Brother to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

  “Every space image receives its own analysis. The fences were noted, but no action was taken. No one brought this to my attention. Even if they had, I’d have thought nothing of it. So now we come to this, one year ago.”

  The new print on the table was at a finer scale than the earlier two. The small rectangular region filled the whole scene.

  “See the people outside that small building,” said Wilfred Dell. “Mostly they work inside, but on this shot our viewing system got lucky. The analysts zoomed in to the highest resolution available. They could see enough to pick out faces, and ask the computers to enhance them and look for matches in the main data bank. That’s when they made an identification of one of the people outside the building.” Dell slid a full-face ID photograph in front of Job. “Dr. Hanna Kronberg. That’s when I was called in. I’ve been tracking Hanna for over seven years—”

  Since that first sight Job had spent a lot of time studying the subject of that photograph, in every light and from every angle. As he leaned with eyes closed on the bus seat in front of him, he could see Hanna Kronberg now in his mind’s eye. If ever they met he would recognize her at once. But he was less confident than Wilfred Dell that the meeting would ever take place.

  If Dr. Kronberg were inside that fenced area, Job would have to find a way to be invited in. That seemed an impossible task. Even if she were outside Techville, the chance of a random meeting was slight. The population of Xanadu was a hundred thousand, maybe more as new prisoners were poured in. No one on the outside was sure of the present number, and if the people inside took a census they kept it to themselves. Job was beginning to think of the Tandy as a separate nation. Nothing was sent in but toxic wastes, radioactive material, and condemned criminals. Nothing came out. Mean life expectancy within Xanadu: one and a half years.

  He shifted on his uncomfortable seat and stared around at the others in the bus. Everyone here was doomed, except—just possibly—Job. He wondered at his companions’ offenses. If one happened to be another Hanna Kronberg, a condemned scientist of great brilliance and reputation, he would not know it. Every face on the bus was pleasure-sated and lethargic.

  But someone might not be what they seemed. Job recalled Wilfred Dell’s words: “It is not a matter of trust. It is that more than one point of view is valuable. So there will be others in my employ, seeking to crack the secret of the Nebraska Tandy. You will not know their identities, as they do not know yours. You will each serve as an independent check on the others. I hope that at least one of you succeeds.”

  There was no reason for Job to assume that another agent in Dell’s service would be on this same bus; but there was no reason to assume that he or she was not…

  After the gouged landscape of the strip mines finally ended, the highway improved. The bus picked up speed to nearly fifty. On their right lay a vast lake, on the left an unbroken vista of buildings was coming into view.

  It had to be Lake Michigan, the second of the Great Lakes on their route west. They had already skirted Lake Erie from Cleveland to Toledo, but that had happened in the middle of the night. Job knew of it only because he had heard the night shift driver talking the next morning, complaining about the smell that came off the water.

  Job studied the wind-ruffled waters off to his right. Lake Michigan was just as acid and necrotic as the other lakes; yet there were people all the way along the shore. Ignoring a cold rain they were paddling in the chill lake water, probing at the bottom with sticks.

  What could they be doing? The last fish had vanished from the lakes a generation ago, well before the Quiebra Grande. Phosphate runoff had filled the lake with the green slime of algal bloom, but that was not edible. Maybe the people had come from the sprawl of Greater Chicago, simply because there was no place left in the whole city where they could live. More and more cities were ridding themselves of the homeless and the indigent, trucking them far beyond city limits and dropping them off to fend for themselves. How long before the countryside itself was full, and everyplace was chock-a-block? According to Wilfred Dell, that lay a long time in the future.

  “Four hundred million sounds like a lot of people to you, but it isn’t. We’ve not doubled in a generation; some countries in Africa have tripled in that time. China tops one and a half billion, India’s the same, Brazil and Mexico and Indonesia and the old Soviet states push six hundred million each. The thing that hurt us the worst was when the economic collapse pulled the rug from industrial development. We could have lived with everything else. You won’t believe this until you’ve seen other places, but this is still a rich country.”

