by Sandy Nathan
Facing the wide part of the platform, Veronica stepped up with her left foot, following it with her right. Down with the left foot, then down with the right. She pumped the weights when her feet went up, lowered them when she stepped down.
Up left, up right; down left, down right. One, two, three, four, arms bending and straightening with each repetition. Two, two, three, four. Three, two, three, four. As time passed, she increased her speed, feet slapping the step.
Fifty, two, three, four… . Eighty, two, three, four.
Her pace slowed as her leaden legs rebelled. Ninety-one, two, three, four.
Ninety-two, two, three, four.
Her legs trembled and her biceps would barely straighten and contract. Sweat rolled between her breasts and ran down her face.
All she could do was a lousy ninety-two. She could hop up and down that step for hours before their cybersleep. She was in shape to do exactly nothing.
The voice kept giving orders. Working out curbs anxiety. Let your subconscious solve the problem. What would Jeremy do? Just hold that thought. Don’t try to solve it. Move it. Move it, Veronica!
She pulled out the portable bench press, then hooked the pulleys to the wall for the lat pulls. Last to come out were the body bag and gloves. She’d work on target shooting later. They’d planned well, building a superbly engineered compact gym to keep killers busy.
Using the bench, she started out pressing one-quarter of the weight she’d been used to, then adjusted that down to one-tenth. She was useless. Worse than useless.
Work it, Edgarton. Keep going.
Veronica used the bench press and free weights until she fell to her knees. She crawled to the storage container and flopped inside. She’d managed her anxiety, but no answers had come. The golden planet hadn’t responded to her message. She hurt everywhere, foreshadowing the pain that would come tomorrow.
The next day’s muscle aches were exactly what she’d expected. Any movement exacted a price. Compared to how she’d felt in field training, it wasn’t so bad, except that her workout barely would have counted as warm-up on any commando course. She forced herself to her feet and to the computer bay.
“I have no idea what to do,” she said looking at the graph she’d generated the day before. Nice bell-shaped curve, fat in the middle and tapering out on both sides. So what? Where was the good data? She went through the computer, file by file. Found nothing using the amount of memory required to store a whole computer’s contents.
Don’t try so hard, soldier; let the answer float to the surface. The voice in her head gave orders as she ate her army rations and sipped purified water. Let all your faculties work.
Get back to work, Edgarton. Pick it up. She began again, stairstepping with free weights. The most effective cardio exercise for a small space. She did 120 before collapsing onto the floor.
Get up, Edgarton. Do you want to die down here? Pick up those feet! Move!
Then she was transported back to the training course in Russia, feeling the mud and sweat. She’d trained for a year, her last year on Earth. Knees pumping, feet hopping, she’d run across fields laced with live land mines. Sparred with killers. Rappelled down mountains. Parachuted in Siberia, Africa, and Guam.
She’d used every kind of weapon from hand-held missiles to garrotes. Learned more about computers than she thought possible. Piloted a ship and flown a plane.
And then she had put on a ball gown and brought the general to his knees with her loveliness. None of her competitors could do that.
She had one disadvantage.
“I know I’m forty-one,” she’d told the general when she convinced him to take her into the bunker. “But women in my family have healthy babies into their fifties. Look.” She had shown him the records. “I can repopulate the Earth better than those little girls.”
She ended up frozen next to the general, the prototype female of the new age.
You won, Edgarton, but it’s not over. Where did Jeremy store the data? She paced in front of the computer, kicking a trash container in frustration.
A trash container? She flew to the keyboard, double clicked on the trash and went through the items it contained. The contents of Jeremy’s computer were in the trash, stored in a huge file labeled “Hermitage Academy.” Simple but very effective. She never would have looked there. Where were the frequencies to which he’d broadcast? Under “Letters to Mom.” The file had a mish-mash of numbers. That had to be it, but how could she interpret the mess?
She ran a couple of statistical programs, resulting in something interesting: another bell-shaped curve like the one she’d produced from the data she’d found originally. She compared the two diagrams.
