Brother to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

“Nasty, eh?” she said. “I think so, too. But don’t blame the Xanadu authorities. The recruits do that, to people in their own group who try to avoid handling radioactives, or put others in danger. You have the same right.” She smiled around at them as she headed the van directly to Tandy Center. “So work hard, boys and girls, and help each other. If you don’t, you might find you’ve earned a long vacation.”

  Without a shielding cover of snow the Center was revealed as a wilderness, an amazing jumble of barrels and carboys and boxes and storage tanks, some still intact, others shattered by the air drop and spilling solids and liquids onto the ground. The Tandymen had already made a first cut at sorting the debris into useful or lethal heaps. It was the cleanup squad’s job to refine that and bring the most valuable and least dangerous finds out of Tandy Center, to the manufacturing and storage facilities.

  Each new recruit was left in a different place and given an individual task. Job was told to seek out and collect cubical containers from the most recent airdrop. “Not dangerous in themselves,” said Ormond. “They contain waste products with a high selenium content. We can use the selenium, but more than that we don’t want it in the aquifers. It’s teratogenic, and people inside Xanadu are having babies.”

  Not dangerous in themselves. Maybe. But the blue-and-gray half-meter cubes were scattered over an area with a quarter-mile radius, and some of them sat on the side of steep mountains of trash and were the devil to reach. Job struggled up and down jagged ridges, trying to tread carefully and still keep one eye on his radiation monitor; but by the end of his shift he had a long skin wound in his left calf and his monitor showed that he had received nearly ten rads. Two months like that and he would be dead.

  He was ashamed of himself until he reached the bus that would take them back to the dormitories, and found that the average dose of the group for a single day’s work was fifteen rads, not counting one unfortunate who had absorbed an incredible six hundred. Ignoring warning signs and her own radiation monitor, she had sought a dropped package in the glowing heart of Xanadu, where only the Tandymen could go, and had stayed there for most of the shift.

  Ormond said nothing, but the next morning the woman had vanished from the group. She never returned.

  On the first day of the second week, when Job’s cumulative dose had already climbed to twenty-two rads, Ormond introduced him to the Tandymen.

  “Suits on before we start,” she said. “Most of the radioactivity is in the chest and arms and pincers, but even around the back you can get a pretty stiff dose.”

  Suited, she led him into the heart of Tandy Center, to where a couple of dozen Tandymen stood in random array. Pausing by the nearest of them, Ormond showed Job how the back of each had a door that could be pulled open. Inside was enough room for one gray-suited person to sit down. Ormond pushed Job through the narrow opening. “Not enough room for two,” she said. “I’m going to be out here, remote controlling. Let me do most of the work. You can always override me manually if you want to, but you don’t need to. You’re in a lead-lined enclosure, and you could roll or walk right through the hottest spot in Xanadu and not get hurt. If you want to be logical, the inside of a Tandyman is the safest place you can be in the whole of this Tandy.”

  The door closed. Job was sitting in claustrophobic darkness. And then the displays came on suddenly, and he was seeing the terrain from ten feet up, rolling across the flat surface of Xanadu. The controls were in front of him. If he chose he could make the Tandyman roll faster, walk, run, or pick up any object that weighed a ton or less. Ormond was in control as they headed for Tandy Center, but after a while Job took over. He soon realized the problem with automatic and remote-controlled modes. Ormond could see an object as small as a pin, but she lacked the coordination to pick it up. Job could do that, easily, with his own direct control. For two hours he forgot Ormond and established the full range of his skills. On level ground the Tandyman was superb; only on the steepest trash-heaped ridges did control and stability become a question.

  “Well,” said Ormond, when he finally relinquished command and let her steer him back towards the dormitories. “You certainly got off on that, didn’t you?”

  Job grinned. He had. The speed, power, and precision of a Tandyman were overwhelming. After nineteen years of being a weed it was nice to be able to throw quarter-ton packages around like pillows.

