better get out of here,” Saalstein said. “A sling would be good. My arm is killing me.”

“I don’t know if I can find anything for you here. Maybe in another room. Let’s try the hall. Careful, there’s a lot of broken glass in that direction.”

The floor shook again.

“We really should hurry.”

Gavein moved aside some rubble. Saalstein stood, trying not to faint. His left arm didn’t seem to be broken, but it was seriously crushed. Some rubble slid away, and Gavein uncovered Siskin, who was cold, sliced by glass. Death had overtaken him as he fled from the room. Pulling the corpse out by its legs made it possible to open one of the swinging doors a little. The rest of the glass fell from the metal frame. The shaking increased in strength. The noise outside was like rolling thunder.

“What’s out there may be worse than an earthquake,” Gavein said.

Saalstein would have shrugged if he hadn’t had an injured collarbone. “We can bitch to our hearts’ content after we make it to a safe place,” he said.

They followed the rising, rubble-filled hallway. Here and there the ceiling and floor had been torn open, and they could see through to the levels above and below. They came upon bodies and stopped to see if any were alive, but none were. The survivors had got out long ago. In a puddle of water that had collected around a broken appliance, Gavein washed his hands and face. When Saalstein urged him to hurry, Gavein muttered that maybe it would be better if David Death didn’t live.

“It’s not that simple,” said Saalstein, kicking a piece of brick and groaning because of his arm.

The staircase was a ruin—the outside wall had fallen away—but they went down the shaking steps, half of which hung over empty space. Plaster sifted from above.

Gavein leaned out and looked at the courtyard. “Look,” he cried. “Look at those boulders!”

The ground was covered with rocks of every size, and more were coming down, an intermittent hail of stone.

“Watch it, or you’ll fall.”

They managed to descend two levels. Below that, the stairs broke off. They were on the fourth floor, the administrative offices. The shaking subsided. The sun was now establishing itself in the sky. The abandoned building had a dismal air about it. The ceilings here were intact, but one of the wings had collapsed all the way to its foundation. There were splits in the partitioning walls, and some had been knocked over. Glass crunched underfoot.

“Saalstein, on which side of the crack are we?”

“What are you getting at?” He limped along, clutching his painful arm.

“On the ocean side or the Davabel side?”

“There should be a bridge.”

“There is none now.”

In one of the offices they found a tablecloth, spoons, forks, and knives. Saalstein paid with a few gasps for the application of a sling, but he perked up afterward, when his arm felt better. His color improved, though his hair was still plastered down with sweat. He tried to find a door to one of the fire escapes.

He stopped.

“Throzz, come with me. Let’s check something out.”

He ran down the hallway. Gavein had trouble keeping up with the wounded man. On this floor there were no bodies. The door they wanted was locked, but the partitions on either side of it had been reduced to mounds of fragmented plasterboard. The floor of a nearby cubicle was covered with banknotes. Gavein sighed. Saalstein knelt clumsily. With his free hand he filled his pockets.

“You can be executed, if they catch you.”

“Maybe in Lavath. Here, rescue workers do this all the time. Take as much as you want, go ahead. It’ll help pay for your Magdalena’s operation.”

Gavein couldn’t deny this last argument. He too began gathering bills. At first he tried arranging them in bundles, but then the rumble of another explosion reached him, hurried him. Imitating Saalstein, he undid the zipper of his hospital coverall and stuffed the money in his chest. Having the use of both hands, he could stuff more than Saalstein. Soon the coverall was filled up. It wasn’t easy closing the zipper. Since he had no underwear, the bills slipped lower.

“The first time in my life that banknotes tickle my balls.”

“You can also wipe your ass with them. That’ll be a first time too,” the biologist grunted, struggling with his uniform.

“Actually, not a bad idea.” Gavein undid his coverall again and stuffed bills in the rear, where there was room for many more.

“You prefer to be big-assed than have breasts and a beer belly?” Saalstein asked.

“One breast only, in the center.” Gavein patted the bills in front. He helped Saalstein button up his suit. Without question, it was time to leave. Powerful shocks came, one after another.

Gavein forced open the emergency door with a shoulder and his back. The metal stairs, a spiral braid of steel, were suspended in space; most of the supporting struts had been broken. At the floor Gavein and Saalstein were on, the stairs were about a meter from the wall of the building, and the next landing, like a small bridge, was at least one and a half meters below them.

Gavein took a step back.

“Now what?”

“We take the other.”

He leaned out: the other fire escape lay below, twisted on a pile of rubble.

