One Million Tomorrows M

by Bob Shaw

  But nobody at the camp had any reason to kill him— before last night none of them had ever seen him. Carewe filled his lungs with golden light, suddenly aware that his new clothing had shed er water and he was almost dry, if a little grubby looking. He pulled the tunic’s solar screen over his head to shut off the growing heat of the day, and began to walk more quickly. The rainstorm rose higher and higher until he could hear it as an ominous hissing and growling which disturbed the morning air. Somewhere up above, at the limits of the stratosphere, men and machines were at work manipulating the elements and, through them, the minds of other men. The concept dismayed Carewe, who understood what was happening and was part of it. What had it done to the people in the Malawi village, he wondered, when they discovered the sky itself had turned against them?

  Mists began to writhe across the track ahead of him, and he saw the outlines of men and vehicles. The storm now filled his whole vision with roiling grayness and cold tendrils of moist air touched his face, while the fierce heat of the sun played on his back. The air was filled with imminence; the whole of creation was unnatural, a scene lit by floodlights, while the stage managers in their sub-orbital flight controlled the effects. Carewe zipped his tunic tighter around his throat.

  “What’s your name?” The man’s voice came from the open door of a parked trailer.

  “Carevve. I’m with Farma.” Carewe fumbled for his identification.

  “It’s all right. Go ahead—Mr. Storch’s expecting you.” “Thanks.”

  “You’ll find him about a kilo down the track.” The speaker put his beard-shadowed face out into daylight, and surveyed Carewe curiously. “Where’s your transport?”

  “Back there—I had some trouble. Can you give me a ride?”

  “Sorry. No vehicles beyond this point.” The man disappeared immediately.

  Carewe shrugged and kept on walking. Within a minute visibility had dropped to fifty paces and the rain was spattering around him, but the solar screen deflected it, maintaining him in a cocoon of dryness. After five minutes of plodding through red mud he neared a group of about thirty men in pale green armor. One of them detached himself and came towards Carewe. He was a thickset funkie with patient, quizzical eyes and a sunburned face which managed to be handsome in spite of a nose which had been crushed sideways and a white scar which interrupted the line of the upper lip.

  “I’m Dewey Storch,” he said, holding out his hand. “They told me you had arrived, but where’s your armor?”

  Carewe shook the offered hand. “It’s in my floater.” “

  You’ll have to go back for it. Didn’t they tell …” “

  I can’t. It’s at the bottom of that river back there—the floater sank right in the middle of it.”

  “How do you mean sank?” Storch&8217;s brown eyes scanned Carewe’s face.

  “I mean it in the usual sense of going straight to the bottom.” Carewe began to feel impatient. “The engine cut on me and I was lucky to get out.”

  Storch shook his head slightly. “I still don’t get it. You say the engine cut on the river—but didn’t the flotation balloons inflate?”

  “Flotation balloons?” Carewe’s jaw sagged. “There was no sign of them—she went to the bottom like a stone.” He fell silent, trying to assimilate the fresh information. If an emergency system had failed to operate at the time of the freakish engine failure, the odds against it being accidental were thrust into a new order of magnitude.

  “This will need looking into,” Storch said. “They must have given you a vehicle that was partly stripped for maintenance. That kind of failure just shouldn’t happen.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Carewe replied heavily. “I nearly didn’t get out.”

  Storch examined him with a concern Carewe found gratifying. “I won’t ask you to come into the village with us today. If you walk back to the trailer you can get …”

  “I’d prefer to go with you.” Carewe needed to get his baptism over with, but he wanted even more—and for no reason he could pinpoint—to make a good impression on Storch. Perhaps it was something as pathetic as a desire to show that beneath the exterior of a cool he was still a “man.”

  “We’re short-handed, Mr. Carewe, but I couldn’t allow you to take that much of a risk.”

  “It’ll be entirely my own responsibility.”

  Storch hesitated. “All right, but stay well to the rear and don’t come forward till I signal. Got it?”

  “Right.”

  The group moved off down the trail. From the desultory conversation Carewe learned that the Malawi settlement was not really a village, but a scattering of dwellings in clumps of up to a dozen which spread over perhaps four square kilometers. The sub-unit which lay just ahead was the first to be tackled in the operation, and there was no telling what sort of reception the team would get. Preliminary reports indicated the Malawi had no firearms, although nobody was sure how reliable the information was.

  When the first of the thatched huts came in sight the group fanned out and blended into the foliage. Carewe got the impression they were not amateurs like himself. He moved in behind a tree, self-consciously, feeling like a kid playing cowboys, and waited for something to happen. There was silence except for the constant blurry voice of the rain.

  Suddenly he saw the Unations men ruing, their green armor glinting like the body segments of giant insects. They raced through the slow-churning mists, closing in on the huts. Carewe’s heart began to pound unpleasantly as a faint scream reached him. It was followed by hoarse shouts and more screams which quickly reached a crescendo, then a return to comparative calm. Storch’s blocky figure appeared, waved to Carewe and vanished back among the huts.

