Blood Music (14 page)
Paulsen-Fuchs pulled up a chair in the viewing chamber with a distant scrape of metal and sat on it. Bernard watched him drowsily from the bed. “So early in the morning,” he said.
“It is afternoon. Your time sense is slipping.”
“I’m in a cave, or might as well be. No visitors today?”
Paulsen-Fuchs shook his head, but did not volunteer an explanation.
“News?”
“The Russians have pulled out of the Geneva U.N. Obviously they see no advantage to a United Nations when they are the sole nuclear superpower on the Earth. But before they left, they tried to get the security council to declare the United States a nation without leadership and hazardous to the rest of the world.”
“What are they aiming for?”
“I believe they are aiming for some consensus on a nuclear strike.”
“Good God,” Bernard said. He sat up on the edge of the cot and held the back of his hands up before his eyes. The ridges had receded slightly; the quartz lamps treatments were making at least cosmetic improvements. “Did they mention Mexico and Canada?”
“Just the United States. They wish to kick the corpse.”
“So what is everybody else saying, or doing?”
“The U.S. forces in Europe are organizing an interim government. They have declared a touring U.S. Senator from California in line of succession for the Presidency. Your Air Force officers at the base here are putting up some resistance. They believe the United States government should be military for the time being. Diplomatic offices are being rearranged into governmental centers. The Russians are asking American ships and submarines to be put into special quarantine stations in Cuba and along the Russian coast in the northern Pacific and the Sea of Japan.”
“Are they doing it?”
“No reply. I think not, however.” He smiled.
“Any more on the bird-fish kills?”
“Yes. In England they are killing all migratory buds, whether they come from North America or not. Some groups want to kill all birds. There is much savagery, and not just against animals, Michael. Americans everywhere are being subjected to great indignities, even if they have lived in Europe for decades. Some religious groups believe Christ has established a base in America and is about to march on Europe to bring the Millennium. But you’ll have your news over the terminal this morning, as usual. You can read about it all there.”
“It’s better if it comes from a friend.”
“Yes,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “But even a friend’s words cannot improve the news as it is today.”
“Would a nuclear strike solve the problem? I’m no expert on epidemiology—could America actually be sterilized?”
“Highly unlikely, and the Russians are well aware of that. We know something about the accuracy of their warheads, failure rates, and so on. They could at best manage to burn out perhaps half of North America sufficiently to destroy all life forms. That would be next to useless. And the radiation hazard, not to mention the meteorological changes and the hazard of biologicals in the dust clouds, would be enormous. But—” He shrugged. “They are Russians. You do not remember them in Berlin. I do. I was just a boy, but I remember them—strong, sentimental, cruel, crafty and stupid at once.”
Bernard restrained himself from commenting on Germany’s behavior in Russia. “So what’s holding them back?”
“NATO. France, surprisingly. The strong objections of most of the non-aligned countries, especially Central and South America. Now enough talk of that. I need a report.”
“Ay, ay,” Bernard said, saluting. “I feel fine, though a touch groggy. I’m considering going crazy and making a great deal of noise. I feel like I’m in prison.”
“Understandable.”
“Any women volunteers yet?”
“No,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, shaking his head. Perfectly seriously, he added, “I do not understand it. Always they have said fame is the best aphrodisiac.”
“Just as well, I suppose. If it’s any consolation, I haven’t noticed any changes in my anatomy since the day before yesterday.” That was when the lines in his skin began to recede.
“You have decided to continue the lamp treatments?”
Bernard nodded. “Gives me something to do.”
“We are still considering anti-metabolites and DNA polymerase inhibitors. The infected animals are showing no symptoms-apparently your noocytes are not pleased with animals. Not here, at least. All sorts of theories. Are you experiencing headaches, muscle aches, anything of that nature, even though they may be normal for you?”
“I’ve never felt better in my life. I sleep like a baby, food tastes wonderful no aches or pains. An occasional itch in my skin. Oh…and sometimes I itch inside, in my abdomen, but I’m not sure where. Not very irritating.”
“A picture of health,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, finishing the short report on his clipboard. “Do you mind if we check your honesty?”
