by Darrell Bain
It wasn't long before the test came. The shadowy head and shoulders of a dark figure appeared silhouetted against the skyline at the top of the bank of the gully. Friend or foe? Surely the NSA couldn't be here already. It came to me then that as soon as the Gaters found the gully, it would strike them as an obvious place to hide. We would have been better off crouched in the woods somewhere.
I fired over the figure's head and shouted, "Eagle!" hoping desperately for an answering "Hawk". Instead, the shadowy shape flipped its rifle down in my direction and fired off a full clip. The shots went over my head. I pointed my gun and fired back twice and the Gater toppled backwards. From above, I heard shouts of "Over here!" and nervous gunfire.
We were ensconced near the head of the gully. I debated whether to begin making a retreat toward the other end when from that direction came a voice. "Eagle," it said, just loud enough for me to hear.
"Hawk," I returned, relief washing over me like a warm shower after being out in a cold wind. How had they gotten here so fast? A man and a woman ran up to us, crouched low.
"This way," the man said. "Hurry. Stay down." He spotted Russell's suitcase. "Is this your data?"
"Yes," Russell said.
"Good, give it to me and come on." Russell handed it over without a thought.
We began running down the bottom of the gully where water had washed a path free of vines and brush. A ripping sound of gunfire followed our retreat, tearing through limbs and branches above our heads.
Two more men joined us at the end of the gully. One of them took the suitcase and hurried away. He dropped to the ground as he crawled over the bank and stayed on his stomach until I lost sight of him as he slithered away. The other three stayed behind, urging us to cover behind a tangle of trees, washed into a heap from a spring flood. I wondered why we all hadn't gone with the other man, but then forgot about him as a withering volley of gunfire raked into the logs, sending wood chips flying.
"Stay down, don't risk yourselves unless they charge," the leader said. "Help is on the way."
I hoped he was right. The Gaters kept our heads down with a constant barrage of gunfire which chewed at the logs like energetic beavers.
"They're going to charge," he warned. "Get ready." I wondered how he could be so certain, but he was right. They came directly at us, over both banks of the gully and along the dry streambed, firing wildly. Fortunately, most Gaters aren't carriers; these must have been newly armed. Most of the bullets went zinging off into the forest. We stopped the first charge dead in its tracks, dropping a number of them, and causing the rest to scramble for concealment, uncomfortably nearby.
A few minutes later, the man gave us a second warning. "They're getting ready again. This time, keep your heads down."
Keep down? God's chips, if we kept down, they would overrun us for sure. I started to raise up and a strong muscular hand shoved my face into the dirt. I sputtered and spat, struggling to get away. From behind us, I heard the bursting rattle of mob guns firing in unison and screams of terror and pain in front of us.
Abruptly, the hand was gone from my neck. I looked up just in time to see the three men and the woman who had saved us scurrying away, miraculously dodging bullets which chewed up the earth around them. They vanished around the curve in the gully bottom just as a gang of agents poured over the edge of the wall above us, shouting, "Eagle, Eagle!".
The NSA reinforcements, or what I thought were reinforcements, had arrived just in time. They surrounded us, three of them forming a tight shield around Russell. I breathed heavily, trying to still my pounding heart.
"All right, let's go," one of the men said.
"Just a minute. I want to thank the men who got here first, before you did. They saved our lives." I looked around in the moonlight, wondering where they had gone and why.
"What first ones?" a flinty voice demanded. "We're the only NSA agents here."
"Then who-?" I forgot the matter as I heard Donna moan. I whirled and saw her gripping her arm. Blood was dripping from it, dark drops appearing almost black in the wan light. I broke away from hands trying to restrain me and went to her. Her left forearm was shattered, but the bullet hadn't torn it up too much; she was just shocky and in pain.
I refused to say anything else until they got us out of the woods and into a helicopter which was just landing, and even then, all I could tell them was that four unidentified figures, three men and a woman had come upon us, given the code word and led us in the first part of the fight.
