by Joe Haldeman
“Card,” I said, “you’re being paranoid.”
“We all should be,” he said. “Alba, even if you do work for NASA, or did, how do we know you’re not one of them, now?”
Snowbird came up behind him. “I could speak to that,” she said, “just from observation.”
“What have you observed?” Card asked.
“This morning, when it became light, Alba could have taken the riot gun and killed everyone except the upstairs guard. And then, probably, killed the guard as soon as he opened the door. Her partners in this endeavor would be nearby—we know they were—and then the three of them would abduct me and get on with their plan.”
“An idiotic idea to begin with,” Alba said. “If, as you say, I’m smart, why would I team up with those idiots?”
“Good enough for me,” Namir said. “Card, your caution is commendable. But excessive in this case, I think.”
“I agree,” Paul said. “The same thing occurred to me last night, Card. But after we’d talked for a while, no. Besides, she had plenty of opportunities last night and, as Snowbird said, this morning, and we’re all still alive.”
I saw a tense look pass between Paul and Namir, and could read it well: Paul was closer, and Namir’s expression was saying, “You do it, and I’ll be right behind you.”
I opened my mouth to intervene, but then the totally unexpected happened.
“I’m sorry, Alba.” Card lowered the gun. “I’m way out of line here. Forgive me?”
“Um . . . sure, Card.” She slowly reached down and retrieved the shotgun.
“I’m used to spending most of my time in virtuality. Making my living in an imaginary world, and mostly living there. Without it, I suppose my imagination is a little out of control.”
“It isn’t a bad instinct,” Namir said carefully. “We need to think in different ways; need to look at problems from every angle.”
“Though we might stop short of pointing guns at each other,” Paul said.
I was just plain stunned. The Card I grew up with would not have apologized if he’d caused the London Fire and 9/11 combined. The fifty years had mellowed him.
“Okay,” Namir said. “If we’re going to stay here much longer, we have to bury what’s left of that poor bastard up front. He’ll be smelling pretty bad by evening.”
Something made the small hairs on the back of my neck stir. “Wait. Where’s Meryl?”
Namir looked around. “Wasn’t she with you?”
“Back in the kitchen, a minute ago.” I called her name twice.
Dustin trotted back toward the kitchen. “Oh, shit,” he said softly.
She was lying on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, her legs out straight, as if she were resting. There was a red stain the size of a playing card on the center of her chest and a large pool of blood under her back. The window over the sink had a bullet hole and blood spatter.
Dustin fell to his knees and tried to breathe life back into her.
I couldn’t find breath myself. Elza shook her head, and said “No.” She got down next to Dustin and grabbed his shoulders lightly. “That’s not . . . She’s too far gone.”
Dustin didn’t respond at first, but then eased the body back down. He wiped blood from his lips. “She didn’t make a sound.”
It was one of the bullets that had crashed through the living-room window. Paul and I found two spades in a shed out back. There was a patch of grass with some roses behind it. We all took turns standing guard and digging. After we buried her, Dustin said some words in Latin.
We washed up in the bathroom, avoiding the kitchen. The water from the tap was still warm.
I felt like part of me had died. I’d never been as close to Meryl as to the other five, but we had all lived through several different worlds together.
So we weren’t immortal. We weren’t even bulletproof.
“The hell with the body out front,” Paul said. “Let’s get our gear together and start pushing up to Fruit Farm.”
“Nothing here for us,” Namir said, then . . . “What the fuck?”
The lights had come back on.
From Rear View Mirror: an Immediate History, by Lanny del Piche (Eugene, 2140):
. . . were the Others just playing a sadistic game, when they restored power temporarily on 30 April that year? If my guess is as good as anybody’s, I’d say they were just temporarily changing the parameters of the experiment. Our physical comfort was of no concern to them, and our existential or psychological state was invisible, not even a variable.
My first area of study was animal behavior. We were reasonably enlightened in our treatment of test animals—any sign of cruelty or even lack of compassion would’ve resulted in student demonstrations and faculty censure.
But that was about animals who were cousins to humans. A lab rat shares more than our gross anatomical structure; it has more than hunger and thirst; it prefers one taste to another. Individual rats have individual personalities, even when they’re raised in robotic unison. Sacrificing them was a necessary chore, but I remember how I grated my teeth when I grabbed one by the tail and swung him down to smack his head against the lab table. Did the other rats know what was going on? I don’t remember them reacting; if they had, it would have upset me.
Perhaps a closer analogy would be in our study of microorganism cultures. A drop of nutrient doped with penicillin would create a clear circle that was the purposeful destruction of millions of creatures. And after their survivors had been measured and photographed, the whole small universe went into a red bio-waste bucket.