  Job didn’t believe it. Unless it were possible to have a rich country filled with poor people. But hadn’t the last Depression, ninety years ago, been exactly that? Starving people, and abundant resources all around. Maybe Wilfred Dell was right. So far he had been right about everything else.

  Job leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. Right about everything, including his assessment of Hanna Kronberg?

  “They kept the watch going, but there’s been no more sightings of Kronberg. It would be blind luck if there were one—naturally, she’ll mostly stay inside the buildings because that’s where her work is. I wouldn’t have sent her to the Tandy at all. Damned do-gooder, ready to change the world—I would have had her killed, the moment I caught her.” The cherub’s face still wore its half-smile. “But unfortunately she was caught out on the West Coast, and shipped before I could have a say in it.”

  Job studied the pictures of Hanna Kronberg. She was a short, gray-haired woman of casual dress. He knew that physical appearance told little of a person’s mind, but the face was good-humored and relaxed, with twinkling blue eyes. And this was supposed to be the most dangerous woman in the country?

  “You’re like everyone else,” said Dell. “You look at her, and you think, that’s just a harmless little lady. But I’ve been on to her for over six years. You have to know about her work to know her. I don’t pretend to understand the technical material, but I do understand her aims.

  “She’s a brilliant biologist who became a fanatic on the subject of world hunger. She was once married to Raoul Kronberg, another biologist. When the Quiebra Grande hit he was on a field trip in South America, in the high Andes. The funds for his project were cut off overnight. The helicopter that was supposed to bring him and the rest of his party out was never sent, and finally they had to trek down on foot over a hundred and fifty miles of rough terrain. One of them made it—not Raoul Kronberg. The others were found later. They starved to death.

  “That’s when Hanna got the bee in her bonnet. She learned that Raoul had starved and died, in a place where lots of animals survive very well. They do it because they can digest cellulose, the woody material in stems and leaves. Hanna was a specialist in recombinant DNA technology, splicing genetic material to make new living organisms that do things no natural organism has ever done. She decided to make a hybrid that would live in the human gut and let people digest cellulose.”

  “It doesn’t sound dangerous. It sounds useful.” There had been many times when Job wished that he could eat grass and leaves.

  “Depends how you define danger. Do you want to see the world population double—again? That’s what it might do, if we could all eat cellulose. It’s nice to have plenty of young and poor, to look after the needs of the old and wealthy, but the biggest threat to the Royal Hundred, and therefore to me, is change. Any major change is bad. We control food and fuel and dope and land and almost everything else. But could we stay in control if the demand side on food went haywire? No one is sure. No one would want to try. That’s why Hanna Kronberg is so dangerous. If she’s still working on her project, inside the Tandy…”

  Except that she was surely not. Job had become convinced of it as the bus toiled on over the Great Plains like a snail, hardly seeming to move in a whole day. He had been filled with a sense of paradox as they passed through the barren lands of Iowa, where topsoil had vanished an
d only a gray and sterile substrate was left for crops. The Nebraska Tandy was supposed to be a place of ultimate punishment. Yet every space image suggested a land more fertile than anything Job was seeing on the way. In Xanadu, Hanna Kronberg would not need to pursue her dream of humans who could eat twigs and leaves. And it made no sense for her to do so, for another reason: no matter what she developed, it could never be exported from the Tandy.

  If you go in, you don’t come back. Hanna Kronberg might be brilliant, but the one-way nature of the Tandy was as true for her as for anyone.

  A clatter of metal a few seats in front woke him from his reverie. Feet drummed on the bare floor of the bus, rhythmic at first, then random and convulsive. Job heard a strangled cry and smelled a terrible stench of evacuated body fluids. The driver stopped the bus. He and his co-driver walked back to the seat where the noise had come from and bent over the prisoner there.