Three hours later, I was still trying to explain it to Whitney Horst. He was furious when Russell told him that he had given away the suitcase with the model light computer and all the painfully preserved notes of his experiments and calculations. Our four unidentified saviors had made a clean getaway. He grilled us for several more hours until I finally told him that we weren't answering any more questions for now. There was nothing left to tell.
I picked Donna up from the hospital as soon as her surgery was over and helped her home. She had a cast on her arm and was dopey from the anesthesia and bone healing injection, but otherwise, Tyson said she was fine and no permanent damage had been done. We put her to bed, then turned in to try to get some sleep ourselves. We didn't have to worry about another attack. There were enough NSA agents surrounding the house to fight a battalion.
Horst came back the next morning for more debriefing, interrupting us as we were trying to repair some of the damage done by the Gaters who had broken in. I had already called our security service to get the system reinstalled and working again. This time, I put up the bond for their Mankiller system.
Horst was still mad and disgusted. After another hour of questioning, he gave up. "I just don't understand it," he confessed. "Who the hell were they? How did they get our code? And how did they manage to get away so easily?"
Chapter Twenty-Two
We didn't find out until long afterwards that it was a consortium of Seconders who had pulled off the coup. Without admitting how they had managed it and not giving away any of their names, they threw all of Russell's notes and designs into the web, designating it as public domain. At the same time, they disclosed that a militant subbranch of the Gater Church had been behind the sabotage at the University laboratory.
The Gater militants had converted one of Russell's team to their brand of Luddite theology and he, in turn, had not only been fouling up their tests but had passed on the information to superiors. When Russell found him out, they had struck, determined to prevent any hint of the possibility of faster-than-light travel being made public. I thought of Messilinda, and how angelic and gently she had espoused her teachings; she had never preached violence, nor resistance to others doing scientific research; she had simply believed it was irrelevant to their beliefs.
I wondered where she (or he, now) was and whether he had been behind our rescue. He was one of the slowly increasing number of Seconders and they were still viewed suspiciously by authorities, though none had ever been shown to be a threat of any kind. The suspicion and resentment of Seconders was normal, I suppose, seeing as how they were theoretically immortal (based on limited data, of course), and couldn't be meaningfully questioned under any circumstances.
For the next several days, until the security system was up and working again, I insisted that one of us remain awake at night to monitor the screens; the NSA agents had been withdrawn soon after Russell's data was made public. Donna was exempted; she would be dopey for another week until the bones in her arm were fully healed.
On my nights of monitor duty, I wrote up our exploits for the Adventureweb and sent it to Mary. It was an immediate best seller in North America, and brought in more money than I knew what to do with.
***
The second evening after the security system was back up and I knew we could all go to bed without worrying, I declared a party, venturing out for the first time to restock our supply of rum and mix. I went well-armed and wary, but the streets were peaceful.
> We had batted around the happenings after the lab explosion at the university among ourselves, but not, so far, as a group. Russell, warmed with several glasses of Whatnot inside him, waxed eloquent. He had a Scienceweb program on, turned low. It was far more technical than my Sunday supplement pieces, but not so mired in jargon that a person with a private education couldn't follow it. On screen, a graphie was explaining what some of the new technology growing out of Russell's light research would mean.
"See that?" he said, gesturing at the screen, where the graphie (depicted as a curvaceous young lady) was wearing the prospective light computer on a chain around her neck. It wasn't any bigger than a silver dollar. She gave it orders and a visual display appeared in midair, a comfortable viewing distance from her eyes. She switched by voice to various webprograms, called up files, and talked. Her words appeared immediately on the display.
"Impressive," I admitted, "but computers that small with projected holovision screens have been on the drawing screens for years."
He waved a hand deprecatingly. "Keep watching; if they do it right, you'll see something new."
