Authors: Joe Haldeman
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #General
Earthbound (8 page)
“Let me see.” She turned around and showed me, a small black dot high on her back, about where a human shoulder would be. There was a little pink froth of blood.
“I can feel exactly where it is,” she said. “It’s not doing any harm.”
Paul was standing behind me. “Are there any doctors for Martians at that Russian place?”
“There are members of the blue family. They’re something like doctors.”
“We have to get you there anyhow, for food. This just makes it a little higher priority.”
“It’s too far,” she said.
“Not anymore,” he said. “I’m a pilot. We just have to dig up an airplane somewhere.”
“That would be a figure of speech?” Snowbird said. “They don’t bury airplanes?”
“Right . . . Damn, I threw away my cell. Do you still have yours?”
“Think I can find it.” I went into the next room, where we’d changed into NASA work clothes. My cell was in the corner where I’d tossed it, the power light a barely visible dull red. I plugged it into the wall and it went bright red, then yellow, then green. I took it in to Paul.
He punched a few numbers and shook his head. “Nothing’s up and working yet, I suppose. Do you speak any Russian?”
“No,
nyet
.”
nyet
.”
“I do,” Snowbird said. “So does Namir. We used it sometimes on the starship.”
I recalled that Namir’s father had come from Russia. He’d gone back for some Olympics and brought home a souvenir balalaika, which was why our mysterious spy had such an odd instrument aboard a starship.
I took the phone from Namir and was looking at it, trying to decide what to do next, when it suddenly rang, the anonymous-caller tone. I punched the answer button, and a young woman’s face appeared.
“Carmen Dula?” she said. “You look just like your picture!”
“Um . . . most people do.”
“Sorry.” She covered her eyes with a hand and winced. “I am Wednesday Parkman, calling from the office of the president. At Camp David, Maryland.”
“Okay. What does the president want?”
“Well, I don’t know, really. I was told to call your number and Paul Collins’s until one of you answered. But you answered right away. So let me try to find the president?”
“Sure, and Paul’s here, too.”
“Hold on!” Her face left, and we saw the ceiling for a moment, and then a slow pan of Monet’s lilies, with a cello playing softly.
“I don’t guess she’s had this job for too long,” I said.
“How the hell did they get up to Camp David without power?” Paul said.
“You couldn’t walk there in a day,” I said.
The lilies dissolved, replaced by an important-looking man I recognized just as he said his name. “Dr. Dula, I’m Morris Chambers. We met briefly at the White House.”
“It seems like a long time ago.”
“Doesn’t it. The president is drawing together a committee to deal with the current”—he made a helpless gesture—“situation, and he’d like you to come here as soon as possible.”
“Washington,” Paul said, “or Camp David?”
“Washington is chaos,” he said. “Once you’re in the air, we’ll give you a code word that will allow you to land at Camp David.”
“Okay. So what do we get into the air with? We’re still on the Armstrong Space Force Base.”
“Let me check.” He got up from the desk, and we had another minute of Monet and strings. He appeared again.
“You were rated for multi-engine commercial a half century ago. Airplanes are simpler now, but there’s no GPS.” Of course not, no satellites.
“If there are charts and a compass, I can sort it out. It would have computers, even without GPS?”
He looked away from the phone and then nodded. “Navigation computers, yes. There is a subsonic twelve-passenger NASA plane waiting for you on Runway 4, South terminal. That’s the only secure terminal, they say, so go directly there. Security there wants your license-plate number.”
Alba was leaning in the door. “Government plate, 21D272,” she said. “It’s a little blue bus.” Paul repeated it.
“What will this committee be doing?” I asked. “What
can
they do in one week?”
can
they do in one week?”
“The key phrase is ‘maximum survival.’ We estimate that there are still about 300 million people alive in America after yesterday. We would like to have . . . a maximum still alive a year from now. Having learned how to live without technology.”
“It won’t be 300 million,” Paul said. “It won’t even be 100 million.”
The bureaucrat’s face didn’t change. “You understand what we’re facing. It will be a disaster of biblical scope no matter what we do. We do want to maximize the number who survive, but we also want to preserve a semblance of the American way of life.”
Paul nodded. “That will be interesting. I’ll call you next from the airplane.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me. “Cheeseburgers and idiotic television? I wonder what the American way of life
is
nowadays.”
is
nowadays.”
“If they really want maximum survival,” Namir said, “they’re aiming for a totally protective welfare state that’s also a police state. Which identifies the ones chosen to survive, and lets the rest go find some way to die. Or is there some humane alternative?”
“We have plenty of time to talk about it en route. We’ll be in the air most of the day.”
“Slow plane?” Alba said.
Namir nodded slowly. “We’ll be going by way of Russia, of course. They’d never allow us to take Snowbird there if we went to Camp David first.”
“Of course. Over the Pole,” I said. Hoping the Others don’t decide to turn off the power prematurely.
We loaded the bus in a hurry, deciding to hold on to all the food and weapons. We could use up the perishables on the way to Camp David, and the rest might come in handy next week.
Alba did the driving; she knew the way, and nobody else but Card had driven during this century. Leaving the place, we passed a sight I could have lived without, a trio of buzzards tearing up the body on the sidewalk. Paul winced at the sight but didn’t say anything.
The guards at the airfield gate knew Alba, of course, and waved us through. There were a couple of dozen planes parked around, but she followed a line painted on the tarmac that led to Runway 4, where a woman was standing by a small passenger plane.
One problem was immediately manifest: you got into the plane by climbing a narrow set of stairs that led to a narrow door—not wide enough for a Martian. Fortunately, the baggage compartment was pressurized, and the bay was a couple of meters wide. The ramp going up to it was a conveyor belt; she gave a thumping Martian laugh as she rolled up.
