Someone had canceled that plan—and the people who believed in it.
Gone. No one left to revive.
New horror struck Todd. What about the tissue, storage labs? If the unknown perpetrator had killed the people, would the hidden assassin hesitate to remove all other traces of those persons’ existence?
The body, the tissue samples . . . the future. Wiped out. Tomorrow was never going to come.
It was as if Ward Saunder had never lived, never dreamed of building a refuge of the Death Years and the Chaos. The refuge was no refuge now. It was a grave. Worse! Those who might have mourned over buried loved ones didn’t even know their relatives and admired leaders were dead. The scientific advances, the successful revival of the cryogenics volunteers—wasted!
Why?
Mari’s accusations, proved. Yes! But much more. Other tradeoffs and bargains made. Goddard wasn’t the only threat to some tyrants and financial barons. How convenient to find a way to make absolutely sure an enemy would never come back to haunt one! In public, for the world, one boasted of altruism and magnanimity, of death sentences commuted to Enclave confinement, of a business rival “unfortunately” caught in a frame-up and sentenced to that frozen prison. In private, worry ceased. The threat would be erased, if the price were right. How high a price for secrecy and the ability to play the generous victor yet murder one’s foes, too?
Who?
That question was far worse than the why of it.
Saunder Enterprises. The Saunders. The Enclave was theirs, entrusted to them by the power brokers and the powerless alike. Todd tried to erect mental walls to fight off the logic. He couldn’t. Unwillingly, his mind replayed Pat’s dedication speech, on the anniversary of Ward’s death after the Enclave had been established and placed under the charter of Protectors of Earth.
“. . . a sanctuary, a haven, a refuge from mankind’s madness. Never again, my Listeners, will we let them die! Saunder Enterprises gives this Enclave to the world—to protect us from the criminal and the criminal from himself, to save us from prejudice and political short-sightedness, to wait out the uncertainties of disease and war and economic chaos. There they will rest undisturbed and safe, they who would otherwise die. They will wait, tomorrow’s heritage for Earth, to waken to a bright and wonderful future . . .”
Did Pat know? Was he responsible for this hideous travesty?
Chinks appeared in that mental wall. Doubts battered against it.
Not Pat! Todd refused to accept the despicable idea. And yet . . .
It’s ours. And the Enclave is under Pat’s division of Saunder Enterprises. He has to take the responsibility.
So do I. Ward let me play second in command while he was building the Enclave. I should have guessed, then, what the temptations would be. The watchdogs don’t know what to look for, or are easily bought off. I know what to look for, and I didn’t. And now it’s too late, for thousands of these victims.
“They’re cutting our throats, Todd. Some supporters are bailing out, and some are simply disappearing. No wonder those who are left are too scared or weak to resist! Whoever’s doing it wants to break Goddard. And they want to destroy everything on Earth that Dad stood for. Earth First! Earth First Party has to rule it all! And if they can’t rule us, they’ll try to wipe us out of existence!”
His feet had brought him back to the cubicle holding the African woman. Elizabeth Gola. Dissident. He came out of past nightmares to waking agony. The woman in the box could be Dian. There was no real physical resemblance, but there were similarities, all the same—the stubborn set of the full mouth, the tense skin around the eyes promising trouble for whoever opposed this woman. If she woke, she would once more bestride her continent, rousing the poor and the landless, creating trouble for the petty dictators and moguls.
If she woke . . .
She was no criminal. Nor was she one of the wealthy who had bought life-graves in the Enclave. Gola had no claim to artistic genius. She was merely an intelligent and idealistic reformer—a problem. Those who had sentenced her proclaimed that in the Enclave she would not be a martyr but would probably outlive those doing the sentencing. Did she have a husband, a lover who hoped to live that long and meet her again? Children? Certainly she had followers, who depended on the watchdog Committee to assure that Elizabeth Gola and all her fellow prisoners were safe.
Todd especially didn’t want to know, this time. But he was compelled to find out. Gola’s humanity appealed to him, and she was helpless to speak for herself. Reluctantly, he slid under the cubicle, removed the crucial base, returned to the aisle, looking up. For a long minute, he stared at the woman, not moving. Then he pushed the set to Off.
Elizabeth Gola did not exist.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ooooooooo
Counterattack
He went further, taking a risk. Todd. disconnected the cubicle shock barrier. Then he returned the holo-mode set to its place. Elizabeth Gola once more appeared within the box. But now there was nothing at all between him and her.
Nothing at all. Not even the cubicle itself!
He put out his hand tentatively, and thrust through the shimmering cryo box. His fingers touched Elizabeth Gola’s frozen face, went into it, beyond it.
The sensation was gruesome, awful.
Todd took a step forward. He now stood in the space where the cubicle wall should be. The machinery underfoot was a sham, too! It might feed power to some cubicles, those heroes and billionaires. But not here. And the outer rings were ravaged and empty.
He drew back, shaking his arm violently as if to shed the presence of the non-existent woman. The reaction was intensely emotional, one he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy and Ward had first shown him the effectiveness of a good holo-mode projection.
Not just the victims! The whole damned installation! Fake!
