Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Mestral wondered if the man in front of him would be the savior of Earth’s humanity. They already have several, he thought, recalling the history he’d learned. Roughly around the time of Surak, there had been a human preaching a similar (albeit rather more emotional) message. There were others, of course, as disagreement seemed to be so completely ingrained into the human race. They fought and squabbled over what they thought their gods wanted. It was no different when this human preacher had become so popular two thousand years earlier.

  “I was gonna make a bundle on it,” Zee said.

  Mestral, his voice carefully maintained, asked, “What is it?”

  Zee smiled, packing the computer away. “You probably wouldn’t get it.”

  Mestral remembered a phrase from a movie: “Try me.”

  “All right,” Zee said, taking another bite of the granola bar. “Basically, I think I can use this machine to channel great amounts of energy and create a warp in space.”

  So the human did understand what he had. Warp drive wouldn’t be an accidental discovery for the people of Earth, as Vulcans believed.

  Zee continued, “So basically, put something inside this spacewarp, give it a little thrust, and boom, faster-than-light travel!”

  Mestral raised his eyebrows. “That’s astonishing. You came up with this?”

  “Yep.”

  Mestral suddenly became worried. “Then what are you doing here? You should get this away from the city, protect it.”

  Zee scoffed, crumpling up the granola bar wrapper and tossing it in a nearby bin. “Protect it? What in the hell for? This whole place is gonna melt to slag soon enough.”

  Suddenly, the room shook around them.

  “See?”

  Mestral moved to the window, and looked through the shades. Another mushroom cloud blossomed over Boston. This one wasn’t far, though it was small.

  “Down!” he shouted, and tackled Zee just as all the windows blew in. Glass and burning wood showered down into the room, and Mestral and Zee were thrown to the far side of it. Mestral looked through the blasted windows, and saw fires catching on nearby trees, spreading to the surrounding buildings.

  “We must leave,” he said.

  “Why? Where would we go?” Zee sat up. He lurched forward, and grabbed Mestral by the collar. “Everything’s coming apart!”

  Mestral pointed at Zee’s backpack. “Your work must survive! Your baby!”

  Zee’s eyes went wide with incredulity. He backed off, and picked up the bag. “My work? Who cares about my work? No one. And no one’s going to be alive to care!”

  “It could be just the thing that saves this planet from destroying itself,” Mestral said calmly. Outside, the fires got closer. “Is your nihilism worth letting humanity wither away on this one little planet? What if your friends were right, that this was it, that you were going to ‘make it big’ with this very invention?”

  Zee stared out at the fires that were starting to blacken the broken window frames.

  “Don’t you even want to try?” Mestral persisted.

  Zee slipped the pack onto his shoulders. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”

  Mestral grabbed his flashlight, and the two of them ran out into the hallway. They exited the building, and ran across the courtyard, Mestral in the lead. “We’ll take Massachusetts Avenue to Route One.”

  “One?” Zee asked. “Are you nuts? We’ll go south, to Ninety-five.”

  Mestral gave him a confused look. “One will take us north, into New Hampshire.”

  “Yeah, and Ninety-five goes south. It’s warmer in the south.” Zee paused. “Besides, New Hampshire creeps me out. Those people are weird.”

  Mestral nodded. “You should visit Vermont.”

  Zee grunted as they ran. A few other stragglers rushed down Mass Ave. with them. They all looked the same—scared, dirty, their clothes covered in soot or blood. Zee realized that it had been very stupid to want to stay. Looking at these other ragged refugees, he saw how close he had come to destroying himself and his baby.

  They ran long, and hard.

  Zee and Mestral drifted down Route 95 with a crowd of about fifty others. All the vehicles on the road were stopped; dead or burned out. Mestral kept his hood on, even at midday.

  “What’s your story?” Zee asked, after hours of silence.

  “I do not have a story,” Mestral told him.

  “Bull,” Zee called. “Everyone has a story. Who are you? Where are you from?”