When the Others are done with us, will they leave us there on the table, to work out our individual and collective destinies?
Or will they be more fastidious than that . . .
5
We spread through the building, flipping light switches on and off. Suddenly, I heard a sustained musical note.
“What’s that?”
“A-440,” Namir said. “Like a tuning fork.” We followed the sound to the Women’s Lounge area, where a small cube had been left on.
“Same guy,” Alba said. The one we called Spy—it couldn’t be the same one literally; we’d left him twenty-five light-years away. Just a standard “human” interface for the Others.
He looked out of the cube, unblinking, for another minute or so. Then the tuning-fork sound ended, and he spoke:
“We have decided to give you power again, for one week, to see what happens.” The screen went blank.
“One week,” Paul said. “What do we do first?”
“Let’s see if the cars work,” Alba said. “One of those panel trucks, or a little bus.”
I followed her out to the lot, carrying my superfluous pistol. Card came out, too. The morning was pleasant, still cool, about nine o’clock.
She got into the first car and punched in N-A-S-A on the dash keyboard.
“Shit.” Faint numerals appeared on the windshield, OOH OOM. “They probably all drained out.”
We tried two others and got the same. Card found the recharging station and unreeled a cable out to a small bus. He plugged it into the rear.
“All right!” Alba called out from the driver’s seat. She hopped down. “Is there another cable?”
“Two more. Maybe do that panel truck?” She looked at me and rubbed her chin. “Do you know how to drive?”
“Umm . . . it’s been a while.” I had a license back in 2070, but moved to Mars in ’72. “Sixty-some years. I suppose cars are a lot different.”
“But you can,” she said to Card.
He shrugged. “I have a car, but I live in LA. Haven’t touched a steering wheel in years.”
“You may be about to.” She pointed to a stolid-looking blocky sedan. “Might as well charge that one up, too. We may want to look official.”
He went off to do that. “How long do they take to charge up?”
“An hour, maybe a couple of hours. Depends on the range, mainly. And whether they’re
hooked up to free energy. You probably want to take the sedan to get the most miles.”
“Couldn’t fit Snowbird in there.”
“Well, the panel truck, then.” She pointed back at the building.
Paul was at the door. “Carmen,” he called, “we have a problem.”
“Only one,” Alba said. “How nice.”
I went to him. “Snowbird’s hurt. Another stray round hit her.”
“How bad?”
“Who can say? She didn’t even tell anybody about it; Dustin saw the hole.”
We walked back to the snack area, where the Martian was standing in a corner. That was normal; she even slept standing up.
“It’s a small thing, Carmen,” she said. “Just a small bullet, which didn’t hit any vital organs.”
“Let me see.” She turned around and showed me, a small black dot high on her back, about where a human shoulder would be. There was a little pink froth of blood.
“I can feel exactly where it is,” she said. “It’s not doing any harm.”
Paul was standing behind me. “Are there any doctors for Martians at that Russian place?”
“There are members of the blue family. They’re something like doctors.”
“We have to get you there anyhow, for food. This just makes it a little higher priority.”
“It’s too far,” she said.
“Not anymore,” he said. “I’m a pilot. We just have to dig up an airplane somewhere.”
“That would be a figure of speech?” Snowbird said. “They don’t bury airplanes?”
“Right . . . Damn, I threw away my cell. Do you still have yours?”
“Think I can find it.” I went into the next room, where we’d changed into NASA work clothes. My cell was in the corner where I’d tossed it, the power light a barely visible dull red. I plugged it into the wall and it went bright red, then yellow, then green. I took it in to Paul.
He punched a few numbers and shook his head. “Nothing’s up and working yet, I suppose. Do you speak any Russian?”
“No, nyet.”
“I do,” Snowbird said. “So does Namir. We used it sometimes on the starship.”
I recalled that Namir’s father had come from Russia. He’d gone back for some Olympics and brought home a souvenir balalaika, which was why our mysterious spy had such an odd instrument aboard a starship.
I took the phone from Namir and was looking at it, trying to decide what to do next, when it suddenly rang, the anonymous-caller tone. I punched the answer button, and a young woman’s face appeared.
“Carmen Dula?” she said. “You look just like your picture!”
“Um . . . most people do.”
“Sorry.” She covered her eyes with a hand and winced. “I am Wednesday Parkman, calling from the office of the president. At Camp David, Maryland.”
“Okay. What does the president want?”
“Well, I don’t know, really. I was told to call your number and Paul Collins’s until one of you answered. But you answered right away. So let me try to find the president?”