I did. Another graphie, a male this time, appeared alongside the first, then walked behind her. The display faded from view. Facing each other, nothing was visible between the two, yet the first graphie appeared to still be manipulating data. Another display popped up, depicting other computer users interacting from beyond the moon with the original pair, instantaneously!
"How do they manage that?" Rez asked.
"They don't, yet. This is just simulated, but it won't be long, now. My notes were clear, and I heard earlier this evening that all the computer companies are rushing to get a version on the market first."
I sipped at the rum, savoring the tart sweetness of the mix, papaya-plum this round. This would be a revolution, not having to carry around a comphone, nor having to hook into a screen for holograms and being able to interact at a distance with no apparent lag. "How much do you think they'll cost? For that matter, how long will a charge last?"
Russell grinned. "With all the companies competing, and as simple as the concept is, the cost should be way less than comphones, especially since the receivers will be so cheap. As to the power source, I suggested inductive body heat. Shucks, they could even be implanted and you wouldn't even have to remember to carry them, or have to take them off at night for sleeping or, um, other things." He ran his hands up and down Donna's shapely thigh. She leaned against him with her eyes closed, awake, but not taking part in the conversation.
"Amazing. How do they work?" Rez asked. She should have known better. I hadn't bothered asking, knowing there was no way I would understand the theory.
"Why don't we just say that we didn't understand the properties of the photon in relation to quantum theory nearly as well as we thought we did," Russell said. "That same misunderstanding is going to give us faster-than-light travel within a year or two."
"I'm more interested in how this is going to affect the fourth worlders," Rez said.
"Well, to start with, comphones will soon be a glut on the market. I suspect someone will come up with the idea of distributing them for free to the needy. That will get many of them into the web right off the bat, since we can make a little converter so they can operate off the new receivers. In turn, that should increase their awareness of educational opportunities. What public schools are left will snap them up, then they'll be able to better prepare their students, even with the miserable funding you see now. And, oh, I don't know, there's just so many other possibilities besides FTL and cheap comphones. Power broadcasting that costs next to nothing, for instance. It will take time for the changes, though. Don't expect results overnight."
Rez smiled gratefully in Russell's direction. "I won't, just knowing is a help. And getting those poor folks into the web is a big step in the right direction, if for no other reason than the availability of cheap entertainment and educational opportunities. Just that much may stop a lot of slothfulness and drug use."
"Well, let's hope so. At any rate, changes are coming. I wish Seyla could be here to see them."
Donna had been listening. She opened her eyes. "I believe you," she said. "Let this be her legacy. She wanted it so badly."
The rest of us nodded sadly. Poor Seyla. Like so many others, she never lived to see the fulfillment of her dreams. Russell did, but he would never realize a profit from all his work. To his credit, he never complained and seemed glad just to have it made public-and become reality rather than a dream.
I guess I'm not as much of an idealist as Rita, or as Seyla had been. I'm a pessimist when it comes to human nature; we still carry too many of our cave men genes. And I'll confess that I was much more interested in the prospects of interstellar travel than fourth world education. I said "Russ, you commented that the new computers would be cheap. How about FTL? Will it cost so much, it will have to be a government program?"
"Nope, it shouldn't. Oh, I'm sure some governments will get involved, but so should a lot of private investors. The best thing about it is that takeoff can be arranged from earth. No gravity well to fight. Then, too, think of all the raw materials available in the asteroids or on the moons of the heavy planets without the cost of rocket power."
"Wait a minute," I said. "I thought we were talking about FTL."
"We are. Saturn, Sirius, the center of the galaxy, or chips, a whole new galaxy. There shouldn't be any limitations." He grinned like a three year old with a new wagon to play with.
That called for another drink. I made myself a good one. If what he was saying turned out to be true... I stared dreamily into space, imagining all the adventures and new worlds to explore that would now be possible. Rez recognized my expression. It was the same one I often carried after reading or watching a good science fiction book or program.
"Come back to earth, Mr. Star Trek," he said, but smiled at me. "Haven't you had enough adventures lately?"
