Brother to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

  The legs were free and feebly waving, but still there was something holding her. Job burrowed deeper, head down in a tangle of metal, plastic, and fabric. He pushed a tow-bar from some wrecked vehicle out of the way, and felt Ormond’s whole body move when he lifted. He cursed his own feeble frame and weakness, cursed Ormond, and finally toppled over backwards as her body came free and tumbled with him down the last few feet of the mountain of trash.

  She was out of the pile, alive but unconscious. But Job could do no more. She probably outweighed him by thirty pounds. He turned and screamed at the other two standing halfway up the mound. “Come and help. You stupid assholes, she’s not dangerous now! You know you can’t get a bad dose, just from a person who got one. Get down here!”

  With the howling wind it was unlikely that they heard a word, but they were coming, scrambling down the slope and over to Job. Other teams must have seen the top of the trash mountain blow over, for people were appearing around the end of the ridge. Job could hardly move or speak. He pointed to Ormond, and then back towards the truck. The others lifted her and he followed, bowing low to lessen the murderous force of the wind and staggering as he went. The icy blast cut through to the very bottom of his aching lungs.

  Ormond was dropped into the back of the truck. While the rest of the group stood wondering what came next, Job climbed into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and was off without another word.

  “Hey!” The answer came faintly from behind. Two people were chasing, floundering through deepening snow. “Stop. How will we get home? Come back!”

  Job heard, but he did not comprehend or care. All his energy had to go to driving the truck, something he had observed many times but never done. While the wind howled outside and struck at the side of the vehicle like an angry elemental, he steered a veering, drunken path south across the open plain of Xanadu. In that direction, according to everything that he had heard and conjectured, lay Headquarters, and within Headquarters was the only place that could help Ormond: Decon Center.

  He tried the two-way radio, but either he was using it wrong or no one was listening at the other end. It remained dead. The snow fell harder, reducing visibility to a few yards. The road itself was vanishing, forcing Job to drive blind and across country. As the world closed in and became nothing but swirling white, he finally allowed the thought that he had vetoed when he was pulling the supervisor free: Radiation does not distinguish between rescuer and rescued. Job’s actions had placed him in as much danger as Ormond.

  He pressed harder on the accelerator. The world was darkening, the windshield wipers had given up the effort, and the window in front of him had become a snowy mirror. Reflected in the glass Job saw the ghost of Skip Tolson. “Idiot,” it said. “Didn’t you ever learn anything from me? Ormond got herself in trouble, you don’t have to lift one finger to save her. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. You’re getting yourself eaten.”

  Skip was right. Job could feel the truth of that, burning in every cell of his body. But behind Skip, diminished by distance, stood the frail specter of Father Bonifant.

  Job pressed the accelerator to the floor and drove into the storm.

  • Chapter Sixteen

  I am a brother to dragons,

  and a companion to owls.

  My skin is black upon me,

  and my bones are burned with heat.

  —The Book of Job, Chapter 30, Verses 28 and 29

  Except for a brief spell of groaning wakefulness in the truck, Ormond remained unconscious. Job stayed awake throughout. By the end of the first night in the Decon Center he was convinced that she had the better deal.

  His knowledge of the location of Headquarters had been all hearsay. Go south, said the rumors, as far as you can travel in Xanadu, to the place where the radiation is lowest, the water is purest, and you are farthest from the approach paths of airborne toxic drops. There you will find Headquarters, the operations center for the Nebraska Tandy.

  And there you would also, according to training center rumors, find Decon Center. Untermeyer and others like him had been given no treatment, but that was only because they were already sentenced to death. Xanadu had as much experience as any place in the world at radiative and toxic decontamination.

  Job had no choice but to rely on hearsay. He drove south. Normally the road would have guided him, but he was driving blind and in heavy snow. He plowed on across the slow-rolling, featureless plains of the Tandy. There were no landmarks, no signposts to guide his path.

