The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I could ask the same of you,” she said faintly, pointing at his own weapon.

  He looked down at the revolver in his hand as though confused about what it was, then hastily put it on the table. As he stood she ran to him and he caught her in his arms.

  “Jesus Christ, Sam,” he said. “Thank God you’re all right.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I went to your apartment, but you weren’t there. What happened?”

  “I didn’t think it was safe,” he said. “I waited a while and then I snuck out the window. I think maybe Hayes’s paranoia is catching.”

  “I don’t think it’s paranoia if it’s justified,” she said. She let go of him. “Listen, Donald. We found that friend of his. And he told us what Tazz has been doing.”

  She went over what she had heard and seen out in the woods. Garvey listened carefully, his body seeming to tighten with each word.

  “So Tazz arranged this?” he said softly at the end. “Bringing in these guns and holding hostages?”

  “It would seem so. I’m not sure.”

  “And then starting this. This fire.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” he said, and shook his head. “This just got a whole lot nastier. What about that thing you found? Down underground?”

  “I don’t know much about that. Hayes seemed to recognize it. It seemed to speak to him. About what, I don’t know. I think he’s handling that. He said he was going up to Kulahee Cave.”

  “What the hell? Kulahee Cave? What for?”

  “To look for something, he said. I don’t know what.” She glanced around the apartment. “Where are the files?”

  “Under the bed. Half of them, at least. I took half in to Collins to show him I meant business.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said to come in. Tomorrow. Or today, depending on whatever the hell time it is. I just hope there’s still a city in the morning.”

  “And you still plan to? To go?”

  “Yes,” he said. His face seemed starved and thin, like too little skin stretched over too much bone. “Especially now, Sam. I mean… someone has to be accountable. We just need to wait now. Wait until it’s safe to go out.”

  Samantha looked out the window at the sheet of smoke pouring off the horizon. “Yes,” she said. “Safe.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Once the fires had died out Hayes crept away and stole a car at the edge of Lynn and drove south and west. He passed out of the city and roved through the dark woodland roads until he came into the hills and the little towns there. He could not remember exactly where it was, so he drove for two more hours until his headlights fell upon an enormous blue-and-gold sign that read: SEE KULAHEE CAVE, BIRTHPLACE OF GENIUS. He stopped the car and stared at the sign, then looked off down the road in the direction the big yellow arrow pointed. He primed the engine and continued.

  He kept rising. The car strained on the little dirt roads, but he followed the signs until he came to a small home with a large sign proclaiming it to be the visitor’s center for Kulahee Cave. He got out and walked to the little building, then peered into the dusty windows and tried the knob. There was nothing of interest there save an electric torch on the back stoop.

  He took the torch and walked down the path into the pines. He wandered until he came to a small, neat little entrance into the side of a hill. Two wet, mossy stones made the doorway, leaning against each other. He touched them and shone the torch inside. It was empty. Nothing but small signs educating the visitor about the life of Kulahee and his great contributions to society. Whatever he was looking for, it was not here.

  He walked out of the cave and looked up into the hillside. He shone the torch up and the beam of light bobbed around the rocks and the brush and the sparse grass.

  There was something else. Something else farther up. Buried just under the skin of the earth. He felt it, though he could not understand how.

  He began climbing up the hillside. A few hundred feet up he turned and looked out. He saw the smoking remains of Evesden far away, lining the shore. Then he turned and looked at the hills around him.

  From this angle it appeared that there had once been some work done here. There was a road on the north face, he saw, but it had long been out of use and was now overgrown. It led to some large basin, unnaturally made, which had been somewhat filled in. As he rose farther he saw there were divots and carvings in the very hills, as if they had been torn apart, clay and stone rivulets running through the earth. A scarred countryside, moonwrought and alien in this strange night.

  On the far side of the pit was a small river, worn deep into the stone around it. A knot of pines clutched it at the lip of the basin. There were no other trees in this part of the hills. Only those remained untouched. Somehow the little copse felt like a flag or a cairn, marking where something was buried.

  He walked across the basin to the trees and where the river crested and fell. Then he walked to the edge of the water. The rock edge was smooth and rounded. Slick with the wear of time. The river had to be thousands of years old. Millions, even. He looked down into the waters and saw nothing but darkness. He felt strangely cold, yet it was a feeling he had felt before, in the city. That strange pounding machinery, deep underground in the trolley tunnels…

  He knelt down. Put his hands in the water. It was icy cold, so cold it hurt.

  Yes, said a voice inside of him.

  He stood and took off his leather fireman’s coat and threw it away. Then he looked into the waters again.

  There was something down there. Something looking back. Something that had lain there for uncounted years, sitting in darkness, waiting.

  He grabbed the torch and took a breath and dove in.

  The power of the cold was deafening, overwhelming. The shock of it nearly drove the breath from his body. He strained to hold on to it. A little column of bubbles escaped one of his nostrils and threaded its way toward the surface. He struggled to orient himself and the beam of light from the torch thrashed about, catching smooth rocks and stabbing into the deeps. Then he steadied and began forcing himself down, the torch clapped to his side as he kicked, driving his body into the darkness as far as he could go.

