"They're designed the same way as your flight suit," Wilma explained. "Thermal and sensitive to the shape of your foot. They actually adapt to fit your foot—uh, feet." She giggled. For the moment, he didn't react to her gentle humor. It wasn't that long ago when his legs were mangled flesh and bone. Amazing the things that brought back to his mind the medical miracles these people had performed on him. Wilma mistook the quiet smile on his face as response to her words, but Buck was smiling in silent gratitude. Suddenly the uniform didn't feel so stiff and formal. Ease up, fella. They're paying you honors. . . .
Buck stood, with Wilma by his side, before the council members. He had already studied holograms from every different
A Life in the Future
angle possible of their faces. He didn't want to go through any last-moment memory searching to respond to whomever might be addressing him or asking questions.
Behind the curving black stone counter—cut, he had been told by Wilma, from the nucleus of a comet and brought back here to Niagara—sat the Supreme Council. From left to right, the council consisted of Benjamin Black Barney himself, in a uniform smothered with medals and ribbons, a strange, glowing rank insignia on his shoulders, and a form-fitting skull headpiece of gleaming metal. Buck almost laughed out loud; he had a sudden memory of a motion picture based on Camelot in which the magician. Merlin, had worn a headpiece identical to that worn by Admiral Barney.
To Barney's left was the imposing figure he recognized immediately as President Grenvil Logan, leader of the seven-state federation that made up Amerigo, elected to the presidential seat by the leader of each of those states. Buck recalled that Logan often identified himself wryly as the quintessential human mongrel, a product of seven different and distinct races. He also, Buck recalled from his studies, still practiced in private certain ancient sorceries and rites. They were the scandal of the government, but no one knew for certain whether Logan believed in his alchemy or simply tweaked his opposition in his own particular way.
He recognized Charlotte Hasafi immediately, the dark-haired, hawk-nosed woman reputed to have extraordinary skills in political matters—and an LQ. that went clear off the charts. She smiled at him quietly, sensing his discomfort with the moment.
A side door to the chamber opened. Filing into the room and taking seats on the dais were several officials and officers assembled specifically for this encounter.
First came Commodore Kevin Kane, Commander of Military Deepspace Corps, who had already befriended Buck and supported him openly to his own following among Amerigo's armed forces. His fiercely devoted supporters throughout Central and South America considered the naming of Kane's command spaceship Admiral Vespucci a clear signal that Kane accepted those hundreds of millions of people as brothers-in-arms. Buck had already learned that Kane's wife, Nanette, was the leader of Amerigo's encrypting and communications center. Buck did not
Buck Rogers
question why Nanette Kane was absent. None of my business, an3rway, he thought briefly.
He was caught completely by surprise to see Dawn Noriega occupy the seat next to Kane. Noriega wore a severely austere jumpsuit and boots, her hair pulled back tightly and bestudded by glowing jewels, which matched her earrings and the rings she wore on her fingers. "She wears crystals of some amazing power," Wilma had explained when they had first rescued Dawn from Atlantis in the final hours before its destruction. "I don't know what they do, but her body is a very compact and powerful energy source that seems to increase her telepathic powers."
There were others. Wilma had provided holographic background on those she was told might attend this special session. If Dawn Noriega was as powerful telepathically as she had seemed on the lo mission and she was trying to create a group of people with real but undeveloped talents in this field, the future could be very interesting indeed.
Buck glanced from Dawn to Wilma by his side. As impressive as Dawn was, Wilma was even more so. Her appearance was stunning, and Buck was button-bursting proud that he and Wilma were about to be recognized as a team of great fighting talent. Wilma had created her own attire for the occasion, a body-smooth, floor-length dress that reflected light in a random pattern. She was a shimmering rainbow of gentle colors, which helped accentuate her own stunning figure.