Somebody paid. And somebody was saving one hell of a lot of funds by this little “economy”!
Todd turned away, nausea roiling in his gut. He stumbled blindly under the cubicle’s image, groping for the maintenance stem, restoring the circuitry to its original place. Holo-mode and shock barrier were solidly implanted once more.
A light was flashing on the section monitor to his right. Security alert. He must have triggered it when he removed the barrier. Guards would be coming here very soon.
He sought to control himself, putting his intellect back in charge. Pat had taught himself to act, to move and convince an audience. Now it was time to find out if that talent ran in the family.
Along with a talent for killing . . .
No! He couldn’t allow that thought to surface. Not yet! Footsteps were echoing in the immense glacial caverns. He would be able to hear the guards while they were still some distance away. If they were running to intercept him, they wouldn’t be paying too much attention to the scanners. That gave Todd a chance for one more clinching detail for his act.
Deliberately, he approached the restored shock barrier. Even being braced for it didn’t help when the current lanced his left thigh. Todd gasped and fell back, dropping to his right knee. He knelt until the pain diminished to a bearable leveL Then, carefully, he got to his feet. The insu-suit fabric was seared open where he had contacted the barrier. Cold was starting to penetrate its inner layers. He hoped the guards weren’t going to enter into a long, on-the-spot interrogation.
Of course, they could make a very short session of it if they shot him on sight!
He positioned himself just outside the shock barrier and looked up at Elizabeth Gola’s false image. To create the emotions he needed, Todd thought of Dian and imagined her trapped in that cubicle, forever locked away from him.
There were four guards. He saw them coming from his right, their shapes distorted by the curved edges of his insu-suit faceplate. They were wearing side arms. Todd resisted an impulse to dive for cover. He couldn’t give them any reason to shoot.
They surrounded him, blocking all chance of escape.
> “Sir?” the guard leader’s filtered voice said. “This is a restricted area. What are you doing here, sir?”
The man was coldly polite, like all Enclave personnel seemed to be. But Todd heard the threat, the steel under the courteous inquiry. Steel? Or was it ice?
Todd continued to stare at Gola. He felt the guards growing uneasiness. The challenge was shifting. Another polite voice repeated, “Sir, what are you doing here? You were told this was a restricted area. Body heat on the main preservement floor endangers the chamber occupants . . .“
Only a scant few of them, compared with how many are supposed to be here!
Todd yearned to throw the lie in their faces. Instead, he gulped and encouraged the lump in his throat until he could say with appropriate hoarseness, “I . . . I had to see her . . . see her real. Not on those . . . those screens. She was so brave. The Right of Independency Manifesto . . .”
The guards stirred, looking at one another. Todd behaved as if he were barely aware of their presence. Their expressions became pitying, so much so that Todd had to work to keep his fists unclenched. The bastards had the cruelty to pity a naive outsider who believed their lies. They had caught the poor fool where he shouldn’t be and assumed—as Todd hoped they would—that Ed Lutz was mooning over one of his ideological heroines. Misguided, but not particularly dangerous.
“She is brave, sir,” the guard leader corrected Todd. “She’s not dead.”
Hypocrites! Euphemisms, hateful, worse than the truth, rose out of the past. One of Jael’s sanctimonious rich relatives, intoning at Ward’s memorial service, “He’s not dead, my child. He’s merely sleeping.” But this usage was the most hypocritical of all! These guards knew the truth. They had to. Yet they mouthed the same words, and without the excuse of piety.
Another guard took up the lie. “Eventually, the Affiliation of the Rift Countries and the other African nations will resolve all their differences, sir. Then people like Elizabeth Gola will return to their homelands and lead their countries to a better world.”
More platitudes. More promises that could never be kept, for Gola and the thousands of others.
“I had to see her,” Todd repeated, making his voice shake. He didn’t have to feign his sorrow, or his trembling. His leg was starting to hurt a lot. With calculation, like a man entranced, he reached out toward Gola’s non-existent cubicle once more.
The guards pinned him and dragged him to safety in the center of the aisle just before he touched the shock barrier again. Inwardly, Todd was grateful to be rescued from that second heroic performance. He wasn’t sure he could endure another shock without yielding to an undignified yelp, one that wouldn’t suit Ed Lutz’s adoring, hypnotized stance at all. He struggled with the guards just long enough to seem believable, then sagged. They supported him, suddenly very solicitous.
“You’re hurt, sir. We’d better get you back to the medics.”
“Had to see her. . .” Todd said faintly, giving the performance of his life. For his life.
“But you have seen her, sir. And you wouldn’t want to risk her chances of revival, would you?” Todd blinked at the man, pretending to consider his logic. The hard voice was soothing. “You’ve seen Elizabeth, and now we have to take you to the Core, sir. Temperature problems here can be extreme. Please, sir. This way.”
Todd slumped, allowing himself to be half carried, half-dragged. The guards weren’t rough with him, but they didn’t dawdle. As they passed the section monitor screens for Gola’s block of cubicles, the guard leader stopped to run a security check. Todd held his breath as the others hustled him onward. How thorough and expert would the man be? And how persuasive had Todd’s act been? In a few moments, he heard the guard leader’s footsteps overtaking them, and then the man was out in front, leading the way once more.
