Exiled from Earth e-1

by Ben Bova

Somebody giggled. Lou was startled to realize it was he himself.

  The doctor turned toward Marcus. “He should be ready now.”

  Marcus came to the bed and leaned over Lou. “All right now, Christopher. Where is Dr. Kori, and what’s he doing with the bomb he stole?”

  “Playing in the sand,” Lou said, laughing. It was funny, everything was so funny. Marcus’ face, the thought of Kori digging sand castles with a nuclear bomb tucked under his arm. The whole thing was uproariously funny.

  “Listen to me!” Marcus shouted, his face red and sweaty. “Quickly, before…”

  The flash of light was bright enough to feel on your skin. For an instant everything stopped, etched in the pitiless white light. No sound, no voices, no movement. Then the bed lifted, the window blew in with a shower of glass, a woman screamed, and a roar of ten thousand demons overpowered every other sensation.

  Somebody fell across Lou’s bed. The roar died away, leaving his ears aching. People started to move again through a dusty plaster haze, crunching glass underfoot. Marcus staggered up from the bed.

  Lou heard somebody say in an awed voice, “Look at that… a real mushroom cloud, just like in the history books.”

  Then Lou heard his own laughter. He couldn’t see Marcus, but he knew he was still there.

  “You’ve lost, Marcus. You might as well admit it. There’ll be a government inspection team here in a matter of hours. Followed by troops, if you want to fight. It’s all over. You’ve lost.”

  “I can still kill you! And the girl!”

  Lou was laughing uncontrollably now. The drug, he knew in the back of his mind. But there was nothing he could do to stop himself. “Sure, kill me. Kill everybody. That’s going to help you a lot. An enormous lot.”

  He laughed until he passed out again.

  It was pleasant to be unconscious. Or am I dead? But the thought brought no fear. He was floating in darkness, without pain, without anxiety, just floating in soft warm darkness. Then, after a long, long while, the darkness began to turn a little gray. It brightened slowly, like a midnight reluctantly giving way to dawn.

  Bonnie’s face appeared in the grayness. There were tears in her eyes, on her cheeks. “Oh, Lou …”

  He wanted to say something, to touch her, to make her stop crying. But he couldn’t move. It was as if he had no body. Then her face faded away and the darkness returned.’

  He heard other voices in the grayness, and once in a while the black turned gray again and he could see strange faces peering at him. He would try to talk, try to signal to them, but always the darkness closed in again.

  Then, abruptly, he opened his eyes and everything was in sharp focus. He was lying in a hospital bed. The walls of his room were a pastel blue, the ceiling clean white. There were viewscreens and camera eyes in the ceiling. Lou found that he could turn his head. It hurt, but he could do it. There was a window at his left. He couldn’t see out of it at this angle, but sunshine was pouring in. A night table was next to his bed, a rolling tray crammed with plastic pill bottles and syringes and other medical whatnots. A door, closed. A single plastic sling chair standing beside it.

  He tried sitting up, and the bed followed his motion with an almost inaudible hum from an electric motor. Leaning back in a half-sitting position, he suddenly felt woozy.

  At least I’m not dead, Lou told himself.

  His body felt stiff. Looking down, he saw that his hands and arms were wrapped in bandages. So was his chest; white plastic spray from windpipe to navel. His face felt raw. as if he’d shaved with an old-fashioned razor.

  The door suddenly opened and a nurse appeared. “Good day,” she said with professional cheeriness.

  “H … hello.” Lou’s voice was terribly hoarse; his throat felt rough.

  She must be pushing forty, Lou thought. She still looks pretty good, though.

  “How do you feel?” the nurse asked.

  He considered the question for a moment. “Hungry.”

  She smiled. “Good! That’s one condition that the automatic monitors can’t record yet.”

  She was gone before Lou could say anything or ask any questions.

