by Ryder Stacy
Charity looked down at the bare-chested hero. Rock was breathing easy. He’d sleep well. And when he awakened, he’d see me, she thought proudly. Good old Charity would be here, instead of those hotheaded girlfriends of Rock’s. Kim, the blonde, didn’t even know Rockson was hurt. She was off in Pattonville. That redhead Rona, then, was Charity’s main competitor for Rock’s attention. She’d been trying to sneak into the medical facility for hours. She gave up only when Schecter told Rona that Rockson was fine, and that he’d be discharged soon.
Charity whistled softly as she dabbed at Rockson. She watched the readout screens too, the screens that showed his strong pulse and respiration, that monitored his blood sugar and white blood cells. This was her time to get him. Charity was determined to have the hard-muscled hero for herself.
Coming into focus in Rock’s eyes was a buxom beautiful nurse. Rock recognized her. “Charity!” he smiled, “how are you? Or more important, how am I?”
“You’re in one piece,” she replied, and said, “but don’t sit up.”
He started to disobey her, winced, thought twice of it, and stayed prone. He felt cool, and no wonder. He used his hands to cover up.
“How come I’m—er—”
“Naked?” She didn’t blush. “You needed a bath. Don’t worry, Mr. Rockson. I’m a professional. There isn’t going to be any hanky panky.”
“Oh . . . too bad.” Rock reached for her thigh, which was swathed in sheer white pantyhose. She didn’t pull away very fast, but let him have a squeeze. Then she straightened her miniskirt.
“Now, now,” Charity said. “You need some rest—and more treatments from Schecter—before you can do anything.”
“Killov,” Rock said, snapping his finger, “I didn’t kill Killov! The man was an impostor! Does Central Command know that?”
“Yes, of course,” Charity said. “Time for your temperature.” She leaned over slowly to plunge the thermometer into his mouth, revealing plenty of cleavage. When she removed the thermometer Rock smiled wanly. “When can I leave here?” He tried to sit up again. “Ouch, what the hell hurts so much?”
“Your stitches. They’ll self-destruct when your wounds heal. Don’t make any fast moves till then. Follow Nurse’s orders and you’ll get a nice treat later,” she promised with a hint of lasciviousness. “My, my, you seem to be getting well already.” She threw him a towel to cover his awakening interest in her. “Do I have to strap you down? I bet Schecter that you’d try to walk right out of here the minute you came around. You should be thankful you have all your equipment intact.” She smiled, “You’re crazy, you know, going down that awful hole after Killov.”
“Yeah,” Rock frowned, “it was kinda dumb. Say, does Rona know—”
“Yes,” Charity huffed, “your red-headed girlfriend knows you’re okay. But Schecter said you should rest here. And he left this for you.” She went to a cabinet and picked up a cigarette-like object. She lit up the chi-stick, sucked on it, then put it to Rock’s lips. He accepted it, took a little drag, then exhaled from his nose. She took it away from his lips. “Doc Schecter said you need a toke of one of these twice a day. Clears the blood. Now roll over, slowly, onto your stomach. I have to apply some moxi-bustion cups to your back. That’s to stimulate your immune system. You know the procedure.”
“Yeah,” Rock frowned, “but I still don’t cotton to it. This blend of Eastern and Western medicine Schecter’s concocted makes me uneasy.”
Ignoring his misgivings, as most nurses did, she pushed a glass bulb against Rock’s upper back. She lit a small paper afire and slipped it under the glass. The fire went out, but the flame’s consumption of air in the glass caused Rockson’s skin to pucker up violently into the glass cup.
“That hurts!”
“It works,” the nurse replied. “Would you rather have a basalt enema?”
“Do you administer it?”
“Fat chance, hero,” she bristled. “Hold still for more moxi-cups.” As Rockson endured the placement of six more, she explained, “Schecter and your Chinese friend Chen have been working to integrate the best of Western medical science with the ancient Tibetan-Mongolian healing arts ever since that exchange program last year. You can’t imagine the power of this. I’ve seen such treatments restore burned, singed lungs! And those chi-sticks! Why, just smoke a few puffs, and—”
“They taste worse than that hundred-year-old pack of Pall Malls I found in the archaeology dig up at Benkill,” he complained. “And these torture devices on my back! Do you work for the KGB?”