“Not much choice, is there?”
They gave him a complete medical twice a day, as regularly as his unpredictable sleep periods allowed. He submitted to them with a grim kind of patience; the novelty of an examination conducted by waldoes had long since worn off.
The large panel hummed open and a tray containing glassware and tools slid forward. Then four long metal and plastic arms unfolded, their grasping parts flexing experimentally. A woman standing in a booth behind the arms peered at Bernard through a double glass window. A television camera on the elbow of one of the arms spun around, its red light glowing. “Good afternoon, Dr. Bernard,” the woman said pleasantly. She was young, sternly attractive, with red-brown hair tied back in a stylishly compact bun.
“I love you, Dr. Schatz,” he said, lying on the low table which rolled out below the waldoes and the tray.
“Just for you, and just for today, I am Frieda. We love you, also, Doctor,” Schatz said. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t love me at all.”
“I’m starting to like this, Frieda.”
“Hmph.” Schatz used the fine-maneuver waldo to pick up a vacuum ampoule from the tray. With uncanny expertise, she guided the needle into a vein and withdrew ten cc’s of blood. He noticed with some interest that the blood was purple-pink.
“Be careful they don’t bite back,” he warned her.
“We are very careful, Doctor,” she said. Bernard sensed tension behind her banter. There could be a number of things they weren’t telling him about his condition. But why hide anything? He already considered himself a doomed man.
“You’re not telling it to me straight, Frieda,” he said as she applied a skin culture tape to his back. The waldo removed the tape with a sticky rip and dropped it into ajar. Another arm quickly stoppered the jar and sealed it in a small bath of molten wax.
“Oh, I think we are,” she replied softly, concentrating on the remotes. “What questions do you have?”
“Are there any cells left in my body that haven’t been converted?”
“Not all are noocytes, Dr. Bernard, but most have been altered in some way, yes.”
“What do you do with them after you’ve analyzed them?”
“By that time, they are all dead, Doctor. Do not worry. We are very thorough.”
“I’m not worried, Frieda.”
“That is good. Now turn over, please.”
“Not the urethra again.”
“I am told this was once a very expensive indulgence among wealthy young gentlemen in the Weimar Republic. A rare experience in the brothels of Berlin.”
“Frieda, I am constantly amazed.”
“Yes. Now please turn over, Doctor.”
He turned over and closed his eyes.
Candles lined the long ground-floor lobby window facing the plaza. Suzy stood back and surveyed her handiwork. The day before, she had pulled her way through a wind-shredded stretch of brown sheet and found a candle shop. Using another cart stolen from an Armenian grocery on South Street, she had heisted a load of votive candles and taken them back to the World Trade Center, where she had established her camp in the ground floor of the north tower. She had seen the green light at the top of that building.
With all the candles, maybe the submarines or airplanes would find her. And there was another impulse, too, one so silly she giggled thinking about it. She was determined to answer the river. She stuck the candles onto the window ledge, lighted them one by one, and watched their warm glows become lost in the vaster darkness all around.
Now she arranged them in spirals along the floor, going back to space them out as her supply diminished. She lighted the candles and walked from flame to flame across the broad carpet, smiling at the light, feeling vaguely guilty about the dripping wax.
She ate a package of M&Ms and read by the light of five bunched candles a copy of Lady’s Home Journal stolen from a concourse newsstand. She was pretty good at reading—slow, but she knew many of the words. The magazine pages with their abundance of ads and tiny columns of words about clothes and cooking and family problems were welcome doses of anesthetic.
Lying on her back on the carpet with the food cart and the empty candle cart nearby, she wondered if she would ever be married—if there would be anybody to marry—and ever have a house where she could apply some of the hints she now pored over. “Probably not,” she told herself. “I’m a spinster for sure now.” She had never dated extensively, had never gone all the way with Gary, and had graduated from special classes in high school with the reputation of being nice…and dull. Some people like her were kind of wild, making up for not being too bright by doing lots of daring things.
“Well, I’m still here,” she said to the high dark ceiling, “and I’m still dull.”
