He reached under his bed again. The cardboard box that had contained his clothes was gone. His clothes were still there, in a heap. But when he grabbed them the cloth just crumbled, like the sheets on his bed.
“Forget it,” Ahmed called, watching him. “Get your flight suit. They seem to have lasted.”
“Lasted?”
“It’s the plastic, I think.”
Snowy complied. He found his boots were still intact too, made of some imperishable artificial material. But he had no surviving socks, none at all; that might be a problem.
Snowy helped get some food inside Moon, while Ahmed continued his patroling.
The woken gathered in a circle, sitting on the lowest tier of the bunks. But there were only five of them, five out of the twenty who had been stored here. The five were Snowy, Ahmed, Sidewise, the girl Moon, and a young pilot called Bonner.
For a time they were silent, as they tucked into banana and chocolate and drank vials of water. Snowy knew that was a good idea. If you were dropped into some new situation it always paid to give yourself time to just sit and listen and think, and adjust to the new situation.
Snowy had pressed Ahmed about the CO. Ahmed showed him. Barking Madd’s body was shriveled and shrunken, literally mummified, just hardened flesh over the bone. The rest, the other fourteen, were the same.
Sidewise, predictably, couldn’t keep his mouth closed. Sidewise was an air warfare officer. He was a thin, intense man, and he had earned his handle for his habit of making sideways crablike moves whenever he got on a dance floor. Now he glanced around at the little group. “Fucking hell,” he said to Snowy. “So much for the safety margins.”
“Shut it,” Ahmed snapped.
Bonner asked Ahmed, “So what was the tally?”
Tally, for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. “There wasn’t one,” Ahmed said bluntly.
“So if not a tally, what woke us up?”
Ahmed shrugged. “Maybe the Pit has an automatic timer. Or maybe something just failed and it pitched us out.”
Bonner was a good-looking kid, though one of the gen-enged plagues had left him hairless from head to toe. Now he ran his hand over his bare scalp. His accent was faintly Welsh. “Maybe we just pushed it too hard. The Pit was supposed to be a cryostore for seeds and animal embryos and stuff. Insurance against the mass extinction. Not for humans—”
“Especially not humans like you, Bonner,” Snowy said. “Maybe your farts blew the gaskets.”
The bit of low humor seemed to relax the group, as Snowy had hoped.
Ahmed said, “This Pit might have been originally built for elephant embryos or whatever, but it was man rated. We all saw the lectures on the safety parameters, the reliability of the systems.”
“Sure,” Sidewise said. “But any system will fail, no matter how well it’s designed and built, if you give it enough time.” That silenced them. And Sidewise said, “Anybody noticed the clock?”
Most of the Pit’s instruments were dead. But there had been a backup mechanical clock that had drawn on a trickle of thermal energy from deep roots planted in the earth below. Before they submitted to the cold sleep they had all been shown the clock’s working — the cogs made of diamond that would never wear out, the dials that spanned the unthinkable time of fifty years, and so on. It had been a not-so-subtle psychological ploy to reassure them that no matter how long they were in the ground, no matter what became of the outside world, no matter what else failed in the Pit, they would know the date.
But now Snowy saw that the clock’s hands had jammed against the end of their dials.
Snowy thought of his wife, Clara. She had been pregnant when he had gone into cold sleep. Fifty years? The kid would be born, grown, with kids of its own. Maybe even grandkids. No. He rejected the thought. It made no sense; you couldn’t have a human life with a gap of fifty years in the middle of it.
But Sidewise was still talking. “At least fifty years,” he said relentlessly. “How long do you think it would take for Barking’s body to mummify like that, for all our clothes to rot away?” That was the trouble with Sidewise, Snowy thought. He was never shy of saying what everybody else didn’t even want to think about.
“Enough,” Ahmed snapped. He was short, stocky, squat. “Barking is dead. I’m senior here. I’m in charge.” He glared around at them. “Everyone happy with that?”
