The Exiles Trilogy

by Ben Bova

  “Sure ” Without a moment’s hesitation Lou asked, “Would you have been so free if I had asked you to have dinner with me? Alone?”

  For an instant a frightened look flickered in her green eyes.

  “What do you mean, Lou?”

  “You’ve been seeing a lot of Kori, haven’t you?”

  “Lou, I’m a tax-paying citizen or at least I was until I got hijacked here “

  “So you are sore about my having you brought here!” “Of course I’m sore!” she flashed back “Weren’t you sore

  when they dragged you away? Do you enjoy being an exile? Is this island any better than the satellite or wherever it is that the rest of the Institute people were sent?”

  Lou heard himself mumble, “You don’t want to be around me, is that it?”

  “Don’t be sullen,” she said, smiling for the first time ” Lou whatever we had going between us back at the I nstitute, it can’t be the same here It just can’t be “

  “That’s the way you want it?”

  She looked sad and lonely now “That’s the way it’s got to be, Lou “

  “Yeah” He took a deep breath “Well, how about dinner? I told Kori we’d both be over”

  “All right,” she said softly “As long as we understand each other “

  He nodded, his face frozen into a bitter mask “I understand”

  He left his office, walked around the computer building, and picked up Bonnie They walked across the lab complex in silence Overhead the trees filtered an unbelievable sunset sky of pink and saffron and soft violet Through the boles of the trees, off at the edge of the reddened sea, the sun was huge and distended as it touched the horizon.

  If Bonnie and Lou had little to say to each other, Anton Kori more than filled their silence The moment they stepped through the door into his cluttered laboratory/workroom, he started chattering.

  “It’s fantastic, you’ll never believe it, it’s like something out of the cinema.

  He bustled around the big room, dragging a table loaded with complex electronic gear across the floor and positioning it near the door.

  “Lou, would you turn on the switch for the laser?”

  Kori pointed to the wall over his workbench “No, not that oneI The next one, on your left Yes “

  Lou flicked the switch He saw nothing in the room that looked like a laser, but there was a hum of electrical power coming from someplace.

  “Wait ‘til you see this Bonnie, the lights, please Behind you “

  With a slightly amused smile, Bonnie turned off the overhead lights. In the darkened room, Kori’s bony face was eerily lit by the glow of the equipment on his table.

  “Now just a minute while I use this old slide for focusing….” he muttered.

  Lou found a rolling chair and pushed it over toward Bonnie. She sat, and he stood beside her, facing the slightly luminescent viewscreen at the far end of the room. A slide came on, some sort of graph, with many colored curves weaving across it.

  “Now the focus,” Kori mumbled. The graph suddenly became three-dimensional. The curves seemed to stand in the middle of the room. Lou felt he could walk around them and look at them from the other side.

  “Okay, good.” Kori said, so excited that his English had a decided Slavic edge to it. “Now we see what no man has ever seen before—except me.”

  The room went totally dark for an instant, and then it was filled with stars. Lou heard Bonnie gasp. It was like being out in space, stars as far as the eye could see: white, yellow, orange, red, blue—unblinking points of fire in the black depths of space. In the distance, the nebulous haze of the Milky Way glowed softly.

  “Wide angle view, looking aft,” Kori explained matter-of-factly. “That bright yellow star in the center is—the sun.”

  “These are the tapes from the Starfarerl” Lou asked, and immediately felt sheepish because it was such a needless question.

  He sensed Kori nodding in the darkness, “It took the ship more than thirty years to reach the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. And it took more than four years just for the laser beam to carry this information back to us.”

  Another moment of darkness and then another picture of stars.

  “Wide view forward,” Kori said.

  There was still a bright yellow star in the center of the field of view. Kori flicked through several more holograms. The yellow star grew brighter, closer. Soon, Lou could see that it was two stars.

  “Alpha Centauri,” Kori said in an awed voice, as if anything louder might shatter the pictures. “Proxima is so distant and faint from its two big brothers that I haven’t been able to pinpoint it yet. It’s out among those background stars someplace. We need an astronomer here!”

  Lou shared Kori’s awe. “Alpha Centauri,” he echoed.

  “You were right, Anton,” said Bonnie. “This is fantastic… so beautiful.”

  “Wait,” Kori answered. “You haven’t seen the best yet.”

  He flicked through another dozen holograms. The double star grew larger. Lou could see that one of the stars was smaller and redder than the big yellow sun.

  “What are those two flecks, near the yellow star?” Lou asked.

  Kori giggled excitedly. “Flecks? Flecks indeed! Those are planets! Two planets orbiting around Alpha Centauri!”