She carried the magazine down the stairs back to the stand, candle in one hand, and picked out a Cosmopolitan to read next. Back on the lobby level, she fell asleep briefly, woke up with a start when the magazine fell across her stomach, and walked around from candle to candle, snuffing them out in case she wanted to use them again tomorrow night. Then she lay down on her side on the carpet, using Kenneth’s coat for a pillow, one candle still burning, and thought of the massive building above her. She couldn’t remember whether the twin towers were still the tallest in the world. She thought not. Each was like an ocean liner upended and stuck into the sky-taller than any ocean liner, actually; so the tourist brochure said.
It would be fun to explore all the shops on the concourse, but even half-asleep, Suzy knew what she would have to do, eventually. She would have to climb the stairs to the top, wherever the stairs were, find out what made the light, and look out across New York—she could see all of the city and much of the state from that vantage. She could see what had happened, and what was happening. The radio might receive more stations that high up. Besides, there was a restaurant on top, and that meant more food. And a bar. She suddenly wanted to get very drunk, something she had tried only twice before in her life.
It wouldn’t be easy. Climbing the stairs could take a day or longer, she knew.
She started up out of light sleep. Something had made a noise nearby, a squeaky, sliding scrape. Dawn was gray and dim outside. There was a motion in the plaza-things rolling, like dust-kittens under a bed, like tumbleweeds. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and got to her knees, squinting to see more clearly.
Feathery cartwheels blew in with the wind, sometimes spinning and falling over, crossing the five acres of the plaza, their wind-vane spokes flapping at the edges. They were gray and white and brown. The fallen ones disassembled on the concrete and flattened out, adhering to the pavement and lifting foot-high fronds. They were pouring into the plaza now, more as day brightened, running into the glass and smearing, spreading outward.
“No more going outside,” she told herself. “Uh-uh.”
She ate a granola bar and turned on the radio, hoping to still be able to receive the British station she had heard the day before. With a little tuning, the speaker produced a weak voice, cross-thatched with interference, like a man speaking through felt
“…to say that the world economy will suffer is certainly an understatement. Who knows how much of the world’s resources—both in raw materials and manufactured goods, not to mention, financial records and capital—lies inaccessible in North America now? I realize most people worry more about their immediate survival, and wonder when the plague will cross the ocean, or whether it is already with us, biding its time—” Static overwhelmed the signal for several minutes. Suzy sat with crossed legs next to the radio, waiting patiently. She didn’t understand much, but the voice was comforting. “—yet my concern, as an economist, must be with what happens after the crisis passes. If it passes. Well, I’m an optimist. God in all His wisdom has some reason for this. Yes. So there has been no communication from the whole of North America, with the exception of the famous meteorological station on Afognak Island. The financiers are dead, then. The United States has always been the great bastion of private capital. Russia is now the dominant nation on the globe, militarily and perhaps financially. What can we expect?”
Suzy turned the radio off. Blather. She needed to know what it was that had happened to her home.
“Why?” she asked out loud. She watched the wheels tumbling through the plaza, their remains beginning to obscure the concrete. “Why not just kill myself and end it all?” She tossed her arms out with self-conscious melodrama, then began to laugh. She laughed until it hurt and became frightened when she realized she couldn’t stop. Hands over her mouth, she ran to a water fountain and gulped the clear, steady stream down.
What really scared her, Suzy realized, was the thought of climbing the tower. Would she need keys? Would she get halfway and find she couldn’t go any farther?
“I’ll be brave,” she said around a bite of the granola bar. “There’s nothing else I can be.”
LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA
It had been a normal and a good life, selling parts and junk out of his back yard, going to auctions and picking up odds and ends, raising his son and being proud of his wife, who taught school. He had taken great pleasure in his major acquisitions: a load of tile, all different kinds, to fix up the bathroom and kitchen in the huge old white house; an old British jeep; fifteen different cars and trucks, all blue; a ton and a half of old office furniture, including an antique wooden file cabinet which proved to be worth more than he had paid for the whole load.