Moon and Bonner seemed to have withdrawn into themselves. Sidewise was smiling oddly, as if he knew a secret he wasn’t sharing.
Snowy shrugged. He knew Ahmed had served as a watch chief — the navy equivalent of a sergeant major. Snowy thought of him as competent, oddly thoughtful, but inexperienced. And, incidentally, not popular enough for a nickname. But there wasn’t anybody better qualified here, regardless of rank. “I suggest you get on with it, sir.”
Ahmed gave him a look of gratitude. “All right. Here’s the deal. We’ve had no tally. In fact, no contact from the outside. I can’t even tell how long since we last got a contact of any sort. Too many of the systems are down.”
Moon said, “So we don’t know what’s happening out there?”
Snowy said briskly, “Tell us what we do.”
“We get out of here. We don’t need protective gear. Enough of the external sensors are working to tell us that.”
That was a relief, Snowy thought. He wouldn’t have welcomed relying for protection on his NBC suit — nuclear-biological-chemical — if it had been subject to the same ferocious aging as his other clothes.
Ahmed hauled a steel trunk out from under one of the bunks. Inside were pistols, Walther PPKs, each packed in a plastic bag filled with oil. “I checked one already. We can test fire them outside.” He handed them around.
Snowy cracked the bag, wiped clean his pistol on crumbling bits of sheet, and tucked its reassuring mass into his belt. He rummaged through more of his surviving kit: helmets, life jackets, survival vests — a pilot’s equipment. The plastic components seemed more or less intact, but the cloth and rubber had failed. He took what he thought he would need. He regretted leaving behind his helmet, his venerable bone-dome, even if it was painted United Nations blue. Still, he somehow doubted he would be doing much flying today one way or another.
They clustered before the exit. The door to the facility was heavy, round-edged, and airtight, and operated by a wheel; it was like a submarine’s hatch. Ahmed began to break its seals.
They were all shitting themselves, Snowy realized, even if none of them wanted to show it to the rest.
“So what do you think we’ll find?” whispered Sidewise. “Russians? Chinese? Bomb craters, two-headed kids? Everybody wearing monkey masks, like Planet of the Apes?”
“Fuck off, Side, you twat.”
With an uncompromising motion Ahmed turned the wheel. The last seal broke with a crack. The door swung back.
Green light flooded in.
Cryobiology was actually a venerable industry.
The key to its utility was that far below the freezing point of water, molecules slowed the frenetic pace that permitted chemical reactions to proceed. So red blood cells could be stored for a decade or more. You could freeze, thaw, and reuse corneas, organ tissue, neural tissue. You could even freeze embryos. The cold was as much an enemy as an ally, of course; expanding crystals of ice had an unpleasant habit of destroying cell walls. So the medicos infused tissues with cryoprotective agents like glycerol and dimethyl sulfoxide.
Still, freezing and reviving a complex mature organism — such as a hundred kilograms of blasphemous Royal Navy pilot — presented more of a challenge. In Snowy’s body there were many different types of cells, each requiring a different freeze-thaw profile. In the end, a little subtle genetic engineering had done the trick. Snowy’s cells had been given the ability to manufacture natural antifreeze — in fact, glycoproteins, a trick borrowed from some species of polar fish — and the freezing was regulated at the level of the cells themselves.
Obviously it h
ad worked. Snowy had come out of the process alive and functioning. After half an hour he barely felt a thing.
Of course he had been intended to come out fighting.
Officially this unit was under the command of UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force. But everybody knew that was only a cover. The strategy had become known as sowing dragon’s teeth. As the intensity of global conflict had rapidly increased, post-Rabaul, new forms of deterrence had been devised. The idea was that it would be futile for any power to attempt an invasion if it knew that the ground was salted with groups of highly trained military personnel, fresh and fully equipped, ready to resume the battle. From these scattered teeth the dragon would regrow. That was the theory.
