Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "You're back early, Gina. What happened?"

  "We've lost a customer," Tochman said, taking off the helmet after all. "Missing, presumed incapacitated. And our radios suddenly went wonky on us. I want you or Georgie to get on the emergency freaks and ask one of the Traffic Control Platforms to train a telescope down here. They'll be looking for a man-sized white spot—"

  "Covered in gray dust, right?"

  "Oh, hell! That's right," Tochman agreed. "He'll be perfectly camouflaged, won't he? Well, maybe they can see his tracks or something—"

  "No can do, Gina." Syls shook her head. "Our radios went out, too. We've been trying to raise the orbital net for the past ten minutes, but it's a bust. First we had all that static, but it's cleared now and still no go. I don't know—maybe whatever sent that burst of noise burned out the platforms' receivers. We've had no problems on the optic cable, so we've got ground talk going as usual. But nothing in the sky, fixed or incoming."

  The situation was worse than Gina had thought. This was not just an isolated equipment malfunction, but something general, a wide-area burst of radio static. Now what could cause that? Maybe some scientific experiment, something having to do with high energy, somewhere in orbit or at least within line of sight, or—

  No. She would have time to think about it later, when the immediate problem of the missing Mr. Carlin was solved.

  "All right, then we'll do it ourselves," Gina told Sylvia. "You take these people through into Maintenance and then into the corridor beyond. They can disrobe there. And get a medical team up here to check them for hearing loss. That was qiute a burst on the headsets. I know my own ears are still ringing.

  "Meantime," she went on, "you scramble everyone in the complex who is surface-trained. We'll need to do a pattern search, and that will require at least a dozen operatives. We'll need working radios, too, so someone should start testing them. And then—"

  "You can't authorize all this! Think of the costs, Gina. You'll have to put in a requi—"

  Tochman grabbed the woman's shoulders in her gritty gloves, careless about leaving print marks.

  "Listen to me! We've got a man out there. He's middle-aged and confused and frightened. He's probably disoriented, maybe injured. With no radio. And with less than forty minutes of air in his tank. If we don't find him in that time, he will die. And that's not going to look good on anyone's balance sheet."

  "I understand," Syls said quietly. "I'll get these people moving."

  The young woman started gathering in the Moon Walkers, helping them off with their helmets, explaining that they had to clear the garage area.

  Gina Tochman went off to begin organizing her search party.

  Trudge

  Trudge

  Trudge

  Trudge

  In the Tranquility Highlands, 19:42 UT

  Gravel on the inclines crunched and rotated under Gina Tochman's clogs as she topped a rise in the low foothills.

  The slope did not look like much, not when you could still see for a distance of a couple of kilometers from crest to crest. But despite the low gravity, she could feel the strain in her legs and lower back.

  Gina was on the western periphery of the search pattern. At thirty minutes out from the garage, she had little hope of finding Carlin on this pass. Anyway, it was doubtful he would have gone into the hills, unlikely he would have come this far. That would be stupid, even for a green tourist.

  But then, Gina Tochman had been walking continuously, moving methodically, pausing at regular intervals to scan the horizon and tick off the squares on her topo map. Carlin, on the other hand, had probably been loping along, trying to cover ground, and gotten confused when he came among these serried knolls, which were actually behind the resort complex. Here he could easily have fallen and hurt himself, especially if he had landed on a patch of this loose gravel and it rolled under his feet. Almost anything was possible with the Moon Walkers.

  Tochman oriented herself on the ridgeline, arranged the mapboard on her forearm, checked her chronometer, and began her fourteenth visual inspection.

  Clear to the west. Tick!

  Clear to the north. Tick!

  Clear to the—wait! There was a shiny patch to the east, winking like a heliograph. Nothing out here should be moving, not even a collection of mechanical discards.

  "Barney?" she called her team coordinator, overriding the burbles of static which still marred communications. "I've got some unusual movement in Square Q-X-Eight-Niner. I'm moving toward it."

  Gina walked down off the ridge, keeping her eyes on the shiny spot. It disappeared as she went into a gully, but she was trained to walk a straight line out here and expected to recover the glinting object as soon as she mounted the lip of the depression.

