Exiled from Earth e-1

by Ben Bova

  “But that would destroy a person’s intelligence,” Lou said.

  “I know,” Bonnie answered. “And I think they’re planning to use Big George as a guinea pig.”

  Lou felt a hot bomb go off in his guts. “No, they wouldn’t… if this is true, then…”

  “Then we’ve been tricked into working for a group of people who’re planning to overthrow the government and turn half the world’s people into mindless zombies,” Bonnie said.

  There was a long, long silence, broken only by the night sounds of insects from the trees and brush, and the distant sound of the surf. Finally, Kori’s voice floated ruefully through the darkness:

  “Well, at least I don’t feel drunk anymore.”

  14

  It took Lou nearly a week to convince himself that Bonnie was right.

  He used Ramo as his source of information and his teacher. He didn’t know very much about the work the biochemists were doing. So he followed their progress by. checking Ramo’s programs and memory bank every evening,’ after his own work was finished. Within his vast memory Ramo stored most of the world’s knowledge of biochemistry. So the computer became Lou’s teacher, and explained patiently and with machinelike thoroughness exactly what Marcus’ biochemists were trying to do.

  By the end of the week Lou knew enough.

  He sat on the warm beach sand, Bonnie on one side of him and Kori on the other. About two dozen people, most of them men and women from the technical staff, were on the beach or swimming in the gentle surf that rolled in from the reef. Far off on the horizon, huge towering cumulus clouds paraded like happy children across the sky.

  The three of them sat a little bit away from all the rest of the bathers. Bonnie was still wet from a brief swim. Her skin was glistening with droplets of water, and prickled from chill. Or was it fear, in this warm afternoon? In the back of his mind, Lou noted with appreciation that there was plenty of her skin to be seen with the brief swimsuit she was wearing.

  But he kept his face serious and his voice-low enough so that it could just be heard by the two of them over the shouting and laughter of the others on the beach.

  “You were entirely right, Bonnie,” Lou said. “The biochemists are working on suppressors. They’ve already produced test samples of a drug and they’ve injected it into mice. Ramo showed me the test results. Six mice starved to death in mazes because they couldn’t find their way to the food at the end of the maze. Before they had been injected, the same mice had made it through the same mazes in less than a minute.”

  “Oh my God,” Kori said. Bonnie shivered.

  Lou went on grimly. “And today they asked Ramo for the complete cortical layout on Big George. There’s no doubt about it… they’re going to try the drug on him.”

  “And then on a human being,” Bonnie said.

  Lou glanced up at her face. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. That would be the next step.”

  “What do we do?” Kori wondered aloud.

  Lou shrugged. “There are only two things I can think of. First, we can stop the work we’re doing… just refuse to do any more. That would slow them down on their genetic engineering and their nuclear bombs—”

  “But it wouldn’t stop this suppressor business at all,” Bonnie pointed out.

  “And they already have enough bombs to destroy Messina, if they want to,” Kori said.

  Lou nodded and traced a square in the sand with his finger. “Okay… then the only other thing we can do is wipe out Ramo.”

  “Blow up the computer?” Kori asked.

  “No… I can just erase all his programs and memory banks. Take a little time and some tinkering, but I could do it.”

  “It would take more than a little time,” Bonnie said. “Ramo’s banks…”

  “I know a few tricks I haven’t shown you,” Lou said grinning. “I could wipe Ramo clean in a night.”

  “Really? That would stop everything they’re doing,” Kori said.

  “They’d still have the bombs,” Lou countered.

  Shrugging, Kori said, “Yes, but without the biological weapons they’re trying to get, the bombs by themselves wouldn’t be enough for them.”

  Bonnie shook her head. “You’re forgetting something else that they’d still have.”

  “What?”

  “Us… or really you, Lou. If Ramo is wiped clean, don’t you think Marcus is smart enough to figure out who did it?”

  “Okay,” Lou said evenly. “So he’ll know I did it. What good does that do him? Ramo will still be blanked out. Marcus will be stopped dead.”

  “And so will you be,” Bonnie said. “He’ll kill you.”

  “That wouldn’t do him any good.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good, either,” said Kori.

  “Don’t you see?” Bonnie said. “Killing you doesn’t help him, I admit. But the threat of killing you will stop you from erasing Ramo.”

  Lou nodded. “It does take a lot of the fun out of the idea.”

  Kori said, “Wait… we’ve left something out of the equation. We’re all assuming that we must stay on this island--”

  “You know a way off?” Lou asked.

  “Weil, there are boats every few days—”

  “Can you sail one? Can the three of us take over one of the boats? Can you navigate? Do any of us even know where on Earth this island is?”

  Dismal silence.

  Then Kori brightened again. “If we can’t get off the island, maybe we can signal someone to bring government troops here to rescue us!”

  In spite of himself, Lou laughed out loud. “Okay, great idea. How are you going to signal? And who do you signal?”

  Frowning in puzzlement, Kori mumbled, “Well… there’s a radio station down by the harbor.”

  “Yeah, and three armed guards at the door all the time. And even if we could get in and operate the radio, and make contact with somebody, we’d be dead before any government people got to this island.”