There were drawbacks, of course. The cold sleep process itself brought a risk of injury or fatality (but low, not 75 percent). And you never knew where you would be stationed; the freezing had been done at huge central depots, the subjects transported and deposited, all unconscious, at selected sites around the country, even abroad. But Snowy had known that his unit of Navy flyers would be kept together, which was more than reassuring.
And there were worse assignments. The tour of duty was limited to two years. For sure it was safer than being posted on a carrier to one of the world’s oceanic hellholes, the Adriatic or the Baltic or the South China Sea. In all, it was odd but it was just another posting.
Snowy had been happy to go along with it, even though it meant being locked away from his wife. He had expected to come out of the hole healthy and happy, a lot richer with the back pay he hadn’t been able to spend. Or, failing that, the grimmer possibility would be that he would have to come out fighting. But that was what he was trained for. Even then, he had expected to emerge into the middle of an ongoing high-tech war, to find a chain of command, everything basically functioning, to find something to fly. That was why they had salted away pilots in the first place. He hadn’t expected that they would be cracking the door cut off from any chain of command, completely ignorant of conditions outside — ignorant even of where he was. But that was what he faced.
Snowy took the lead. He stepped through the hatch.
Beyond the hatch, a stairwell was cut into concrete. The well led up to a rectangle of bright green light: leaves, traces of blue-white sky beyond. A forest?
The stairwell’s concrete, where it was exposed, was stained brown where metal fittings had rusted away. And when Snowy put his weight too close to the edge of a step, the concrete just crumbled. The stairs themselves were barely visible under a tangle of moss, leaves, debris of all kinds. Snowy wasted a little energy trying to clear this stuff off, but found that much of it was actually growing here, out of a layer of mulch over the concrete.
Ignoring the mess, he stepped up and just pushed his way out of the well.
At last he found himself standing on leaf-covered ground. He was panting hard. Evidently the cold sleep had taken more out of him than he had expected. The others followed him, one by one, brushing dead leaves and moss and mulch off their clothes.
The forest was built of tall trees, with low branches, heavy, spreading leaves. Oak, perhaps. Wind rustled, bringing warm air to Snowy’s face. It felt like late spring or early summer. The air smelled fresh, of nothing but forest, green and mulchy.
The Pit was set in the ground, half-concealed by a great concrete lid. But the lid was tilted askew and cracked, and plants were growing out of its surface.
Ahmed had a small black backpack. This contained a clockwork radio transceiver — which, like the pistols, had been stored in oil. Now he turned this on, wound it up, extended its aerial and began to walk around the little clearing.
Both Moon and Bonner looked very young and scared, lost in the green shade.
Sidewise stood by Snowy. Moodily he kicked the concrete carapace. “It’s amazing the power supply kept going as long as it did.”
Snowy said, “It’s like we just clambered out of Chernobyl.”
“I don’t think Chernobyl is a problem anymore.”
“What?”
“Snow, just how long do you think we’ve been stuck down that hole?”
Snowy braced himself. “More than fifty years?”
Sidewise grunted. “Look around you, pal. Those trees are oak. And look at this.” He led Snowy to a fallen tree. The trunk had snapped off maybe a meter above the ground. Much of the fallen trunk was coated with greenery, and fat, platelike fungi adhered to the upright stub of trunk, like disks stuck into the wood. “Snow,” said Sidewise, “you are surrounded by a mature forest. These are old trees. This one got so old it died without being felled. Come on, Snow. You remember those eco classes in training. What happens if you let a forest clearing recover?”
The grasses and herbs would be first to colonize the empty space. Within a year or so there would be Scots pine seedlings, birches, other deciduous trees sprouting from seeds left in the ground, or from stumps. Once there was some protection from the frost, Norway spruce and chestnut might take hold. Then, as conditions changed, different species would compete for light and space. After maybe fifty years, as the recovering forest darkened, the grasses on the floor would make way for shade-tolerant vegetation like bilberry and mosses. And after that, the oaks would return.