  In half a kilometer she topped another, smaller rise and saw the thing again. It was a bright patch on a clear resin helmet, propped against a rock and attached to a dusty gray body that was lying on its back.

  "Barney. I have him at those coordinates." She switched to Walkers' Channel 12. "Mr. Carlin? Are you all right?"

  The figure made no response. But the helmet was still moving, tilting back and forth languidly, as if keeping time to dance music. Then she saw the rise and fall of the suit's chest in counterpoint. The man was gasping his last breaths against a drained bottle.

  Gina rushed to him in three bounding strides. She knelt beside him—and yes, there was the red "12" on his jumper. Beneath the bubble, Carlin's mouth was opening and closing, like a fish at the side of an aquarium. But the fish's face was turning a mottled slate-blue. She put a hand on the man's shoulder to steady him.

  Carlin noticed her and reached down to his waist, turned a knob on his radio.

  "Miss Tochman! Thank God you came… I can't breathe… Something wrong… with my respirator… Think I'm—"

  "Hush now. You're almost out of air, is the problem." She drew a spare canister out of her backpack and showed it to him. "I'm going to give you a fresh bottle, but to do that I have to valve you off. Just hold your breath for two seconds. Can you do that?"

  He nodded frantically.

  Gina reached behind his neck, pulled the fittings loose from the folds of his thermal jumper, and turned the valve lever crosswise. She dropped the coupling from the dead bottle and attached the full one.

  "Okay now, take a deep breath."

  He opened his mouth in a wide yawn. In a second his color was starting to return. When he had taken five or six good breaths, Gina helped him up, checked him for suit tears and broken bones, and opened his jumper to fit the new bottle in his harness, taking the old one into her pack.

  "Can you walk back with me?" she asked.

  "Yes, I think so."

  She switched back to the rescue frequency. "Barney. I've got him in tow. You can probably meet us with a buggy at, oh, Square Q-BB -Two-Five. Copy?"

  "Got you. On my way."

  The two of them started off to the east, toward the resort. After a moment, when they were covering ground easily, Gina thought of something.

  "How did you become separated?" she asked Carlin. "Your radio seems to be working fine. Didn't you hear my instructions? Or the roll call?"

  "Oh, I turned my radio off. That static was hurting my ears."

  "But when you were lost, why didn't you turn it back on?"

  "Every time I tried, I just got more static. And then—well, I just wasn't thinking too clearly." Carlin hung his head sheepishly.

  "That's all right." She tugged his arm. "You're safe now."

  Click!

  Click!

  Click!

  Click!

  Women's Wardrobe, Tranquility Shores, 20:23 UT

  Gina had shed her thermal jumper and utility harness out in the garage. Now, in the privacy of the locker room, she could finally peel off that skin-tight pressure suit and give herself a thorough scratch. Except, here came a sound that didn't change much whether the gravity was a full gee or point-one-six: high heels on tile. Sh
e turned her head toward the end of the aisle and waited.

  The sound found her.

  "There you are, Miss Tochman!"

  It was one of her customers from the Moon Walk: Number 4, Miss Ednara Gladvale, of the Gladvale Uranium Trust—as she was sure to let you know. Gina recognized that voice even without her cuff notes.

  "What can 1 do for you, Miss Gladvale?"

  "I have a complaint to make."

  "I'm sure you do," Gina said. It was a rare slip—but then, she was physically tired as well as stressed out by having to run the search party.

  Miss Gladvale ignored the gaffe. "It's about my camera." The woman pulled a small InstaPrint model out of her handbag. "It was working just fine before we went outside, and now all it makes are these blank, white squares." She showed Gina a handful of exposed prints—totally overexposed, by the look off them.

  "Maybe it's the chemicals in the film," Tochman suggested. "They can evaporate out, you know, if you expose them to vacuum, especially in the heat of direct sunlight."

