Steel Beach (65 page)

Eventually we reached the base of the ship, which I knew mainly because we left square corridors and right-angle turns for the haphazard twists of the Great Dump. Not long after that we descended some stairs and were in a tunnel bored through solid rock. I still had no idea how far this network extended. I gathered it was possible to walk all the way to King City without ever visiting the surface.

We came to an abandoned, dimly-lit tube station. Or it had been abandoned at one time, but the Heinleiners had restored it: pushed the trash on the platform to one side, hung a few lights, homey touches like that. Floating a fraction above a gleaming silver rail was a six-person Maglev car of antique design. It had no doors, peeling paint, and the sign on the side still read MALL 5-9 SHUTTLE. With stops at all the major ghost warrens along the way, no doubt: this baby was
old
.

Random cushions had been spread on the ripped out seats and we sat on those and Smith pulled on a cord which rang a little tinkling bell, and the car began to glide down the rail.

“The whole idea of building a superman has acquired a lot of negative baggage over the years,” he said, picking up as if the intervening walk had never happened. As if he needed another annoying characteristic. “The German Fascists are the first ones I’m aware of who seriously proposed it, as part of an obsolete and foolish racial scheme.”

“I’ve read about them,” I said.

“It’s nice to talk to someone who knows a little history. Then you’ll know that by the time it became possible to tinker with genes, a lot more objections had been raised. Many of them were valid. Some still are.”

“Is that something you’d like to see?” I asked. “A superman?”

“It’s the
word
that throws you off. I don’t know if a ‘superman’ is possible, or desirable. I think an altered human is an idea worth looking into. When you consider that these carcasses we’re walking around in were evolved to thrive in an environment we’ve been evicted from…  ”

Maybe he said more, but I missed it, because just about then we had a head-on collision with another tram going in the opposite direction. Obviously, we didn’t really. Obviously, it was just the reflection of the headlights of our own car as we approached another of those ubiquitous null-fields. And even more obviously, you weren’t there to stand up and shout like a fool and see your life pass before your eyes, and I’ll bet you
would
have, too. Or maybe I’m just slow to catch on.

Smith didn’t think so. He was very apologetic when he realized what had happened, and took time to tell me about another little surprise in store, which happened a minute later when a null-field vanished in front of us and, with a little gust of wind, we entered vacuum and began to really pick up speed. The tunnel walls blurred in the beam of our headlights, details snatched away before they could be perceived.

He had more to say on the subject of human engineering. I didn’t get it all because I was concentrating on not breathing, still learning to wear a null-suit. But I got his main points.

He thought that while Gretel’s method was wrong, her goal was worthwhile, and I couldn’t see what was wrong with it, either. Basically, we either manufacture our environment or adapt to it. Both have hazards, but it did seem high time we at least start discussing the second alternative.

Take weightlessness, for example. Most people who spent a lot of time in free-fall had some body adaptations made, but it was all surgical. Human legs are too strong; push too hard and you can fracture your skull. It’s handy to have hands instead of feet at the ends of your ankles. Feet are as useless as vermiform appendices in freefall. It’s also useful to be able to bend and twist more than the human body normally can.

But the question before the court was this: should humans be bred to space travel? Should the useful characteristics be put into the genes, so children are born with hands instead of feet?

Maybe so, maybe not. We weren’t talking radical change here, or anything that couldn’t be done just as easily surgically, without raising the troublesome issues of more than one species of human being.

But what about a human adapted to vacuum? I’ve no idea how to go about it, but it probably could be done. What would he look like? Would he feel superior to us? Would we be his brother, or his cousin, or what? One thing was sure: it would be a lot easier to do it genetically than with the knife. And I feel certain the end result would not look very human.

I chewed that one over quite a bit in the coming days, examining my feelings. I found that most of them came from prejudice, as Smith had said. I’d been raised to think it was wrong. But I found myself agreeing that it was at least time to think it over again.

As long as I didn’t have to clean up after kewpies.

The train car pulled into a siding at another abandoned station where somebody had scrawled the word “Minamata” over whatever had been there before. I had no idea how far we’d come, or in what direction.