  Carewe ran forward reluctantly and reached the dwellings. The armored men had rounded up a group of about twelve dispirited-looking tribesmen. Most of the natives were kneeling in the mud, but several were struggling and being held with difficulty. Women and children were watching from the entrances of the huts, and from these came occasional ululating sobs. One of the kneeling men had an ugly gash on his scalp, from which crimson deltas mingled with rain coursed down his back. Looking at the blood, Carewe felt a slow stealthy retraction of his testicles. He was gripped by a cold repugnance for what the Unations men were doing.

  “This is our anthropologist, Dr. Willis,” Storch said beside him “Go around with him and administer a shot to any man he judges to be sixteen or over.”

  “Sixteen! That’s the official limit?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “It seems early to be …”

  “We’re dealing with Fauves, Mr. Carewe. Fauves. Don’t get notions about depriving anybody of the butterfly touch of first love, or anything like that. At sixteen some of these people ought to be worn out.”

  “It still seems early,” Carewe said stubbornly, glancing sideways at Willis, who was a cool with white eyebrows like gull’s wings.

  “I know what’s on your mind, Mr. Carewe,” Willis said. “But we are dealing with men who have rejected all the values of our society. That’s their privilege, of course—we don’t relish forcing immortality on anybody. But, by the same token, we will not permit them to inflict death on others.”

  “This isn’t the time or the place for an indoctrination talk,” Storch put in crisply. “I advised you to go back to the camp and rest, Mr. Carewe. If you aren’t up to the work you’re only wasting your own time and that of everybody else. Now, are you going to administer those shots and let me move on to the next part of the village, or do I have to stay here and do it myself?”

  “I’ll do it,” Carewe mumbled, opening his pouch. “I’m sorry—perhaps I’m shaken up a little.”

  “It’s_ all right.” Storch made a signal and four men joined him. The splinter group quickly moved away among the huts.

  “Start with those three.” Willis pointed at the natives who were under restraint. Two of them quieted instantly, but the third redoubled his efforts to break free. He
wn his early twenties and his arms were massive, with a slight varicosity of the biceps which told of long hours of punishing work. The two men holding him were almost lifted off their feet as they executed a grotesque, slithering dance in the mud. Carewe lunged forward with the hypodermic gun at the ready. The native, his face contracted with fear and hatred, threw himself backwards so violently that the two armored men went down with him.

  “What are you waiting for?” one of them snarled disgustedly.

  “Sorry.” Carewe ran around them, came up behind the native and fired the gun into the corded neck. The native went limp. A few seconds later the Unations men released him tentatively, and got to their feet. Carewe worked his way around the others, relieved at the submissive way in which they held out their wrists for the shots, yet despising them for it at the same time. He kept his eye on the first man he had treated and saw him walk dejectedly to the door of a hut, where a tall young woman took him in her arms. She brushed away some of the mud clinging to the vest which was all that covered his torso, like a mother fussing over a child. Her eyes, shining in the dimness under the hut’s eaves, opened and closed slowly, twin heliographs flashing Carewe messages at whose meaning he could only guess. I gave up too soon on Athene: the thought exploded in his head like a grenade. I ought to get back to her.

  “That takes care of this lot,” one of the armored men said, wiping sweat and rain from his stubbled face. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Carewe’s mind was filled with thoughts of Athene. “How about the women?”

  “We don’t bother with them—they usually come into one of the Unations treatment centers as volunteers. It’s up to them.”

  “Oh.” Carewe put the hypodermic gun in his pouch. “They don’t count.”

  “Nobody said they don’t count. They never go raiding, that’s all.”

  “Everybody acts so fairly,” Carewe commented. He watched the others get ready to move off in the direction Storch and the advance party had taken. “Just a moment, please. I want to speak to the first man we treated.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it, new boy.”

  Carewe felt the action was inadvisable too, but in his mind the native who had fought so hard against the shot represented himself. The black Carewe had not received E.80 into his bloodstream and tissues, however, so Carewe had all the advantages. He picked his way through the staring men and children in the central clearing and went to the hut where the mud-splattered native was standing with bowed head. The woman moved into the darkness of the but as he approached.

  “Do you speak English?” he said uncertainly.

  The man raised his head and his eyes locked with Carewe’s like pi Unatliding into sockets, a silent interface of hostility, then he turned his face to the wall.

  “I’m sorry,” Carewe said inadequately. He was turning to rejoin the Unations team when the woman emerged from the hut in a blur of frightening speed. She closed with him, her hand glinting with steel, then backed away. Carewe stared into her triumphant face for a long moment before looking down at the knife protruding from his chest.

  He was kneeling in the mud, still shaking his head in disbelief, when the Unations team came back for him.

  IX

  “It was a very old knife,” Dewey Storch commented. “That’s what saved you.”

  Carewe stared soberly at the ceiling of the trailer in which he was lying. “How am I?”

  “You’ll survive. The blade had been honed down till it was more like a thin spike—not the most efficient of weapons.”

  “I’m not complaining.” Feeling no pain, Carewe tried to sit up in the narrow bed.

  “Take it easy,” Storch said, firmly pushing him down. “Your right lung got punctured, and the medic has collapsed it.”

  “Collapsed it! Does that mean…?”