  "But then the film would stay gray, wouldn't it? Like when it first comes out of the slot," Miss Gladvale said. "Besides, here are some perfectly good pictures that I took early on in the Moon Walk." She offered a smaller clutch of not very interesting snaps, mostly dead-black sky over a dull-gray horizon, with flashes of sun reflecting off rocks and blurs that were the jumpers of the other Moon Walkers.

  "So when did the all-white ones start showing up?"

  "I don't remember, but I think it was after our radios failed."

  "That's interesting," Gina said.

  "'Interesting, hell! I want you to fix my camera."

  "Well, have you tried some fresh film in it? Or taken some pictures inside here, away from the vacuum?"

  "But there's still half a pack in the camera! Why would I waste perfectly good film?"

  "Let's try it," Gina urged, taking the unit and snapping a print of the angry Miss Gladvale. In a second, the slot spit out a square of pearly gray film. They waited the required four seconds. This one also faded to a ghostly white.

  "Huh!" Tochman said. "Now do you have any fresh film—some that wasn't outside?"

  "If you'll pay for it—"

  "I'll pay, don't worry."

  "Then here." The woman rummaged around in her bag and came up with an unopened package.

  Gina slipped the partly used pack out of the camera and set it on the bench beside her hip. She inserted the new film, aimed the lens at Gladvale, and fired offanother shot

  It developed into a not very attractive—but otherwise normal—image of the woman. The hectic spots of color in her cheeks, which came up dramatically in the film's chemical dyes, did not make her seem any younger or more blushing.

  "I'd say your camera was working just fine, ma'am."

  "Well, then…" Miss Gladvale appeared to think about it. "Then I want to take another tour outside—at your company's expense, if you please—so I can get my souvenir pictures. After I come all this way to—"

  "I'll look into it, ma'am," Gina Tochman promised. "I'm sure something can be arranged."

  Chapter 10

  Running From the Darkness

  Mumble

  Rumble

  Grumble…

  BANG!

  Pompeii, August 24, 79 A. D., Ninth Hour

  The breakfast table jerked and danced, spilling a glass of red wine into the soft, white woolen garment covering Jerry Kozinski's lap. That must be a toga. Under it, he could feel he was wearing a linen shirt-thing and short trousers, kind of like a pair of summer pajamas. The loose clothing was comfortable in this hot weather, except where the toga draped over his arms and itched.

  Jerry looked over his shoulder, past the brow of the immediate hillside, and saw that the mountain cone beyond it, Vesuvius, was belching up gouts of black smoke. This was the event he had been waiting for. When the bang came—half a second after an underlit mushroom cloud of ash flew out of the volcano's top—that was his signal to begin running. The game had officially begun.

  Kozinski gathered up the folds of his toga, raised them above his bare knees, and set off through the house at an easy jog. He knew the way out to the street, because his entry point into this Pompeii simulation had been the villa's cobbled atrium.

  Almost before he was started, the toe of his sandal caught on something, and Jerry fell forward. He pitched face-first to the marble floor. Damn, but it was hard stuff! Stars flashed in his eyes and his teeth clicked by motor contraction when his chin connected with the slab. Picking himself up and rubbing at a bloody scrape on the underside of his jaw, with two more patches on each knee, Kozinski looked back to see what had tripped him.

  The marble square had tipped out of its bed of grout by about a ten-degree angle, exposing one sharp edge. Jerry's eyes widened as he realized that the whole floor was now tilted cockeyed. He'd have to watch his step as he went.

  "Master! Master! What is happening?" A terrified slave ran out of one of the side rooms and clutched his ankles.

  "Which one are you?" Jerry asked.

  “Josephus, Master. Your valet."

  "Well, Josephus, I guess it's a volcanic eruption."

  "What are we to do?" the man pleaded, digging in his fingers and rolling his eyes in panic. If this was a simulation, it was all too real. If he was another player, then he would probably get extra points for his acting—if he survived.

  "We have to leave here," Jerry explained. "We can't stay or the ash and lava will trap us. We have to find our way to safety."

  "O Master! Which way?"