Shit! Shit! Shit! They were the same diagram. All of her work had brought her no closer to a solution. Why was he so damn secretive?
Furious, Veronica stalked off to the gym locker and set up targets at the end of the bunker. She pulled out one of the air pistols.
She aimed the gun carefully and squeezed the trigger. Perfect. She’d been a markswoman since childhood. Her father liked to hunt. He taught her to shoot. She took another shot, and another. Another. Again.
When her fingers were so tired she could barely unwrap them from the pistol’s grip, she collected the targets. Round concentric circles. She noticed the lower half of the circles. They formed smiley faces. Lower in the middle than each side. The opposite of the bell-shaped curve formed by Jeremy’s frequencies. Inverted bell curves. Her eyes widened.
That was it! Jeremy had reversed the number of times he’d broadcast to each location. The frequencies he’d used most were not those stacked in the middle of the bell, they were the outliers! That was perfect Jeremy.
She went to the computer and flipped the distribution of the data she’d created. Another bell-shaped curve appeared, this one showing completely different most-used coordinates. That’s why she hadn’t heard from the golden planet. They didn’t get her message.
Now all she needed was the password so she could broadcast. She had one try left before the computer locked up.
She sprawled in the opening to the storage container, defeated. What would Jeremy use as a password? He liked funny things, or enigmatic things. People. Friends. Places.
Would he use Hermitage Academy? His school. No. He hated it. Henry Henderson. Maybe. Henry and Lena had cared for him since birth. Would it be Henry and Lena? Or H. Henderson? What about Arthur? His driver/bodyguard Arthur Romero was a good friend. Jeremy might use his name. The estate? Piermont Manor? Would he use that?
Chaz Edgarton—his father? No. Jeremy hated him. How about the general? He really hated him.
Get up and move, Edgarton. Move. Work it. Jump. She pulled out a jump rope. Taggety, taggety, taggety. The rope ticked away the cycles. It flew over her head, under her feet. Taggety, taggety, taggety. She did tricks, crossing the rope before her. Behind her. Taggety, taggety. The sound echoed from the bunker’s cement surfaces.
A smile came to Veronica’s lips; she was really good at jump rope. She’d shown off in front of Jeremy a few times. His eyes had opened wide and he smiled, unable to believe that his mother could do anything athletic. He’d looked at her with love on those occasions, so different from his usual suspicion.
It came like a flash—her name was the password. She was the most enigmatic thing in Jeremy’s universe. He loved her and hated her, wanted to be close to her and couldn’t stand being around her. Veronica Piermont Edgarton.
Veronica took a deep breath and set the machine to broadcast her taped communication to the new coordinates. A password box came up.
“Veronica Piermont Edgarton,” she typed, hitting enter decisively.
The screen indicated a message had been sent. Her broadcast was successful.
6
Sam seemed to be wounded. He held one arm wrapped around his belly and positioned the other arm over it, pushing down hard with both. He’d run a few steps and bend over, groaning.
“We ca
n’t stop, Sam. I don’t know if they’re following us.” Jeremy felt sorry about pushing him, and worse the more he observed his condition. It was almost dark, but he could see that Sam’s skin was gray-white, dusted with something like splotches of flour. Jeremy recoiled when he realized what it was: mold or a fungus. Jeremy couldn’t slow down, no matter how hurt his companion was.
Sam’s bare feet looked as tender as his own. He’s never walked on anything but a cement or dirt floor, Jeremy thought. He walked as fast as he could, an arm around Sam’s back, holding him up with a hand under the armpit. He could feel the other man’s ribs. His shaved head and face were covered with stubbly hair. Jeremy thought he was in his fifties or sixties, though with his gray skin, it was hard to tell. Sam was very tall, probably as tall as Sam Baahuhd had been: 6’ 8”.
Jeremy had had the growth spurt that everyone told him would come while they were on the golden planet. He’d gotten used to being a big man, at least compared to the other humans in the golden world. But Sam was still half a head taller than him, maybe more.