“Nursey knows what’s best.”
He stared soulfully into her eyes and she nearly came in her pink panties.
The therapy continued for most of the early morning. Rockson was treated to salt and mineral baths, shocked by small doses of electricity on his earlobes, burned by moksha puncture sticks, needled with a hundred carefully placed acupuncture needles. “I’m not a goddamned pin cushion,” he complained at last. But whenever he got too upset, she let him have a long look down her cleavage—by accident, of course. Her short white skirt would ride up sometimes, too. And when she bent over, those pink panties made him forget his discomfort.
The therapy worked rapidly, and Rockson sat up now. She allowed him a few sips of ginseng-laced broth.
Schecter returned to the hospital at 10 A.M., quickly stuck his ice-cold stethoscope on Rock’s massive chest, and said, “Well, I don’t know how you do it, but you’re back to normal health. Normal for a mutant, that is. Now put on your clothes, Rock, and get the hell outta here, before that sexy nurse I shoved into the other room seduces you into exhaustion. By the way, the council has—”
“I know,” Rock frowned, “they have a job for me.”
Schecter nodded. “Democracy is a real hard taskmaster, Rockson, my boy.”
Rock slipped into his blue workshirt, buttoning it wrong. Then he pulled his olive fatigue pants off a hook and jumped into them. “What is it the council wants?” he asked. “Has another of our free cities gone fascist? Somebody stub their toe in Utah?”
“Lots worse than that, Rock,” Schecter replied grimly. “The council instructs me that they wish urgently to see you in their main chamber in . . .” he looked at his watch “. . . one hour and five minutes. Be there. Go shave and clean up, but that’s all! Don’t be late.”
“Want to know a funny thing?” said Rock, rubbing his stubbled chin. “I usually don’t have to shave—my mutant genes must have been altered by those weird treatments Charity had been giving me.”
“Yes, hair growth is a harmless side effect. Chen assures me that the Tibetan drugs promote hair growth on the chin, but that’s the only side effect. Maybe I should try some of that stuff on my thinning scalp. No—I’d better not, could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Rock moaned. “You and Chen and Nurse Ratched out there were sure anxious to try out those weird drugs on me, but you won’t take it yourself! Thanks a lot!”
Schecter laughed, “No, no, Rock—it’s all perfectly safe. I mean, it might be dangerous for me to change my looks. People respect this balding head of mine. All the drugs you took were made of natural ingredients. Some of those pills you took were made of herbs gathered in Mongolia, 12,000 feet up the side of a mountain. Those Mongolian mosses have different effects on different people, of course. There have been reports that they—er—can act as a sort of aphrodisiac.”
Rock snorted. “Likely story. I’ve been an unwilling guinea pig, and now you’re sorry.” He gave the old man a tap on the arm. “Get yourself another experimental subject.”
Rock avoided going through the anteroom of the clinic in order to avoid Charity, on the way out. The nurse had pressed the key to her room into his hand just before Schecter had come in. He’d see her later.
But he did not avoid another female. He was grabbed, and squeezed so hard that his ribs hurt. “Rona, ease off,” he complained. “I’m sore all over.”
“But you’re alive,” the beaming redhead
replied. “Is everything okay? You didn’t lose—any parts?”
“I’m all there, but it needs a workout.” Rockson scooped Rona up into his arms and walked down the corridor with her toward the elevator leading to Section B and her suite. She rubbed his stubble. “Hmmm . . . you need a shave.”
“Yeah, I guess we’ll have to go to my room.”
“You can use my Lady Remington laser razor, honey. I don’t want to go to your mess-of-a-room. Not to make love. It’s better at my place.”
Rock caught a glimpse of the nurse peeking out the doorway after them.
She didn’t look happy. Not one bit.
Three
Two hours later, Doctor Schecter raced down the hallway toward Rona’s pink-painted door. He’d been sent by the council president to find Rockson. He’d already been to Rockson’s room, and found it empty. Damn! What was the matter with the man? The council had been waiting an hour for Rockson. They didn’t like to be stood up; not one bit.
