Third World

by Louis Shalako

  “I’m very sorry about all this.” He had to start somewhere. “Look, we need to get a proper identification. Maybe this is all just a big mistake, in which case, you will have my full apologies and who knows, maybe even a little compensation…”

  Newton was dying inside, and all for the lack of a good cup of coffee.

  The man just stared, knees up and on his left side.

  “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 anot
her 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.

  “Hermes, come in please…” Newton cursed. “Shit. Nothing.”

  At that exact moment, a head popped in the side door and Newton just had time to turn and see a startled look on Trooper Barnes’ face. Then she grabbed a coil of rope off the floor beside the prisoner, and dragging it out, slammed the door decisively. He saw Grimaldi and Sims right there too.

  “Well.”

  His guts seethed inside, but he had let the cat out the bag now.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A Little Fresh Air

  Lieutenant Shapiro had the prisoner with him for a little exercise and fresh air. He was supervising a small group right near the road, engaged in pulling small brush and some big logs, cut into three-metre sections, out of the way.

  The scream, when it came, was blood-curdling. It cut through the sounds of buzzing saws and cracking underbrush with no problem. It was like his heart just stopped.

  Spinning on one foot, Newton peered, or attempted to peer, through a mound of new-fallen trees, still with their glossy leaves and branches mostly on them.

  He slapped the microphone button.

  “What happened? One at a time, please.”

  There was a brief pause, and then three people at least started talking.

  He recognized one.

  “Roy. Report.”

  “Oscar fell and the saw hit his leg.”

  “Shit!” Newton looked at Mister Beveridge, just as the high note of a combat whistle came through the screen of branches. “Come on.”

  Plowing their way, tripping and falling, the babble of excited voices guided them the next few metres, constantly barred by finger-thick saplings, bending back and slapping at them dangerously, and then they came upon it.

  Pushing a way through a ring of standing figures, green with debris and sticky with sap, he pushed bodies aside and broke through to see Oscar with his back to a log, and his right leg gushing hot red blood. His face was ashen but his eyes were still open. He gaped and gasped but luckily wasn’t screaming. Oscar’s upper thigh was laid open to the stark white bone.

  They all turned and began talking and shouting at Newton Shapiro.

  “Shut up!”

  A big arm swept Newton aside and Hank Beveridge dropped to his knees.

  He was already taking off his wide leather belt.

  “Get that armour off him!” It was all new to Hank, and he couldn’t see the fasteners.

  A slender figure knelt beside him and Newton looked at the rest of the troops. Spaulding was right there.

  “Get a stretcher! We need the medical box.” Three troops turned and dashed away.

  Trooper Hernandez pulled Oscar’s hands back and Semanko, who was there now too, grabbed onto him by the shoulders as Oscar moaned and cried. The clamps let go front and back, the upper greaves fell away and the leg was exposed.

  “Lift him up.” Willing hands got Oscar off the ground and Beveridge wrapped the belt around his upper thigh, as high up as he could get it, and then pulled strongly on the end of it, quelling the flow and drawing a final gasp of pain from the wounded man, who promptly fell unconscious.

  “This man needs blood.” Hank looked around. “You! Hold the end of this tight and don’t let go.”

  “We have plasma in the medical kit.” Ensign Spaulding looked wildly around. “Get the medical kit.”

  Shouts and voices came fro
m the direction of the vehicles.

  With Trooper Marlowe gaping at the blood on her hands, but holding the belt for all she was worth, Hank and Semanko picked up the man as troops scampered back through the mess they had made, floundering through the bush to the vehicles. Flinging Oscar over his shoulder, with Marlowe trotting alongside, Hank carried Oscar to the road. He was finding his way better than some as he almost got tripped up by a trooper who sprawled into the undergrowth then jumped back up as he went by. People crashed through the brush in both directions, calling in confusion.

  “Damn.” Semanko gasped for breath in ragged desperation.

  Beveridge’s breath sounded like an express train.

  “Over here! Over here!”

  Shapiro was right at their heels, trying to keep his hands under Oscar’s shoulders and take some of the weight. There was too much blood falling…it splattered as they went, onto the lush leaves and blades of the forest floor.

  “Tighter! Tighter!” Marlowe gasped and sobbed, her pull forcing Hank to one side but he was big and strong for a man of his age and he stumbled out into the light.

  Troops ran up from the back of the trucks. Someone spread a groundsheet and someone else plonked down the big white plastic case with the medical kit.

  Hank carefully put the man down and Trooper Cornell cradled Oscar’s head.

  “Keep the pressure on.” Newton looked up at Trooper Marlowe. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, staring big-eyed at Oscar’s pale features. Her wrists and forearms were already aching.

  With the medical kit open, Shapiro’s training came back to him with a rush, and Jackson seemed to know what he was doing as he pulled out bags and tubes and a needle to stick in Oscar’s arm.

  “You want to hit the big blue vein.” Jackson looked up. “You. Hold this.”

  Kane stepped forward with no hesitation and held up the bag for a gravity feed.

  “Mister Beveridge?”

  “You need to clamp off both ends of the vein.”

  “Right.” Newton beckoned at Jackson, who slapped two sets of hemostat forceps into his bare palm.