“This is still part of the Delambre dump, more or less,” Smith said, so at least I had a general idea. We started down a long, filthy corridor, Smith’s flashlight beam bobbing from wall to wall as we walked. In a movie, rats and other vermin would have been scuttling out of our way, but a rat would have needed a null-suit to survive this place; mine was still on, and I was still thinking about breathing.

“There’s really no reason why the stuff in here shouldn’t be spread out over the surface like the rest of the garbage,” he went on. “I think it’s mainly psychological reasons it’s all pumped in here. This is a
nasty
place. If it’s toxic or radioactive or biochemically hazardous, this is where it comes.”

We reached an air lock of the kind that used to be standard when I was a child, and he motioned me inside. He slapped a button, then gestured toward the air fitting on the side of my chest.

“Turn that counter-clockwise,” he said. “They only come on automatically when there’s a vacuum. There’s gas where we’re going, but you don’t want to breathe it.”

The lock cycled and we stepped into Minamata.

The place had no name on the municipal charts of King City, just Waste Repository #2. The Heinleiners had named it after a place in Japan that had suffered the first modern-day big environmental disaster, when industries had pumped mercury compounds into a bay and produced a lot of twisted babies. So sorry, mom. That’s the breaks.

Minamata Luna was really just a very large, buried storage tank. By large, I mean you could have parked four starships the size of the
Heinlein
without scraping the fenders. Texas is a
lot
bigger, but it doesn’t feel like being a bug in a bottle because you can’t see the walls. Here you could, and they curved upward and vanished into a noxious mist. The far end was invisible.

Maybe there was some artificial light in there. I didn’t see any, but they were hardly necessary. The bottom third of the horizontal cylinder was full of liquid, and it glowed. Red here, green there…  sometimes a ghastly blue. The makers of horror films would have
killed
to get that blue.

We had entered at what seemed the axis of the cylinder, which was rounded off at this end, like a pressure tank. A ledge, three meters wide and with a railing, curved away from us in each direction, but to the right was blocked off with a warning sign. Looking past it, I could see the ledge had crumbled away in several places. When I looked back Smith was already moving away from me toward the left. I hurried to catch up with him.

I never did quite catch him. Every time I got close my eye was drawn by the luminescent sea off to my right, and a few hundred meters down.

The thing about that sea…  it
moved
.

At first I only saw the swirls of glowing color like an oil film on water. I’d always thought colorful things were just naturally pretty things, but Minamata taught me differently. At first I couldn’t explain my queasy reaction. None of the colors, by themselves, seemed all that hideous (except for that blue). Surely that same swirl of color, on a shirt or dress, would be a gorgeous thing. Wouldn’t it? I couldn’t see why not. I began walking more slowly, trailing my hand along the top of the rail, trying to figure why it all disturbed me so.

The side of the cylinder went straight down from the edge of the ledge we walked on, then gradually curved inward until it met the fluorescent sea. Waves were rolling sluggishly to crash against the metal sides of the tank.

Waves, Hildy? What could be causing waves in this foul soup? Maybe some agitating mechanism, I thought, though I couldn’t see any use for one. Then I saw a part of the sea hump itself up, ten or twenty meters high—it was hard to judge the scale from my vantage point. Then I saw strange shapes on the borderline between sea and shore, things that moved among the mineral efflorescences that grew like arthritic fingers along that metal beach. Then I saw something that, I thought, raised its head on a spavined neck and looked at me, reached out a hungry hand…  

Of course, it was a long way off. I could have been wrong.

Smith took my arm without a word and urged me along. I didn’t look at the Minamata Sea again.

We came to a series of circular mirrors standing against the vertical wall to our left. Each had a number over it. I realized that tunnels had been bored into the walls here and each had been sealed off with a null-field barrier.

Smith stopped before the eighth, pointed at it, and stepped in. I followed him, and found myself in a short tunnel, maybe twenty meters long, five meters high. Halfway down the tunnel were metal bars. Beyond that point a level floor had been built to support a cot, chair, desk, and toilet, all looking as if they’d been ordered from some cheap mail-order house. On our side of the bars was a portable air plant, which seemed to be doing its job, as my suit had vanished as I stepped through the field. Spare oxygen cylinders and crates of food were stacked against the wall.