  “You won’t get more Tandyman rides until training is over,” Ormond went on. “You’re real good at it, but tomorrow it’s back to pick and shovel for you.”

  Pick, shovel, and higher radiation and toxin doses. Job had noticed inside the Tandyman that his cumulative dose did not increase at all. But that was an anomaly, a day of special dispensation arranged by Ormond because she had been able to do nothing for Job earlier.

  His total dose crept up, to thirty rads and then to forty. He began to feel queasy when he ate certain foods, his mouth was plagued by little ulcers, and when he showered his hair came out in handfuls. His only consolation was that others of his group seemed worse. Ormond’s grim statistics were accurate. At this rate they would lose over a third of the new recruits by the time training ended.

  Work took on a pattern. Job thought about it, and created a new Golden Rule: Do your work if you can, during the shift, but if you get behind, don’t compromise on safety. Never, never, never. And never ignore your radiation monitor. By the end of the sixth week he felt that he had been doing this kind of job all his life. Wilfred Dell was a million miles and a thousand years away, almost forgotten until one bright mid-December morning when Job was sorting through a pile of short steel bars. He noticed a stranger standing thirty yards away and staring at him intently.

  Job froze. Had they seen through his test, or was he betrayed by some other word or action?

  The man was coming forward. He was tall and burly, with a full brown beard and long swept-back brown hair. Job gave up the pretense of work, straightened, and returned the stare.

  “Yes?”

  The tall man snorted. “I knew it! When Mannie said skinny brute, with a receding chin and a face like a fish, I was sure there couldn’t be another in the whole world. You made it out! I always swore you had.”

  The voice had given Job all that he needed in the first few words. “Skip Tolson!”

  “Who else? I told you I’d last through Cloak House, and I did.”

  “You don’t look like Skip. You used to have curly hair!”

  “Yeah.” Tolson swept a hand through his mop. “Funny thing, that, I lost it in the first few months here, and when it come back it grew straight.”

  “You were sent right from Cloak House?”

  “Well, not quite right here.” Tolson was grinning down at Job. “I had a few years out and free. But then me and a friend knocked off a car, an’ it turned out it belonged to a Representative who was out slumming. Our fault, we shoulda’ checked it out. Time we did, it was too late. How did you get out of Cloak House? There were fifty theories—none of them any good.”

  “Through the infirmary. In with the dead boys.”

  “That was my suggestion. Some of the others got pretty wild. A lot of the kids said you went off the roof. They said that if you jumped at just the right place and the right time, the updrafts around the building would float you down gentle. They had fun with that one. Teeter on the edge, screw up your courage, then jump and whomp! For a coupla’ weeks they were sweepin’ up splattered messes every morning in the road outside. Dangerous place, Cloak House—if you didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “Not as bad as Tandy Center. Do you work at Headquarters?”

  “I do, matter of fact.” Tolson stared hard at Job. “What difference it make?”

  “I thought you might know a way to get me out of this, to somewhere safer.” Job held out his radiation-dose meter.

  Tolson hardly looked at it. “Forty rads. That’s nothing. I had near twice that when I finished training, and look at me now—fine. You’ll be fine, too. R
emember, it’s radiation gets the publicity, but it’s toxins does you in.”

  “But can you get me out?”

  “Doubt it. Why should I?”

  “I gave you everything I had when I escaped from Cloak House.”

  “True. But what you done for me recently?”

  “Same old Skip.”

  “Hey, be reasonable. Nobody gets another job ’til they done hot service. Not Pyle, not Gormish, not Bonvissuto. They done theirs, I done mine, you do yours.”

  “How about after that, then? You must know where the good jobs are.”

  “Well, what sort of thing you want to do? What you good at?”

  There was a dreadful temptation to say biology, and hope that would lead to Hanna Kronberg, but the first question from an expert would show that Job knew hardly more science than Skip Tolson.

  “You know what I’m good at, Skip. Languages, same as always. With people coming here from all over the country, there must be a need for somebody who can talk to all of them.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Don’t get your hopes up. An’ I’m getting out of here now—too hot for my taste.” Tolson was turning away when he had another thought. “Hey, I met an old buddy of yours when I first come here.”