  Kori clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out on the sand. “Louis, my friend, I am a physicist, I have come up with a great basic idea. I admit that there are a few details, to be ironed out. That’s the work of engineers, not physicists.” He closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

  Without a word, Bonnie picked up a fistful of sand and dumped it on Kori’s face. He sputtered and sat up. They all laughed together.

  Bonnie stood up. “Come on, let’s take a dip before dinner. We’re not going to solve the problem right now.”

  Lou got up beside her, “Maybe not. But we’d better solve it pretty fast. We don’t have much time left.”

  Lou couldn’t sleep that night. He lay in his narrow bed, peering into the darkness, listening to the night sounds outside. The room’s only window was open to the sea breeze. A million thoughts kept crowding in on him. No matter how he turned or punched the pillow or forced his eyes shut or tried to relax, he still found himself lying in the rumpled bed, sticky with perspiration, his eyes open and jaw clenched achingly tight with tension.

  Finally he admitted defeat, got up and dressed. He walked out into the darkness, down the road toward the laboratory buildings. And the computer.

  He turned around the corner of the first lab building and went toward the fence of Big George’s compound. Down the way he could see a guard sitting by the gate, drowsing. The moon was riding in and out of scudding silvery clouds, but inside the compound the shadows cast by the trees made everything dark. Straining his eyes, Lou thought he saw the bulky shape of the gorilla sleeping on a man-made pallet of wood, straw, and palm fronds. Then he heard a snuffle and the big dark shape moved sluggishly.

  “It’s okay,” Lou called softly. “It’s me, Georgy.”

  The gorilla sat up and Lou could see a glint of moonlight reflected off his eyes. Big George pulled himself off the pallet and shuffled over to the fence.

  “Uncle Lou,” he whispered.

  “How are you, Georgy?”

 
; “Good. I been very good.”

  Lou wanted to reach out and pat him, but the wire fence was too fine a mesh to allow his hand through.

  “I know you’ve been good, Georgy. Do you like it here? Has everybody been nice to you?”

  “I have lots of room to play and they feed me good. But nobody comes to play with me. I’m all alone.”

  “I’m sorry… I haven’t been to see you as much as I should,” Lou replied guiltily.

  “But the doctor said he’d come and play with me,” George whispered.

  “The doctor? What doctor?’

  “The doctor,” George answered. “He was here today… or was it yesterday? Do you call it today if it was the day before tonight?”

  “Never mind,” Lou said impatiently. “What doctor? Who was he?”

  “He’s a new friend. He said he’s going to play with me when he comes back again. And I didn’t move or yell or do anything, even when it hurt.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  The gorilla touched the back of his head with a huge clumsy hand. “He made a funny noise back here, and it hurt a little. But just a little. It feels all better now.”

  Spinal tap, Lou thought, his innards sinking.

  “I promised I wouldn’t move even if it hurt,” George said.

  “Georgy, listen. The doctor… he said he’d be back. When? When’s he coming back?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. This morning, most likely. “Okay, Georgy, you get back to sleep now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”

  “All right. Uncle Lou. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  As the gorilla shambled back toward his pallet, Lou began to know what real responsibility felt like. Big George trusts me. he told himself. He needs me to keep them from hurting him.

  And then with a shock Lou realized that the only way he could save Big George would be- to destroy Ramo. He almost laughed as he stood by the wire fence in the moonlight.

  Some family I’ve got, he thought bitterly. A gorilla and a computer. One of them is going to die. And it’s up to me to choose which one.

  He hesitated only for a moment. Then he turned and headed for the computer building.

  15

  The door to the computer building was locked. Not by a voice-code lock, but an old-fashioned mechanical type, the kind that has a set of nine buttons that must be pushed in the right combination.

  Lou didn’t know the combination. And I’ll bet Marcus has the building wired with alarms. There’d be guards swarming in here before I sat down in the control slot.

  He stood there for a moment, uncertain. No sense getting shot if you can’t do the job you set out to do, he told himself. And then he smiled. On the other hand, if you’re smart enough, and quick enough, there might be a way to get the job done without killing anybody.

  Grinning with his new idea, Lou walked back to the dormitory, undressed quickly, and got into bed. He set his wristwatch alarm to buzz at six, then closed his eyes. In five minutes he was sound asleep.

  He had less than three hours of sleep, but Lou felt bright and ready as he stood by the fence of George’s compound again.

  “Here’s some fruit I saved from breakfast,” he said to the gorilla. “Catch!”

  He tossed a banana and two oranges over the fence. George backpedaled clumsily and managed to grab the banana in one huge hand. The oranges fell to the ground.

  He stooped to pick them up, then jammed all three into his mouth.

  “Thank you, Uncle Lou,” Big George said juicily.

  Lou laughed. “You’re welcome, Georgy.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lou saw a guard walking past the lab buildings, stopping at each door briefly to touch out a combination on the lock. He talked with the gorilla for a few minutes more, then, when he was sure that the guard was out of sight, Lou walked briskly to the computer building.

  The rest of the technical staff was probably just getting up, Lou thought as he glanced at the control panel clock. Sliding into the seat, he immediately started typing out instructions to Ramo.