  Two things saved him, from fire and then from ice. He ran into a five-foot drift of snow which stalled the truck’s engine just a few hundred yards short of the Tandy’s outer boundary. One more minute of forward progress and the guardian ring of power lasers would have vaporized the vehicle. Clogged with snow, the truck’s engine then refused to start. The heater was useless. With the outside temperature dipping below zero, Job began to shiver. He prepared to leave the truck for a surely doomed trek on foot. But the truck’s blundering run south had intersected the eastern edge of a guarding ring of watchdog sensors around Xanadu Headquarters. The presence of an unauthorized vehicle had been noted. Alarms sounded. Security forces set out through the driving snow and reached the stalled intruder within twenty minutes.

  They dragged Job out and flattened him face-up in the snow, guns ready to shoot him at the first sign of resistance. Who was he, and why had he violated the secured perimeter?

  Job was past worrying about details. He ignored the guns, sat up, and pointed to the truck. “In there. Ormond. Training course supervisor. Radiation overdose. Pretty bad.”

  How bad?

  Job shrugged. “Don’t know.” When he had last looked at her monitor it showed three hundred rads; borderline for a lethal dose.

  No one asked if Job had been affected too. He was swept into a security snowmobile and whisked away. Within five minutes they were inside Decon Center. Four gray-suited technicians stripped him and Ormond without a word, pushed them into a sealed bath that squirted and scrubbed hot water and detergent over every square millimeter of body skin, and then submitted Job to an exquisitely painful and lengthy process of deep lavage. They irrigated his alimentary canal from both ends, penetrating deeper and deeper until he was convinced that the enema tubes and stomach pump were going to meet in the middle. They simultaneously catheterized his penis and flushed his bladder, inserted tubes up his nose to wash out his sinuses, and did the same for his ears.

  That was the beginning. While one technician hooked the pair of patients to intravenous nutrient drips, another was systematically shaving every hair from their bodies.

  “You’re going to lose it anyway,” she said, at Job’s feeble protest. It was the only words spoken to him until a grinning ape of a technician approached with a syringe big enough to knock out a horse and injected the whole thing into Job’s left buttock. “There,” he said. “You’ll piss green for a week, but it’s all in a good cause.”

  The technicians left. Job had assumed that the last injection was some sort of sedative. He was wrong. It was a strong sudorific, designed to make him perspire. Within two minutes the sweat was pouring off him, his head swam, and he wanted to vomit but could not—he had nothing in his stomach. He shivered and writhed on the hard bed, sure he was dying, wondering how long it would take, wondering why they had even bothered to treat him.

  The night was the longest that he had ever endured. On the next bed, Ormond sweated and tossed and turned just as hard, but she slept through until dawn; that was when Job, staring out of the window at snow that seemed determined to fall forever, finally lapsed into exhausted sleep.

  When he awoke a gray-garbed figure stood at his bedside. Job was cringing away from it, ready to fight off more giant syringes, when he realized that the man cramped into the suit a couple of sizes too small for him was Skip Tolson.

  Skip frowned down at him. “Thought you were never going to wake up.”

  “Am I dying, Skip?” Job automatically glan
ced across to the other bed, and found it empty. Ormond’s disappearance filled him with alarm.

  “Dying? Course you’re not dying. You only got one-seventy, you’ll just feel rotten for a while. Ormond’s not dying, either.” Tolson had seen Job’s look. “She got twice what you did, but she’ll recover.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In a private room. She an’ Mannie Segal are like that”—he held up two fingers, close together—“an’ Mannie’s got Headquarters clout.”

  “She would have died, Skip, if she’d been left much longer. She would have suffocated before the radiation got her.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to sell me nothing. And Mannie’s already sold. The others on your work team told him what happened. They were madder than hell when you left ’em out in the snow an’ they had to walk a mile to the other truck. Mannie got ’em even madder. He said you an’ Ormond was worth the whole lot of ’em put together. That make you feel better?”

  “I feel lousy. But thanks for coming to see me, Skip.”

  “Hey, this ain’t no social visit.” Tolson was scowling, dark brows a thick line across his forehead. “I come to make a deal.”

  “I have nothing to trade. Even if I had, I don’t need a deal. I’m getting treatment as good as they’re giving Ormond.”