  That indeed was the question. Uphill, to the top of their little knoll, might take them out of the lava flow and put them above the level of any poison gas. But they still might get buried in falling rocks and ash. Downhill, toward the bay, offered a possible escape by boat—or by swimming as a last resort. Jerry also had some idea that the cool seawater would protect him from the worst of the heat and gas.

  "Down, through the town," he said, reviewing a possible route through the streets and plazas in his mind.

  "Take me with you!"

  "Yes, come!" Kozinski put a hand under the slave's armpit and hauled him upright. Together, with Jerry slowed up only a little by the pain of his skinned knees, they made their way out to the street behind the house. There the roadway slanted, uphill to the left, down to the right. Jerry and Josephus turned right and ran over the smooth, rounded cobbles.

  Immediately Kozinski sensed a penalty looming behind him. What was the duty of a Roman householder, especially one of noble birth? The game script said nothing about his having family members, so he hadn't thought to search the villa for anyone else. But what about the rest of his slaves? Jerry knew he had them, because they had served his breakfast. Should he have tried to evacuate those people? Or were menials supposed to be beneath his notice, not people at all? Or was panic at the sight of the eruption a sufficient justification for his acting out of historic character?

  Jerry stopped running and looked back to the house.

  "Master, we must go!" Josephus brayed.

  "But the others—"

  "No time!"

  And, in fact, there was no time. As Kozinski watched, the earth shook under his feet again, and the front of the house cracked above the door's lintel. The wall fell in two halves, and the roof collapsed on top of them. Now he could choose to waste hours trying to dig out anyone who was trapped inside—and then they would just die anyway—or he could save himself.

  Jerry spun around and ran with his one slave.

  Down and turn right, down and turn left, the two of them pounded over the paving stones until his feet—poorly supported by the thin leather sandals—were screaming with pain. In the excitement of the escape, suddenly there were people running along beside him. They appeared by twos and tens and twenties, and Jerry never quite saw which alley or doorway they came from. With surprisingly little sound, other than the clop-clop of feet on stone, they all ran downhill.

&nb
sp; Something struck him in the shoulder. Jerry turned his head to see who might be goading him. Nobody was there, but his white toga now had a broad black streak on it. While he was looking that way, a stone about two fingers wide arced down out of the sky and hit him in the arm. Jerry faced about and kept running, conscious now that a flurry of greasy ashes was falling across his vision, like black snow.

  He and the crowd made another turn, onto a street leading into a wide plaza. But before it could empty out, the way inexplicably narrowed. Well, not really without reason: the owners of the houses that faced on the square had overbuilt their walls, encroaching upon the pavement along either side of the street. Jerry, Josephus, and about a hundred others jammed up in this narrow place, packed in against the side walls, and filled the space with their hubbub.

  When all these people stopped moving, the ashes began to gather and cling to their hair and clothing. Jerry ran a hand over his own head and came away with a clot of filth. In another two minutes he would be wearing a helmet of solid black muck.

  Panic immediately gripped him. Everyone had to keep moving, or the volcano would bury them right here… Well, if Jerry Kozinski were really a patrician, this would be a characteristic time for him to exercise his authority. He elbowed the people standing on either side of him and raised his voice.

  "Make way there!" he called to the leading edge of the crowd. "One at a time, you people! Go on through!"

  A woman in front of him turned and glared. "Who the hell are you?" she demanded.

  "I'm Jer—uh, wait!—Marcus Cornelius Sulla! That's who I am."

  "The corn factor!" Her face pinched up with disgust "It's the speculator!" she called to those about her. "Sulla the Speculator!"

  "No, really!" he protested. "I'm an all right guy."

  "Sulla the Speculator!" the crowd took up her cry. "Sulla the Speculator!"

  A man behind him punched Jerry in the kidneys. Jerry moved his arm to protect himself and got it twisted, wrenched, and pushed up behind his back. He looked around for Josephus, thinking the slave might help him, but the man had already disappeared. Somebody kicked Jerry's legs out, and he fell heavily. More blows came down on his head and shoulders. Short kicks pummeled his sides. Each jolt flashed a red glare in his eyes as the simulated pain waves stung him.