Well, she had something there. Did I really want to go out into space, exploring new worlds and possibly having to fight for my life against some ten-eyed monstrosity? Now that fiction was turning into fact, I didn't know if I really had the guts to go first. But if not first, maybe later. And just to know what lay out in the galaxy would be like a fourth worlder winning the lottery, a wildly improbable occurrence suddenly coming true.
I came back over and sat back down by him. I took a good pull from my drink and stretched out with my head in his lap. He began trailing his fingers lightly over my bare midriff, then slid his hand up and back under my blouse and rested it comfortable on my breast. "If I get a chance to go on a starship, would you go with me?" I looked up into his face where a faint shadow of whiskers were growing, something I never thought about anymore. One of the compensations of being a woman.
"Why don't we wait and see what develops first?" he said. "Russ, how long do you think it will be?"
"Oh, a year or two, I should think, then you'll be seeing all kinds of spaceships being built."
"How fast will they go?" I asked.
For the first time that evening, Russell didn't either smile or grin when he answered a question. "Trust you to put a finger on the one thing we're not sure of. We're certain the theory works. We're certain FTL will work. What we don't know, and can't predict until someone actually goes out and comes back, is what the upper limits are. I may have erred when I said something about other galaxies. Then again, maybe not. I'm optimistic, but why worry? We'll know soon enough."
***
Russell was a little optimistic. It took almost three years before the first starship took off from earth, disappearing instantly from its berth at the Gila Bend testing facilities. The delay was caused by the need to develop pinpoint accuracy in the guidance mechanisms. America's lead in nanoelectronics helped enormously in getting our craft off first. Other governments, racing to catch up, launched other ships before ours. They should have waited. None of theirs ever returned. A few private consortiums, more interested in n
ear-space, built smaller and simpler ships and they worked fine. Others began building, and the competition to exploit the solar system got under way in earnest. The United Nations made a lot of noises about space belonging to all mankind, but if I were any kind of judge, it appeared the solar system was going to be exploited and fought over, just like the American continents had been after they were discovered
In the meantime, Russell's other predictions were right on the mark. The new computers sold cheaply and quickly replaced the old comphones. I wore mine on a neck chain with it disguised as a gold sand dollar. They were amazing. It took some time to get used to having a display instantly available wherever I was, and being able to interact instantly from any spot on earth or space, but eventually, it began to feel normal. I was even beginning to think of having one implanted.
Fourth worlders all over the globe snapped up the old comphones that were distributed at no cost by most countries and Rez's analysis proved to be pretty much on the mark. Crime and unrest began decreasing and some fourth worlders began doing any kind of work available in order to convert from comphones to bodycoms, as the new computers were called.
Donna and Rez never returned to school. I had made so much money, we could all live comfortably without leaving home unless we wanted to. Russell did go back as soon as a new temporary lab was erected, and he helped design the new permanent buildings. Rez continued his research and I kept up with stories about the gates simply because I was still so fascinated with them. When the spirit moved, I did a story myself and I continued to sell them easily.
I did one serious program on the Seconders, speculating a lot (or guessing, really). Rez helped on it. We noted the statistics: only about one in ten thousand persons managed a successful second passage. We got into the mental orientation of those who did. There wasn't much positive correlation with any particular aspect of a person's personality, and what little there was could still be wrong, given the small population and reluctance of Seconders to be interviewed. One thing was fairly clear, though: a rigid religious belief seemed to preclude passage, which made me wonder how serious Messilinda had been with her Church of the Gates religion. Had that hundred year old man played a huge joke on the world after coming back as a woman? I put that in as a teaser. Negative correlations were many. Those who went into a gate for the first time who were psychopaths, had criminal mentalities, very low intelligence, an excessive number of harmful genes, either recessive or dominant, extremes of physical endowment, and those with any kind of dogmatic propensities never became Seconders if they tried for it, and many didn't even come back from the first try at passing though a sex gate.