  “Huh? What’s that gotta do with anything? Joby, I guess you don’t know nothing about this place. Everybody in Xanadu know you saved Ormond, and Mannie Segal’s ready to kiss your ass. So, you’re a big hero. So, in a few weeks you start to feel better. What you think happens next?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “I tell you. You get sent back—to finish the training course. An’ in your condition, that kills you. Tough? It’s the Xanadu rule: nobody, I mean nobody, gets out of training early ’cept by dying. I did mine, Gormish did hers, you do yours. You got a fair dose of radiation, okay. You were lucky and you’re gettin’ treatment. Still okay. But last thing you want now is another fifty rads on top of what you just got.”

  Job lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He had lived with hard rules all his life. The unbending code of the Tandy came as no surprise. But he knew one thing for sure: no one who had just received a dose of a hundred and seventy rads could survive the rigors of the training program, even in the mildest weather of spring. Already he could feel the radiation sucking at his bone marrow, ulcerating his mouth, wasting his limbs. The Decon Center program should help, but he would feel sick and physically weak for months. Another forty or fifty rads, or work outside in the freezing winter weather: either would be enough to finish him. Take them together, and he would not last a week.

  “Don’t you go noddin’ off on me again.” Tolson shook Job’s shoulder. “You listening?”

  “Not any more, Skip.” Job opened his eyes. “I don’t need to. You just told me I’m dead.”

  “Bullshit! I told you I come with a deal.” Tolson sat on the edge of the bed, crouched down, and glared into Job’s eyes. “You listen, and listen good. You get treatment here, an’ in three, four weeks—five weeks, maybe, if Mannie an’ Ormond swing you a bit more time—the people in Decon say, okay, we done all we can, take him away. An’ you go back to training.”

  “And die.”

  “Yeah. And die. But you know radiation. You get it all at once, zap, you die. But you get it spread out, you can take it. So. After you leave here, you get better slow. You get hair an’ strength back slow. Six months from now, when the weather is good, you begin to feel pretty good. You go finish training then, get thirty, forty more rads, so what? You eat ’em up, no trouble.”

  “But if everybody has to finish training—”

  “They do. No exceptions. But they don’t have to finish right off. Suppose some urgent job come up, somewhere in the Tandy, an’ a new recruit’s the only person can do it? Well, training stops, just ’til that other job finish.”

  Job’s weakened condition was slowing his brain, but finally he was following Tolson. “You mean you can find work for me, something that will keep me out of training for a while, let me get better, then go back and finish?”

  “You hear me. Tell you how it works.” Tolson went to the window and stared out at the drifted snow, came back to close the door of the room, then sat down next to Job. He leaned close and spoke in a whisper. “Don’t you talk about this, see, but the Big Three been havin’ an argument. They got their followers scattered all over the Tandy, little groups of ’em. Bonvissuto says his people tell him Gormish been favorin’ anyone who came into Xanadu with her. Pyle says his supporters complain, gettin’ worst locations, worst jobs, worst equipment. Gormish says her followers claim they get slowest maintenance, lousiest service work. It’s not that big a deal, nothin’ to go to war over, but the Big Three sit down together an’ they say, okay, let’s get facts. We set up a mixed team, it goes out and surveys Xanadu, comes back and reports. An’ then we sort things out between us.

  “Now, one problem with that. People in the Tandy come from all over, and they mostly settle with their own sort. Don’t talk to each other too good.”

  “Different languages?”

  “You got it. Survey team gonna have a hell of a time. But suppose I pass word up the line. I say, hey, we got a new recruit here, talks every lingo you can think of. He should be on the survey team, pull it all together. Mannie an’ Ormond put in the good word, too. You work the survey—no radiation—an’ when it’s finished, you go back an’ finish training.”

  It almost made sense. But there was one problem. “Skip, you said you came to make a deal. What you said would be good for me, but I don’t hear any deal. What’s in it for you?”

  “I’m doing you a favor.” Tolson was looking away, out of the window. “You can just owe me.”

