Reconception: The Fall (3 page)

One day, he followed her back to her cubicle and
opened the door, which was never locked, to find her getting
undressed. Her back was toward him and his breath caught as she
peeled off the navy jumpsuit, revealing the slender curves of her
back and buttocks. As she turned toward the shower—her long, blonde
hair swinging—she saw him in the doorway and froze.

Morgan enjoyed the moment. He admired her breasts and
belly, even the look of shock on her face. He stepped forward,
crossing the eight feet between them, and reached out. Evie whirled
out of reach, slamming the door of the bathroom in his face.

Angry now, Morgan turned the handle and pushed on
the door. He was strong and wiry, and she was just fourteen, so it
didn’t take long for him to push it back far enough to get a hand
inside. The pain as a pair of scissors went into his hand was
unbearable, but he grunted in agony and kept pushing. This wasn’t
about sex anymore. Now it was about control. He would have her. She
would be his.

And Morgan’s will might have made it so except that
Evie was just as determined that he would not have her, that she
would not be his. She pulled the scissors out of his hand and
stabbed him again, and this time, Morgan couldn’t do anything but
withdraw his arm. Evie slammed the door closed and locked it.

Swearing, he opened her tiny closet, pulling out a
shirt and wrapping his arm and hand. The pain lessened slightly,
and blood stopped pouring out. Morgan sat down on the bed to catch
his breath.

“You’d better get out of here,” Evie said from behind
the door.

“You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Get out of here, John, or I won’t be responsible for
what happens to you.”

Morgan laughed. “What happens to me?”

There was silence for several minutes. Then there was
a knock on the door. Morgan didn’t know what to do. There was blood
everywhere. Evie was locked in the bathroom. The knock came again,
and then the voice of Jersey Lipton. “Evie! Evie, what the hell is
going on in there? There’s talcum powder pouring out of the vents.
Is everything all right?”

Morgan cringed. She’d dumped powder into the air vent
and it was flooding the hall! Pulling his dignity like a robe
around him, he got up, opened the door and walked out, pushing past
Lipton and disappearing around the corner.

The repercussions had been minor, the worst of it
being the jokes about how a man of twenty-two couldn’t take a
fourteen-year-old girl. Between the stitches he’d needed in his
hand and forearm, and the ridicule, most of East USA thought he’d
been punished enough.

Except for Garret, who caught up
with him in the 1
^st
Quad and threatened him in public, saying that if
Morgan ever so much as went near Evie without an invitation again,
he, Garret, would see to it that the next time Morgan got to his
feet, he would be missing a couple of vital parts.

After that, Morgan stayed away from Evie. Not because
he was afraid of Garret, but because of the titters and chuckles at
his expense. Someday he’d get even. When the time was right.

Another thing Morgan kept hidden was his ambition,
but after his thirty-fifth birthday when his work on the
regeneration of earth's atmosphere had earned him a position of
some influence, he opened up and let it show. People started to pay
serious attention to him and to his ideas, and he began to crave
more of the same. He discovered that people he had formerly taken
as intellectual equals could now be manipulated. This aroused in
him such contempt that he could scarcely contain it.

Morgan had it worked out to a formula. Find a man's
weakness (basically whatever he believed in). It could be an ideal,
his feeling of love for another, his respect for his fellows, his
desire to be recognized for his ability, or his fear of looking
like a fool. It didn't matter what the weakness was; once it was
found, it was a simple matter to use it to control the man. It
never occurred to Morgan that what he called a weakness was very
often the most decent thing about the individual.

When he realized that the project in which they were
all involved would never end, at least not during his lifetime, he
began to have serious doubts about its merit. His life would be
unending work deep within the bowels of East USA, with little
opportunity to exercise what he had come to believe was his true
gift—his ability to manipulate and control the lives of others. He
was bored with the Habitat. He was sick of the sameness. He wanted
a change.