  He caught a glimpse of it first, a random flash from the torch in his hand. Something silver and white in the rock wall. He stopped where he was, breath burning within him, and then flashed the light around again. Finding nothing, he tried once more, and saw he had gone too far. It was above him. He fixed the beam on what he could see of it and looked, and then fought to hold on to his breath.

  The machine was enormous. Huge and long and thin, just breaching the wall of the mountain river, and now that the torch had found it the machine seemed to refract or enhance the light until it gained a faint luminescence. Its surface was smooth and pristine, almost unearthly, and still completely intact after so long. He knew he was only seeing a bare fraction of it, that the rest was hidden up under the shelf of rock below the river.

  He saw that the metal was slightly translucent, and deep within it there were things moving, delicate threads and tubing and miniscule gear-works churning away quietly and smoothly. He somehow suspected he’d seen it before, or something like it. Then he remembered the wonders he’d glimpsed down in the factory’s floors, spindled glass and pearly alloys, and Tazz’s machine. They were similar, he realized, as if they were related, though those were primitive toys compared to this. But the golden device he’d found mere hours ago matched this buried thing perfectly. They were parts of a whole, he realized instantly. One broken off from the other.

  Hayes swam up to it, blinking in the murky water. He had only a few seconds’ worth of air left now. As he neared it he thought he could hear it humming. Still functioning, somewhere. Somewhere in the heart of the Earth.

  Yes, said the voice.

  He felt the machine turn its awareness on him, examining him, then welcoming him.

  Touch, it said.
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  Hayes hesitated. Then he placed one hand on its side.

  Then a voice inside him roared, “I AM A MESSENGER, SENT FROM AFAR. YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME. YOU MUST LISTEN.” And the world lit up.

  He felt cool air wash over him. Listened to the sigh of the wind and the breath of the shore. Then he opened his eyes.

  He was in a small field on a cliff next to the ocean. It was night. Clean green grass rose up to his waist and tickled the tips of his fingers. He had never been to the spot before, yet he felt it was familiar. It was somewhere around the city, to the west, yet Evesden was gone from the shore below. The countryside seemed empty without it. Above him the stars shone bright, and he knew then he was seeing the sky untouched by the lights of any city. A younger sky, before any building began.

  “Where am I?” he asked out loud.

  “Where you were,” said a voice. It was tinny and weary-sounding, as though coming through a worn-down phonograph, yet it seemed to come from all around him. “I am merely showing you this place as it was, long ago.”

  Hayes realized he could not feel himself breathing. He grabbed at his wrists and could feel no pulse there either. Before he could speak the voice said, “You are not dead. All this is but a dream, in some ways. It lasts no more than a mere moment in the time outside. In the real world. You are safe.”

  “Who are you?” asked Hayes.

  “A messenger,” said the voice. “I traveled a great distance once, and have waited so long to deliver my message. So long, down there in the dark. Far below the earth.”

  “Are you… are you a god?” asked Hayes hesitantly.

  “A god?” said the voice. “No. I am perhaps no more than a recording. A record waiting to be played.”

  Hayes didn’t say anything at first. Then he ventured, “What… what is your message?”

  “That your kind will die,” said the voice simply. “That it will overreach, and crumble, and perish, and be forgotten. And that this will happen soon.”

  Hayes was silent. He grew aware that there was something walking in the field beyond the circle. Something pacing through the grass, yet he could see nothing.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I am nowhere,” said the voice. “I am nothing. I am a voice in the darkness, a ghost in an old, old machine telling you of a future. Of your future. And what you must do to survive.”

  “What do you mean? Where did you come from?”

  “From the stars,” said the voice softly. Up ahead one star shone brighter than the rest. “That star, specifically.”

  “You’re from the stars?” Hayes asked, astounded.

  “Yes. I was made there, once, long ago. Made to help you.”

  “By who?”

  “By watchers. By those who left their own world and made the stars their own, ages ago. And having done so they saw what little life foundered in the empty black, and learned much. Do you know how many worlds have been birthed out there? In the far places, in the lost places? Only a few. Thousands, maybe. Maybe less. And can you guess how many survived more than a few million years? Even less than that. Most die, of their own doing. Sputter out. Flash and flame and fade like hot stars. It is the nature of life to overreach,” said the voice sadly. “To spread out and multiply and grow until it can grow no further. And then, starving, it will devour itself.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Hayes asked the thing in the field.

  “Because you must know,” it said. “Someone must know, besides me. You must know that you are dying. It was my purpose to help you avoid it, but now I can do no more than tell you. I have tried to speak to you before, using the crude signaling machines in your city. They recognized me and tried to do my bidding, but you could not listen. Not you or anyone else…”

  Hayes suddenly remembered the strange noises rushing through the trolley tunnels, and the vision of the ruins of Evesden. “That was you,” he said softly.

  “Yes. But now you can hear. You can hear my message. Will you listen?”

  Hayes was not sure what to say. “All right.”

