Third World (23 page)

“
You obviously don’t have to
answer my questions. I’ll just write your answers down anyway, and
use them against you. Right?”

The man ignored him, eyes closed
now.

“
In fact, my personal
advice, now that I’m off duty, would be to say nothing that might
incriminate yourself. In fact, there may not even be a finger-print
reader on board
Hermes.
Under those circumstances, there would be no
reason to lug you off-planet, right?”

That would clearly be going too far.
He’d put some thought into this.

Newton reached into his duffel bag and
pulled out the bottle of scotch.

“
Privilege of rank. Like a
snort?”

No response.

“
They tell me you’re not
eating.”

No response.

“
So they say your name is
Hank.”

No response.

Shapiro sighed. It didn’t pay to be
alive some days.

“
I promise you, if you are
really who you say you are, no harm will come to you.”

No response. Those eyes were hard to
look at, but Newton pressed on.

“
Where were you born? Who
were your parents? Maybe we can clear all this up.”

To his surprise, the man said
something. He sat up, with big crocodile tears pouring down his
cheeks again, but Newton could live with that if he would just eat
something and start talking to them.

“
What?”

“
I was born in a little
place called Melrose.”

Newton Shapiro sat there with his mouth
open, and then proffered the bottle.

Hank took a quick gulp, almost in
disbelief and not trusting Shapiro one bit by the look on his face.
Something changed inside of him and he took a good look at the
label.

“
Where is that? You mean on
the planet, right?”

It turned out Melrose was ninety
kilometres northeast of Capital City. There were six or eight
buildings, with the usual track petering out into the wilderness
beyond.

“
My father’s name was
William Beveridge. My mother’s name was Amanda.” Hank clammed up,
strong emotions visible on his face as Shapiro grabbed the data-pad
from the center console and began typing in the names.

“
William Beveridge…Melrose.
What was your mother’s maiden name?”

“
Downie.”

The man’s name was in there. Sure
enough, she came up too. They were in the final wave of colonists,
just before the program closed down.

“
Any brothers or
sisters?”

“
No. Not on Third
World.”

“
Are they still
there?”

Hank wiped his eyes and said
no.

***

Hank Beveridge was seventeen. Money was
hard to come by, but there were ways. He took their biggest
rucksack and his old single-shot .22 rifle and walked twenty-five
kilometres to Copper Reef, where people went from time to
time.

The hill was pockmarked with diggings,
as the copper lay close to the surface and all you had to do was to
find a likely-looking spot and get to work hammering and chiseling
it out. Opening up an abandoned shaft wasn’t unheard of, but some
folks maintained regular diggings and you were best to respect
that. Hank had his own favourite spot up there. He lived off the
land and stayed there for a few days, six or seven as he recalled.
There were traces of lead, tin, silver and zinc in the ore. That
was worth good money too, although the quantities were
small.

Once he had a big pile of ore, he
loaded as much as he could into a couple of jute sacks, and
probably another twenty or thirty kilos in the bottom of his
rucksack. He carried the first load all the way home, and then on
return brought the horse and the wagon as far as he could along the
trail. This was marked or blazed with axes and paint-splotches in
wooded areas, and by ribbons on wire rods through the lowlands and
swampy areas according to Hank.

“
It was all properly
surveyed and everything.”

It took another few days of traipsing
back and forth, and then he had a wagon-load sitting at the
trailhead. Beveridge hitched up the horse, went home for a day or
two to rest up, and then set off alone on the long trip to Capital
City.

According to Mister Beveridge, his trip
had been saddled with problems. He broke a couple of wheel spokes,
and had to stop and somehow jack up the wagon with a tree trunk,
something Newton could barely visualize, using a lever and fulcrum
and all of that; and then he had whittled some new spokes. Hank had
never been to the capital alone before and there was some
nervousness about getting ripped off.

But after a week or so, he made it into
town and sold the load for a couple of hundred bucks. He went home
again, where his old man was probably going to give him proper shit
for breaking the wheel, and of course by then it was time for the
harvest, which according to him was mostly kitchen vegetables,
potatoes and oats, all sown and reaped by hand.

“
When I got home the place
was gone—burned down.”

He’d promised to check the chimney for
varmints and bird’s nests when he got home. He didn’t think the
trip would take so long or that the cold would hit so soon, as
they’d had a warm, dry summer.

He found his parent’s charred bodies.
According to Hank, and Shapiro wondered how he could be so calm,
but his mother was ailing and had probably been asleep. His old
man, with the nights getting cooler, must have started the big
fireplace without checking it. They’d had problems
before.

His mother was half-on the bed, torso
sprawled off the side and his father was laying on top of her, as
if he had gotten up, opened the doors and windows and then went
back for her. He was trying to get her out, no question, according
to Hank.

He must have been overcome by the
smoke, according to Beveridge.

“
And you have no birth
certificate?”

“
No.”

It was ninety kilometres to Capital
City and they were very poor. No one ever thought he would need
one. The odds of traveling off-planet anytime in his life were slim
and they cost cash money to boot.

“
Does anybody still live up
there?”

“
I don’t know.” Beveridge
hung his head again. “I just don’t know.”

Understandably, he’d left the place of
his birth soon after, drifting from village to village for some
years.