  Within minutes a food tray slid out of the wall and swung over to the bed. It was clumsy, eating with bandaged hands. By the time Lou was finished, there was a knock on the door and it opened wide enough for Kori to stick his head through.

  “Hi. They told me you were finally awake.”

  Lou’s voice felt and sounded better. “Come on in. How are you? Where are we? What happened? Where’s Bonnie?”

  Kori grinned and pulled the chair up next to the bed. As he sat on it, he answered. “Bonnie’s fine. She’s here in the hospital, too, getting treated for radiation dosage. There was a considerable amount of fallout from my little toy, you know I stayed inside a cave until the government troops arrived, but I got a touch of it, too.”

  “Marcus and the others?”

  “They gave up without much of a fight,” Kori said “A government inspection team ’coptered to the island in four hours and eleven minutes after the blast. Inside of another two hours they had a little army of government troops covering every square centimeter of the island.”

  “And what happened to me?” Lou asked “I remember trying to hold them down at the dock. Then somebody shot me and I fell into the water. Then…”

  Kori was trying not to laugh, without being very successful at it.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Well, forgive me, but you are. Do you know how they found you?”

  Lou shook his head.

  “You were lying flat on your back in one of the bedrooms of Marcus’ house. Stark naked. Sixty million splinters all over your face and body and arms and legs. And you were laughing. Laughing your head off.”

  “Very funny,” Lou said “Marcus had me shot full of happy-juice, so I’d tell him where you were. So he could find you and kill you.”

  “I know,” Kori said, still giggling “Forgive me. It just presents an odd picture.”

  “Is Bonnie going to be all right?” Lou asked.

  “Oh yes, certainly. She’ll be visiting you herself in a day or so.”

  “And Marcus and his crew?”

  Kori shrugged. “In jail, I suppose. The troops took them away.”

  Lou felt himself relax against the supporting bed. “That takes care of everybody, I guess. Oh! What about Big George? Who’s taking care of him?”

  Kori’s face suddenly went somber. “That that’s the one bad part of it, Lou. He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody shot him,” Kori said, his voice low. “We don’t know who did it. It might have been Marcus’ guards or the government troops. Bonnie was right there, and she couldn’t tell who fired the shot.”

  “Killed him? But why?”

  Shaking his head, Kori answered, “We’ll never know. There was a little fighting when the troops landed. Maybe it was just a stray shot. Or perhaps someone got frightened at the sight of the gorilla. At least he didn’t suffer at all. One shot he died instantly.”

  “Poor Georgy,” Lou said.

  For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Lou asked, “Where are we, anyway?”

  Ron’s face didn’t cheer up at all. “Back where we started In Messina It looks to me like we’re going to be shipped up to the satellite as soon as you and Bonnie are well enough to travel. To begin our exile.”

  19

  The doctors made Lou stay in bed for a week, while his torn skin healed and he got his strength back. He saw Bonnie and Kori almost every day. But most of the time he lay in bed, thinking. So much had happened in so short a time. Now he could think about it, look back on it and try to fit all the fragments together, to form a coherent picture of what had suddenly happened to him and his life.

  Why? he thought bitterly. Why Big George? The main reason we tried to go against Marcus was to save George, and he was the only one that didn’t get through it all right. Lou thought o
f the bomb explosion and how it must have terrified the gorilla. The last few hours of his life must have been hell for such a peaceful, gentle animal. We didn’t do right by you, George, Lou said silently. I’m sorry.

  Looking toward the future, Lou was just as bleak. They were going to exile him, of that he was sure. Kori was more optimistic, though.

  “After all we’ve done for the government?” Kori said one afternoon, at Lou’s bedside. “Risking our lives to stop Bernard’s attempt at a coup? They won’t exile us, they’ll give us medals. You should get an award anyway, you’ve set a new international record for splinters.”

  Lou grinned with the young physicist. But inwardly, he knew the government couldn’t let them go free. They would tell the world about the exile, and the government would never be allow that.