  Mestral, for an instant, considered telling him the truth. He considered telling him all about the myriad space fleets that traverse the skies at speeds Zee would consider almost ludicrous. He considered telling him that Zee could very well save the planet Earth.

  “I wander.”

  “Hail the wandering wanderer,” Zee said sarcastically. “Why are you wandering?”

  “I left home, my job, my colleagues…because I wanted to learn,” Mestral said. “I was no longer content with my position. I needed more.”

  Zee grunted. “Tell me something I don’t know. Y’know, Mike, I’ve been alive for a while now”—Mestral raised his eyebrow—“and I gotta say, no one is content with their positions. Trust me.” Mestral just nodded. They took a turn around an overturned semi. They found themselves at the tip of a small rise, looking out as the highway extended off into the distance.

  Ahead, “traffic” got much thicker. Hundreds of cars, all parked neatly where they stopped running in the middle of rush hour. The overcast sky threw it all beneath a dull gray blanket, killing the colors on even the most garish, ridiculous vehicles. People streamed between them, lines of them snaking off to disappear into the distance along with the cars around a bend nearly a mile and a half off. Beyond that, tree-covered hills, and a set of radio antennas.

  Zee grunted when he saw the antennas.

  “What?”

  “The antennas.”

  “What about them?”

  Zee pointed. “They’re not blinking.”

  “This position you left,” Zee said, “what was it?”

  Mestral looked up from the can of soup he was heating on their campfire. He stuck his spoon into the can and swirled it. “I was a researcher, of sorts. Anthropology, the study of other cultures.”

  “Cool.” Zee was eating the soup that had meat in it—chicken noodle, the can read. They had scavenged the food out of a grocery store’s back room. The rest of the store had been picked clean, but in the locked storerooms they had found a case of soup and some bottled water—prizes of immeasurable value, now.

  Zee tilted his head back and downed the rest of his soup. “So…what were you doing at MIT? In the physics building, I mean. Not exactly the kind of place I’d expect an anthropologist to hole up in.”

  Mestral didn’t answer.

  “I mean, especially when everyone else was hightailing it out of the city.”

  More silence. Zee was getting frustrated at his incommunicative traveling partner.

  “You’re not telling me something,” Zee said coldly. “I don’t appreciate it. It scares me. This isn’t the time to take chances on people.”

  “I know,” Mestral said. “I love this world. It saddens me to see it falling apart.” He regretted saying that as soon as it left his lips; not because he thought Zee would guess the truth, but because he’d expressed such emotion so explicitly. He knew, of course, that other Vulcans would look down on his choices over the past century. But the one thing that they would not forgive was his assimilation into Earth culture. His emotional barriers had been breaking down for some time, and now he realized that he was Vulcan only physiologically.

  In his heart, he was human.

  “I was not one for emotional attachment,” Mestral said. “In my…family…it was frowned upon. We were a particularly cold group. I left that.”

  Zee grunted. “Doesn’t sound like there’s much to regret. I’d have ditched a family like that, too.”

  “It was all I knew,�
� Mestral said, finishing his soup. “And then I came out here, and it just…I fell in love with the outside world.”

  “Were you, like, Amish or something?”

  “Or something.”

  “…Ah. Don’t know much about the Amish,” he replied thoughtfully as he puffed a cigarette that he’d lit moments before.

  In the distance, they heard and felt an arrhythmic thudding vibration. Over the trees, faint flashes of light.

  “More bombing,” Mestral said neutrally.

  Zee stood, trying to see through the trees. He bunched his fists angrily. “That damn Eastern Coalition! They couldn’t leave us well enough alone!”

  Mestral shrugged, moving to stand beside Zee. “The United States has been the aggressor more times than I can count in the last century.”

  “So what?”

  “So, the E-Con clearly felt there was precedent for their actions,” Mestral said, continuing to keep his tone as neutral as he could.

