Authors: Joe Haldeman
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #General
Earthbound (19 page)
“Governor was a fucking nut-case even before this all happened. Like I have to tell you guys.”
“He used to be the funniest thing on the cube,” Roz said. “He didn’t just want to secede from the States. He wanted to put California into orbit, and declare independence from Earth.”
“Not really?” I said.
“Science wasn’t his strong suit. His handlers said it was metaphor. Everybody knew better.”
We talked for a couple of hours, satisfying Lanny’s curiosity about our flight out to Wolf 25 and meeting with the Others. About half the time we just talked about our remote pasts, growing up in the last half of the twenty-first century.
The Others first made their presence known almost sixty years ago. There aren’t too many people around who remember everyday life as adults back then, without a Sword of Damocles hanging in the sky. Back when there was “everyday life,” uncomplicated by doom.
Lanny said that suicide had been the leading cause of death for as long as he could remember, for children as well as adults. He was born in 2068, right after Gehenna. His Jewish mother killed herself before he was one. He grew up with his father’s fierce atheism and had never been tempted away from it.
He led us around the store with a shopping cart. Roz had a scribbled list of all the titles in Funny Farm’s library.
Some choices were obvious, like medical manuals and a five-volume gold mine, the
Foxfire Journals
, a twentieth-century compendium of low-technology solutions to the problems of country living, from midwifing to burial. Chicken raising, building a smokehouse, foraging for wild plants, how to make a banjo. That got Namir’s interest. He’d made a balalaika to pass the time on the starship, but left it in orbit, to be sent to Earth later. Pulverized now.
Foxfire Journals
, a twentieth-century compendium of low-technology solutions to the problems of country living, from midwifing to burial. Chicken raising, building a smokehouse, foraging for wild plants, how to make a banjo. That got Namir’s interest. He’d made a balalaika to pass the time on the starship, but left it in orbit, to be sent to Earth later. Pulverized now.
Lanny unlocked a glass case and gave us a fat one-volume
Medical Practices
from 1889, before antibiotics. Some of the medicine seemed more superstition than science; the surgery, painful butchery.
Medical Practices
from 1889, before antibiotics. Some of the medicine seemed more superstition than science; the surgery, painful butchery.
How long would our anesthetics hold out? Long enough for me to die before needing them?
Paul chose a judicious assortment of books on science and engineering, and Lanny gave him a thing called a “slide rule,” along with a fragile yellowing folder of instructions. It was a foot-long slab of yellow metal with numbers printed all over it. Paul squinted at it and moved the middle bar around and told me the cube root of 100 was 4.64. I supposed that might come in handy some day.
By mutual consent, we all got to choose two books without argument. I got the fat old poetry book that had sustained me the year before my family moved to Mars, Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
, and a one-volume complete Shakespeare in tiny print. Roz’s list already had a Shakespeare, but Rico said it was a simplified edition for children.
Golden Treasury
, and a one-volume complete Shakespeare in tiny print. Roz’s list already had a Shakespeare, but Rico said it was a simplified edition for children.
About half the cart was filled with children’s books, a mixture of schoolbooks and play. Raising kids without the cube was going to be a challenge. I had a disturbing vision of myself as an old lady, scaring children with stories around the campfire. Though they wouldn’t be so easy to scare by then.
One priceless find was a thirty-volume set of
Encyclopedia Britannica
, from 2031. It had been a curiosity, not for sale, but when the cloud evaporated,
it
would be all we had. A finger-powered paper memory bank. I decided to read through it, five pages a day. That would be eighty-four hundred days, so when I finished I would be twenty-three years older and wiser.
Encyclopedia Britannica
, from 2031. It had been a curiosity, not for sale, but when the cloud evaporated,
it
would be all we had. A finger-powered paper memory bank. I decided to read through it, five pages a day. That would be eighty-four hundred days, so when I finished I would be twenty-three years older and wiser.