He mentioned the names of some people
he remembered. Shapiro tapped it all into his notes.

It could be true. It would also be very
difficult to verify. Their brief did not include travel to Melrose
to see if anyone up there would remember Beveridge after
twenty-something-odd years.

The man wasn’t even a hundred percent
sure of his age. He thought about forty, but how you would ever
prove it was beyond Newton. Cut him apart and count the rings,
maybe. He suppressed a bleak grin.

A proper identification seemed unlikely
in this case. Only a finger-print or retinal scan could reveal if
he had ever been inducted into the forces…it was an interesting
problem. The military helmets weren’t equipped for retinal scan,
although he thought police had devices like that on the more
developed worlds, in the big cities for sure.

“
Ah…are you ready to eat
something now?”

Hank shook his head.

Shapiro waved the bottle at
him.

He shook his head again.

Newton heaved a deep
exhalation.

“
All right.” He looked at
the time.

Another hour and three quarters, and he
could take to his own bed.

“
Let me get you another
blanket, Mister Beveridge. And when the youngsters come in for the
next shift, I’m afraid I’ll have to keep the restraints
on.”

Hank lay back on the seats and tried to
close his eyes. His mouth worked and then he sobbed a couple of
more times and then he was quiet as Shapiro took another sip of
whiskey and shoved the bottle back in his equipment bag.

And of course their man blamed himself
for the parents’ deaths.

He supposed it might be true. It might
be. If only they could prove it.

***

The road to Cedar River and points
beyond wasn’t a road at all, once he’d had time to really look at
it. Newton shook his head in disgust. They were getting all of that
and more.

It was a trail, or rather a series of
trails, some old, some new, some nothing but footprints from herds
driven along them, all of them very raw and probably at the time
offering some advantage over the pre-existing trail. The road ahead
of them was inundated. According to the field notes, the wet ground
shifted and heaved considerably over time and as often as not quite
quickly.

“
Are you sure this is our
road?”

Semanko looked up from the map console.
According to the compass, their bearing was perfectly correct. They
were following their own dotted line of GPS
measurements.

“
Yes!”

A composite pastiche of data, some of
it collected from space by radar and photography, and very little
of it by actual on-ground surveys, it showed that this was the
exact same road they had come in by, only days before.

“
This creek flows north.
Something might have happened downstream, to jam it up. But I’m
thinking it’s more likely that there was a big storm somewhere
higher up the valley.”

Newton looked over Trooper Benson’s
shoulder through the windshield, and took in the raging torrent of
greenish, coffee-coloured water. Out in the middle, a hundred
metres from their position, standing waves with white tops could be
seen, the proverbial haystacks, and there was no way to go through
there.

Trooper Benson spoke.

“
That’s one reason everyone
walks or rides in this country.”

Shapiro nodded.

“
Yes. Dave, what about the
map?”

Dave Semanko traced their route
backwards with his index finger as Shapiro stared. The trucks
idled, with Number One patiently awaiting
command-directions.

“
We go back six kilometres,
turn left on one of three marked trails. If they are still there
and we can find them, and if there’s some way of telling which one
is better.”

“
Side-trails? I saw one or
two, going off on both sides.”

Shapiro recalled them, and many more
besides, some of the more oblique turn-offs and other roads and
Y-shaped intersections had involved long and exhausting talk before
they could pick one.

“
Shit.” Newton thought it
out. “So, what then?”

“
We…ahem. Cross the exact
same river. Climb up onto the ridge and follow it along. It shows a
ford just before the main cross-trail hits the bottom of the hill .
Then it just goes along for twenty or so kilometres and rejoins the
main road. So-called.” Semanko bit his lip. “And, as usual, we have
to figure out how to turn the trucks around.”

Immediately to left and right the brush
was fairly tall, eight meres or so to the tops of real hardwood,
lookalike vegetation. It was open, light and airy in this
particular patch, with thin low undergrowth and gently rounded
shelves of pock-marked limestone.

“
All right.” Newton
sighed.

He keyed his microphone, setting it for
all troops.

“
All right, people. Out we
get, and we’re going to need saws, gloves, helmets, full armour. We
need to turn these vehicles around.”

Trooper Benson looked at Newton
cheerfully.

“
At least the sun is
out.”

“
Yeah—and it will heat up
pretty damned quick, too.”

Unbidden, Benson unbuckled and made his
way to the rear door as the vehicle heaved and rocked on its
springs as the troops in the rear dropped out and opening up the
side bins. Cornell put on his gauntlets and climbed out.

Dave looked at Newton, who
shrugged.

“
Just sit tight and keep the
engine running.”

Semanko snorted.

“
Clearing a dozen trees
might take an hour and a half with these bozos.”

“
It won’t be that bad. The
important thing is to avoid real disaster. We’re assuming the
river’s going to fall, but what if it rises? We’d lose the trucks.”
Newton pulled out the big communications pad. “I’m going to try
calling the ship again.”

“
Yeah, that’s a good
point.”

It wasn’t normally-scheduled call-in
time, but since they hadn’t been getting through anyway, he had
nothing to lose by trying.

His fingers tapped keys and the thing
lit up and all, but still no signal-lock.

“
I keep thinking it’s a
problem at their end.”

Semanko nodded absently.