  There was something different about Bonnie. She was up tight, holding back something that she didn’t want Lou to know.

  One afternoon, as they strolled together through the busy hospital corridors, he asked her.

  “What’s bothering you?”

  She didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Does it show?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve got to make a decision,” Bonnie said Her gray eyes looked troubled, sad.

  “About Kori and me?”

  “In a way. You see, Lou, I’m not officially on the list of exiled persons. I can go back to Albuquerque, if I want to. Or I can go with the rest of you to the satellite.”

  “And stay for the rest of your life.”

  “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath.

  If you married me. he said to her in his mind, you’d have to share my exile. So I can’t ask you for that. I can’t even mention it.

  She was staring at him, trying to read his face, looking for something and not finding it.

  Aloud, he said, “Bonnie, you might never allowed to make that decision. You’re in pretty deep with us now. The government might decide to exile you along with Kori and me.”

  Bonnie stopped, right there in the corridor. “They can’t do that; they wouldn’t.”

  “They might,” Lou said “And if they do, it’ll be my fault.”

  “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you two!” Kori ran down the corridor, dodging between frowning nurses and muttering patients Breathlessly, he told Lou and Bonnie, “The General Chairman, he’s asked to see us. To talk to us. Tomorrow morning. The General Chairman!”

  Lou turned to Bonnie. For the first time, he felt hope. If not for himself, then at least for her.

  Despite his anger, despite his hatred of what had been done to his life, Lou felt as awed as a peasant in a palace when the three of them were ushered into the General Chairman’s office. Bonnie and Kori, he saw, were also wide-eyed and silent.

  The office was impressive. It covered the entire top floor of the tallest tower in Messina, stretching from the elevator doors where they stood to the sun-bright window-wall where the Chairman’s old fashioned ornate desk stood.

  “Come in, come,” said the little man behind that desk, in a voice cracked with age.

  They walked silently across the thick carpeting, past a ten-foot globe showing the world in color and relief, complete with networks of tiny satellites orbiting around it. The whole globe hung in mid-air, suspended magnetically. The entire office was decorated in shades of green, dark jungle greens for the most part. The furniture was all richly polished natural wood. There was a scent of orchids and other lush tropical aromas in the air. And the climate control for the big room was warm, moist, almost sticky.

  “Forgive me for not rising,” the Chairman said “I suffered a slight stroke recently, and the doctors want me to exert myself as little as possible.” His voice was soft, gentle, and friendly, with an undisguised Brazilian accent. He was small, slight, his bony face high-domed and haloed with wisps of white hair, his hands fragile. He was very old. His skin was white and powdery-looking, laced with networks of fine etched wrinkles.

  “However,” the Chairman went on, “I did very much want to meet the three of you. Please sit, make yourselves comfortable. Would you like anything to drink? To eat?”

  Lou shook his head as he pulled up a leather-cushioned chair. He sat between Bonnie and Kori, and the three of them faced the Chairman.

  Before the silence could become awkward, the Chairman said, “I want to express my personal thanks for your courageous actions on the island. You prevented an uprising that might have taken many lives.”

  “We did what we had to,” Lou said.

  The Chairman nodded. “It must have been quite a temptation, though, to put in with Bernard’s people and avoid going to exile.”

  Shrugging, Lou answered, “As far as I’m concerned, we were in exile on that island. There was no difference between the way the government has treated us and the way Bernard’s people were treating us. The government was a little more polite, maybe. That’s all.”

  “Besides,” Kori added, “I think we all felt that the people running the island would be worse than the people running this government, if they got the chance.”

  With a smile, the Chairman said, “Thank you. It’s good to know that we are not completely at the bottom of the list.”

  Ron grinned back at the old man.

  Somehow their smiles irritated Lou. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like the exile is still in effect, and we’re going to be shipped out to the satellite.”

  The Chairman’s face grew somber. “Yes, I am sorry to say. If anything, this attempt by Minister Bernard to seize power proves the wisdom of the exile. Your work on genetic engineering is simply too powerful to be used politically.”