Two more men took their seats. Buck recognized Vladimir Kharkov, a swarthy man of mixed Russian and Mongolian extraction with a fierce handlebar moustache and scars that covered much of his body. Kharkov had led the ground forces in repeated forays against Mongol and Han outposts in the far country of Asia, Alaska, and Canada, almost invisible behind energy shields and the frozen wastelands. He had gained no small fame within the Amerigo government for his deadly strikes against enemy garrisons and fortifications, especially through his favorite tactic of rapid tunneling beneath the snow fields by means of a nuclear-powered auger, from which his force would suddenly spring to attack and destroy the enemy.
Kharkov took no prisoners, and since his battles were far from the cities of either side and no nuclear weapons were involved, he was considered a guerrilla leader and left to his
A Life ev the Future
own devices. His records had captured Buck's attention before he first laid eyes on the man. When the Mongols first exploded across Europe, behind a rolling barrage of tactical nukes and massive armored columns, they regarded the Russians and Europeans as unworthy of mercy. Prisoners were handed over as gifts to the Han to serve as slaves. Vladimir Kharkov was the sole survivor of his small city in which every other man, and all the women and children, had been butchered. The city was held up to the rest of Europe as an example of what would happen if there were continued resistance to the massive Mongol forces. Vladimir survived by cutting open the belly of a recently killed horse and removing its innards, after which he crawled inside the carcass and hid for five terrifying days and nights. He had never cleared from his nostrils the stink of the decaying animal or the smell of death of his own family and friends. He worked his way to an Amerigo strike team in the Mediterranean, swore absolute fealty to the Federation, and through bloodthirsty and successful missions of his own, worked his way up through the ranks to the rank of Field General.
The last of the group entered the chamber with heavy boots thudding against the floor. Buck and the others turned to see a tall man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, sunken eyes in a gaunt face, and the look of a man who had known the extremes of life and death for most of his life. He wore an artificial buckskin shirt and trousers beneath a rumpled hat. He strode with open arms to Wilma, grabbed her in a bear hug that lifted her off her feet, and kissed her soundly on the lips. He put her back on her feet, surveyed her before him, and boomed, "When I bring 'em into the world, you can bet they'll be smashing great lookers!"
Without pausing a moment, he turned to Buck, clapped him on one shoulder with one hand, and shook his hand with the other. "So you're the wonder from the past. You don't look much like a neanderthal to me, Rogers!" He let out a loud guffaw and winked at Buck. "Not to worry, friend. I am Hieronymus Huer. Doctor Huer, that is. I birthed this young woman"—he threw out one arm—"as well as the Logan brats and a few hundred others. You can call me Doc." He spun about, waved to the group, and took his seat.
It was as if a whirlwind had passed through the room.
Buck Rogers
President Grenvil Logan was a merciful man. He knew that men like Buck Rogers and Black Barney and Killer Kane hated the formal trappings of state and its ceremonies. He was mercifully brief
"Anthony Rogers, I would have enjoyed hearing the complete story of your recent adventures and superb performance for Amerigo. You, however, know full well what you accomplished, so I will not belabor the issue by sounding like a politician running for office. Besides"—he gestured to take in most of the people on the dais—"I have been informed in detail of much that has transpired. I am aware also that medals and similar honors are not, in your own idiom, your 'cup of tea.' So we will put all that to rest
."
Logan paused, and his demeanor assumed a more serious look. "Please allow me to get right to the point. We wish you to continue serving the Federation. Is this also your desire?"
"It is, Mr. President," Buck said with quiet conviction.
Logan nodded. "Commodore Kane has expressed himself to me most clearly. He would be grateful if you would accept his invitation to become part of his DeepSpace Operations Command."
Buck started to speak, then reminded himself to shut up until he was asked to do so. Logan didn't keep him waiting.
"Are you of this same inclination, Anthony Rogers?"
DeepSpace! This is like a dream. . . .
"Yes, sir!" His voice echoed through the chamber. Logan smiled.
"Then, henceforth, that is your assignment. And from this moment forward, you are now Brigadier Anthony Rogers. My congratulations, sir."
