Worlds (34 page)

“Nah… we couldn’t pronounce that Swahili, or spell it. Let’s just you go one way and I go the other, and we burn anything that looks important.”

“We ought to go together. We don’t want to get trapped if the building catches on fire.”

“Okay, that makes sense. This way?”

“Good as any.” They went down a corridor marked
ZEITUNGSWESEN BEREICH
. They encountered another stuck door, and Goodman kicked it open.

“Well, I’ll be God damned. Would you look at that.”

O’Hara’s glove slapped against her helmet as she instinctively tried to cover her mouth. Instead of screaming, she squeaked.

They were in an observation area over a large room full of muted sunshine. There were forty or fifty consoles in neat rows, and forty or fifty bodies slumped over the consoles or sprawled on the floor. They wore identical white uniforms, stained, and their faces and hands were mummified, shrunken around bone, skin dark gray with a white dusting of mold.

“What the hell happened to them, I wonder.”

O’Hara leaned against a rail for support. “They—they’ve been sealed in here since they died. And they must all have died at the same time. Probably poison gas in the air conditioning. Or radiation, like a neutron bomb. I wonder who did it.”

“Well, it must be the place we’re looking for. Let’s burn it up.”

“Sort of hate to.”

“Yeah.” They clumped down the stairs together. “Break the window first,” Goodman said. There was a bay window of polarized plastic, overlooking the landing strip and launch pads. He melted a hole in it and the Sun glared through.

“Careful,” O’Hara warned. “We don’t want to be standing too close to those consoles when the picture tubes blow out.”

“Don’t think they’re cubes. Look like flatscreens to me.” But he aimed carefully and sent a squirt of flame all the way across the room, enveloping the two farthest consoles. He was right; the screens just melted down. The bodies burned passively at first, and then their limbs started to stir.

“Christ that’s ugly. Let’s get this shit over with.” He fanned the flame in a sustained roar over half the room, and O’Hara added hers to the inferno. They backed up the stairs together, spraying fire. The tile floor caught, burning bright orange with greasy black smoke.

Something pinged against O’Hara’s tanks, and she saw a shiny needle spin off into the fire. She whirled around. “Jimmy!”

It all happened in less than a second. At the top of the stairs were four boys, tall boys in their teens, naked except for body paint. Three of them held spears, and one had a large rifle with a wooden stock. He was working the bolt of it.

O’Hara shot high and to the right, flame splashing
against the wall behind the boys. The one with the rifle fired; his dart and the fire from Goodman’s gun crossed in midflight. All four boys were suddenly covered with burning oil. Two fell and two ran screaming.

Goodman’s firestream tilted up, spraying the ceiling. O’Hara turned and saw him topple backwards down the stairs, a metal spike in his chest.

He lay on his back on the burning floor. O’Hara started down to help him, saw the flames licking around the tanks of oxygen and fuel, hesitated, called herself a coward, grabbed his foot, and pulled with all her strength. Halfway up the stairs, she heard a terrible rattling groan. She looked at him through the helmet and he was dead, his face dark purple with eyes bulging, swollen tongue forcing his jaws apart. She let go with a cry and his body bumped down the stairs as she backed away. She almost tripped over one of the bodies at the top of the stairs, then turned and ran. She passed two more smoldering bodies in the hall. As she stepped outside there was a tremendous explosion, Goodman’s tanks, and the black window popped out in one piece, sailing through the air with ponderous grace in a rain of smoking human fragments.

She stopped dead and sat down and tried to put her head between her knees. Then she remembered the drug pack on her wrist, tore it open, and pressed the tranquilizer button.

Her teeth ached when her jaws unclenched. The pulse stopped hammering in her ears. The muscles in her arms and legs deliciously relaxed. A spear clattered on the steps next to her.

She looked up and a small boy was running away. Languidly she aimed in his direction, thought about it, and fired deliberately high. His hair caught on fire and he ran on even faster, beating at it.

“Poor child,” she said. “I ought to do you a favor.” She stood up and resisted the impulse to brush herself off. Someone was shouting at her.

“Goodman! O’Hara! What happened down there?”