At first it was just a niggling little thought that
kept going round and round his mind. What would happen if the earth
restoration project were abandoned? What would happen if there were
no restoration project? Then he began to imagine scenarios that put
an end to it, realizing that the only way this could happen was to
put an end to the earth.

The thought tantalized him; it drew him like a
magnet draws steel. Could he do it, he wondered? Could he carry it
off? Could he convince others to work with him, or in some other
way coerce them? In no time at all, the thought became a challenge
he could not deny. He would do it. He would put paid to the whole
venture and start a new era in human history.

The first question was: what could he do to finish
off the earth once and for all? It was his wife, Elissa, who
answered that one. Elissa, Morgan had long ago decided, was some
kind of throwback. She had had an education of superior dimensions
even by Underground standards. She was the daughter of a corporate
king, and all the little fool wanted was to have a baby.

One "evening," he let her ramble on and on about her
need before interjecting, "You know there's no way you can have a
baby until someone dies, and then you have to wait for your turn.
There are four women ahead of you."

"Of course I know that. It'll be ten years before my
turn or more, and even then, it won't be our baby—not really. I
want us to have a baby the old fashioned way, our baby, not the
baby of some dead man. Oh, I know the law, but why can't we change
the law, or figure some way around it? Don't we have any power or
influence?"

Chuckling, Morgan replied, reaching for the cup on
the coffee table, "You sound like a spoiled little debutante, not a
scientist with a total education."

"I know. I know. It's just that I want it so
desperately. I can't stop what I feel. I just wish there was some
way...."

He pretended to think for a moment before answering,
"Maybe there is ... you know, if there was just some extra space,
if we all didn't feel so closed in, if we'd only work a little
harder on making our own situation more bearable, instead of
forever trying to make reparations for what our ancestors did. We
didn't do it. Why do we have to suffer?"

"I agree with you 100%!" his wife cried. "If only we
could expand our horizons a little, build more cities, travel a
little. We've become so insular. It's just all wrong. My natural
instincts are being smothered. I want a baby!"

"The only way to change the direction of our R and D
would be to end the earth project."

"Oh, no one would do that," she said, stretching out
on the couch. "Not unless someone made them give it up. It's
practically a religion to some of these people you know."

"I know. I know." Morgan grimaced in distaste. "You'd
think people of their supposed intelligence and education would be
above all that, wouldn't you?"

"The only thing that could stop the earth project
would be a disaster of such dimensions that it became hopeless to
persevere. You know, like a nuclear accident ... "

"But we have no nuclear weapons...."

Elissa looked at him darkly. "Morgan, I'm surprised
at you! Think of the millions of tons of waste! But, this is a
foolish conversation. That’s not the answer to us getting a
baby."

Morgan liked the idea. Although all nuclear power
plants (no more than sophisticated, expensive and dangerous devices
used to boil water) had been shut down in 2018, the problem of what
to do with the billions of gallons of deadly nuclear waste
remaining, had never really been solved.

Each of hundreds of commercial breeder reactors in
the U.S. had, for over 50 years, produced tons of cesium-137,
strontium-90, and other radioactive materials requiring hundreds of
years of isolation from the environment. Additionally, between four
and five hundred pounds of plutonium was produced in each reactor
each year.

Since even the tiniest dose of plutonium is lethal
to all life for 500,000 years, it had to be kept isolated from the
environment for virtually all time. This was, of course, an
impossible task, and just as there had been power plant accidents
like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Guadalupe, and
transport accidents such as Albuquerque (which rendered the entire
city uninhabitable for the next 500 years when cesium-137 was
leaked from a truck) a catastrophic nuclear event was only a matter
of time. Fortunately, the clock stopped when the power plants were
shut down.

In Morgan's time, barely a hundred million hardy
souls, genetically predisposed to live under the most harrowing
conditions, still survived on the surface despite cancer,
mutations, brain dysfunctions and more. But the worst was yet to
come.