  Zee stubbed out his cigarette on a tree, then stamped on it with his foot. “It’s just so…unfair.”

  “I know.”

  Zee turned to Mestral, his eyes flaring with anger. “Why the hell does my life have to be turned to crap because some jackass congress on the other side of the world doesn’t like us? What the hell does this have to do with me?”

  “War is not about you.”

  “Then why do I have to deal with it? All I wanted to do was sit in my lab, invent something pretty, and retire in peace! I don’t give a crap about politics, or the way this stupid world works! I care about money, and naked chicks!”

  Mestral looked at Zee, who was not the most attractive human male he’d ever come across. “Naked chicks?”

  “Yeah, well, you gotta have a goal, right?” Zee laughed, and sat back down by the fire. He put his face in his hands and sighed. “This is a goddamn nightmare.”

  Mestral sat back down beside him. “If you were to build your baby…where would you go?”

  “What?”

  “What would you need? If what you want is to continue your work, then do so. Everything here is up for grabs. You saw the stores, looted clean.”

  Zee laughed again. “You think we’ll be able to just steal the materials to build a spaceship? Jesus, you are weird, Mike.” Mestral sat next to him. They were quiet for a moment, and Mestral could see that Zee was, indeed, working things through in his mind. “Jesus, where would we get this stuff? How would we even get the damn thing into space?”

  “I have an idea about that…”

  The next day, Zee and Mestral came across an evacuation point. Standing at the top of a rise on the highway, they looked down over a convoy of green army transports idling in the center of the road. Larger vehicles with huge plows attached to the front were clearing an area of the highway of the dead cars littered about. Off into the distance, Zee and Mestral saw wrecked cars shoved to the side of the road. The army had literally plowed its way into the State of Massachusetts.

  The two walked straight up to the first soldier they saw.

  “What’s going on?” Zee asked. Mestral tried not to look the man straight in the face, and kept his hood on.

  The soldier replied, “Evacuation. We’ve got E-Con troops moving south from Canada.”

  “From Canada?” Zee said, incredulous. “Y’know, Maine and New Hampshire are pretty big…. We’re not talking Rhode Island, here.”

  “It’s the nukes,” the soldier said. He looked like he might tear up for a moment, then just said, “Move along, please. Move along.”

  Zee and Mestral walked away, but not toward the evacuation line.

  “What do you think?” Zee asked.

  “It depends on where they are going to take us.”

  “Yeah.”

  A squadron of military jets roared by overhead. The several hundred refugees all looked skyward as one, and then shrieked as a missile came streaking in from the opposite direction. Everyone broke into a hundred different directions; refugees fled in panic while the soldiers tried to herd them toward the transports.

  Zee grabbed Mestral’s hood. “C’mon!” he shouted, yanking hard to the left. Mestral’s hood came down from his head and bared his ears for the world to see. Luckily, no one was paying attention as he pushed the hood back into place. Zee pulled him through the crowd toward the forest to the west. Another missile came down right in the middle of the group of transports.

  A jet of flame roared up into the sky, and torn, twisted, burning metal rained back down. Mestral took hold of Zee’s arm, and swung him around. Zee’s feet left the ground, and Mestral flung him past the tree line as one of the transports came slamming down practically on top of them, the metal compacting into the ground.

  Zee stood, and grabbed Mestral as the Vulcan crawled away from the flaming wreck, dazed. “Come on!” He pulled him into the trees, and then collapsed next to him, breathing hard. They both felt the heat from the flames. On the road, the screaming continued. The soldiers were pulling back; the green transports swerved wildly around their blasted comrades.

  “Guess we don’t get a ride after all,” Zee wheezed. “C’mon.” They stood and limped off into the woods away from the highway.

  Zee and Mestral avoided advancing military troops and major cities on their journey westward. Life in many small towns across the northern United States remained very much the same, they found. Whenever they came across a public transportation system that still ran, they took advantage of it. Zee never let his backpack, with its precious computer cargo, out of his tight grasp.