Paul was talking to the woman while this was going on. She was a flight controller who also flew, but she’d never piloted one this big, and she’d never flown without GPS. Paul hadn’t either, in a real-life situation, but in Space Force training he’d flown everything from gliders to spaceships. By the seat of his pants, as they say.
They went up into the cockpit and checked out the emergency navigation system, which could work by compass headings and a VR cube that showed what the ground looked like from any altitude over any place on Earth. Goggles that could see through clouds.
It only took a few minutes to load up our provisions and weaponry. “Well,” Alba said, “I guess I’ll be leaving you now.”
“Not if you don’t want to,” Paul said, looking down the aisle of the plane. “This is an alien planet to us; you and Card are our native guides. You know modern weapons, and the riot gun doesn’t work for anyone else.”
Everybody murmured or nodded assent, even me. Though I didn’t care for the way he carefully didn’t look at her when he knew I was watching.
Well, we’ve always given each other that freedom. But neither of us had exercised it in some years. Not to mention light-years.
The plane started taxiing, and there was some discussion over the radio when Paul turned left. For some reason, they thought we were going east. We took off headed for the North Pole.
In retrospect, I suppose they had the ability and authority to shoot us down. I’m glad I didn’t think of that until later.
The ride was pretty bumpy and loud until we got to cruising altitude. Then it was just a mild vibration, with the noise from the wind and engine canceled out.
Alba came up the aisle and sat next to me, offering to share a packet of nuts and dried fruit.
“This may seem funny,” she said, “but I’m not quite clear on what you and Paul actually did. I mean, I was never good at history. That was like forty years before I was born.”
Fair enough. What did I know about 2014, forty years before I was born? Had they started building the space elevator yet? I’d have to look it up.
6
“It kind of started with the space elevator. Our family—Card and me and our parents—won a sort of lottery. There was a small colony on Mars, mostly single scientists, that wanted to start accepting families.
“So we took the space elevator up to orbit—two pretty boring weeks—and then got on an old-fashioned spaceship to Mars. That was most of a year, but it wasn’t boring. I started college, VR to the University of Maryland, and met Paul, and we fell in love.”
“He was a lot older than you?”
“Well, yeah, I’d just turned nineteen and he was thirty-one. But it worked out.”
“I can see.”
How sweet. “Well, it caused no end of trouble with the administration of Mars, namely one walking disaster, Dargo Solingen. She clearly disapproved, and did everything she could to keep us apart.”
“Which had the opposite effect, I suppose.”
“That’s for sure. Well, we’d been in Mars, as they say, for little more than a year, and she caught me in an unforgivable situation, swimming with a bunch of other kids in a new water tank. Since I was the oldest, she rained all kinds of shit on me. Including barring me from the surface.
“Well, that didn’t last. I snuck out after midnight, planning to walk a couple of kilometers and come straight back—Card had figured out how to disable the alarm on the air lock.
“But I had an accident. Crossed a place where the crust was eggshell-thin and fell some distance to the floor of a lava tube.
“I broke my ankle, and that should’ve been the end of it. Nobody knew where I was, and the radio didn’t work.”
“Which was when the Martians came to the rescue. I remember that.”
“One Martian, anyhow, the one we called Red. They all look pretty much the same, at least to us, but they wear different colors according to their family. Red was the only one who wore red.”
“Of course I know about him.”
“Everyone should. Anyhow, he collected me and flew me back to their underground city, where they used some kind of mumbo-jumbo medical science to fix my ankle.
“It did occur to me to wonder why these weird-looking aliens should be living in an earthlike environment in a huge pressurized cave under the Martian surface. I asked Red, and he said he didn’t know, and at the time I wondered whether he was holding something back. He wasn’t; it was a mystery to them as well.”
“They didn’t know they’d been built by the Others,” Alba said.
“Yes and no. They had a tradition, almost mystical, that the Others had created them and brought them from someplace unimaginably far away. When they first told us about that, it sounded like a creation myth. But it was literally true, and explained a lot.”
“Like how they had this high-tech life but knew nothing about science.”
“Right. You know about the Martian pulmonary cysts?”
“The Martian lung crap, yeah.”
“That’s what brought us together, Martians and humans. Nobody believed my story about these Martians living in a cave—well, my mother almost believed—but then everybody under about the age of twenty caught the lung crap. I’d brought the spores back with me.”
“So Red showed up with the cure.”
“In essence, yes. And the humans and Martians started studying each other.
“Well, the Martians had been studying
us
for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.
us
for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.
“They told us about the Others, but we dismissed it as myth-making, a kind of religion—you know, these almighty beings gave birth to us a jillion years ago.”
“And then you found out it was literally true.”
“That’s right.” The yellow family, the ones who wore only yellow, specialized in memory, and they swore that the memory of the Others was real. It was vague and patchy because it was tens of thousands of years old, but it wasn’t a myth.
“Then, in 2079, the Others proved it. A signal that triggered strange behavior in the yellow family. They started babbling weird nonsense—but they each said the same nonsense over and over. Turned out to be a binary code that basically told us who the Others were and what their body chemistry was, nitrogen and silicon. They lived in liquid nitrogen, and this one—there was only one in the solar system—lived in a liquid-nitrogen sea on Triton, Neptune’s moon. It had lived there for twenty-seven thousand years.
Other books
Hidden Gem by India Lee
Jinx by Sage Blackwood
Deep Breath by Alison Kent
Holes by Louis Sachar
Just Call Me Superhero by Alina Bronsky
Cobra by Frederick Forsyth
La dalia negra by James Ellroy
Command by Sierra Cartwright
Stuart by Alexander Masters
The Flavours of Love by Dorothy Koomson