Huffing from his exertion, Schecter reached the pink door, knocked loudly with his gold pinky ring on the wood. He didn’t get an answer. No wonder, for someone in there had their stereo all the way up, playing some godawful music. Heavy Metal? He thought that was what they called it. Heavy Metal: a recently unearthed—and better left buried—form of so-called 20th-century pop music. Unfortunately the ancient recording was restored, along with a copy of a beautiful Aaron Copeland piece, uncovered in the ruins of the same radio station.
Not to be daunted in his mission, Schecter screwed up his face in disgust and tried the doorknob. It turned and he let himself in. The music was now intolerably loud. And there was the fabulous and famous “Doomsday Warrior”—he was dancing around in the altogether; and so was his girlfriend.
Rona screamed and jumped into bed and pulled the covers up over her pulchritudinous beauty. Rock just stood there, wiggling his—everything. “Hi, Schecty-baby.”
“Well,” Schecter huffed, turning his face. “Get dressed at once. Unless you want to come to the council in the raw.”
“I don’t mind,” Rock winked at Rona, who was shouting something about getting Schecter the hell out of her boudoir.
“Hey Schecty-man, come and join the party,” Rock insisted. “Don’t you like Judas Priest?”
“HummphI Not at all!” With big strides of his mechanical legs the brilliant old scientist scooted over to the teak wall unit. He reached over to the stereo and turned the volume much lower, though he did not turn it off. Rockson would get very mad, Schecter knew, if he turned it off completely. Then Schecter pulled out the material he had jammed in his belt and waved the sheaf of 8-by-10 photos in the air toward Rockson. “If you can stop dancing and put on at least your skivvies, I have to show you something awesome.”
Rockson bounded like a ballet dancer to his closet, opened it, and dived in. He emerged in a remarkably short time dressed in red coveralls, the ones with the Century City emblem of crossed comets on its left front pocket. “Hand me those things. I’m ready. What’s so awesome?”
Schecter handed over the glossies as the Judas Priest “Sad Wings” album ended—at last. “Thank God,” the scientist muttered, and before Rock could start the CD over, Schecter hit the power button. The lights on the stereo unit died. He blocked Rock from the unit, saying, “Just sit down at your desk and study the photos. You’ll see what’s awesome.”
Rock shuffled through the pack of photos like they were a deck of cards, almost too quickly for the human eye to see. “Astro-photo plates?” Rock asked. “Why show me these? It just looks like some part of the solar system. So what?”
“You’re a fast study, Rock. Really, I wish the hell I could CAT-scan your brain to see what makes it tick . . .”
Rockson frowned, “You know you can’t do that to psi-ability people—it screws up their ESP. Besides, even if it wouldn’t mess up my abilities, I’d be afraid you’d remove my brain, put it in a jar for study.”
“Especially to find out what’s wrong with your sense of music appreciation, Rock. By the way, didn’t you ever hear of headsets? You can hear that trash all the way down on E deck.”
“The photos, Doc, what about the photos?”
“Oh, here, give me those!” The shaky age-spotted long hands of Schecter fumbled through the sheaf of glossies until he hit the fifth one. Then his long nailed index finger pointed out a short white line across the view of countless stars. “That one, that particular line—an object has moved. Quite a bit—it’s between Uranus and Neptune now. It’s—”
“An asteroid. So what?” Rock was not impressed.
“A new asteroid, Rockson. A damned new one. The first discovered in twenty years.”
Rock rolled his eyes. “So, I’m impressed! Congratulations! I suppose you’ll call it Schecter 2099A? Why not Rockson 2099A—right? Look, if you want me to come to the celebration party and bring my Judas Priest record,” he mocked, “I will.”
“Get serious, Rock, damn it! You won’t be so happy when you hear this.” Schecter whispered conspiratorially into Rockson’s ear. “Keep this under your hat! This new asteroid is headed toward Earth. It’s going to hit us! Only the council knows this as yet.”
As Rockson blanched, Rona smiled, “Hey, what are you two up to?”