There was a whole section of survival manuals, mostly earnest and useless, either painfully obvious or relying on technology we used to think was basic. There was a Girl Scout manual,
Handbook for Girls
, that had useful tips about getting along in the woods. For a fun week away from home.
Handbook for Girls
, that had useful tips about getting along in the woods. For a fun week away from home.
What we really needed was a book about how to rebuild civilization from scratch, but if there was one, it was checked out.
Lanny had a good idea, a practical use for his printing press. Try to boil down everything that made Funny Farm work, and everything they’d done wrong, and print it on a single sheet of paper, both sides. Send copies up and down the coast, and out into the Plains, so that people wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
We sat down and, with Lanny’s help, made a chart covering the benefits civilization provided. He traced it on a three-foot flatscreen, drawing circles around words with his finger while a teenaged boy drew a copy on a piece of paper with a pencil. It did look odd, but paper was going to be
it
soon. We’d better be learning how to make the stuff.
it
soon. We’d better be learning how to make the stuff.
After about twenty minutes, we all ran out of ideas and looked at the thing quietly. Something important was missing.
“Where is art?” I said.
Rico looked at me quizzically. “Who?”
“There’s no place there for art . . . or science.”
“Or philosophy,” Dustin said. “All that comes later.”
“She has a point,” Lanny said. “If all you do is plant crops and haul water and keep a roof over your head, and fight off the other savages, what are you?”
“Successful savages,” Namir said. “You’d rather be a cultured corpse?”
“To be realistic,” Roz said, “how much art and science did we get done at the farm?”
“How much did we need?” Rico said. “We aren’t exactly an art colony. And we had the cube to keep up with science.”
“Had,” Roz said. “Maybe art will take care of itself. People do draw and paint and make music. But science and technology . . . what will it be like a hundred years from now? When everybody who ever got a degree in science is dead?”
“I guess you want general textbooks about every discipline,” Lanny said, “and then be selective about advanced texts.”
“Civil engineering,” Dustin said, “which we used to call a contradiction in terms. Buildings, roads, sewers. Chemical engineering rather than pure chemistry. That kind of selectivity.”
“We can take all the time you need,” Lanny said.
“We’re not going to find paper books that are up-to-date on technology,” Paul said. “I didn’t have any when I got my degree back in ’63.”
“Same at the university here,” Lanny said. “If you want to look at a paper book in the library now, you have to go to the reserve room or Special Collections, and wear gloves. The only new paper books I see here are gift items or things that were printed for collectors.
“Library books are how I started this store. The university library was selling off books by the pound when they went paperless, back in ’21.”
“During the big depression,” the butler said.
“Yeah; my dad had made a fortune in real estate. When he died, I got this building and enough money to fill it with books.” He laughed. “It was 2121, and I had just turned forty-two. Not that I’m superstitious.”
I thought the world economy was under central control before 2121. Would there be an economics book printed later than that?
A Child’s Garden of Macroeconomics
?
A Child’s Garden of Macroeconomics
?
Lanny led us around the store with the paper copy of the diagram and helped us choose old academic books that weren’t outdated or too fragile to be of use. There was a debate over electronics and computer science. Justin thought they were about as useful as a “how to wrap a mummy” book. But they compromised on a couple of general texts and a wall chart full of arcane symbols.
I have some sympathy for Paul’s side, the sciences, even though I’m a useless liberal-arts type myself. How could anybody decode all that stuff from scratch? Maybe the electricity would come back in a hundred years.
People might remember how to turn on the lights, or the machines, but who could repair or replace them?
A uniformed soldier came rushing in, and saluted Lanny. “Sir, California has . . . they bombed the border.”
Lanny was incredulous. “The Oregon border?”
“All of it, they said. Hellbombs, all along the state’s borders.”
Hellbombs gave off intense radiation for years, without causing any other damage.
“ ‘California for Californians,’ ” Lanny quoted. “Are they far enough away not to harm us?”