Sam had some muscle. He didn’t look like a concentration camp victim, quite. But he looked like he was in very bad shape. Another week in there and he would have been dead.
Shit. He realized why they’d put him up the canary-port. They must have run out of canaries. They threw Sam up the hole because he was going to die anyway.
Pissed, Jeremy made a final charge to his home in the machine shop. He deflated when he realized that his companion couldn’t climb into the buried building. If he managed to get in, he’d never get out.
The wolves howled, coming closer.
“We may end up wolf-chow,” Jeremy said to his new friend. Jeremy saw his face clearly by moonlight. Once again he was struck by the resemblance to Sam Baahuhd.
“Sam? Is that you? Sam Baahuhd? The headman of the village?”
“I’m Sam, but not Sam Baahuhd.”
“Which Sam, then?” Jeremy remembered that Sam seemed to be the favored name of the village.
“I’m Sam of the line of Sam and Emily, and I have Arthur in me, too.”
“Who is Sam Baahuhd?”
“He who threw me out.”
The raging degenerate. A chill went through Jeremy. “How is he related to Sam Baahuhd?”
“He is straight bred to Sam and Mollie.”
“Sam’s wife who had the disease?”
“Aye. He has the disease and more.” Sam leaned over and groaned, his lips pulling back from gray teeth. He swayed.
“We can rest if you want.”
“No. They will find us.”
How he made the last few hundred yards, Jeremy didn’t know. He kept looking for the pipe sticking up under the trees, but he couldn’t find it. He found something much easier to spot: a light with a huge black mass next to it.
“Oh, Jeremy! I’ve been so worried about you!” His mother was standing in front of a storage container like they put on ships and trains. It sat on railroad ties, raised a bit off the ground. She wore black pants, a parka, and combat boots. Next to her were a plastic table and chairs. An electric lantern sat on the table. Night bugs dive-bombed it.
Jeremy stopped dead, digging his fingers into Sam. “Mom! What are you doing here?” He stood, open-mouthed and rigid.
“I came to be with you, Jeremy.”
His head moved from side to side, denying her silently. “How did you get here?”
“It wasn’t easy. I had to get through the security measures on your computer.”
“My computer? Which one?”
“The one from your room at the Hermitage Academy.”
“What were you doing with my computer?” His sense of being violated merged with his shock at seeing her.
“Arthur put it on a cylinder and had it smuggled to me just before the meltdown. I hid it in my uniform in the bunker before we were frozen. When I woke up, I downloaded it and hacked into it.”
“You saw everything on my computer?”
“Yes. From the cylinder. Getting it wasn’t easy, either. A half dozen people put their lives on the line to get it to me.”
“I can’t believe you’d do that … And you got Arthur to help you. He was my friend.”
“He was my friend, too, Jeremy.” She stepped closer, holding her hands out to him. “Why are we arguing? Aren’t you glad to see me?” She smiled tremulously. “I contacted the people on the golden planet and asked them to reunite us. I asked them to bring that,” she nodded her head in the direction of the storage container, “so we’d have what we needed to survive. There was one with weapons, too, but they didn’t send it.”
“They sent you, but kept Ellie?”
“Yes, Jeremy. They came to me before they sent me. I could feel them floating around in the bunker. Then they put me here.”
“They didn’t say anything about Ellie and the others?”
“No. I knew they had sent you back to Earth alone, but I’m not quite sure how.”
“That’s how they are. No words.”
“I’m truly sorry about Ellie.” She looked at him tenderly. He regarded her without saying a word. Her mouth tightened.
“It’s nice to see you, too, dear.” She held her head high, but her lips quivered. “I rather hoped for a warmer welcome.” She turned to Sam, who was slipping out of Jeremy’s grip. “Your friend seems to need help.” The wounded man fell on the ground, groaning. “Who is this? My goodness, he looks like Sam Baahuhd.”
“He’s from the underground shelter, Mom. They were using him like a canary to see if the air’s safe.”
“What?”
“They had him tied by the waist and threw him out the chute for the canary cage.”
