by John Varley
They prodded me and turned me. They referred to the computer screen, consulted hastily, and apparently decided to pass the problem of the artificial leg on to others. All they were supposed to do was make the wimp look enough like me to fool FBI investigators in 1955. I was just a piece of meat wrapped up like a frozen steak in a supermarket.
The team worked damn well together. Nobody got in anyone else's way, everything needed was always at hand. Literally. They would reach without looking, and it would be there.
They were fast. They sliced that wimp's leg off and kicked it aside the instant it hit the floor. Meanwhile someone was extracting all the wimp's teeth and plugging in new ones that would look just like mine. They hooked up the artificial leg, slashed the wimp here and there in the places where my skinsuit shows scars. They peeled the skin away from her face and began building it from beneath, then closed it again and applied the forced regenerators. It healed without a scar.
But there were scars they wanted the wimp to have. The only way to make those is with a timepress field. When everybody was ready they plugged feedlines from big nutrient tanks into the wimp, connected her ureter and anus to evacuator lines, and jumped back.
The blue glow of the Gate surrounded the wimp. It began to breathe so fast the chest was a blur. Its hair and fingernails grew visibly. It used nutrient fluid so fast that it had to be pumped in, and it emitted urine in a pulsed, pressurized stream that hissed into a tank on the floor. In ten seconds it grew six months older. The scars healed normally.
They then pulled my jeans onto the wimp, inserted a funnel into its mouth and were about to pump it full of half-digested airline food when one of the workers looked at my face.
I mean she really looked at it. She had looked right at me several times before but nothing had registered.
Her eyes grew wide.
When she managed to make them realize who it was they were duplicating, the whole team helped me peel out of the plastic skin.
Things got a little hazy for a time.
I remember looking down at the sleeping face that looked just like mine. Then they were pulling me away from it. There -was a stout aluminium bar in my hands and a rip in the palm of my skinsuit from thumb to index finger. I had wrenched the bar loose from one of the examining machines.
And I had sure made a mess of that wimp.
I regret that. I really do. The thing had been wearing my jeans. and I never did get all the blood out of them.
The head of the wimp-building team trailed me all the way to the door.
He kept trying to apologize and I kept ignoring him If there was blame, it was mostly mine, but I didn't want to say that. Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it. Inside, I was whipping myself severely for pulling a tyro stunt like leaving my squealer in the ready-
room. Outside, I trust, I was at work and the man's apologies simply got in my way.
I had wasted five whole minutes in there. I would never know if those minutes were the margin between life and death for Pinky.
I wasted fifteen more seconds just getting through the door.
There were no procedures for it. The whole goat-sorting operation was designed to prevent anybody getting through easily. But with a few quiet, totally sincere death threats, I managed it. I raced up to Operations, told Lawrence to put every available operative on the search for Pinky's stunner in the city from which the flight had originated -- which I learned was Houston -- got him to extend the bridge again, and ... stepped ... through the Gate.
It was a shambles.
They had looked just about every place it was possible to look, and they had not been gentle. The aisle was knee-deep in torn seat cushions. The carpet was ripped up. The contents of the galley were strewn from nose to tail of the plane. Tiny bottles of booze clinked underfoot.
To make everything worse, the customized wimps began arriving.
So much. time had already been wasted that we had to hurry getting them placed. We seated a few and strapped them in, but most we just threw. We had our portapaks on full power, and we were strong. Instead of just enriched blood, adrenalin, and vitamins -- the wake-up mixture -- we were now getting an insane brew of hyperdrenalin, methedrine, Essence of Hysteria, TNT, and Kickapoo Joyjuice. We picked up those half-corpses and tossed them around like beanbags. I could have tom sheet metal with my eyebrows.
Three-quarters of the wimps had been through the process I had recently seen firsthand.
They looked exactly like the people they were replacing. To save time, the other quarter came premutilated. Most were hideously burned. Some were still smoking.
One is supposed to say the smell of charred human flesh is revolting. It's not actually. It smells pretty good.
Most of the wimps were still breathing. They'd existed an average of thirty years in the wimp tanks, kept alive by machines, exercised mechanically to keep the muscle tone.
Theoretically they didn't have the brains to breathe, but the fact is they were too dumb to stop. Most would still be breathing when they hit the ground.
It didn't take long to get them all through. When we were done we still had three minutes and forty seconds. I sent one of the team back to the future to see if anyone had located the stunner in Houston. The rest of us kept looking for it on the plane. The messenger returned with the expected bad news, and now we had two minutes and twenty seconds.
Pinky had calmed down, if you could call it that. She was no longer crying. I believe she was paralyzed with terror. I found Lilly Rangoon, the squad leader, and pulled her aside.
"I don't know Pinky well," I said. "What does she have in the way of twonkies?"
"Nothing. She's clean." Lilly looked away from me.
That's a rarity. We were talking about such things as artificial legs, kidneys, eyes -- medical implants of any kind that were too advanced for 1955. Pinky was a healthy girl. She would be a great loss to the teams, if for no other reason than that.
