Edward Llewellyn - [Douglas Convolution 03]

by Prelude to Chaos (epub)

  “Judy! Thank God they let you out. And still you! I thought I’d never have a chance to explain.”

  “They didn’t let me out, Eugene. I escaped.”

  “You escaped from the Federal Penitentiary? How could you? Nobody escapes from that place!”

  “I have. Mind unwiped. And you’re the first person I had to see. To tell you the truth.”

  “I already know the truth. Or most of it. I realized the truth soon after they’d taken you away. I went to the Director. I went to everybody I could think of. All I could get from anybody was that, guilty or not, it was already too late. You were now a new person, living a new life. I was told not to try to find you. To leave you alone to be happy. And Paxin’s still covered by the Social Stability Act. Judy, they’re clamping down on everything to do with pharmaceuticals. This Impermease business—”

  “Impermease is something else. It’s the facts about Paxin I broke out to publish. If I tell you where my data are hidden, what will you do with them?”

  “What I’ve decided to do anyway. Go to Europe. Visit every research center where there are colleagues I can trust. Tell them the truth about Paxin. It’s Impermease they’re really worried about now, but that Paxin business is still damnable. And the way they murdered Audrey and Jim—the way they treated you—” He shuddered. “Horrible!”

  “Who killed them?” Judith’s voice was fierce and too loud. “I don’t know. At the time I assumed it was you. May God forgive me! Then—after you’d said my life was in danger— that made me think.” Drummond stood back from her and spoke in clear clipped tones. “I don’t know who did the actual killing. But I’m certain about who ordered it. Gerald Fu-trell—the Attorney General! He’s the man who’s running America now, Judy. Only those of us who see the inside workings of the Administration seem to realize it. He’s got the President—all the cabinet—following his orders. He’s using the Impermease disaster to justify every kind of subtle tyranny—”

  “Eugene, are you still in danger?”

  “Me?” He gave a little laugh. “No more than anybody else. They left me alone after they’d frightened me into keeping my mouth shut. And they seem to have forgotten about Paxin. Even if the public knew what Paxin does, I doubt that they’d stop taking it” Through the dusk I could see him pass his hand across his forehead. “With things going the way they are—I’ve used it myself. It helps at times.”

  “I’ve used it too. But not all the time.” She caught Drummond’s arm and turned him to face her, his back to the gate. “If I tell you where the report’s hidden, will you swear to publish?”

  I began to relax, although I still wished she would move him away from the gate.

  “I swear I’ll do my best to have it published. It’ll have to be in Europe. No American journal will touch anything that’s ever been covered by Social Stability.”

  “If you can’t publish in Europe, will you swear to have it duplicated and copies mailed to everybody who’ll understand what my report means?” She was gripping him by both arms, almost shaking him.

  A searchlight struck from across the parking lot. A bullhorn bellowed, “Hold it! Hands high! You’re both under arrest!”

  The tableau held for an instant, then vanished as I shot out the searchlight. Somebody beside it shrieked. A hail of bullets came humming through the trees, ricochets screaming high into the night above the cemetery.

  Judith had reacted the instant I fired, pulling Drummond down with her. Both were flat on the ground. She seemed unhurt. He was moaning, “Judy, I didn’t know. I had no idea!”

  I scrambled to them. He was bleeding. “Back to your car, Judy!” I hissed. “Take off before they cut you off! I’ll follow in mine. Get moving while I cover.” I rolled to the nearest grave as another spotlight flashed on, probing erratically. I shot it out before it picked us up.

  More wild bursts hissed overhead. Judith, her arm around Drummond, crawled away into the darkness. I glimpsed a shadow racing for the cemetery gate, waited for a head to show against the night sky, then hit it with one shot. The shadow dropped into darkness.