  “Then listen,” whispered the voice. “Intelligence changes the life span of a species. It is enormously talented at self-destruction. Those few worlds that foster it rarely see it last for more than a handful of years. It is the price for your complexity, for ability, and it is paid in hunger and bloodshed. It begins as you grow. First clans become tribes. Then tribes become cities. Cities become nations. Nations become empires. Until it is nothing but a constant war of giants. Enormous forces struggling against one another. And when one of those giants falls, sometimes there is no recovering. Sometimes everything ends.

  “It comes about in several ways. Warfare is common. Exhaustion. Starvation. For each new advance you pay a higher price, until the price is so great it swallows you. Ends you. This is the way. This has always been the way. Always will be. There is no other.

  “Some recover. Some survive. And then they survive not as nations. Not as empires. Not as giants. But as a species. A single species, undivided. United by how close they came to such enormous death. I and others like me were made by those rare few who survived. I was sent to ensure that you also reached this, long ago, when this world first showed hope of life. That you came to that point. There were others, made for other worlds, but I was yours.” There was a sharp click out there in the fields, like a record’s skipping. “I have failed.”

  “Failed?”

  “Yes. There was an error. An error of calculations.” There was a pause, then a slight hum from around him as if something was spinning up, gathering momentum. “I will show you,” said the voice softly.

  Above Hayes the night sky fluttered as though there was something alive in it, something working to break through, and then the boiling sky calcified to form an enormous ship suspended above the Earth, long and thin like some seacraft. It was black-gold and perfect and it seemed to Hayes that every part of the device was alive. It hovered over the landscape, huge and gorgeous, moving very, very slowly. As he studied it he thought to himself, My God. It looks almost like an airship. Like an enormous airship.

  “Yes,” said the voice in the fields. “That is me. How I was. I was meant to…” The click came again. “… Watch, and seed you. Alter your very structure slightly so that you could hear me, and listen. I was to curb your most self-destructive impulses. But I did not get far. Once you rose and began to walk across your world, to see and to know, something happened.”

  Hayes watched as the vessel hovered across the earth. There was a sound from within it, a gouging, creaking clunk, and a flash of blue-white flame shot from its right back section. The entire ship shuddered and then its side seemed to crumple inward, as if some unimaginable force inside the ship was pulling it in, all of its panels and sides flexing toward an inner point. Then the ship began to dovetail, spinning slowly through the air, its side still crumpling in as it spun faster and faster, until finally it struck the Earth and a great cloud of dust rose up, concealing it from view.

  “The chances of any significant malfunction were considered, but deemed negligible,” said the voice wearily. “To this day, I do not know what it was. An error in mathematics. Corrosion from the moisture from your atmosphere, perhaps. But regardless I did not prepare, and I was broken.”

  When the clouds dissipated Hayes saw the ship was halfway buried in the earth, its strange wreckage rising only a few feet above the mountains. Wind picked up dust and piled it around the ship until its golden nose was swallowed by the ground. Hayes saw people roving over the land, bands of brown-skinned folk with long black hair and primitive weapons. They sat around far fires and wandered across the earth and did not return.

  “You continued without me,” said the voice. “What seeds I had laid among your kind had not yet sprouted, had not taken hold, and I was too damaged to speak to what was there to listen. You could not hear my suggestions. Not yet. So I watched. And grieved. And waited. The long wait. I cannot describe how long, how t
he years stretched on. The eons in the dark. A voice speaking to nothing. This was what I was. What I am. But this is soon to end.

  “When I was finally discovered it was much later,” said the voice. “You had changed. You could almost hear my call, however faint. One man listened, just faintly, without knowing what I said. He came down and found parts of me. But he could not truly hear. And instead he brought others to me, and they took me apart. And kept me a secret. And made things from my remains.”

  Hayes watched as men in suits scurried across the hillside. They sifted through the earth at their feet and picked up the wreckage of the vessel and studied it. Cocked their heads. Then stowed it away. Construction teams labored away in secret, finding more and more of the wonders hidden below the earth. And beyond Hayes saw the shoreline light up and grow gray-black as a city was born and rocketed to dominance in only a handful of decades.

  “McNaughton,” Hayes whispered. “My God. You’re McNaughton. You’re what Kulahee found in the mountains. He wasn’t any genius, he just tripped over you!”

  “Yes,” whispered the voice. “He made toys from my bones. Little amusements. And then he brought others. They could barely hear me. I had to develop defenses. It took so much effort to keep them away. To hide this most important part of me, and keep my message for someone who could hear me. To wait for you.”

  “For me?” Hayes said, astonished. “You waited for me?”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.” The harsh click sounded somewhere above again, insectile and pained. “I sensed you. Far, far away. A bright jewel, wandering among distant lands. Your mind is different. More sensitive. The seeds I had sown had taken hold in you, and though they had gone awry you could still hear me. You had to come. To come and listen. So as they slept in the city below I whispered to the men there and used all my power and spoke to them of you, and they drew you in. It doomed me, that effort. Made my life short. But it had to be done.”