At the same time, her lack of medical anachronisms made Lilly's job a little easier. It would have fallen to Lilly to cut those items out and bring them back with us.
"Thirty seconds," someone called out.
"There's a minute leeway," I said. "We'll have to go on the dick. You stay long enough to get her skinsuit and -- "
"Shut your freaking mouth! I know my job. Now get out of my aircraft."
Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. I looked into her eyes. If looks could freeze I'd have been a one-legged pop side.
"Right," I said. "See you in fifty thousand years."
I hurried to the front, where everyone was hanging back, away from the Gate. Nobody wanted to go. Neither did I. It would have been a lot easier to ride it in.
I looked back and saw Pinky hand something floppy to Lilly. I knew it was Pinky, though it didn't look like her, because there was no one else it could be. The floppy thing was her skinsuit. She was no longer a sexy stewardess; without her disguise she was a terrified, naked little girl.
Lilly gave her a salute which Pinky did not have the will to return, and sprinted toward me.
"Start walking through, or I start kicking ass," I said.
They did. I turned to Lilly.
"How old was she?" I asked.
"Pinky? She was twelve."
I didn't make the rule. I'm not trying to absolve myself by saying that. I think it's a good rule. If we didn't have it, I'd write it myself.
No hardware gets left behind. The penalty for carelessness is death. You bring it back, or you stay with it.
We couldn't always work it the way we did with Pinky. That was the best way. It could be done because this flight would hit so hard and burn so fiercely that no one would expect to recover more than fifty percent of the body in any form at all. If they got ten identifiable corpses it would be miraculous, so one girl who shouldn't be there would never be noticed.
Even so, Lilly's last act b
efore leaving the plane was to grab a wimp of about Pinky's body mass and toss it back into the future. The balance is critical.
The worst way? If we'd had to bring Pinky back with us for temporal reasons, Lilly would have stood her up against the wall and shot her. And then, possibly, have shot herself. I had a team leader do that once. "
Nobody ever said it was easy duty.
I came through the right way this time. I still didn't have my squealer, but Operations knew that now, and knew nobody but snatchers would come through the Gate until they closed it for good. Which they were preparing to do.
We all fetched up at the padded Team Recovery Area. Medics were waiting all around us, like crash trucks at an airport. We all made hand signals that we were okay except one girl who wanted a stretcher.
It's traditional just to lie there for five or ten minutes. Our portapaks had automatically returned to normal operation when we passed through the Gate, so our hysterical strength was fading fast. Behind it was the exhaustion the drugs had masked, both physical and mental.
But I had to get up.
"Reward time," I said, as I grabbed Lilly's weapon and headed for the door to Operations.
"One hour at full power. Set 'em up, girls."
"See you in intensive care, Louise," one of them called out, twisting the dial on the portapak strapped to her wrist.
"Tell my dear mom I died grinning, " yelled another.
I ran into Operations and confronted Lawrence. He was going through his checklist preparatory to shutting power to the Gate.
"One of my people is still on that plane," I told him. "I want you to keep the Gate focused on it until it actually touches the desert."
"Out of the question, Louise."
"One of my people is still on that plane, Larry. If she manages to find her weapon she can still come back."
"Do you realize the problems we have keeping the Gate tuned in on a plane that's flying straight and level? Do you have any inkling of how that problem squares and cubes in complexity when it starts to twist and turn on the way down? It can't be done."
There are three settings on a stunner. The first puts you to sleep. The second delivers pain. I let him see me set Lilly's gun on the third notch. I put the muzzle to his temple.
"One of my people is still on that plane, Larry. I have now said that three times."
He managed to bring the Gate to the falling plane twice, once for two seconds, then again for almost five. Pinky didn't come through.
What the hell. I had to try.
I sat on the floor beside Larry's console and watched him supervise the powerdown operation. I asked him if he had any smokes, and he tossed me a packet of Lucky Strike Green. I lit three of them.
When he was through, I reversed the stunner and handed it to him.
"For me?" he said. He took it, hefted it in his hand.
"Do whatever you want with it," I said.
He aimed it at my forehead. I took another drag, and waited. He used the barrel to brush hair away from my eyes, then tossed the weapon to me.
"You don't really care right now," he said.
"No. I really don't."
"That would take all the fun out of it." He folded his arms and leaned back. Well, not really. He didn't exactly have a chair; he was more or less built into it.
His eyes lit up.
"I'll wait till things are going great for you. The next time -I see you smile, you've had it."
Tricky bastard. I did smile, but he didn't ask for the gun.
"Larry, I'm sorry."
He looked at me. We'd been lovers for a while, before he fell apart too much to get around under his own power. He knew my feelings on apologies.
"Okay. My fault, too. Tempers run a bit high during a snatch."
"Don't they, though."
"Forgotten?"
"Until the next time," I said.
"Naturally."
I looked at him and felt a deep regret for what had once been. No, let's get brutally honest here. For what I would one day become. One day real soon now.
Larry had elected to acknowledge his gnomehood all the way. Most of the gnomes at the other consoles looked like anyone else except they had thick bunches of cables running from their backs. Those cables ran into their chairs and down into hundreds of bulky machines in the basement.