  Lou had no words. He simply stared at the screen as Kori flicked on several more holograms, closer and closer, of the two worlds. On the very last slide only the second-most planet was in view. It looked like a fat round ball, yellowish-green, streaked with white clouds.

  “I haven’t had a chance to analyze the spectroscopic data,” Kori said, “but those clouds look like water vapor to me. It’s a bigger planet than Earth, probably a heavier gravity. But if there’s water, there could be life!”

  It was very late when Bonnie and Lou walked with Kori back to the dormitory. None of them had eaten dinner. In their excitement over the star pictures they had simply forgotten all about it.

  Kori stopped in the middle of the road, at a spot where the trees didn’t overhang, and threw his head back.

  “Look at them!” he shouted. “Millions and billions of stars. And millions and billions of planets. Some of them must bejust like this Earth, waiting for us to reach them. And we can! We can reach them, and we will!” He laughed loudly, and then gave a shattering shrill whistle as he swung his long arms up toward the sky.

  “Hey, easy… you sound like you’re high,” Lou said.

  “I am high,” Kori answered happily. “I’m drunk with joy and knowledge and power. We can reach out to new Earths. That’s enough to make any man drunk.”

  Lou shook his head in the moonless dark. “Maybe we’ll need new Earths. We’ve certainly fouled up this one.”

  Kori laughed. He wasn’t in the mood for seriousness. “Wait

  until the people of the world see these pictures. Wait until they realize what it means… .”

  “I thought the government wasn’t going to let the news out,” Bonnie said.

  Lou answered, “Marcus and Minister Bernard will get the pictures out to the newsmen somehow, I’ll bet.”

  Her voice was quiet but firm. “Will they? Do you really think that they intend to let the world know about this? Or about genetic engineering, when we get it to work right?”

  Lou stopped and looked at her. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the expression on her face.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  For a moment Bonnie didn’t reply. Then, “I’m not sure… I could be wrong. There’s nothing definite, but I’ve just got a… well, a feeling, sort of…”

  “Go on.”

  “Well… why do they have Anton working on nuclear explosives? What guarantees do we have that our work will be made public? Why are the biochemists working on cortical suppressors… ?”

  “Suppressors?”

  “Uh-huh. I just found out this afternoon,” Bonnie said. “That’s what they need the computer time for: to select the che
mical suppressor that does the best job of degrading cortical activity—permanently.”

  “But that would destroy a person’s intelligence,” Lou said.

  “I know,” Bonnie answered. “And I think they’re planning to use Big George as a guinea pig.”

  Lou felt a hot bomb go off in his guts. “No, they wouldn’t… if this is true, then…”

  “Then we’ve been tricked into working for a group of people who’re planning to overthrow the government and turn half the world’s people into mindless zombies,” Bonnie said.

  There was a long, long silence, broken only by the night sounds of insects from the trees and brush, and the d istant sound of the surf. Finally, Kori’s voice floated ruefully through the darkness:

  “Well, at least I don’t feel drunk anymore.”

  (14)

  It took Lou nearly a week to convince himself that Bonnie was right.

  He used Ramo as his source of information and his teacher. He didn’t know very much about the work the biochemists were doing. So he followed their progress by. checking Ramo’s programs and memory bank every evening,’ after his own work was finished. Within his vast memory Ramo stored most of the world’s knowledge of biochemistry. So the computer became Lou’s teacher, and explained patiently and with machinelike thoroughness exactly what Marcus’ biochemists were trying to do.

  By the end of the week Lou knew enough.

  He sat on the warm beach sand, Bonnie on one side of him and Kori on the other. About two dozen people, most of them men and women from the technical staff, were on the beach or swimming in the gentle surf that rolled in from the reef. Far off on the horizon, huge towering cumulus clouds paraded like happy children across the sky.

  The three of them sat a little bit away from all the rest of the bathers. Bonnie was still wet from a brief swim. Her skin was glistening with droplets of water, and prickled from chill. Or was it fear, in this warm afternoon? In the back of his mind, Lou noted with appreciation that there was plenty of her skin to be seen with the brief swimsuit she was wearing.

  But he kept his face serious and his voice-low enough so that it could just be heard by the two of them over the shouting and laughter of the others on the beach.

  “You were entirely right, Bonnie,” Lou said. “The biochemists are working on suppressors. They’ve already produced test samples of a drug and they’ve injected it into mice. Ramo showed me the test results. Six mice starved to death in mazes because they couldn’t find their way to the food at the end of the maze. Before they had been injected, the same mice had made it through the same mazes in less than a minute.”

  “Oh my God,” Kori said. Bonnie shivered.

  Lou went on grimly. “And today they asked Ramo for the complete cortical layout on Big George. There’s no doubt about it… they’re going to try the drug on him.”