  “It’s a temporary thing. Gives the lung a rest, that’s all.” Storch looked over his shoulder at someone beyond Carewe’s field of vision. “Isn’t that right, Doc?”

  “Absolutely,” a man’s voice said. “There’s no need for alarm, Mr. Carewe. Your lung bled internally for a while, but we’ve put a stop to that and drained off the blood. All that’s necessary now is to give the lung a rest.”

  “I see.” Carewe felt ill at the thought of one of his lungs lying limply inside his chest. He turned his senses inwards as he breathed and realized, for the first time in his life, that the process of taking in air began not with the lungs but with the muscles of his rib cage. The ribs rose, expanding the organic bags attached to them and causing vacuum-seeking air to rush in through the nose and mouth—except that in his case only one lung was operational. Half-expecting to feel starved for air, he concentrated on breathing steadily while he was carried out of the trailer on a stretcher and put in an ambulance.

  Back at the base, he was carried into a medium-sized dome which served as a medical center. There were three other beds in the single ward, but they were unoccupied, and the afternoon air was filled with a buzzing peacefulness. A female nurse visited him every thirty minutes, and a medic called Dr. Redding looked in twice to see how Carewe was and told him he would be shipped out the following day. Both treats filth a kindly efficiency, which served only to make him feel depressed and inadequate. Fauve teams throughout the world were notoriously short of help and rarely turned away an able-bodied volunteer, but all along he had felt that the old hands regarded themselves as a cadre of professionals who occasionally had to humor well-meaning amateurs. The Beau Geste syndrome, Kendy had called it. Carewe had no idea who Beau Geste was, but he had a feeling the morning’s exploit would cause some hilarity in the Unations club’s huge circular bar when night came. He allowed himself to drift off to sleep, hoping he would dream of Athene and the warm secure past….

  In the evening, when white moths were thudding at the windows, he had a succession of visitors which included Kendy, Storch, Parma and some faces dimly remembered from his beer-sodden induction. Parma was the only one who expressed what appeared to be genuine regret at Carewe’s scheduled departure, his silver-stubbled face solemn as he offered to smuggle in some beer from the club for a farewell celebration. Carewe refused gratefully, and when the old funkie had gone asked the nurse for a sedative. He swallowed the banded capsule and stared stoically at the ceiling, waiting for it to take effect.

  Much later he awoke with a conviction that something was wrong. He glanced at his wrist and stared for a moment at the blank skin before remembering that the Nouvelle Anvers region was too far from a grid transmitter for his watch to work. A footstep sounded beside the bed. A swarthy young man in medical whites was holding out a glass of water and a pale blue pill.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Carewe,” the stranger said in a low voice. “It’s time for your GP booster.”

  “What’s it for?” Carewe demanded drowsily.

  “Dr. Redding doesn’t take any chances with wounds—it isn’t considered healthy in this part of the world.”

  “Well, I suppose I …” Carewe raised himself on one elbow and took the glass of water. He accepted the pill without further comment and was raising it to his mouth when he noticed that the stranger’s fingernails were rimmed with dirt. He brought his eyes to a bleary focus in the wan light and saw the network of ingrained grime on the back of the man’s hand.

  “Just a minute,” he said, struggling to shake off the effects of the sedative, “are you sure Dr. Redding wants me to take this?”

  “Positive.”

  “Suppose I refuse?”

  “Listen, Mr. Carewe”—the words carried an undertone of urgency—“do us both a favor—just take your medication, huh?”

  “I’ll take it after I’ve seen Dr. Redding.” Carewe tried to study the stranger’s face but his head and shoulders were above the cone of light from the bedside lamp.

  “All right, Mr. Carewe—I don̵t want to fight with you.”

  The man held out his hand and Carewe dropped the pill into the palm. An instant later he was
smashed downwards under the weight of the white-clad body and a powerful hand was pressed over his mouth. The pill clicked and ground against his teeth. Filled with an icy certainty that if the pill got onto his tongue his life would be ended, Carewe tried to throw the attacker off, but his knees were trapped in the bedding. The hard hand clamped his nostrils, depriving him of air, which meant he could hold out for only a matter of seconds. As his vision reddened, Carewe became aware of a smooth object in his left hand—the glass of water. Holding it by the base he thrust upwards at the dimly seen face. Water cascaded down his arm as the glass shattered, and suddenly he could breathe again. The stranger scrambled away, moaning, holding his lacerated cheek together with one hand and producing a knife with the other. Carewe frantically threw the bedclothes off and rolled out of bed on the opposite side, hit the floor and kept on going in the direction of the doorway, with pursuing footfalls close behind. Something was slapping around inside his chest like a piece of wet leather. One part of his mind made the sickening discovery that it was the collapsed lung, but the main focus of attention was on escaping before he got a knife thrust in his back. He exploded through the swing door, saw another leading to the general office and shouldered it out of his way. The office was empty. He snatched a black wooden carving from the top of a desk and turned to defend himself, but the stranger had vanished. The only sound was the unsynchronized slapping of the swing doors. He ventured out into the entrance hall just as a white-clad figure appeared in the black rectangle of the outer door. Carewe raised his improvised club, but the newcomer was the female nurse who had attended him earlier.