“Goodman’s dead now. I’m coming back.” She switched off the intercom for a while and started walking back up the runway. Every now and then she fired a random burst into the brush. That seemed prudent.

Funny how the jungle had taken over. Two years before, these grounds were all carefully landscaped. She remembered the fat funny woman who had shown them around the place, stream of wisecracks in her lovely lilting accent. They’d each been given a flower, a lily red as blood. You come back some time now.

From the cryogenic warehouse to the Mercedes, the jungle was a solid sheet of flame. The paint on one side of the warehouse was starting to blister and smoke. Jackson and Ahmed were standing guard. She turned on her intercom and went inside.

They had found a forklift and were loading it with long gray cylinders. There was a large vault door beside the racked cylinders. O’Hara didn’t care to think about what was behind the door. Heads.

This was a storage area for Immortality Unlimited, the only one in Africa. Dying people would have their heads separated from their bodies, the blood replaced with some more lasting fluid, and then have the head quickly frozen to the temperature of liquid nitrogen and sent here for storage. The idea was that a new body could eventually be cloned from a cell, and the brain recharged with some memories intact. No one knew how much. When they did it with dogs the dogs would remember some tricks. O’Hara thought it was ghoulish—and so much like groundhogs, to stockpile millions of new mouths to feed someday, when half the world was starving already.

She remembered the fat lady talking about it, talking seriously for a change. The storage area was here because some of the heads were bound for orbit. The initial cost was higher but there was no maintenance fee. It was easier to keep things cold in orbit, and you wouldn’t have to
worry about earthquakes or anything. She didn’t say war. O’Hara wondered whether anybody had bothered to waste a missile on the vault satellite. It was possible. There were a lot of politicians up there whom some people would like to have stay dead.

Another forklift came rumbling through the door, and Berrigan told her to help with the loading. They should be able to empty the rack in two more trips.

The cylinders were heavy. Two people could barely handle them. O’Hara worked with Berrigan and another engineer, alternating, two wrestling the cylinder into place while the third held the stack together on the fork. She was glad for the strain of the work but noticed it was getting rather smoky.

“You’re sure he was dead?” Berrigan asked.

“Oh, he was dead all right. They shot him with a dart from a rifle, it must have been a poison dart. His face got all puffed up. And then his tanks exploded. He’s really dead.” She set the cylinder into place but didn’t move to get another one.

“Are you all right, Marianne? You could go trade places with Ten or Jackson.”

“No, I’d rather do this. I’ve really had enough of guns.” She went to another cylinder and knocked the supporting flange away, and stood holding the cylinder in place.

“You took something.” Berrigan did the same on her side, and they rolled the cylinder out.

“A trank. I was starting to really lose it.”

“Don’t blame you. We should never have taken those damned ’phets. Plenty of excitement to keep us awake.” They dropped it on the stack, and the forklift man leaned up against it. “Two more and we’ll secure this load.”

They tied a cable around the load and sat while the other rolled away to stow it. Marianne told her about the mummified technicians in the operations center.

“I wonder,” Berrigan said. “It’s not important anymore, but I wonder whether it might have been the Americans
or the Socialists. It is strange that neither side bombed here.”

“Leave a spaceport intact for whoever wins,” O’Hara said.

When the forklift came back they loaded it up again, but while they were waiting for it to return, the metal wall facing the fire started to creak ominously. The wall thermometer was stuck at fifty degrees Centigrade. There were enough cylinders for one more load, but Berrigan decided not to risk it. Everybody went up in the lift and helped secure the nitrogen for takeoff, then took seats in the passenger area. It was cramped, since the acceleration couches hadn’t been designed for use with space suits.

“Anybody here who can’t take seven gees?” Berrigan asked. Jackson and Ten said they’d never been in a high-gee vehicle. “Well, we’ll keep it down to five. The more gees down here, though, the less fuel we use overall. The less fuel, the more water for the daisies.”

The ship’s electrical activity made loud crackles of static. O’Hara could hardly hear what Berrigan was saying, the tranquilizer humming a lullaby in her veins, her body sagging with fatigue. With her chin she turned down the volume and stared through the porthole, out over the jungle canopy. Her last view of Earth, but she didn’t feel any real emotion.