"Thank you, Mr. President. But—" He faltered, groping for the right words.
Logan seemed amused. 'Tes, Brigadier?"
"Sir, Major Deering and I have become a very special team. It would be . . . well, if accepting this promotion means breaking up our team, I'll have to pass—with all due respect, sir."
"So you believe in loyalty. Brigadier Rogers?"
"Yes, sir."
A Life in the Future
"Then you shall have your wish. Colonel Wilma Deering will be officially assigned as your combat partner."
The word blurted fi'om Wilma before she could stop herself. "Colonel. . ." she managed, her eyes wide.
"If that is acceptable to you." Logan was almost laughing.
"Oh, it is, sir, it is!"
Logan stood. "Then this ceremony is ended as of right now. Let the records be secured in the computer with distribution to all commands." He picked up a gavel. "This is somewhat antique, I admit, but no one has come up with an3^hing better." The gavel slammed against the stone with a loud bang.
"Case closed!" announced the president. "We shall retire now to the dining room where, I dearly hope, you will all divest yourself of rank and ceremony and, in a moment all too rare in our lives, thoroughly enjoy yourselves with superb food and wine."
Logan sure knows what he's doing. Back in that chamber, these people would never be as loose and gutsy as they are here. I don't know what we ate, but it was great, and the wine— Of course. It's that same drink I had before. Gets you whacked out for a few minutes, and then you're back with both feet on the ground. It's time to get together with Kane and Doc Huer. The good doctor knew what Buck wanted most to hear.
"Ah, the Tiger Men. I sense you're fairly bursting at the seams to drub me with all your questions, Rogers."
'Tou're Doc. I'm Buck, okay?"
"Agreed." They clasped hands firmly.
"Look, Doc, I know we've been on Mars. Even before I left the dark ages of my time, we'd landed probes on that planet. You know that we and the Russians landed on Venus and surveyed all the planets, as well as most of the moon. We didn't quite get closeups of Pluto, but that was next. We had plenty of manned flights, and we went to the moon and— Please pardon me, sir. I'm not telling you anything you don't know."
"But you are, m'boy, you are. You see, when you talk about it, there's fire and pride and a feeling that everything is very personal to you. So I get the taste of it this way."
"That's precisely what I was going to say to you about this
Buck Rogers
race on Mars," Buck answered immediately. "We both know I'll be going through all the holo records on whatever manned expeditions we've made to Mars—"
"Stop. Not expeditions. It's a regular run, just like those big-bellied aluminum cans in which you dragged people all over the world. Amazing how you did all that without Inertron and beamed energy and antigrav. And your computers were just about on a par with the abacus."
"I admit we were clever little savages," Buck said with mock seriousness. "C'mon, Doc, tell me about the people on Mars. You interacted with them from what I hear. That means you communicated with those folk, got to know them somewhat."
Huer made a sour face. "That's true, despite the fact that the Mongols are really the big cheese up there."
"I didn't know that."
"Between the Han and the Mongols, with a couple of billion people at their beck and call, they could afford to throw away lives. When we stopped lobbing hydrogen bombs at each other back here on Earth, we started throwing rocks at each other on Mars. The rocks were made up of all kinds of weapons—disintegrator beams, antigrav force fields, huge atmospheric electrical spasms, waves of electromagnetic energy. Fortunately, we didn't do in the whole planet. The problem is that when we started fighting the Han and the Mongols on Mars, they outnumbered us ten to one. Nevertheless, we clobbered them. We were killing off seven of them for every man or woman we lost. Can you do quick math in your head?"
"I see what you mean," Buck said, nodding. "When your last one is wiped out we're down to zero, they've still got three."
"Crude," Huer said, gesturing with a goblet, "but accurate."
Killer Kane slipped into a chair to join them. "Doc's a bit gung-ho with his numbers and that silly-ass math. As bad as it was up there, it wasn't all bad. Besides, there are time frames. It was terrible in the early days, but right now we're pretty much on an even footing with each other. What happens now and in the near future will determine not only what happens on Mars, but also who's running the show through the asteroid belt and beyond."