The courtyard of the Division of Science looked as if giant moles had been at work; it was covered with a great assortment of slabs and chunks. Stones, large and small, still fell, hissing as they flew past. Someone in a white coat lay motionless.

In the distance the sky was clear. Sun shone on the buildings of Davabel, but over the DS hung a cloud, violet-brown and stinking.

“Listen, Saalstein. On this floor there are only two fire escapes?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then that’s the other in the courtyard.”

Saalstein swore under his breath. “What do we do?” he asked.

“We jump. A meter across, one and a half meters down . . .”

“I can’t with this arm.”

“You have a better idea?”

“What I think I’m seeing outside, it can’t be.”

“I see it too. A volcano is forming.”

“If it forms in that trench, we’re done for.”

“We haven’t got to the trench yet,” said Gavein. “There’s no reason to wait here. No one will come flying in for us.”

“On the contrary,” Saalstein said under his breath.

“I’ll jump first, then you. I’ll try to catch you.”

Gavein concentrated. The jump wasn’t difficult, but he couldn’t afford to miss. A fall from the fourth floor would break both legs.

He made it, grabbing a rail to stop himself. He banged his knee painfully.

The fire escape, connected to the top of the building by only one or two struts, began to jerk like a giant spring. A meter down, a meter up. Gavein held on; he could picture the last strut snapping, the whole fire escape separating from the wall and plunging to the ground.

Not this time: the oscillation stopped.

“Your turn, Saalstein. I’ll break your fall.”

“I can’t,” said Saalstein. “My arm.”

He jumped then, and Gavein caught him, but unfortunately Saalstein’s arm hit metal. He howled like an animal and moaned until the fire escape ceased its rocking.

“That’s the end of my arm,” he gasped, when he could speak. “I must have torn nerves.”

“Stop,” Gavein told him. “We either get off this thing or we fall with it. If you’re dead, your arm will make only an ornament to be set beside you in the coffin.”

As if to second his warning, the iron structure groaned and was hit by a ball of lava. Carefully, but as quickly as they could, they descended. The accompaniment of roars and hisses increased in volume. The sky over the ocean glowed a rusty red. The flying lava was coming from that direction.

The fire escape stopped in midair, the stairs ending two and a half meters above the ground.

“I’ll go first,” said Gavein.

He chose a level spot and jumped, somersaulting and turning a few times when he hit, hoping in this way to lessen the impact. But even so he fell hard, and it hurt. The hospital coverall and slippers were not made for acrobatics. Overhead, in response to his jump, the fire escape was shaking and groaning again. He ran, limping clumsily, from under the reach of the stairs. But the anchoring metal at the top held.

Saalstein jumped and landed heavily, on both feet. He tried to remain standing to protect his arm. He had come down on a flat piece of concrete. He screamed from the pain.

“Something tore in me,” he grunted. “My back too.”

“You should have fallen as I did. You probably ruptured yourself.”

They moved away from the falling stones, Gavein limping, Saalstein stepping with exaggerated care, holding the sling with his good arm, not sure if his intestines were in place.

It was on an incline. The last quake had lifted the ground near the trench. To leave the DS area, they had to climb.

They passed a figure in a lab coat. It resembled a white moth with wings outstretched. Aurelia had fallen from a window during the shocks. Her head was surrounded by a smear of black blood.

The sky toward the ocean continued to burn red. Explosions rumbled, light flashed. The cone of the volcano couldn’t be seen—it might not have formed yet. Rocks fell, some breaking into pieces in the air. On the ground, they hissed and steamed. Gavein was struck in the back, but the bills cushioned the blow.

He and Saalstein had no difficulty crossing the trench, which was partly filled with rubble. But then they had to climb the steep, crumbling escarpment that now formed one of the edges of the trench. Saalstein panted, exhausted.

When they were almost at the top, Gavein saw a helicopter approaching.

“We have to show him where we are, so he can pick us up.”

“Don’t be in a hurry, Throzz. Let’s keep our heads down. Maybe he won’t see us. The sod above us, it’s like a roof.”

Gavein was astonished.

“Wait,” said Saalstein. “And watch.”

The helicopter hovered over the ruins of the DS. Then it circled the volcano’s column of fire and plume of smoke. It was keeping low, to avoid retardation of time, and went lower still. A line of white dots unexpectedly flew from the copter to the ground. The shots couldn’t be heard in the thunder of the volcano.

“What is he doing?!”