His act had worked! The guard hadn’t stayed at the monitor long enough for any sort of replay. And each additional hour of readouts would bury any tiny evidence of tampering in a blizzard of new data. Todd didn’t need an indefinite cover-up, anyway—one just long enough to permit him to get away. Once the news broke, it wouldn’t matter. They could falsify data, but they couldn’t bring the dead back to life . . .
I’m making a habit of breaking shocking news to the world, of late. For all the panic the alien messenger news caused, though, I’m still proud of that. I always will be. But this . . . I’m not proud of what’s been done at Saunder Enterprises Enclave. I’m sick and ashamed—and mad!
His escort heaved Todd over the outer maintenance shock barrier and pulled him up the ladder to the catwalk. He no longer had to fake unsteadiness at all. Shock was setting in, physical pain underlined by emotional stress. Unabashedly leaning on the guards, he staggered with them through the heat lock. Trav-carts were parked just beyond the doors, and he fell into one of the seats with a groan.
The guards didn’t talk to him during the ride back to the Core. They kept up a busy chatter on the com, however, reporting to their Enclave superiors. Todd tried to brace himself for the next tests—medics and questions. It was going to be hard to concentrate, even with the hyperendors’ help. Burning cold spread across his leg, a growing distraction that was swamping his thoughts.
Where were they? At the outer perimeters of the Core. The trav-carts veered sharply, taking an auxiliary corridor toward Medical. Todd was thrown against the cart’s side rail and cried out involuntarily. The guards muttered something that might have been an apology and pulled him back upright again.
Enclave medics, Todd found to his relief, weren’t too interested in why he had gotten burned, only in how to treat the injury. He wrapped himself in Ed Lutz’s United Ghetto States accent and mannerisms, shrugging off their attempts to administer narc-synths or other sedatives. He needed his mind as clear as possible.
“This is going to be unpleasant, Mr. Lutz,” the physician warned in an understatement. “Electro-stimulus will be rough in these dosages. We can give you some—”
“I c’n carry it. ‘M all right! No drugs or blood! ‘M New Genetic Coalition!” Todd put all the fervor he could into that boast. It was something that wouldn’t be on Lutz’s idents, but also something they would be inclined to accept, if his act continued to convince.
A few Committee members peeked in the emergency-room door. Some were whispering with the Enclave guards who had brought Todd here, obviously being briefed on Ed Lutz’s peculiar behavior and rule-breaking.
Todd almost forgot to perform when the medics began shearing the insu-suit away from his wound. As Lutz, an alleged New Genetic Coalition adherent, he had bragged he could stand this without an injected or inhaled pain killer. As Todd Saunder, he wasn’t so sure.
He had bumped a barrier that wasn’t at full-shock Capacity when Ward was building the Enclave. This injury was worse. He could only compare the pain to the time he had had a brush with a ray, fifteen years ago, in the waters off Saunderhome. Pat had pulled him out of the water, or he would have drowned, doubled over with pain and stunned almost unconscious. The accident had bought him a flight to Gulf Central Medical Facility, one of the best-defended and safest areas still around during the Chaos. It had also drawn the family together anew, in a time of heavy stress for Jael and Ward’s marriage. They bad all stuck close by Todd, while he was out of his head with fever and then recovering.
Pat, saving my life then, and now I’m going to . . .
Todd braced himself as the medic trainees debraded the insu-suit fabric out of the wound and removed dead skin. The chief physician talked while he worked, damnably cheerful. “Don’t see too many of these. Our staffers learned, the hard way, to stay off those shock barriers. Hmm. Doesn’t look like we’ll have any necrosis or permanent scarring here. You’re pretty lucky it didn’t bite you harder . . .”
It would have if I hadn’t been set for it and had floundered around and hit it several times in reaction.
“Had t’ see her,” Todd said through clenched teeth. “Up close.”
&nb
sp; “Well, you certainly did that. I hope you’re satisfied. Painful price to pay for satisfying your curiosity, I must say.” As Todd continued to mumble, the doctor patronized him, as the guards had. “Yes, of course, I understand. Gola’s a wonderful woman. A true heroine. Now just lie back, please.”
It occurred to Todd that the medics probably had a lot more experience working with comatose and sedated incoming confinees than they did treating alert and resistant patients. There were undoubtedly occasional injuries among the Enclave staffers, but, as the doctor had said, most of them had learned to avoid the sort of wound Todd had suffered. The medics were alternately rough and then gentle and apologetic when their procedures brought agony.
“Stimulus current is working nicely. There’ll be some swelling. You’d better see your own medic when you get home..
Todd climbed out of a haze of pain, realizing the ordeal was nearly over. Part of the ordeal. The medics had disconnected the equipment. A glistening protecta-cover was over his wound. No one had noticed anything unusual about his skin color or hair texture. No one had tried to take a DNA or blood sample for close analysis. His religious protests had held.
Tomorrow’s Heritage Page 37