“You could detect it, sir, but just barely. We measured one or two milligrays. Ten times that wouldn’t hurt.”
“He threatened this during the last election,” Alba said, “but we thought it was just isolationist rhetoric.”
“Could he have enough bombs to actually do it?” Justin asked. “He’d need to drop one every five miles or so.”
“Their standard radius of effectiveness is about five miles,” Namir said, “so one every ten miles would do it.”
“You can fly above them?” Rico asked.
“No problem,” Paul said. “Hell, you could drive past one in a car, a mile or two away, if you were going fast enough.”
“And didn’t want to have children,” Namir said. “You’d get quite a sunburn, a mile away.”
“Nobody’s going to walk across the border,” Paul said, “or settle near it. I assume Fruit Farm is far enough away.”
“Unless he tossed one our way,” Rico said.
“Not likely,” Roz said. “He’s crazy, but he’s sort of
our
crazy. Back to basics and all.”
our
crazy. Back to basics and all.”
“With his mansion in Malibu,” Rico said. “I wonder if he bombed the border with the Pacific.”
“He didn’t, sir,” the soldier said. “Just the borders with other states and Mexico.”
“That’s great,” I said. “If the plane doesn’t work, we can hijack a boat.”
Paul was shaking his head. “Shit. What do we have? Roz, how badly do you guys want to go back?”
“You could make a good case for going anywhere else,” she admitted, “but no; it’s our home.” She looked at the other three and got dour nods. “I guess we’re at your mercy.”
“Oh, I’ll give you a ride. But what do the rest of us do? Stay stuck in California for years, or get out while we can?”
“Will the hellbombs still work after Wednesday?” I asked.
“Nothing electrical in them,” Namir said.
There was an awkward pause. “You couldn’t stay here,” Lanny said. “You’d more than double our population.”
“Funny Farm would probably be the best place for you,” Roz said, and pointed to the center of the diagram. “Food, water, and shelter.”
I felt a rising choking panic. Stuck on a few acres of farmland? After having two worlds and parsecs of space to roam in?
Paul gave me a look that I couldn’t read. What did
he
want—a life of kids and crops and chores?
he
want—a life of kids and crops and chores?
“I think we ought to go,” he said slowly. “Let’s get these books on the ground, on the other side. Then decide whether to stay or go . . . someplace.”
My mind was spinning, or rather rattling around like a pebble in a can. Even if it was my choice, I wouldn’t know what to do. Return to the farm, stay in Eugene, head for the sea, the hills? Funny Farm was a haven and a trap. Hiding place and target.
Well, we did have to go there, Step One. Maybe then take off and head back east? Rather than stay locked up in a radioactive lunatic asylum.
Lanny helped us pack the books into cloth and plastic bags, with the store’s logo, RESERVED FOR VOLUME CUSTOMERS. We turned on the cube and saw the governor’s ranting speech while we loaded the truck and rolled off to the field.
The watching crowd was bigger. Some of them shouted at us as we slowed to go through the gate. But they weren’t armed, or at least weren’t shooting.
I couldn’t blame them for being resentful. But we weren’t actually escaping. Just hopping from one part of the frying pan into another.
We stacked the bags of books evenly into the overhead racks. The cargo area was pretty full with the weapons, ammunition, food, and water we’d brought. Even if we had carried it from the Farm and back for nothing, it had been reassuring.
When the door eased shut and cut off the crowd noise, I relaxed. The rush of the jet exhaust was comforting. We bumped along the soft ground for half a minute and then floated up into the air.
“Need to get some altitude,” Paul said over the intercom. “Like to be a few miles up when you go over the bombs.” He’d mentioned that on the way out. Hellbombs fall in such a way that their radiation isn’t wasted on the sky; most of it’s reflected to fan out horizontally. But it was still significant a mile or so up; besides, a bomb could land on a slant or tip over.
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