  Job knew that it was too late. The same thing had happened five times in the past twenty-four hours. The pattern was clear now. The drug that kept the prisoners sedated had a cumulative effect, or it was being fed intravenously at higher and higher doses. First a prisoner showed little interest in food and relieved himself at less frequent intervals. Then the stimulant patches lost effectiveness. The prisoner would remain slumped in one place, unaware of anything. At last he went into periodic convulsions of increasing severity. If the first fit did not kill, the second or third would always do the trick.

  The drivers finished their examination. They pulled the body into the aisle and dragged it away to the door of the bus. It would be stowed with the other five, in the empty luggage compartment. The task of the two drivers was to deliver a shipment of prisoners to the Nebraska Tandy. Dead or alive, that made no difference.

  They left the door wide open. The wind that blew in was icy enough to make Job shiver in his thin shirt and pants, but he welcomed it. He could stand cold, but the smell of sweat and urine and excrement inside the bus made him gag. He had been unable to force down the last two food packages. He peered at the road ahead, wondering when he would catch a first glimpse of Xanadu.

  The drivers returned rubbing chilled hands and cursing the snow, and slid the door closed at once. They were impervious to the stench. From their point of view it was part of a trade-off. Job had seen them eating the extra food packages left by the dead prisoners. The bus started on its way again.

  Fifteen minutes later Job heard a change in the note of the engine. He thought at first that it was a mechanical problem, something that had held them up twice already on the trip. Then he realized that they were ascending an incline, so long and uniform that the ground ahead looked flat.

  Over the brow of that long hill, according to everything that Job had been told in his briefings, lay the only entrance to the Nebraska Tandy. Already the sky ahead was a darker shade of gray.

  In Xanadu, the sky burns black.

  If you go in, you don’t come back.

  History recorded no exception to that rule.

  • Chapter Thirteen

  Xanadu

  The bus grumbled to a halt on a long, flat stretch of road. The nearest buildings were still a quarter of a mile ahead, half-hidden by a flurry of snowflakes. Just fifty yards in front of the bus stood a flimsy wire fence with huge red signs set along it at regular intervals:

  T. A. N. D. I.

  TOXIC AND NUCLEAR DISPOSAL INSTALLATION

  ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

  NO EXIT PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT

  The bus drivers were suddenly busy. One of them was tinkering with the dashboard, while the other went down the aisle. Job, halfway back, saw that the man had a hypodermic and a big bottle of milky liquid. At each prisoner he stopped, filled the syringe, and gave the man a shot in the thigh.

  No pretense here of clean needles. But as the prisoners at the front of the bus began to stir, Job had a frightening thought. A stimulant that would bring a heavily drugged man to consciousness might blow an undrugged man’s brain right out of the top of his head.

  When the driver came to him Job put out a hand, restraining the syringe. “Not for me, I’m all right without it.”

  The man stared, at Job and then at the bottle he was holding. “You can’t possibly be all right. You have to have this.”

  He moved the needle closer. Again Job pushed him away. “I’m fine.” He spoke loudly and clearly.

  “But—”

  “Rafael!” The voice of the other driver came from the front of the bus. “Don’t dawdle around. If he says he’s awake, he must be awake.”

  The man with the syringe straightened, gave Job another puzzled look, and moved on. He was still injecting the last prisoners when the second driver left the bus, went around to its side, and pulled a flat runabout vehicle from the luggage compartment. Job heard the whine of an electric motor, and the shout, “All set. Come on!”

  The second driver finished the last shots in record time and ran for the front of the bus. He moved a lever on the dashboard and at once jumped out, falling down in the snow. The other man helped him to his feet. They were both climbing onto the runabout when the engine of Job’s bus roared to life. There was a jerk of meshing gears and skidding wheels. The driverless vehicle began to move along the road at a steady five miles an hour.