The chromosome damage and sweeping death of every
form of life caused by a nuclear accident of such magnitude as that
imagined by Morgan would finish the planet off. Plants would die or
mutate into poisons that could not be ingested. Reproduction would
stop as plants and animals became sterile. Even when no damage was
evident, the plant carrying the most minute bit of plutonium would
destroy any herbivore that ate it and any carnivore that ate the
herbivore, and so on and so on ad infinitum. Death would not be
quick or easy for these unfortunates but slow, painful, and very
ugly.

To Morgan, this was of little consequence. What kind
of lives did these remaining inhabitants of earth have anyway? His
useless wife had given him the answer. He knew what he would do.
Now all he needed to know was how, where and when.

CHAPTER 3

East USA Habitat: 2128

Industrialism was founded on the premise that it was
perfectly rational to profit at the cost of common property; and
self-interest, for most people, represented the highest level of
rational thinking. To consider that it might be reasonable to take
only what one needed and no more was considered either ridiculously
idealistic or dangerously communistic. The results of
industrialization were finally an indictment of the capitalist
system that spawned it. It was on this sorry foundation that the
world rested and finally died.

For a brief moment after its death throes began, it
almost seemed that people had changed. Everyone in the habitats was
dedicated to restoring the earth, and this dedication was like a
prayer joining each to each. Money and power were put aside as
unimportant. But it happened too late. Some people could not learn
the necessary lessons. The answers were not in quick fixes, but in
character, integrity, and honor. What hurts one, hurts all. It was
so simple, but it was too late.

John Morgan, the desire for power in his genes, could
not control his need to control. Rather than exert power over
himself and overcome this defect, he chose to exert power over
others. In choosing himself and his desires as more important than
the common good, he condemned humanity to a life as sterile as the
great mothering earth it had destroyed. Humankind would live and
die imprisoned within the remains of that earth, never to be
reborn.

But Morgan didn't know that, and, if he did, he
wouldn't have cared. What mattered to him was that he (in what he
considered to be great wisdom) would decide a new course for
mankind and everyone would have a better life. It was a kind of
madness within him, this desire to make it his way, fueled by each
conquest he made on his way to the 'top."

For those who had dreamed of undoing the damage that
had been done by industrialization, a massive influx of high-level
radiation into the environment would be a devastating blow. There
would be no way to eliminate a radioactive poison which would
continue its lethal activity from organism to organism for half a
million years. In despair, researchers would give up the idea of
restoring the earth and devote their knowledge and resources to
improving the lives of those who remained. Of this, Morgan was
certain.

Communication, which was sporadic between
underground habitats in the U.S. and other nations, would blossom.
New knowledge and technology would be applied to creating
radiation-proof transport vehicles between habitats. Morgan thought
that it might be possible to create an above ground city protected
from the pollution and radiation by a dome. Perhaps they’d resume
the old space program.

Everyone was grist for Morgan's mill. He never held a
conversation without wondering how he could use the person before
him. Before the Fall, he would have encountered stiff competition
during his rise to power, which might have slowed him down. Here he
rose unopposed, and as his influence grew, so did his madness.

Once he had decided that he would end the earth
project, he went after that goal with all the drive and power that
had motivated his ancestors. He wasn't the hereditary chairman of
Exxon for no reason, he thought. It had purpose and meaning, and he
had discovered what that purpose was - a new world run by him. It
was of course, easier considered than done, and it cost Morgan many
sleepless nights trying to figure out the How to go with the
What.

He knew that only finishing the earth project once
and for all would work. He knew that only a major nuclear event
would effectively finish the planet in a short enough time for it
to matter to him. How to cause that event was what was keeping him
awake. The nearest nuclear waste dump was nearly 1000 miles away
buried in the New Mexican desert. 1000 miles away through terrain
that was uninhabitable to humans. No transport vehicles existed any
longer. In fact, the habitat had been sealed for so long, there was
no way to go outside. But Morgan knew that he would have to find
someone to go there for him, find a closer source of radioactive
material, or give up his plans.