Sam made a choking sound, the sort of noise someone who was determined not to show pain would make before completely losing control. He held his arms over his belly.
“Are you hurt?” Veronica asked. Jeremy shook his head. “Let me see what’s wrong with him. Hold up the lantern, Jeremy.”
“No! No light!” Sam gasped and passed out.
Veronica bent over him and untwined his arms. She looked, and quickly wrapped his arms back again.
“What was that, Mom?” Jeremy asked. “It looked like an eye sticking out of his stomach.”
“That’s exactly what it is: an eye like the ones they used to have in public places to spy on us. This type hooks up to the victim’s belly and looks out from there. I’ve seen them in the general’s camps.”
“Shit. I’ve never heard of anything like that. Does it know we’re here?”
“Maybe. Depends on its range. Did he keep it covered like that all the time?”
“Yes.”
“Good for him. Whoever was on the other end was undoubtedly hurting him to make him uncover it. Did he show pain?”
“Yeah.”
“We need to get it out of him. I’ll get some things from the container.” She disappeared and came back with a tarp and medical supplies. “You take his shoulders, I’ll take his feet.”
They lifted Sam on the tarp and got ready. Sam awakened during the process, looking at them with wild eyes.
“Sam, we’re going to get this thing out of you, and we’re going to do it without killing you. I’m going to give you a shot to dull the pain around the implant. You’ll feel a stick or two.” Veronica injected spots around the eye. “It won’t hurt as much in thirty seconds.” She looked at her watch and flicked his belly with her fingers. “Hurt?” He shook his head.
“OK, let’s go.” Veronica took a scalpel from a sterilized packet and made a neat incision around the eye’s head, revealing the casing, a cylindrical sheath about two inches wide and a half-inch deep. The eye was on the front of the head, the side that had been exposed. They could see a snakelike tail sticking out the other side, tunneling under Sam’s skin.
“Look at this, Jeremy. This is why the people who try to remove this themselves die.” Her fingers wrapped around the circular head of the device, below the ey
e. Three long, slender protuberances sat below a rim. “Retractable knives are positioned at the end of the cord. They withdraw into the cord to allow it to be inserted or removed by people who know what they’re doing. If someone tries to pull it out of the carrier’s belly without depressing those, the knives will spin and cut a three-inch swath inside the carrier. Who then dies.
“When you remove this from Sam, you need to press all three buttons flat and totally under the rim. That will pull the knives back in. Then yank that thing out as hard as you can. I’ll be ready with the gauze pads to stop the bleeding. Whoever put this in him will know that it’s being removed. They’ll try to kill him. The eye is electric; it’s still hot.” She turned to Sam.
“Sam, I’m going to count to three. While I do that, breathe in as much air as you can. Take big breaths, starting now. On the count of three, blow out hard. Do you understand that?” He nodded. “OK, Jeremy. On three, you pull. One … two … three!”
Sam blew out and Jeremy pulled. The thing ripped out, with small chunks of Sam attached. It was a monster; they’d seen the top of the head, but it looked bigger pulled out. The tail was a segmented metal line a foot long and a quarter of an inch thick. The minute Jeremy let go of the three buttons, something like a propeller burst out on the end and started spinning, outside of Sam.
“Jesus!” Jeremy exclaimed.
Sam passed out again. Veronica bent over him with heavy sterile pads.
“I’m going to take care of him while you disarm that. See the tool kit in the bucket? You need to pop the eye out of the casing, turn the device inside off, and disarm it. It can explode.”
Jeremy picked up the toolbox.
“Pop the head off it by keeping those little buttons pushed in and twisting the eye. Careful, it will try to shock you.”
The tail turned and twisted as though it were trying to find Jeremy’s skin. He did what she said and the tail went limp.
“What a nasty bastard,” Veronica said. “It’s an all-purpose device: You can torture or track or eavesdrop with one, or use it as a mine. They can’t have one of these on everyone down below. They’d lose too much population. Sam must have tried to escape or done something they really didn’t like, so they put it on him.”