“General Thompson is in command. Possibly they saw the body of Aurelia, or someone else’s body.”

I am stupid, stupid, Gavein thought. Only now did he recall the things that were said as they were putting him to sleep on the gurney.

Overhead flew a squadron of combat copters equipped with missile launchers. The craft were flying low, at the altitude of real time; the roar of their rotors could be heard over the volcano.

The two fugitives, under the overhang of sod, were not visible from the air. The squadron executed a model attack, unleashing all its firepower upon what was left of the Division of Science. After completion of this mission, they regrouped, turned above the ocean, and headed back to Davabel. The first copter still hovered, still circled, apparently to oversee and direct.

A second squadron came, then a third, fourth, and fifth. Each raked the area. The reconnaissance copter also fired at chosen targets.

“I wonder if Thompson himself is in that one.”

“Not unlikely. It’s his style. He likes to take part personally. Throzz, bring it down!”

“If only I could . . .”

“And you call yourself Death?”

“At least I have no qualms about this loot,” said Gavein, patting his belly.

“Doesn’t tickle anymore?”

“I shifted most of it to the back, where I have the skin of an elephant. All those years, you know, of sitting behind a desk . . .” He stopped. More squadrons were coming from Davabel. The destruction would be methodical. “They’re the same copters. I recognize their markings. They refueled, got more ammo, are going back to work.”

“Thompson is thorough.”

“Sparing nothing to put me out of the way.”

Saalstein nodded.

“Why that masquerade with the tests?” Gavein asked. “They could have killed me in my house.”

“Killing a man in his house . . . it’s awkward. Particularly a man who is innocent, legally, of any crime. Also, they wanted to understand the phenomenon. At first the tests were genuine, following Siskin’s plan.”

“But then they tried to cut me up alive on the table.”

“They made that decision earlier, when Balakian died. They all switched to Thompson’s plan, wanting to save their sorry asses. Medved’s statistics only added to their fear. Those numbers made an impression. And then, the failed attempts.”

“Attempts? What did you people do?”

“Well, first Winslow was supposed to put alcohol in your IV. Then Chechug was supposed to give you an x-ray dose strong enough to melt a tin can. When that didn’t work, Winslow tried to inject you with cancer cells, except she stuck herself instead, and no doubt is growing something from that, if she’s still alive.”

“Saalstein . . . Did those dogs do something like that to my wife?” Gavein went pale.

“I never heard anything along those lines. Her illness resulted from a time when no one knew that you were Death. Whatever the guards did to her during her trip from Lavath has nothing to do with us.”

He appeared to be telling the truth.

“Setting all this up for me must have been a ton of work,” Gavein said.

“Meetings that ran for hours: how to do it in such a way that you wouldn’t guess. Votes taken in the middle of the night. Then Lee . . . He was to hook you up to a high-tension wire, but you got him first.”

“I did nothing.”

“He died; that’s not nothing. And then your dissection was interrupted by an earthquake. You ended up pulling the plug on the division, not the other way around.”

“The volcano pulled the plug, not I.”

“Amounts to the same thing.”

“There was voting, you said. How did you vote?”

“For, of course. It seemed the best line of action.”

“Then why don’t you push me from this hiding place when one of the squadrons is overhead? A blast of machine-gun fire, and that’s the end of me. And Thompson wastes no more of the government’s money.”

“There are three reasons,” said Saalstein after a little thought. “I give them in no particular order. First, you saved my life, pulling me from the rubble. Whereas Thompson and company would have killed me. If not for you, I’d have been blown into little bits by their missiles.” He pointed toward the ruins. “Second, if Thompson’s boys catch sight of you, it won’t end with machine-gun fire. The whole area in the radius of a kilometer will be hit with such a quantity of bombs and rockets that not one molecule of me will be left intact. And third, even if I decided to lay down my life for humanity, I am convinced that I would be the only one to die. You would come out of it in one piece, once again. Death can’t be killed.”

“So you, too, believe that I am Death.”

“It’s not a matter of belief. I’m accepting the simplest explanation of the facts. You are what you are.”

Thompson’s squadrons flew over, one after the other, and pounded the remnants of the DS to even finer dust. As the ruins grew lower to the ground, the volcano emerged more: a lake of flame, still without a crater. From the depths spewed tongues of lava, red-hot boulders flew, and smoke gathered in a dark cloud. The rising cone, Gavein thought, will bury forever what is left of the DS. Several times the copters threw shells so close that he could hear the fragments whiz by, but the hiding place on the slope was never hit.