Berrigan’s voice droned quietly through the countdown. It was only a couple of minutes, but O’Hara started to doze and didn’t hear the warning: look straight ahead.

A clear chime sang out, then an impossibly loud grinding roar. O’Hara’s head was suddenly clamped side-ways, staring out the porthole as the ship swiftly rose. In seconds, the horizon bent to a curve. Something popped in her neck; the cartilage in her nose crackled, and her nose began to bleed. The aspirator started hammering; she wondered idly whether it would work in five gees, or seven, and then she got her answer. The ship tilted side-ways suddenly and rivulets of blood splashed over the
inside of her faceplate. They evened out to a thin red film that was barely transparent. To the suit’s little brain, it felt like condensation: the faceplate heated up and baked it to a black crust. She tried to curse but couldn’t move her lips or jaw.

After what seemed like a very long time, the acceleration stopped abruptly and they were in free fall. She turned her head cautiously and her neck felt fine. She could see a little bit through the cracks in the blood crust.

A figure in a spacesuit floated in front of her. It was Berrigan. “Marianne—what’s wrong? Did you—”

“I’b jusd fide. Bud I god a broggen fugged nodes. You wadda helb be ged dis fugged helbed off?”

“You got a nosebleed?”

“Ndo, id’s all a big agt. You wadda ged duh latch odd duh bag so I cad geh duh helbed off?”

Berrigan laughed with silly relief. “You can’t take your helmet off, not until we’ve disinfected. That’ll be a few hours. Better get used to it.”

“Used do id!”

The first step was to set off the spray bombs of biocide, everybody swimming around through the fog for an hour. Then they evacuated all the air out of the control room and the passenger area, and went over every square centimeter of the ship and each other with powerful ultraviolet lamps. Then they filled it with air again and heated the air to two hundred degrees Centigrade, their suits’ limit. That combination would kill any virus or bacterium, but it was hell on the leather upholstery.

They got out of their spacesuits and everybody drifted up to the control room to listen while Berrigan made her report to New New. Ahmed, who’d had paramedical training, peeked and poked at O’Hara’s nose, and pronounced that it probably wasn’t broken; at any rate, there wasn’t much he could do if it were. He helped her clean the dried blood off her face and gave her a cold pack to hold against the back of her neck.

Berrigan talked with the Policy Coordinator, Weislaw Markus. He had released all the details of the plan once they’d left—hard to keep a shuttle to Earth secret—and some people, predictably, were incensed that it hadn’t been put to referendum. Paranoia about the plague was running high. Their reward for a job well done would be twenty days of quarantine.

She signed off. “Good thing they don’t know we have enough fuel to get to Mars. They might suggest we go start a new settlement.” She tapped out an order on the console. “Guess I’ll evacuate the cargo bay. Won’t sterilize it completely, but—”

“Overridden,” the console said, with a thick German accent. She cleared the board and retyped. “Overridden,” it said again.

Ahmed looked up from packing his medical bag. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, I’m doing something wrong.” She thought for a minute and typed a short command.

“Diagnostic.” It clicked. “Overridden because bleed areas were currently are currently occupied.”

“Occupied?” She typed out a sequence and the cube lit up with a view of the cargo bay. Floating in the middle of it were two children, a boy and a girl, both six or seven years old. The girl was wailing, and the boy was either unconscious or dead.

They all stared at it. “She has a broken arm,” Ahmed said.

“Here.” Berrigan handed a throat mike to Ahmed. He stuck the disk next to his Adam’s apple and said something stern, in Swahili.

The girl stopped crying and mumbled something, then started to sob again. Ahmed touched the disk to silence it.

“Damn. She doesn’t speak much Swahili. Just Bantu.”

“They must have followed one of the forklifts in, and hidden,” Berrigan said. “Those storage lockers.”

“We can’t take them back,” O’Hara said.

Ahmed nodded. “No matter what you mean by ‘back.’” He sighed heavily. “They have to die.”

“Maybe not,” Berrigan said. “When we were roughing out the mission plan, two people were in favor of abducting someone, for medical experimentation. It’s pretty certain that this plague is spread by a virus. If we could isolate it we could make an antigen.”

Ahmed stared into the cube. “The risk…”