  Mestral fought off an unwelcome bout of nostalgia when they passed through Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania. The two travelers walked down the main street, ignoring suspicious glances from the locals.

  “Turn left,” Mestral said. “There is a tavern.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “A long time ago.”

  They turned left onto Coalmine Road, and Mestral was dismayed to see a mini-mall two blocks down.

  “So…no tavern?” Zee asked.

  “It is gone.”

  The two walked into the mini-mall parking lot, which was empty except for a few beaten, weathered sedans. Mestral looked up at the sign by the road, frowning. “Pine Tree Mall.”

  Zee tapped him on the shoulder. “Check it out, a sub shop.” Mestral nodded absently and followed. Even before they reached the door, the smell of meat assaulted Mestral’s nose, and he steeled himself to the experience that was to follow.

  They entered, and Zee frowned at the place. The decor was absolutely ancient. Just how long ago was this place a tavern? he wondered. Linoleum flooring curled up in a few places, and the Formica-covered tables to the left were faded from exposure to the sun through the shop’s large windows.

  Zee walked forward to the counter, looking up at the menu.

  “You guys got a liquor license?” he asked.

  The teen behind the counter chuckled. “Sorry, we only have pop and juice.”

  Zee looked at Mestral. “You believe this?” He shook his head, and then looked back up at the menu. “I’ll get, uh, I’ll get a roast beef sandwich.” He turned to Mestral. “You?”

  “House salad.”

  The teen got to work preparing their food while Zee and Mestral selected drinks from a cooler to the right of the counter. Zee picked a caffeinated soda. He saw Mestral turn his nose up at it and said, “I need the sugar.” Mestral nodded, and picked a fruit juice. They sat down at one of the tables, and Mestral sipped his juice. Zee looked over to the counter.

  “Hey, kid…. Wireless?”

  The teen nodded, and Zee pulled the laptop out of his bag and turned it on for the first time in days and watched the monitor as the machine connected to the internet.

  “I’m amazed this place is still open,” he said as the computer booted up. “I can imagine meat becoming something of a commodity nowadays.”

  Mestral nodded. “Carbon Creek is…a place of tradition. At least, I thought i
t had been.”

  “You’re really thrown by this tavern thing, aren’t you? Why was it so important?”

  The teen walked up and put their food on the table. Mestral began to eat his salad, and Zee chomped into the sandwich with gusto.

  “Jesus, that’s good,” he mumbled with a full mouth. They ate in silence for a moment, then: “So, you didn’t answer my question.”

  Mestral chewed and swallowed, then put his fork down. “I used to live here,” he said. “There were some people who were very important to me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Mestral said, and began eating again. There was another moment of silence, and then Zee swiveled his laptop around to show Mestral the screen.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing.” A 3-D image of the warp engine spun around slowly on the screen. “We have to get it into space somehow; you can’t light this thing off in the atmosphere.”

  “No,” Mestral agreed.

  “So what’s the best thing we’ve got right now for pumping stuff into orbit? We haven’t had a viable shuttle program in decades, and this war certainly isn’t going to be a boon to space travel.”

  “I don’t imagine so.”

  “So…I was thinking, maybe, we could build it into the fuselage of a missile.”

  Mestral raised his eyebrow. It was a bold idea, bolder perhaps than even the warp drive itself. “Missiles powerful enough to launch into orbit,” he said slowly, “are not generally for sale to the public. Especially in wartime.”

  Zee scratched his head. “I know. I know. But if we can get one, it’s absolutely the easiest solution. The hardest thing about this project is getting it into space. The missile is designed to deliver a payload into orbit, and then it breaks away and falls back down. That’s absolutely perfect for what we want to do.”

  “I used to love television,” Mestral said.

  Zee scrunched his nose. “What?”

  “One time, I wrote a script for a TV show and sent it to a friend of mine in Los Angeles. He said, ‘You’re writing the third act before the first.’”