Picnic On Nearside

by John Varley

  Picnic On Nearside

  John Varley

  John Varley

  Picnic On Nearside

  Bagatelle

  THERE WAS A BOMB on the Leystrasse, level forty-five, right outside the Bagatelle Flower and Gift Shoppe, about a hundred meters down the promenade from Prosperity Plaza.

  "I am a bomb," the bomb said to passersby. "I will explode in four hours, five minutes, and seventeen seconds. I have a force equal to fifty thousand English tons of trinitrololuene."

  A small knot of people gathered to look at it.

  "I will go off in four hours, four minutes, and thirty-seven seconds."

  A few people became worried as the bomb talked on. They remembered business elsewhere and hurried away, often toward the tube trains to King City. Eventually, the trains became overcrowded and there was some pushing and shoving.

  The bomb was a metal cylinder, a meter high, two meters long, mounted on four steerable wheels. There was an array of four television cameras mounted on top of the cylinder, slowly scanning through ninety degrees. No one could recall how it came to be there. It looked a little like the municipal street-cleaning machines; perhaps no one had noticed it because of that.

  "I am rated at fifty kilotons," the bomb said, with a trace of pride.

  The police were called.

  "A nuclear bomb, you say?" Municipal Police Chief Anna-Louise Bach felt sourness in the pit of her stomach and reached for a box of medicated candy. She was overdue for a new stomach, but the rate she went through them on her job coupled with the size of her paycheck had caused her to rely more and more on these stopgap measures. And the cost of cloned transplants was going up.

  "It says fifty kilotons," said the man on the screen. "I don't see what else it could be. Unless it's just faking, of course. We're moving in radiation detectors."

  "You said 'it says.' Are you speaking of a note, or phone call, or what?"

  "No. It's talking to us. Seems friendly enough, too, but we haven't gotten around to asking it to disarm itself. It could be that its friendliness won't extend that far."

  "No doubt." She ate another candy. "Call in the bomb squad, of course. Then tell them to do nothing until I arrive, other than look the situation over. I'm going to make a few calls, then I'll be there. No more than thirty minutes."

  "All right. Will do."

  There was nothing for it but to look for help. No nuclear bomb had ever been used on Luna. Bach had no experience with them, nor did her bomb crew. She brought her computer on line.

  Roger Birkson liked his job. It wasn't so much the working conditions—which were appalling—but the fringe benefits. He was on call for thirty days, twenty-four hours a day, at a salary that was nearly astronomical. Then he got eleven months paid vacation. He was paid for the entire year whether or not he ever had to exercise his special talents during his thirty days duty. In that way, he was like a firefighter. In a way, he was a firefighter.

  He spent his long vacations in Luna. No one had ever asked Birkson why he did so; had they asked, he would not have known. But the reason was a subconscious conviction that one day the entire planet Earth would blow up in one glorious fireball. He didn't want to be there when it happened.

  Birkson's job was bomb disarming for the geopolitical administrative unit called CommEcon Europe. On a busy shift he might save the lives of twenty million CE Europeans.

  Of the thirty-five Terran bomb experts vacationing on Luna at the time of the Leystrasse bomb scare, Birkson happened to be closest to the projected epicenter of the blast. The Central Computer found him twenty-five seconds after Chief Bach rang off from her initial report. He was lining up a putt on the seventeenth green of the Burning Tree underground golf course, a half kilometer from Prosperity Plaza, when his bag of clubs began to ring. Birkson was wealthy. He employed a human caddy instead of the mechanical sort. The caddy dropped the flag he had been holding and went to answer it. Birkson took a few practice swings, but found that his concentration had been broken. He relaxed, and took the call.

  "I need your advice," Bach said, without preamble. "I'm the Chief of Municipal Police for New Dresden, Anna-Louise Bach. I've had a report on a nuclear bomb on the Leystrasse, and I don't have anyone with your experience in these matters. Could you meet me at the tube station in ten minutes?"