The weirdest thing he had ever done (since getting married) was shave the thinning hair on his crown to expedite going bald. He had hated the in-between state. Ruth had cried when she saw him. That had been two months ago and the thinning hair had come back, as unruly and distasteful as ever.
John Olafsen had made a good living back when life had been normal. He had kept Ruth and seven-year-old Loren in good clothes and well fed. The house had been in his family for ninety years, since it had been new. They had wanted for little.
He pulled away the scratched black enamel binoculars and wiped fatigue and sweat from his eyes with a red bandana. Then he continued his peering. He was surveying the broad spread of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the Sandia Labs across the road. The smell of dried grass and dust made him want to blow his nose, leave, pack up…and go nowhere because that was exactly the only place he had left to go. It was five thirty and dusk was coming on. “Wave your flag, Jerry,” he murmured, “you sonofabitch.”
Jerry was his twin brother, five minutes younger, twice as reckless. Jerry had flown crop dusters in the Salinas Valley. How John had escaped, neither of them knew, but it was obvious Jerry was too full of DDT and EDB and what have you. He just plain didn’t taste good to whatever had eaten the town of Livermore.
And Ruth, and Loren.
Jerry was down between the big modern square buildings and the old bungalows and barracks, scouting the thirty-foot-high mounds that now rose wherever there was empty space on the LLNL grounds. He carried another red bandana on a stick. Neither brother was ever without a bandana. Each Christmas, they had bought each other new ones, wrapping them up in red foil with big red ribbons.
“Wave,” John growled. He shifted the binoculars and saw the red bandana circling rapidly on the stick: once clockwise, once counterclockwise, then three times clockwise. That meant John should come down and see what there was to see. Nothing dangerous…as far as Jerry could tell.
He hefted his two hundred and fifty pounds up and brushed down the knees of his ragged black Levis. Curling red hair and beard glowing against the eastern grayness, he climbed out of the drainage ditch and squeezed through the barbed wire fence, the chicken wire fence, and the no-longer-electrified inner perimeter fence.
Then he ran and slid down the twenty-foot grade and hopped another culvert before slowing to a casual walk. He lit up a cigarette and broke the match before tossing it into the dirt. Fifteen or twenty cars were still parked in a lot next to the old Yin-Yang fusion project buildings. An especially impressive mound, about sixty feet in diameter, rose from the earth near the lot Jerry stood on top of the mound. He had come across a pick somewhere and was dangling it head-down by the handle, a big grin on his beardless face.
“No more joggers,” he said as John climbed the mound to join him. They called some of the peculiar things they had seen in Livermore joggers. The name seemed appropriate, since the things almost always ran; not once had they seen one standing still.
“Gladdens my heart,” John said. “What’s your plan?”
“Dig my way to China,” Jerry said, tapping the mound. “Ain’t you curious?”
“There’s curious, and curious,” John said. “What if these mounds are something the lab people put in…you know, defense, or maybe an experiment out of hand?”
“I’d say an experiment’s already got out of hand.”
“I still don’t think it came from here.”
“Shit” Jerry plunked the head of the pick on the mound, cracking the already fissured dirt and dried grass. “Why not and where in hell else?”
“Other places got labs.”
“Sure, and maybe it’s aliens.”
John shrugged. They’d probably never know. “Dig, then.”
Jerry brought the pick up and expertly swung it down. The point broke through the dirt like a pin through an eggshell and the handle almost jerked from his hands. “Hollow,” he grunted, pulling it loose with some effort. He knelt down and peered into the pick hole. “Can’t see.” He got to his feet and swung the pick again.
“Hit ’em,” John said, licking his lips. “Let me hit ’em.”
“We don’t know anything’s down there,” Jerry said, snatching the pick handle away from his brother’s broad, thick outstretched hand.
John nodded reluctantly and put the hand in his jeans pocket. He looked off at the setting sun and shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do to them,” he said. “There’s just us.”
Jerry swung three times in quick succession and a hole a yard wide caved in. The brothers jumped back, then retreated several more steps for caution’s sake. The rest of the mound held. Jerry got on his hands and knees and crawled up to the hole. “Still can’t see,” he said. “Go get the flashlight.”