  “Alan Singh?”

  “Never heard of him. I meant Father Bonifant.”

  Job found himself unable to breathe. “Mister Bones is alive—here in Xanadu?”

  “Nah. Not any more. He died a few years back.”

  The new bright warmth in Job’s heart faded. “How did he die?”

  “Went near the hot spots once too often. Helping recruits.”

  “Yes. He would have. That was Mister Bones.” But Job spoke under his breath.

  Tolson nodded. “I’m goin’. This place got too much burn in it for me.”

  He strode away. Job watched him out of sight, and was smiling by the time that Tolson vanished behind a ridge of trash. Skip hadn’t changed. The ultimate pragmatist, but you couldn’t dislike him for that. It was good to see him again. And he was quite right; Job had nothing to trade.

  For the next forty-eight hours Job thought about Skip in every spare moment. How had he survived at Cloak House? How was he surviving now? One thing was guaranteed, if there were a safe burrow in Xanadu old Skip would have found it and crawled inside. The Tandy might be a death sentence, but it was a slow one. Ormond and Skip and Paley had lived here for years; Father Bonifant had survived for over a decade, and he had surely not taken good care of himself. He never did.

  Job relived his years at Cloak House under the benign rule of Mister Bones and felt curiously comforted, until the third morning after Tolson’s visit brought a major airdrop and the threat of a winter blizzard. Then there was no time for reminiscence.

  The temperature across the Nebraska Tandy had been dropping steadily as the New Year approached. While long-time residents could batten down against the cold and go outside as little as possible, for the new recruits there was no such relief. The airdrops would go on in any clear weather and the cleanup work had to begin at once, before rain or snow turned the dropped materials into a coalesced mass, impossible to work with and hopelessly contaminated. Job and his companions were sent out in all weathers, until the cold became so intense that lubricants in the Tandymen congealed to a viscous solid, and the gears of the giant robots froze into place. Then the Tandymen could not make their first sorting of the most dangerous dropped materials, and all work halted.

  Ormond had been watching today’s weather closely. “Cold, but still clear,” she said from the driver’s seat of the truck. “They’ll make the drop. The schedulers outside don’t give a damn what happens here afterwards. The Tandymen will have time to take their cut, too. Then it gets tricky. You’ll have to move fast. There’s a winter storm sweeping down through Canada and Montana, and it’s a bugger. Gale-force winds, foot or more of snow by tonight.”

  The recruits, bundled in multiple layers of warm clothing, waited tensely. There was already six inches of snow over Tandy Center. That would make the darker mass of the new drop easy to distinguish from the rest, but harder to handle and move around.

  At noon half a dozen of the great pilotless drone aircraft came winging from the east through a sky of deep and flawless blue. The drop was made to perfection, masses of dark material falling to stain the snowy ridges of Tandy Center. A score of Tandymen went rumbling by the truck where the recruits were waiting, raising every pulse rate until the giant robots were safely inside Tandy Center and the danger of a wild Tandyman was past.

  And then it was another agonizing wait, while the sky slowly clouded over and a north wind began to pick up strength. No one would risk going into Tandy Center before the Tandymen had done their work and left, but at the same time everyone dreaded the idea of scaling the snow-crusted and treacherous ridges of compacted trash in high winds and poor light. With just two days to go to winter solstice, dusk would arrive by five o’clock. Most of the training course casualties had made their fatal mistakes in failing light, at the very end of the shift when fatigue affected judgment and concentration.

  At three o’clock the first tentative snowflakes drifted down. The wind began to gust more strongly. Ormond swore, and spoke into the van’s two-way radio. “Just a few more minutes,” she said at last. “Then they promise the Tandymen will be out and we can go in. You’ll have two hours. Better be ready to hop.”