"I hear what you're saying. Commodore, but you're jumping from pillar to post," Buck complained. "It's tough to keep every-
A Life in the Future
thing in perspective. Can we stick with one issue at a time until I'm up to speed on the whole scene?"
"Doc, damn it, be cool, will you?" Kane prodded the older man.
"Stop interrupting, you space scalawag. Where are those cigars you promised me?" Doc demanded.
Kane grinned and reached into his jacket. "Temple Halls," he noted. "The bloody best. There's two dozen of them in here," he said, handing them to Huer.
Buck looked at the cigars. "Barney used those. Veggies, he said. Self-lighting. Are these the same?"
Doc Huer busied himself snipping off the end of one cigar and flicking flame from a fountain pen. "I can see you don't know much about cigars," Huer said. "This is real tobacco, grown on one of our private farms. Very expensive, but who lives forever? Even the aroma, taste, wrapper, smoke . . . it's real."
"How about the Tiger Men, Doc?" Buck reminded him.
"All right, all right! Pushy, aren't you?" Huer replied with a twinkle in his eye. Then he leaned back in his chair, blew out a plume of smoke, and got down to business.
"First things first. Buck. Not until I was able to review what happened when you sailed on lo, trying to find Atlantis, did I realize that many of the beliefs we held about the Tiger Men of Mars and the Golden People— Damn it, don't gape like that. You're likely to have a frog jump down your throat."
"Two distinct, separate races?" Buck pushed.
"We used to think that. But if you include that albino race of undersea Atlanteans, that makes three. My personal opinion is that the albino effect was an evolutionary change, brought on by thousands of years without any direct sunlight. It can happen that way. Pigmentation mutation, that sort of thing.
"My feeling is that when this group arrived in our solar system some fifty thousand years ago, they didn't just go to Earth. One group did because they wanted to settle on a water planet. Like most cultures, however, they had different groups with some severe divisions among those groups. So one bunch opted for Earth, and a second crowd went to Mars. Then that group split up. I'll get to their differences in just a minute, but first I wanted to establish the time frame from the very beginning. Fifty thousand years fits in."
Buck Rogers
"Perhaps more than you realize," Buck replied. Immediately he had the rapt attention of both Doc Huer and Black Barney, who barely looked at Wilma as she joine
d them. "Look, for fifty or sixty thousand years, people on this planet have been seeing strange things in the sky. This isn't a local advertisement for UFOs or flying saucers or whatever. It's a page right out of history. There are caves with granite walls in China. Radiocarbon dating puts their age, and the carvings in the granite, at about fifty-seven thousand years ago. The pictures carved into the granite are unquestionably of spacecraft of some kind—discs and rocket shapes."
"The discs," Barney offered, "could be skimmers, both atmospheric and sea surface. Figure it out. If they had plenty of power, which we know they did, and some sort of antigrav, the flying disc makes sense as a runabout. A spaceship to cross the universe it definitely is not. But for something that's suitable local transportation in a world then without roads, it's perfect."
"Like the helicopters of your time," Huer offered.
"Precisely. You had some big suckers, too. With all those turbine engines screaming and the rotors churning like mad—well, to natives isolated from the rest of the world, you'd be considered gods who had come from outer space."
"Okay, then," Buck said, anxious to go on about the next phase. "Time rolls by. With greater population on the planet, more and more people are reporting these things. Even the Romans had discs on their gold coins. Most UFO stories were just so much nonsense, but not all of them. Then they died out. Oh, people still saw strange things, but the real ships in the sky, why, they began to fade away like a strange dream. It's funny— or not so funny—how this coincided with the Atlanteans finally making their decision to remain underwater. And there's one more bridge tying all this together."
Barney smiled. "Let me guess."
"Guess, hell, Admiral. You're not the only one who knows about USOs."
Buck Rogers- A Life in the Future Page 26