  “So we spend the rest of our lives in a beryllium jail!”

  “What else can we do?” The Chairman waved his frail hands helplessly “We are not monsters. We have no desire to make you suffer. We will supply you with everything you desire aboard the satellite. Anything.”

  “Except freedom,” Lou snapped.

  “Regretfully true,” said the Chairman. But now there was a hint of steel behind the softness of his voice. “If I must choose between the welfare of twenty billions and two thousand or so, I will choose the twenty billions. The mere knowledge that you might soon be able to control human genetics has already triggered one attempt at revolution. I will not see the world destroyed. We have worked long and hard to avert destruction from war and from famine. I am not going to permit destruction to come from a test tube or a computer. Not if I can help it.”

  “But what about Kerf? The work of the rocket scientists doesn’t really threaten the world.”

  “Perhaps not,” the Chairman admitted. “I must confess that I didn’t realize anyone except those working on genetic engineering had been sentenced to exile. Someone in the bureaucracy considers the starship scientists a threat to world stability. I must find out why. If they cannot convince me that you are a threat, Dr Kori, then you will be released from exile and free to resume your normal life You, and any of your colleagues who have been placed in exile.”

  Before Kori could say anything, Lou went on, “And Bonnie, here what about her?”

  She murmured, “Lou, you shouldn’t.”

  “No, I want to find out about this. Bonnie wasn’t sentenced to exile. She was picked up like the rest of us, and then released. She came to the island and found out what’s going on. Now where does she stand? Is she going to be shipped off with the rest of us or not?”

  If the Chairman was angered by Lou’s insistent questions, he didn’t show it. “Miss Sterne is not a scientist nor an engineer. There is absolutely no reason for her to be exiled. Unless she wishes to accompany you, for her own personal reasons.”

  “You can really say that with a straight face!” Lou raged. “You can sit there and promise her freedom when you know you don’t mean it!”

  “Lou, what are you saying?” Bonnie reached out for his arm.

  The Chairman’s eyes narrowed. “Explain you
rself, Mr. Christopher. Why do you call me a liar?”

  Almost trembling, Lou said, “If you let Bonnie go, if you let Kori go, what’s to stop them from telling the newsmen about this exile business? What’s to stop them from telling the whole world? Will you want them to sign a pledge of silence, or will you do surgery on their brains? Because we both know you can’t risk having them tell the world about what you’ve done to the scientists…”

  “Why not?” the Chairman asked gently.

  “Why… why? Because the people of the world will demand that you release us. They’ll want genetic engineering… they’ll want us free. You can’t throw two thousand of the world’s top scientists into prison and …”

  The Chairman silenced Lou with an upraised hand. “My brave, impetuous young man, you are completely wrong about so many things. Firstly, I do not lie. When I offer Miss Sterne her freedom, and raise the possibility of freedom for Dr. Kori, I am not lying. Why should I? Please do me the honor of granting me honest motives.

  “Secondly, the people of the world already know about your exile. We have not kept it secret. There would be no way to do so, even if we desired to. You cannot whisk away so many prominent men without anyone knowing it.”

  “They … they know?”

  “Of course they know. And they do not care. Do you think that the teeming billions on Earth care about a handful of scientists and engineers?” The Chairman shook his head. “No, they care about food, about jobs, about living space, about recreation and procreation.”

  “But genetic engineering. I thought…” Lou felt as if he were in a glider that was spinning out of control.

  “Ah yes, your work,” The Chairman said. “I admit that if you were on Earth and showing the world, step by step, that it could be done—then there would soon be an enormous demand for it. Catastrophic reaction. Everyone would want his next child made perfect.

  “But today, you are only talking about the possibility of doing this sometime in the future. You might be successful next week, or next year, or next century. I confess that our public information experts have tried to make it sound more like next century than next week. And having you all out of the way has made the job that much easier.”