“Sure, and Paul’s here, too.”
“Hold on!” Her face left, and we saw the ceiling for a moment, and then a slow pan of Monet’s lilies, with a cello playing softly.
“I don’t guess she’s had this job for too long,” I said.
“How the hell did they get up to Camp David without power?” Paul said.
“You couldn’t walk there in a day,” I said.
The lilies dissolved, replaced by an important-looking man I recognized just as he said his name. “Dr. Dula, I’m Morris Chambers. We met briefly at the White House.”
“It seems like a long time ago.”
“Doesn’t it. The president is drawing together a committee to deal with the current”—he made a helpless gesture—“situation, and he’d like you to come here as soon as possible.”
“Washington,” Paul said, “or Camp David?”
“Washington is chaos,” he said. “Once you’re in the air, we’ll give you a code word that will allow you to land at Camp David.”
“Okay. So what do we get into the air with? We’re still on the Armstrong Space Force Base.”
“Let me check.” He got up from the desk, and we had another minute of Monet and strings. He appeared again.
“You were rated for multi-engine commercial a half century ago. Airplanes are simpler now, but there’s no GPS.” Of course not, no satellites.
“If there are charts and a compass, I can sort it out. It would have computers, even without GPS?”
He looked away from the phone and then nodded. “Navigation computers, yes. There is a subsonic twelve-passenger NASA plane waiting for you on Runway 4, South terminal. That’s the only secure terminal, they say, so go directly there. Security there wants your license-plate number.”
Alba was leaning in the door. “Government plate, 21D272,” she said. “It’s a little blue bus.” Paul repeated it.
“What will this committee be doing?” I asked. “What can they do in one week?”
“The key phrase is ‘maximum survival.’ We estimate that there are still about 300 million people alive in America after yesterday. We would like to have . . . a maximum still alive a year from now. Having learned how to live without technology.”
“It won’t be 300 million,” Paul said. “It won’t even be 100 million.”
The bureaucrat’s face didn’t change. “You understand what we’re facing. It will be a disaster of biblical scope no matter what we do. We do want to maximize the number who survive, but we also want to preserve a semblance of the American way of life.”
Paul nodded. “That will be interesting. I’ll call you next from the airplane.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me. “Cheeseburgers and idiotic television? I wonder what the American way of life is nowadays.”
“If they really want maximum survival,” Namir said, “they’re aiming for a totally protective welfare state that’s also a police state. Which identifies the ones chosen to survive, and lets the rest go find some way to die. Or is there some humane alternative?”
“We have plenty of time to talk about it en route. We’ll be in the air most of the day.”
“Slow plane?” Alba said.
Namir nodded slowly. “We’ll be going by way of Russia, of course. They’d never allow us to take Snowbird there if we went to Camp David first.”
“Of course. Over the Pole,” I said. Hoping the Others don’t decide to turn off the power prematurely.
We loaded the bus in a hurry, deciding to hold on to all the food and weapons. We could use up the perishables on the way to Camp David, and the rest might come in handy next week.
Alba did the driving; she knew the way, and nobody else but Card had driven during this century. Leaving the place, we passed a sight I could have lived without, a trio of buzzards tearing up the body on the sidewalk. Paul winced at the sight but didn’t say anything.
The guards at the airfield gate knew Alba, of course, and waved us through. There were a couple of dozen planes parked around, but she followed a line painted on the tarmac that led to Runway 4, where a woman was standing by a small passenger plane.
One problem was immediately manifest: you got into the plane by climbing a narrow set of stairs that led to a narrow door—not wide enough for a Martian. Fortunately, the baggage compartment was pressurized, and the bay was a couple of meters wide. The ramp going up to it was a conveyor belt; she gave a thumping Martian laugh as she rolled up.
Paul was talking to the woman while this was going on. She was a flight controller who also flew, but she’d never piloted one this big, and she’d never flown without GPS. Paul hadn’t either, in a real-life situation, but in Space Force training he’d flown everything from gliders to spaceships. By the seat of his pants, as they say.
They went up into the cockpit and checked out the emergency navigation system, which could work by compass headings and a VR cube that showed what th
e ground looked like from any altitude over any place on Earth. Goggles that could see through clouds.
It only took a few minutes to load up our provisions and weaponry. “Well,” Alba said, “I guess I’ll be leaving you now.”
“Not if you don’t want to,” Paul said, looking down the aisle of the plane. “This is an alien planet to us; you and Card are our native guides. You know modern weapons, and the riot gun doesn’t work for anyone else.”