  It was more like half an hour before the last Tandyman beelined away across the flat plain of Xanadu. The workers jumped down from the truck and hurried into the wilderness of Tandy Center. It was familiar ground now, and they had well-defined tasks. The group of three that Job was assigned to advanced along a series of broad, cleared corridors that had been swept through the mountains of trash. They held their monitors and counters before them as they went. All the prisoners had become old hands at the job, and they swapped information and snap judgments as they went: “…real scorcher here, iodine-130.” “No problem, half-life is only twelve hours. Leave it, and we’ll handle it next time when it’s not so hot…” “This box has a high beryllium content, and it’s leaking.” “Poisonous as hell! Grab it now.”

  The snow was falling faster, driving along close to horizontal in the rising wind. The moving air produced eerie screams and howls as it passed through struts and open-ended boxes at the summit of the garbage mounds, interfering with conversation and slowing progress. It was clear that there would not be time for half the job that Ormond was demanding. She must have known it, too, because instead of sitting in the truck as she usually did she was walking through Tandy Center and urging the teams on to greater effort.

  “You can’t afford to leave that up there!” She stood splay-legged at the foot of one of the giant heaps of trash, while Job and his two companions perched precariously halfway up the side of it. They had been pulling futilely at a huge cylindrical container, slightly cracked along one side, and had just agreed that with the icy condition of the steep slope there was no way to obtain the necessary leverage. The cylinder seemed to be stuck immovably, buried deep by the force of its fall from the drones. They started to slide back down towards Ormond.

  “Look at the sign on the side of it!” She was shouting through cupped hands, but the wind snatched her words away. “You could poison half a square mile if that got loose. Get back up there, and go above it, for God’s sake. Push it down!”

  Job and the other two hesitated. Ormond did not know it from where she was standing, but there was a second hazard on the mound. Farther up, close to the summit, lay another item from the recent drop. It was a great tangled bundle of thin metal tubes, probably cans from reactor fuel rods, and the counters showed that it was highly radioactive. If the team ascended to a point where they could shove at the big container of toxins, they would be dangerously close to the bundle of radioactive tubes. And at every gust of wind that bundle lifted and turned, as though ready to tumble and roll down the side of the ridge.

&nbs
p; While they hesitated, Ormond started to scramble up the heap towards them. The wind had become so strong that she assumed they could not hear her. “Higher!” She was waving her arms as she shouted. “Go higher.”

  She was halfway to them, crabbing along the side of the mound to avoid slipping, and when she was still five yards away the wind struck the heap with new violence, Job heard a warning shout from one of his companions and turned to see the whole top of the ridge, lifted by the wind, rolling in an avalanche of trash down towards them. It was too late to run. Job and his two companions did the only thing they could do. They dived for the shelter of the big cylinder, hoping that it was so firmly planted in the side of the ridge that it would not move. The dislodged top of the mountain rolled and crumbled past them in a mix of old trash and new loose snow. Job, head down, felt small fragments fall harmlessly on his thickly dressed body. He heard a cry from Ormond. When he was sure that the wave had passed he looked out cautiously from the shelter of the container. The whole side of the mound where Ormond had been standing was swept clear. At its foot stood a jumbled heap of snow and rubbish, but of Ormond there was no sign.

  “Come on.” Job shouted to his team and started down. As he left the protection of the great cylinder the wind tugged at him, almost knocking him over.

  He went wallowing into the new, soft heap before he realized that no one had followed. They were still standing by the cylinder, pointing past Job. Ten feet away from him the tangle of lethal fuel cans was visible half-buried in snow. Midway between that and where he stood was the sole of a booted human foot.

  He had left his pick and lever up on the side of the mound. He dived for the exposed foot and began to push snow and garbage out of the way with his bare hands. In a few seconds he could see the waist and the trousered thighs. He began to pull, desperately, repressing the warnings and the urge to run that bubbled up in his terrified mind.

  His thoughts became totally focused. Radioactive dose is proportional to time of exposure. Speed was the thing, the main thing, the only thing. She had been in for only a couple of minutes. If he was quick enough, he could save Ormond.