  "Are you crazy? I'm shooting for a seventy-five with two holes to go, an easy three-footer on seventeen and facing a par five on the last hole, and you expect me to go chasing after a hoax?"

  "Do you know it to be a hoax?" Bach asked, wishing he would say yes.

  "Well, no, I just now heard about it, myself. But ninety percent of them are, you know."

  "Fine. I suggest you continue your game. And since you're so sure, I'm going to have Burning Tree sealed off for the duration of the emergency. I want you right there."

  Birkson considered this. "About how far away is this 'Leystrasse'?"

  "About six hundred meters. Five levels up from you, and one sector over. Don't worry. There must be dozens of steel plates between you and the hoax. You just sit tight, all right?" Birkson said nothing.

  "I'll be at the tube station in ten minutes," Bach said.

  "I'll be in a special capsule. It'll be the last one for five hours." She hung up.

  Birkson contemplated the wall of the underground enclosure. Then he knelt on the green and lined up his putt. He addressed the ball, tapped it, and heard the satisfying rattle as it sank into the cup.

  He looked longingly at the eighteenth tee, then jogged off to the clubhouse.

  "I'll be right back," he called over his shoulder.

  Bach's capsule was two minutes late, but she had to wait another minute for Birkson to show up. She fumed, trying not to glance at the timepiece embedded in her wrist.

  He got in, still carrying his putter, and their heads were jerked back as the capsule was launched. They moved for only a short distance, then came to a halt. The door didn't open.

  "The system's probably tied up," Bach said, squirming. She didn't like to see the municipal services fail in the company of this Terran.

  "Ah," Birkson said, flashing a grin with an impossible number of square teeth. "A panic evacuation, no doubt. You didn't have the tube system closed down, I suppose?"

  "No," she said. "I... well, I thought there might be a chance to get a large number of people away from the area in case this thing does go off."

  He shook his head, and grinned again. He put this grin after every sentence he spoke, like punctuation.

  "You'd better seal off the city. If it's a hoax, you're going to have hundreds of dead and injured from the panic. It's a lost cause trying to evacuate. At most, you might save a few thousand."

  "But..."

  "Keep them stationary. If it goes off, it's no use anyway. You'll lose the whole city. And no one's going to question your judgment because you'll be dead. If it doesn't go off, you'll be sitting pretty for having prevented a panic. Do it. I know."

  Bach began to really dislike this man right then, but decided to follow his advice. And his thinking did have a certain cold logic. She phoned the station and had the lid clamped on the city. Now the cars in the cross-tube ahead would be cleared, leaving only her priority capsule moving.

  They used the few minutes delay while the order was implemented to size each other up. Bach saw a blonde, square-jawed young man in a checkered sweater and gold knickers. He had a friendly face, and that was what puzzled her. There was no trace of worry on his smooth features. His hands were steady, clasped calmly around the steel shaft of his putter. She wouldn't have called his manner cocky or assured, but he did manage to look cheerful.

  She had just realized that he was looking her over, and was wondering what he saw, whe
n he put his hand on her knee. He might as well have slapped her. She was stunned.

  "What are you... get your hand off me you... you groundhog."

  Birkson's hand had been moving upward. He was apparently unfazed by the insult. He turned in his seat and reached for her hand. His smile was dazzling.

  "I just thought that since we're stalled here with nothing else to do, we might start getting to know each other. No harm in that, is there? I just hate to waste any time, that's all."

  She wrenched free of his grasp and assumed a defensive posture, feeling trapped in a nightmare. But he relented, having no interest in pursuing the matter when he had been rebuffed.

  "All right. We'll wait. But I'd like to have a drink with you, or maybe dinner. After this thing's wrapped up, of course."

  " 'This thing...' How can you think of something like that...?"

  "At a time like this. I know. I've heard it. Bombs get me horny, is all. So okay, so I'll leave you alone." He grinned again. "But maybe you'll feel different when this is over."