It was getting dark when John returned with a heavy-duty waterproof lantern from their truck. Jerry sat by the hole, smoking a cigarette and tapping the ashes into it. “Brought a rope, too,” John said, dropping the coil next to his brother’s knee.
“What’s the town look like?” Jerry asked.
“From what I could see, same as before, only more so.”
“Be anything left tomorrow?”
John shrugged. “Whatever it turns into, I suppose.”
“Okay. It’s dark down there, night makes no difference. You hold on, I’ll go on down with the light—”
“No way,” John said. “I’m not staying up here without a light.”
“Then you go down.”
John thought about that “Hell, no. We’ll tie the rope to a car and both go down.”
“Fine,” Jerry said. He ran with the rope to the nearest car, tied it to a bumper, and paid it out on the way back. About thirty feet of rope remained when he reached the top of the mound. “Me first,” he said.
“Dur rigor, as the Frogs say.”
Jerry lowered himself into the hole. “Light”
John gave him the light. Jerry’s head dropped below the rim. “It’s reflecting,” he said. The beam shot back up into the moist evening air and caught John’s face as he peered after. When enough space presented itself, he took hold of the taut rope and followed his twin.
Their mother had told them stories, passed on from a Danish-speaking grandmother, about such mounds full of elf gold, dead bodies, weird blue fire and “skirlin’ and singin’.”
He never would have admitted it, but what he truly expected to find was Morlocks.
Both twins were sweating by the time they set foot on the bottom of the hollow mound. The air was much warmer and more humid than outside. The lantern beam cut through a thick, sweet-tasting fog. Their boots sunk into a resilient dark purple surface that squeaked when they moved. “Gaw-awod-damn,” they said simultaneously.
“What the fuck are we going to do, now that we’re here?” John asked plaintively.
“We’re going to find Ruth and Loren, and maybe Tricia.” Tricia had been Jerry’s girlfriend for the past six years. He had not seen her dissolve, but it was easy to assume that was what had happened to her.
“They’re gone,” John said, his voice low and hidden in the back of his throat.
“Hell they are. They just been disassembled and brought down here.”
“Where in hell do you get that idea?”
Jerry shook his head. “It’s either that or, like you say, they’re gone. Do they feel like they’re gone?”
John thought a moment. “No,” he admitted. Both of them had known the feeling of having someone emotionally close to them die, and knowing it without even being told. “But maybe I’m just foolin’ myself.”
“Bullshit,” Jerry said. “I know they’re not dead. And if they’re not dead, then nobody else is, either. Because you saw—”
“I saw,” John butted in. He had seen the clothing filled with dissolving flesh. He had not known what to do. It had been late morning and Ruth and Loren had come down with what seemed like some kind of bug the night before. White stripes on their hands, their faces. He had told them they would all go into the doctor in the morning.
The time between seeing the clothes and when Jerry arrived was still blank. He had screamed, or done something to hurt his throat so he could hardly talk. “Then why weren’t we taken, too?”
Jerry patted his belly, as prominent as John’s. “Too big a bite,” he said. He swirled at the fog with his hand. The beam wouldn’t go more than a few feet in any direction. “Jesus, I’m scared,” he said.
“Gladdens my heart,” John said.
“Well, you’re the one suggested we go down here,” Jerry said. John didn’t object to the reversal of truth. “So now you tell us which way to go.”
“Straight ahead,” John said. “And watch out for Morlocks.”
“Yeah. Jesus. Morlocks.”
They walked slowly across the spongy purple floor. Several moist and unhappy minutes passed before the beam showed a surface ahead. Glistening, irregular pipes, mottled gray and brown, Vaseline-shiny, covered a wall, pulsing rhythmically. To the left, the pipes bent around a curve and vanished into a dark tunnel. “I don’t believe this,” Jerry said.
“Well?” John pointed to the tunnel.
Jerry nodded. “We know what the worst is already,” he said.
“You fucking hope we do,” John growled.
“You first.” Jerry pointed.
“Love you, too.”
“Go!”
They entered the tunnel.