  “Try another one.” Job felt he was becoming as cynical as Skip. “That bird won’t fly.”

  “Hey, Joby, don’t you know a good thing when you hear one?” But Tolson was grinning at Job in an embarrassed way. “All right, smart ass. Here’s the rest. You’re in Headquarters now, but you don’t know nothin’ about this place. I do. If you have to live in Xanadu, there’s only one place to be: right here. Water’s cleanest, dose rate way down, never an accident from a bad air drop. An’ here’s where all the power is. So you scheme an’ struggle and fight to get in, an’ you’re makin’ it on the inside, an’ you sure as hell don’t want to leave, even for only a few weeks. You lose an edge, that’s all it takes.”

  “So that’s it! You got picked to be part of that survey team, and you don’t want to go. Come on, Skip, admit it.”

  “Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s the way it’s been shapin’ up. Gormish picked me, an’ acted like she was doin’ me a favor. But I told her, she needs a real good language man, an’ that sure ain’t me. I got one language in my head, an’ all the rest are animal noises. Pyle’s bunch sound to me like dogs barkin’ when they get together, Bonvissuto’s lot might as well be gargling, an’ there’s a dozen other sets that’s worse.”

  “So you’re not doing me a favor—I’m doing you one.”

  “Don’t you believe it.” The certainty returned to Tolson’s face. “You be savin’ me a job I don’t want. But I’m savin’ your life. The survey will be all talk work, indoor work, easy on you. By the time you finish you know more about different bits of the Tandy than near anyone, an’ Pyle an’ Gormish an’ Bonvissuto know you, know what you can do. After you done the rest of your training, that pays off. You make it here to Headquarters in a year or less, record time—took me four, and that was fast.” He stood up. “So. What you say? We got a deal?”

  “Skip, you got me on ice. I have no choice.”

  “Yeah.” Tolson was grinning again. “That’s how I figured. So I go an’ start the wheels rollin’. You oughta’ have four easy weeks, maybe five, before they kick your ass out of here an’ into the survey team. You better be ready.” He walked to the door, opened it, and turned back to Job. “Hey, one other thing, Joby. Don’t let �
�em bring you no mirror. Your face looks like a plucked chicken’s ass when you got no hair.”

  Job lay back on the bed as the door closed. Four easy weeks. Like hell. He had seen prisoners who had eaten a hundred and fifty rads and tried to keep going in the training program. None had made it. The treatment he was receiving would help a lot, but the next month was going to be murder. He ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth. Already the tender tissues of his cheek and tongue felt rough and fissured. In another day they would be a mass of ulcers. Swallowing would be agony, speech next to impossible. And then it would really start to become unpleasant.

  Job tried to visualize his own hairless head as it would surely be in a week or two: swollen, ulcerated, purulent, covered with weeping radiation sores. Instead his mind fed him the bald, grinning gnome face of Wilfred Dell. Only then did Job realize that during the past couple of weeks the agenda set by Dell in the Mall Compound had disappeared from his thoughts. Dell himself was a mirage, a wraith, no more than the distant memory of a former life. This was the world that mattered, the solid reality of the Nebraska Tandy.

  Dell vanished. Balanced on the edge of sleep, Job saw in his mind the face of Hanna Kronberg. He realized the other implications of a survey of Xanadu installations: If the team traveled everywhere in the Tandy, as Tolson had suggested, then Wilfred Dell’s secret agenda might not be so impossible after all.

  • Chapter Seventeen

  In a moment shall they die, and the people

  shall be troubled at midnight, and pass away:

  and the mighty shall be taken.

  —The Book of Job, Chapter 34, Verse 20

  Four weeks were nowhere near enough. By the end of that time the intravenous feeds had been removed and Job was able to force down liquid nourishment, but he was so weak that half a dozen steps left him dizzy and panting. He was totally hairless, his face and chest carried the red stigmata of radiation burns, and the flesh had melted from his bones; his arms and legs were stick-thin, their muscles no more than strings and puny knobs of flesh. He could stand and walk, but a breath of wind would push him over. As part of a survey team he was a dead loss; that would be obvious to anyone.