Sitting on the cot and watching a slash-boxing show on the television, was Andrew MacDonald. He glanced up from the screen as we entered, but he did not rise.

Possibly this was a new point of etiquette.
Should
the dead rise for the living? Be sure to ask at your next seance.

“Hello, Andrew,” Smith said. “I’ve brought someone to see you.”

“Yes?” Andrew said, with no great interest. His eyes turned to me, lingered for a moment. There was no spark of recognition. Worse than that, there was none of that penetrating quality I’d seen on the day he…  hell, how else can I say it? On the day he died. For a moment I though this was just some guy who looked a lot like Andrew. I guess I was half right.

“Sorry,” he said, and shrugged. “Don’t know her.”

“I’m not surprised,” Smith said. He looked at me. I had the feeling I was supposed to say something perceptive, intelligent. Maybe I was supposed to have figured it all out.

“What the fuck’s going on here?” I said, which was a lot better than “duuuuh,” which was my first reaction, though neither really qualifies as perceptive.

“Ask him,” Andrew said. “He thinks I’m dangerous.”

I’d started toward the bars but Smith put his hand on my arm and shook his head.

“See what I mean?” the prisoner said.

“He is dangerous,” Smith told me. “When he first came here, he nearly killed a man. Would have, but we got to him in time. Want to tell us about that, Andrew?”

He shrugged. “He stepped on my foot. It wasn’t my fault.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” I said. “What the hell are you people doing in here? I saw this man die, or his twin brother.”

Smith was about to say something, but I’d finally gotten Andrew interested. He stood and came to the bars, held on with one hand while the other played idly with his genitals. You see that sometimes, in old alkies or voluntary skitzys down in Bedrock. It’s a free planet, right? Nobody can stop them, but people hurry by, like you don’t stop and stare if someone is vomiting, or picking his nose. I’d never seen an apparently healthy man masturbating with such utter lack of modesty. What had they done to him?

“How did I do?” he asked me, tugging and squeezing. “All they’ll tell me is I died in the ring. You were there? Were you close up? Who was it that got me? Damn, the least they could do is give me a tape.”

“Are you really Andrew MacDonald?”

“That’s my name, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

“It’s him,” Smith said, quietly. “That’s what I’ve finally decided, after thinking it over a lot.”

“That’s not what you said last time,” the man said. “You said I was only part of old Andy. The mean part. I don’t think I’m mean.” He lost interest in his penis and stretched a hand through the bars, gesturing. “Toss me a can of that beef stew, boss man. I’ve had my eye on that for days.”

“You’ve got plenty of food in there.”

“Yeah, but I want stew.”

Smith got a plastic can and lobbed it toward the cell; the man snagged it and tore off the top. He took a big handful and crammed it into his mouth, chewing noisily. There was a stove, a table, and utensils plainly in sight behind him, but he didn’t seem to care.

“I didn’t see you fight,” I said, at last.

“Shit. You know, I’d like you if you weren’t so fat. You wanna fuck?” A gravy-covered hand went to his groin once again. “Let’s get brown, honey.”

I’m going to ignore the rest of his antics. I still remember them vividly, and still find them disturbing. I’d once wanted to make love to this man. I’d once found him quite attractive.

“I was there when they carried you back from the ring,” I said.

“The good old squared circle. The sweet science. All there is, really, all there is. What’s your name, fatty?”

“Hildy. You were mortally injured and you refused treatment.”

“What a jerk I must have been. Live to fight another day, huh?”

“I’d always thought so. And I thought what you were doing, risking your life, was stupid. I thought it was unnecessary, too, but you told me your reasons, and I respect them.”

“A jerk,” he repeated.

“I guess, when it came time for you to live up to your bargain, I thought you were stupid, too. But I was impressed. I was moved. I can’t say I thought you were doing the right thing, but your determination was awesome.”