  It was mid-morning before he found out if his scheme had worked. Despite the computer room’s nearly arctic air conditioning, Lou was sweating as he sat at the control desk. He was trying to do his own work, but it was going very slowly. His mind certainly wasn’t on it.

  The phone buzzed. Lou was expecting it, but it still made him jump. He touched the ANSWER button. The round Oriental face of the chief biochemist appeared on the screen. He looked unhappy.

  “We seem to have a problem this morning,” he said without preamble.

  “Really?” Lou said as innocently as he could.

  Still frowning, the biochemist said, “Yes. We went to run a routine check of yesterday’s work and found that the data we recorded yesterday is missing from the computer’s memory bank.”

  “Missing?” Lou shook his head. “Impossible. You’re probably just searching the wrong bank.”

  They talked it over for nearly half an hour. The results of yesterday’s spinal tap on the gorilla, the cortical map, even some of the chemical formulas that had been stored in the computer weeks earlier—were gone from Ramo’s memory banks.

  Lou forced himself to look serious. “I’ll do a complete check to find the missing data,” he said, “but it sounds to me like some of your people have goofed up. Running this computer isn’t as simple as operating a typewriter, you know. You should have let me record your data… or at least you ought to have a trained computer programmer or technician doing the job.”

  “They are trained technicians!” the biochemist snapped.

  Lou shrugged. “Then they haven’t been trained well enough— Okay, I’ll look for the data for you. But I’m willing to bet it was never stored properly in the first place, and it’s simply not in the memory banks.”

  The biochemist was starting to look furious. “Two months of work lost!” He lapsed into Chinese.

  It took them a week to figure out what was going on. Lou would spend his days at his own work, and then at the end of the day he’d have Ramo review the biochemists’ work for him. It took him only a few minutes to erase some of their material from Ramo’s memory banks. Lou never washed out very much material, just enough to slow them down.

  The biochemists became a very unhappy group of people. Their chief went around screaming and purple-faced. The computer technicians who worked for (hem looked scared. By the end of the week, Lou was spending most of his day with the technicians, trying to find out why they couldn’t do their jobs properly.

  Lou told nobody what he was doing. But Bonnie and Kori guessed it. By the end of the week, at dinner with them in the noisy cafeteria, Lou said to Kori:

  “You’ve got to figure out some way to get us off this island. It’s only a matter of time until the biochemists figure out what’s wrong with the computer programs, and then…”

  “I know,” Kori answered, hunching over the table and speaking as low as possible. “I’ve been trying to work out a navigational fix, so that we can at least find out where we are. But I’m afraid I’m not much of a navigator. And the sextant I’ve built isn’t very accurate.”

  “But how do we get off the island?” Bonnie asked.

  Kori shrugged. “Maybe we could build a raft—”

  “Or a flying carpet,” Lou replied acidly.

  That ended their discussion.

  It happened the next day. Lou wasn’t really surprised when an armed guard showed up at the computer control room. It had been exactly a week since he had first started tinkering with Ramo’s biochemistry banks.

  “What is it?” Lou asked, tensing.

  The guard said, with a Malay lilt to this voice, “Mr. Marcus wishes to see you.”

  “I’m busy at the moment. Tell him…”

  “Now,” the guard said. And he hitched a thumb on the holster at his hip.

  Lou nodded. “Okay, just let me…”

  “Do not touch the comput
er controls,” the guard said softly, even gently. But his hand curled around the butt of his gun.

  Lou found that his own hands were suddenly trembling, and well away from the controls. “Okay, okay, but the computer’s in the middle of a run.”

  “Some other technicians are being brought in to take care of it. You will come with me, please.”

  Marcus’ car was waiting outside, with another guard at the wheel. Lou climbed in and the first guard sat beside him. In a few minutes, Lou was ushered into the air-conditioned study of Marcus’ house. It was a small room, lined with books and a single large window that overlooked the sea.

  Marcus was sitting at a desk in front of the window. There were a few straight-backed chairs in the room, and a comfortable-looking sofa. Marcus was talking into the viewphone on his desk when Lou entered. Without looking up, he gestured Lou to a chair next to the desk.

  If he was angry, he wasn’t showing it. His face had it’s normal calm expression as he said quietly to the phone screen, “We’ve tracked down the source of the trouble and we’ll get things back under control and on schedule.”

  Lou couldn’t see the screen, but heard the voice reply, “Very well. See that you do. The timing is very critical.”

  “I understand. Good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  Marcus pressed the OFF button, stared into the screen for a few moments longer, then turned to face Lou.

  “You surprise me,” he said.

  “I do?”

  Marcus almost smiled. “Let’s not play games, Christopher. You’ve been sabotaging our computer programs, slowing down our biochemistry project. Why?”

  “How do you know it’s me?” Lou stalled.

  “It’s fairly obvious,” Marcus leaned forward in his chair slightly. “Now listen, Christopher. You’re not in the States any more. You’re playing in a different league, with different rules. I don’t have to prove it’s you who’s screwing up the computer. I think it’s you, and I’m going ahead on that assumption. I called you here to find out why you’re doing it, and to tell you what’s going to happen if you don’t stop.”