Snowy hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to this kind of stuff, at school, during his training, or later. Eco was always too depressing, nothing but lists of dead creatures. But — how long?
Sidewise poked at the grounded trunk. “Look at these bryophytes — the mosses and liverworts — and the lichens, fungi, insects burrowing away. You know, in our day a sight like this dead trunk was as rare as a wolf.”
“In our day?”
Ahmed had given up his stroll around the clearing. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a peep on any frequency. Not even GPS.”
“Maybe the radio’s out,” Moon said.
Ahmed pressed a green button on the set. “The self-test is okay.”
“Then,” said Bonner, “what do we do?”
Ahmed straightened up. “We keep ourselves alive. We get out of this damn forest. And we find somebody to report to.”
Snowy nodded. “Which way?”
“The maps,” said Bonner immediately.
Their training asserted itself, and they hurried back to the Pit.
The Pit had been equipped with external stores of paper maps, in case of the eventuality that a troop found itself revived like this without external direction or orientation. The maps were supposed to be contained in weatherproof boxes on the exterior of the Pit. The maps would also come with spins — specific instructions. Snowy knew they would all be reassured to find something to tell them what to do, maybe a clue as to what was going on.
But, try as they might, they couldn’t even find a trace of the map boxes. There was nothing but a surface of corroded, crumbling concrete, heavily colonized by mosses and grass.
Sidewise helped with the search, but Snowy could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He had known the maps wouldn’t be here. Snowy began to feel vaguely scared of Sidewise, because he was so far ahead of the game; he really didn’t want to know what Sidewise had already figured out.
They gave up on the maps. Still Ahmed tried to take a lead, to be decisive, and Snowy admired him for that. Ahmed sniffed the air, looked around, and pointed. “The land is rising that way. So that’s the way we’ll go. If we’re lucky, we’ll break out of these woods. Agreed?”
He was rewarded by shrugs and nods.
II
There wasn’t much to take from the Pit — nothing but what they could plunder from the dead: all the weapons and ammo they could find, spare clothing, ration packs. They made backpacks from spare flight suits, and loaded up their gear.
They set off in the direction Ahmed had chosen. The sun looked to be setting, and that meant, Snowy thought, that they had to be traveling roughly north. Unless even that had gotten itself screwed up in the years they had lost in the Pit.
The forest was dominat
ed by the great oaks, though they were interspersed with other species like sycamore, Norway maple, and conifers. There were plenty of birds — mostly starlings, it seemed to Snowy — but he was startled to see a rattle of green and yellow wings pass across the sun. Occasionally they saw animals — rabbits, squirrels, small, timid-looking deer, even what looked like a wolf, which had them all fingering their pistols.
After maybe an hour they came to a neat round hole in the ground. It was full of debris, but was obviously man-made. The bit of human design drew them insistently. They gathered around, sipping water from the small vials they carried.
Snowy said to Sidewise, “Did you see those green birds? They looked like—”
“Budgerigars. The descendants of escaped pets. Why not? There are probably parakeets and parrots too. Some of those deer looked like muntjac to me. Out of zoo stock, maybe. Even some of the trees look like imports — like that turkey oak back there. Like they taught us: Once you disturb the balance of nature, once you start importing species, it never goes back the way it used to be.”
Snowy said, “There was a wolf.”
“You sure it was a wolf?” Sidewise said sharply. “Didn’t it look too low, too fast?”
Come to think of it, Sidewise was right. It had looked a little furtive, low-slung. Rodentlike.
Bonner said, “All right, two-brains, what about this hole in the ground? Somebody’s removed a tree stump here, and done it deliberately.”
“Maybe,” said Sidewise coldly. “But holes in the ground last a long time. You can still find holes dug by hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago. All this tells us is there hasn’t been another Ice Age yet.”
Ahmed glared at him. “You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.”
Sidewise shot back, “And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.”
Evolution Page 62