  “And then on a human being,” Bonnie said.

  Lou glanced up at her face. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. That would be the next step.”

  “What do we do?” Kori wondered aloud.

  Lou shrugged. “There are only two things I can think of. First, we can stop the work we’re doing… just refuse to do any more. That would slow them down on their genetic engineering and their nuclear bombs—”

  “But it wouldn’t stop this suppressor business at all,” Bonnie pointed out.

  “And they already have enough bombs to destroy Messina, if they want to,” Kori said.

  Lou nodded and traced a square in the sand with his finger. “Okay… then the only other thing we can do is wipe out Ramo.”

  “Blow up the computer?” Kori asked.

  “No… I can just erase all his programs and memory banks. Take a little time and some tinkering, but i could do it.”

  “It would take more thana little time,” Bonnie said. “Ramo’s banks…”

  “I know a few tricks I haven’t shown you,” Lou said grinning. “I could wipe Ramo clean in a night.”

  “Really? That would stop everything they’re doing,” Kori said.

  “They’d still have the bombs,” Lou countered.

  Shrugging, Kori said, “Yes, but without the biological weapons they’re trying to get, the bombs by themselves wouldn’t be enough for them.”

  Bonnie shook her head. “You’re forgetting something else that they’d still have.”

  “What?”

  “Us… or really you, Lou. If Ramo is wiped clean, don’t you think Marcus is smart enough to figure out who did it?”

  “Okay,” Lou said evenly. “So he’ll know I did it. What good does that do him? Ramo will still be blanked out. Marcus will be stopped dead.”

  “And so will you be,” Bonnie said. “He’ll kill you.”

  “That wouldn’t do him any good.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good, either,” said Kori.

  “Don’t you see?” Bonnie said. “Killing you doesn’t help him, I admit. But the threat of killing you will stop you from erasing Ramo.”

  Lou nodded. “It does take a lot of the fun out of the idea.”

  Kori said, “Wait… we’ve left something out of the equation. We’re all assuming that we must stay on this island–-”

  “You know a way off?” Lou asked.

  “Weil, there are boats every few days___”

  “Can you sail one? Can the three of us take over one of the boats? Can you navigate? Do any of us even know where on Earth this island is?”

  Dismal silence.

  Then Kori brightened again. “If we can’t get off the island, maybe we can signal someone to bring government troops here to rescue us!”

  In spite of himself, Lou laughed out loud. “Okay, great idea. How are you going to signal? And who do you signal?”

  Frowning in puzzlement, Kori mumbled, “Well… there’s a radio station down by the harbor.”

  “Yeah, and three armed guards at the door all the time. And even if we could get in and operate the radio, and make contact with somebody, we’d be dead before any government people got to this island.”

  Kori clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out on the sand. “Louis, my friend, I am a physicist, I have come up with a great basic idea. I admit that there are a few details, to be ironed out. That’s the work of engineers, not physicists.” He closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

  Without a word, Bonnie picked up a fistful of sand and dumped it on Kori’s face. He sputtered and sat up. They all laughed together.

  Bonnie stood up. “Come on, let’s take a dip before dinner. We’re not going to solve the problem right now.”

  Lou got up beside her, “Maybe not. But we’d better solve it pretty fast. We don’t have much time left.”

  Lou couldn’t sleep that night. He lay in his narrow bed, peering into the darkness, listening to the night sounds outside. The room’s only window was open to the sea breeze. A million thoughts kept crowding in on him. No matter how he turned or punched the pillow or forced his eyes shut or tried to relax, he still found himself lying in the rumpled bed, sticky with perspiration, his eyes open and jaw clenched achingly tight with tension.

  Finally he admitted defeat, got up and dressed. He walked out into the darkness, down the road toward the laboratory buildings. And the computer.

  He turned around the corner of the first lab building and went toward the fence of Big George’s compound. Down the way he could see a guard sitting by the gate, drowsing. The moon was riding in and out of scudding silvery clouds, but inside the compound the shadows cast by the trees made everything dark. Straining his eyes, Lou thought he saw the bulky shape of the gorilla sleeping on a man-made pallet of wood, straw, and palm fronds. Then he heard a snuffle and the big dark shape moved sluggishly.

  “It’s okay,” Lou called softly. “It’s me, Georgy.”

  The gorilla sat up and Lou could see a glint of moonlight reflected off his eyes. Big George pulled himself off the pallet and shuffled over to the fence.

  �
�Uncle Lou,” he whispered.

  “How are you, Georgy?”

  “Good. I been very good.”

  Lou wanted to reach out and pat him, but the wire fence was too fine a mesh to allow his hand through.