“I have to take your hero away for a while, Rona.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Yeah, baby,” Rock said a little too softly, “I’ll have to go now, to see the council.”
“Make sure you come back here as soon as you can. It’s my day off.”
When Rockson and Schecter left the room, the scientist snapped, “First we go to the observatory. The council told me to bring you on a leash, if necessary, back to their chamber by 2 A.M. That’s another hour. I want you to see what we’re up against while we have the time. Besides, I have to verify some crucial data.”
The scientist led the Doomsday Warrior to the Railjet subway line that ran beneath the city. Rockson rode the tiny two-seater pneumo-car with the old man up the steep incline to the observatory at the top of Ice Mountain, a nearby peak.
“Schecty-man,” Rock complained, when they exited the rail car to walk into a vast, dimly lit domed room. “Can’t the heat be turned up in here?” He rubbed his hands together.
“No! Put on one of those down jackets over there. We can’t have temperature changes in this place—disturbs the optics. It’s fourteen degrees outside, and it’s fourteen in here. That’s perfect for observations.” The scientist walked over to a control panel, sat down, and started hitting the buttons to set the huge telescope in the center of the circular floor. It was an old Schmidt sixty-inch-aperture photo-telescope. There was a hum, and the dome above slid open. The perfectly clear Colorado sky, filled with stars, appeared in that widening gap.
“I’ve always found astronomy fascinating,” Doc said. “We have only recently set up this telescope. Found it buried in a huge mound of nuclear war debris in Boulder, Colorado—used to be a university there. Took a month to haul it to Century City and another month to get it up the mountain and into this building.” He adjusted a few more dials and then walked with Rockson over to the huge tubal instrument. “Here, look into this eyepiece, Rock. Don’t fog it with your breath.”
Rockson did as asked. “God! It’s the asteroid! You can see its shape; it’s like a potato.”
“A potato fifty miles wide, Rock! And note the strange geysers and dark spots on its surface. All quite unusual. The asteroid is somewhat like the head of a comet. That’s our only hope.”
“Hope?”
“Yes. Perhaps, as the asteroid gets closer to the sun, those geysers will spout out more violently and shift the course of the asteroid.”
All this time the old computer bank was chugging and blinking over in the corner. “What do you have on the Mega-Cray?” Rock asked. “Sounds like it’s having a nervous breakdown.”
“Whenever it’s cold it creaks,” Schecter laughed. “It’s the old
hard disks. But it’s perfectly sound. Ah! Hear that beep? The computer has the problem I gave it this morning. Let’s have a look.”
Rock was glad to go into the other room and sit down in a warm, cushioned chair. Schecter brought up some data on the computer screen with a flick of his fingers. “Here it is—Yes! Good! Interesting!”
Rockson leaned over the old man’s shoulder and squinted at the screen. His eyes were good for night vision, but they always hurt when he stared at a VDT screen.
“It’s wobbling, and its color is changing,” the scientist said. “It’s as if it were alive. As if it were some—evil god. Years ago, the scientific community started naming asteroids after ancient Roman and Greek gods. Most of those names are used up already. Too bad, for come to think of it, I don’t want something that’s going to destroy the Earth bearing my name . . . I’ll call it—Karrak! Karrak was the old Mesopotamian god-of-bad-news. An apt name!”
“You’re telling me you’re sure it’s going to hit us?”
“Ah, here is the latest plot of the asteroid’s orbit. Uh-oh . . . no good news here, Rock. See, the orbit of the thing is a wavy ellipse. Fascinating! No wonder we never knew about Karrak! It would never have gotten near Earth if the nuclear catastrophe hadn’t happened in the twentieth century. That nuclear war altered the earth’s orbit ever so slightly. Watch. Here’s the old plot of the orbit of the asteroid. See, Rock? It goes way off. And here,” the scientist pressed a button and the lines reconfigured, “here is the new orbit of the Earth. The asteroid will hit us in—” he pressed another key. “In three weeks, almost exactly.”
“That’s it? We’re all gonna die? The Earth will be blown to Kingdom Come in three weeks?”
“Yes! But I intend to do all the observing of Karrak I can until then. There is some sort of radio emission from the asteroid, too.”