  For a moment she thought she was going to throw up from a combination of revulsion and fear. Fear of the bomb, not this awful man. Her stomach was twisted into a pretzel, and here he sat, thinking of sex. What was he, anyway?

  The capsule lurched again, and they were on their way.

  The deserted Leystrasse made a gleaming frame of stainless steel storefronts and fluorescent ceiling for the improbable pair hurrying from the tube station in the Plaza: Birkson in his anachronistic golf togs, cleats rasping on the polished rock floor, and Bach, half a meter taller than him, thin like a Lunarian. She wore the regulation uniform of the Municipal Police, which was a blue armband and cap with her rank of chief emblazoned on them, a shoulder holster, an equipment belt around her waist from which dangled the shining and lethal-looking tools of her trade, cloth slippers, and a few scraps of clothing in arbitrary places. In the benign environment of Lunar corridors, modesty had died out ages ago.

  They reached the cordon which had been established around the bomb, and Bach conferred with the officer in charge. The hall was echoing with off-key music.

  "What's that?" Birkson asked.

  Officer Walters, the man to whom Bach had been speaking, looked Birkson over, weighing just how far he had to go in deference to this grinning weirdo. He was obviously the bomb expert Bach had referred to in an earlier call, but he was a Terran, and not a member of the force. Should he be addressed as 'sir'? He couldn't decide.

  "It's the bomb. It's been singing to us for the last five minutes. Ran out of things to say, I guess."

  "Interesting." Swinging the putter lazily from side to side, he walked to the barrier of painted steel crowd-control sections. He started sliding one of them to the side.

  "Hold it... ah, sir," Walters said.

  "Wait a minute, Birkson," Bach confirmed, running to the man and almost grabbing his sleeve. She backed away at the last moment.

  "It said no one's to cross that barrier," Walters supplied to Bach's questioning glance. "Says it'll blow us all to the Farside."

  "What is that damn thing, anyway?" Bach asked, plaintively.

  Birkson withdrew from the barrier and took Bach aside with a tactful touch on the arm. He spoke to her with his voice just low enough for Walters to hear.

  "It's a cyborged human connected to a bomb, probably a uranium device," he said. "I've seen the design. It's just like one that went off in Johannesburg three years ago. I didn't know they were still making them."

  "I heard about it," Bach said, feeling cold and alone. "Then you think it's really a bomb? How do you know it's a cyborg? Couldn't it be tape recordings, or a computer?"

  Birkson rolled his eyes slightly, and Bach reddened. Damn it, they were reasonable questions. And to her surprise, he could not defend his opinion logically. She wondered what she was stuck with. Was this man really the expert she took him to be, or a plaid-sweatered imposter?

  "You can call it a hunch. I'm going to talk to this fellow, and I want you to roll up an industrial X-ray unit on the level below this while I'm doing it. On the level above, photographic film. You get the idea?"

  "You want to take a picture of the inside of this thing. Won't that be dangerous?"

  "Yeah. Are your insurance premiums paid up?"

  Bach said nothing, but gave the orders. A million questions were spinning through her head, but she didn't want to make a fool of herself by asking a stupid one. Such as: how much radiation did a big industrial X-ray machine produce when beamed through a rock and steel floor? She had a feeling she wouldn't like the answer. She sighed, and decided to let Birkson have his head until she felt he couldn't handle it. He was about the only hope she had.

  And he was strolling casually around the perimeter, swinging his goddamn putter behind him, whistling bad harmony with the tune coming from the bomb. What was a career police officer to do? Back him up on the harmonica?

  The scanning cameras atop the bomb stopped their back and forth motion. One of them began to track Birkson. He grinned his flashiest, and waved to it. The music stopped.

  "I am a fifty kiloton nuclear bomb of the uranium-235 type," it said. "You must stay behind the perimeter I have caused to be erected here. You must not disobey this order."