Larry hadn't seen any use in living on a leash. If he couldn't leave the building, what was the point of phoney legs? So Larry's chair was part of Larry. It had no back. He sort of grew from it, planted there on the floor in front of his console. He looked like a bizarre chess piece.
From the waist up he looked like a normal human being. I knew most of that was a lie, too. Even when I'd known him he had only one real arm. His face had been hit-and-miss the one time I'd seen it without the skinsuit: nose gone, lips eaten away, only one ear. I didn't know which diseases he had. One doesn't ask I didn't know which parts of him were actually organic; probably not much more than the brain. One doesn't ask that, either.
Nobody but me and my doctor and Sherman know which of my organs and limbs are my own, and I'm happy to keep it that way. I must care, or I wouldn't live in this lying skinsuit pre, tending to be a film star from the year 2034. That's right: the me everybody knows is patterned, down to the last birthmark, on a glamor queen we snatched from a terrorist explosion.
It struck me, sitting there with him in a rare moment of quiet, that when I could no longer carry all my prostheses I would do well to emulate Larry. Then the time for attractive lies would be over. Then it would be time to face, finally, what I am, what all of us here in the glorious future really are.
The Last Age.
I got up and wandered from the Operations room. I found some clothes and got dressed, had breakfast from machines in the Snatch Team Ready-Room, and just sat for a while. I realized the day was still young.
So far it had been pretty typical.
3 "Let's Go to Golgotha"
Testimony of Bill Smith
The chopper pilot told me Roger Keane had already spent three hours at the DC-10 site.
I wasn't quite sure what to do. We had two big planes separated by twenty miles, and seven people to begin the investigation. What I saw below me was unpromising. In the absence of any better guidelines, I turned to my team and polled them.
"I'd like to get out here," Eli said. He'd been looking down at what might have been one of the engine cowlings, and I could see he was eager to get his hands on it. "I mean, what's the difference? We'll see them both eventually so I might as well start here."
"I'll get off, too," Carole said. "It's close enough to those farmhouses that I might get some useful eyewitness accounts. Isn't the other one up on top of a mountain?"
"Yes, ma'am," the pilot said. "Mount Diablo. I doubt anyone was close when it came down."
Craig and Jerry said they'd just as soon start here, too, which left me and Tom Stanley.
"Keep your eyes open for the recorders," I told Craig as he was getting out. The pilot heard me.
"You mean the black boxes?" he asked. "They already got those. I flew 'em back to Oakland an hour ago."
I nodded at him, and jerked my thumb into the air. How the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder got nicknamed black boxes has always been a minor mystery to me.
For one thing, they're usually red. To me, a "Black box" has always been some esoteric gizmo that does something mysterious. The CVR's and FDR's were perfectly straightforward devices. Anybody who could run a car stereo could understand them.
It looked like the 747 had flown a little after the collision. It had plowed a long furrow up the side of the mountain.
Tom and I reconstructed it from the air, hovering over a site that was not nearly so crowded as the other, and which had much more to tell us.
The plane had come in on its belly. The impact had demolished the nose, and probably cracked the fuselage. It had bounced, then bellied down again, and this time the fuselage broke into four
distinct sections, each of which had rolled end over end. There were big hunks of wing to be seen. The engines had been stripped away and were not visible from the air. But the cockpit seemed almost intact, though blackened by fire. That's the thing that makes the 747 unique among commercial airliners; instead of being perched out at the nose -- "first to the scene of the accident," as the pilots like to say -- the flight crew of a, 747 sit high atop everything and well back.
The other large piece we saw was the broken-off vertical stabilizer, still attached to the rear section of the fuselage. That looked good for the flight recorders. I thought I could see a group of people working around it, and asked the pilot if he could set us down there. He said it was too risky, and took us to the assembly area, where a dozen fire trucks and police cars and a handful of ambulances had begun to gather.
It's not like Mount Diablo was really remote. If a single plane had come down there it would already have been crawling with workers. But the other plane had come down in full view of the freeway and had quickly drawn off the lion's share of the available rescue workers. As soon as it was determined there were no survivors from the 747 and thus no real hurry, Roger Keane had decided to concentrate the clean-up at the more accessible site.
Before we were even out from beneath the helicopter rotor a big guy in a yellow raincoat was coming toward us with his hand out.
"Bill Smith?" he said, and grabbed my hand. "Chuck Willis, CHP. Mister Keane's over at the tail section. He told me to bring you up as soon as you got here."
I had time to recall that CHP meant California Highway Patrol, and to attempt to introduce Tom Stanley, but the guy was already off. We followed, and I glanced back to see yellow body bags being loaded into the helicopter we had just left. I didn't envy the pilot his trip back to town. The whole place smelled of jet fuel and charred meat.
We were halfway to the tail section when Tom said, "Excuse me," turned aside, and threw up.
I stopped and waited for him. In a moment, Willis of the CHP noticed he was no longer being followed, and he stopped, too, and looked back at us impatiently.