  Job’s first urge was to follow the drivers into the snowy road, but the bus was already rolling past the fence with its warning signs. Job moved to stand at the open door, peering through the front window. And then another vehicle was moving up alongside, paralleling theirs. As Job fell back into the vacant seat of one of the dead prisoners, a bearded man leapt across to the steps of the bus and ran lightly up them. In a couple of seconds he had control of the vehicle. He drove it to the nearest buildings and brought it to a careful halt.

  A small group of people was waiting in the snow. They came forward as the bus stopped.

  “All right.” A squat man wearing a sleeveless shirt to show off massive arm muscles put his foot on the lowest step. “Let’s see what pile of crap they’ve left with us this time. Digger and Sim, you get the live ones. Looks like they’re pretty far gone. Smells like it, too.”

  The prisoners had been returning to dazed life. Judging from their groans and shudders, they felt terrible. The crew from Xanadu shepherded them from the bus and placed them shivering in a line in the snow. The cold wind sliced through the thin shirts, providing the last step of uncomfortable revival.

  “Right then.” The muscle man stepped in front of them. “In a few minutes Digger’ll take you inside. You’ll get warmed up, and a bath, and food if you feel up to it. But first things first. You made it. You’re inside Xanadu now, the Great Nebraska Tandy. And you’re going to stay here. There’s the way out—but it’s closed.”

  He pointed back up the road. There was a long stunned silence, while the prisoners scanned the empty waste of snow. At last one of them gave a warbling cry of fear. He started running towards the fence.

  Job knew how he felt. He had the urge to run himself, but he noticed that the Xanadu guards made no move to pursue. They were watching, waiting.

  The fleeing man’s condition was no better than Job’s. As he ran his legs became wobbly and he moved with more and more effort. He slowed to a walk, until right at the fence line he gave a shout of triumph, raised his arms like a runner breaking the winners’ tape, and rushed forward. As though that were a signal, a series of whiplash cracks sounded from beyond the fence. Beams of blinding blue flashed out from three small cones and converged on the escaping prisoner.

  He exploded at the middle. The head, chest, and raised arms were blown high in the air, up and away from the running legs. While the half-torso was still rising, the three beams hit again and again. There was a series of secondary explosions. Head, arms, and chest spattered into bloody mists, the hips and legs formed another.

  The whip cracks ended. A strange and absolute silence fell on the snowscape. The flakes still drifted down. Where they touched t
he road through the fence, a lurid splotch of crimson and black slowly began to fade to pink and gray.

  Job shuddered. Wilfred Dell had told him that if and when Job gave the signal, the boundary security system would be switched off on this same road so that Job could escape. But Job would not know that the signal had been received and it was safe to pass through, until he was actually outside the Tandy. Did he have the nerve to try, after what he had just seen?

  “That was lesson number one,” the squat man was saying. He looked along the line of stunned prisoners. “Anyone else want to try? Guess not. We never have more than one in a busload. For your general information, your buddy there just used the only practical spin-off of the old SDI program. You saw it at low power. It steps up the energy if it doesn’t wipe out a target first time. People here found out—the hard way—that it can vaporize a full-size battle tank if it has to.” He turned away. “All right, Digger, get ’em in now, before we all freeze our nuts off.”

  The prisoners were steered to a long, low building of sheet metal and ushered inside. It was even hotter than the bus, and the sudden changes of temperature were too much for a couple of the men. They doubled over, clutching at their middles. The bearded guard, Digger, walked to stand by them.

  “Wait it out.” His voice was oddly gentle. “It’s the drugs, you see, just the drugs. Once you sweat ’em through your system you’ll feel better.” He helped one of the prisoners to his feet. “There we go. Clothes off now, all of you. It’s bath time. Smell yourselves, an’ you’ll know why.”

  Job was soon naked except for the crucifix around his neck. He was issued a square cake of gray and grainy soap. He sniffed it, and wondered what Stella would have made of this. Its stink rivalled what it was supposed to wash off. He followed the other prisoners through a long continuous shower of hot water, soaping as he went. They were partially dried by hot air at the other end, and emerged to find Digger waiting with piles of clothes.