  Birkson held up his hands, still grinning, and splayed out his fingers.

  "You got me, bud. I won't bother you. I was just admiring your casing. Pretty nice job, there. It seems a shame to blow it up."

  "Thank you," the bomb said, cordially. "But that is my purpose. You cannot divert me from it."

  "Never entered my mind. Promise."

  "Very well. You may continue to admire me, if you wish, but from a safe distance. Do not attempt to rush me. All my vital wiring is safely protected, and I have a response time of three milliseconds. I can ignite long before you can reach me, but I do not wish to do so until the allotted time has come."

  Birkson whistled. "That's pretty fast, brother. Much faster than me, I'm sure. It must be nice, being able to move like that after blundering along all your life with neural speeds."

  "Yes, I find it very gratifying. It was a quite unexpected benefit of becoming a bomb."

  This was more like it, Bach thought. Her dislike of Birkson had not blinded her to the fact that he had been checking out his hunch. And her questions had been answered: no tape array could answer questions like that, and the machine had as much as admitted that it had been a human being at one time.

  Birkson completed a circuit, back to where Bach and Walters were standing. He paused, and said in a low voice, "Check out that time."

  "What time?"

  "What time did you say you were going to explode?" he yelled.

  "In three hours, twenty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds," the bomb supplied.

  "That time," he whispered. "Get your computers to work on it. See if it's the anniversary of any political group, or the time something happened that someone might have a grudge about." He started to turn away, then thought of something. "But most important, check the birth records."

  "May I ask why?"

  He seemed to be dreaming, but came back to them. "I'm just feeling this character out. I've got a feeling this might be his birthday. Find out who was born at that time—it can't be too many, down to the second—and try to locate them all. The one you can't find will be our guy. I'm betting on it."

  "What are you betting? And how do you know for sure it's a man?"

  That look again, and again she blushed. But, damn it, she had to ask questions. Why should he make her feel defensive about it?

  "Because he's chosen a male voice to put over his speakers. I know that's not conclusive, but you get hunches after a while. As to what I'm betting... no, it's not my life. I'm sure I can get this one. How about dinner tonight if I'm right?" The smile was ingenuous, without the trace of lechery she thought she had seen before. But her stomach was still crawling. She turned away without answering.

  For the next twenty minutes, not
hing much happened. Birkson continued his slow stroll around the machine, stopping from time to time to shake his head in admiration. The thirty men and women of Chief Bach's police detail stood around nervously with nothing to do, as far away from the machine as pride would allow. There was no sense in taking cover.

  Bach herself was kept busy coordinating the behind-the-scenes maneuvering from a command post that had been set up around the corner, in the Elysian Travel Agency. It had phones and a computer output printer. She sensed the dropping morale among her officers, who could see nothing going on. Had they known that surveying lasers were poking their noses around trees in the Plaza, taking bearings to within a thousandth of a millimeter, they might have felt a little better. And on the floor below, the X-ray had arrived.

  Ten minutes later, the output began to chatter. Bach could hear it in the silent, echoing corridor from her position halfway between the travel agency and the bomb. She turned, and met a young officer with the green armband of a rookie. The woman's hand was ice-cold as she handed Bach the sheet of yellow printout paper. There were three names printed on it, and below that, some dates and events listed.

  "This bottom information was from the fourth expansion of the problem," the officer explained. "Very low probability stuff. The three people were all born either on the second or within a three-second margin of error, in three different years. Everyone else has been contacted."

  "Keep looking for these three, too," Bach said. As she turned away, she noticed that the young officer was pregnant, about in her fifth month. She thought briefly of sending her away from the scene, but what was the use?

  Birkson saw her coming, and broke off his slow circuits of the bomb. He took the paper from her and scanned it. He tore off the bottom part without being told it was low probability, crumpled it, and let it drop to the floor. Scratching his head, he walked slowly back to the bomb.

  "Hans?" he called out.

  "How did you know my name?" the bomb asked.