  Our attackers were reacting rather than thinking. They had probably slapped a radio transponder onto Drummond’s car as a routine precaution, then sent a team after him to discover what he was doing at dusk in suburban Buxton. When they had seen he was meeting the woman they were hunting They must have assumed they had an easy snatch and gone into their usual brutal drill. They’d met rifle fire and fallen apart, shooting wildly at every shadow they thought had moved. By now they would be radioing frantically for reinforcements, reporting that they had a gang of armed revolutionaries holed up in Buxton cemetery.

  I was moving from grave to grave in the darkness under the trees, firing only when I saw a target. My night sights were proving their value. I picked up a cluster of shadows working their way round the margin of the parking lot and put a burst among them. A woman screamed and the shadows scattered. I turned and ran across graves and gravel paths.

  I had almost reached the far railings when a blow on my left shoulder spun me round and sent me sprawling. I struggled up with my left arm useless. I grabbed my Luger with my right, found the gap in the railings, squeezed through, kicked it closed, and staggered to the Auditor.

  Drummond was hanging onto the door while Judith was trying to drag him away across the dirt road. Lights were coming on in the inhabited houses. When Drummond saw me he made a weak gesture of defiance and Judith shouted, “No—that’s Gavin! He’s my friend. Gavin, help me get Eugene to my car!”

  A chopper roared out of the mists overhead, its search-beam probing among the trees of the cemetery. “Faces down!” I gasped as we crouched by the Auditor, hoping the leaves of the oak tree were thick enough to hide us. Apparently they were for the chopper continued to follow a standard search pattern, methodically angling across the cemetery.

  Drummond hung onto the door. “You’ve got another car? Then go to it, for God’s sake! Leave me. I’m finished. Lungs!” The whistle of air through a puncture wound, the blood he was coughing from his mouth, confirmed his diagnosis.

  “No!” Judith continued to tug at him.

  I hit her with my good arm, knocked her sprawling across the road, dragged her semi-conscious into the overgrown backyard beyond.

  “Help me in!” Drummond had got the door of the Auditor open and was trying to climb behind the wheel. “I’ll decoy!” He spat blood. “Least I can do.” The questing chopper came overhead a second time and its beam flashed off the car. “That thing will follow me. I’ll lead it as far as I can.”

  He wouldn’t get far. I can recognize the face of death on the features of a wounded man. He moaned, “Save Judy! Please!”

  I took him at his word. With only one arm I had little choice. I shouldered him behind the wheel of the Auditor and he gripped it with both hands. “Start the motor!” he gasped.

  I started the motor. “Straight ahead, down the hill, through the underpass, into the cloverleaf.” I was careless of how many innocent motorists he might kill so long as he led the hunters away from Judith.

  “Headlights!” he moaned.

  I switched on the headlights, grabbed my Luger, and stumbled across the road to where Judith was starting to get up. I pulled her down.

  Drummond roared the motor; the tires spun and gripped. The Auditor skidded and swerved away along the dirt road, the picture of a panicked driver. I held Judith down among the weeds as the chopper sighted its target and darted off. Moments later a car came around the comer of the cemetery and roared past, chasing the tail-lights of the Auditor.

  I managed to get to my feet and urged Judith across the yard to the Superb. She was starting to get in when from down the hill came a dull thud. An instant later there was the screech of brakes and a second thud. Judith stood with the door open to stare past the houses at the glow rising from beyond the hill.

  “Oh God! He’s crashed!”

  “He’s hit the underpass!” There was a sullen ru
mble from the valley. “So have the Feds!” The glow was changing from dull red to brilliant white. Hydride packs don’t explode like gasoline tanks nor catch fire as easily. But if they do bum they bum in a feedback combustion, reaching temperatures which turn everything around them into a fine ash. Including bones.

  “Eugene!” She had her hand at her mouth. “He never hurt anyone in his life!”

  “He’s finished it by killing himself and a carload of Feds. With luck they’ll assume we’re among the ashes. It’ll be days before they’ll be able to sift for dental fillings. Maybe they melt. Or maybe they won’t bother.” I was losing orientation in time and space. “For Christ’s sake, get under way while they’re watching us bum!”

  She shuddered, started the car, then noticed my arm hang-lug loose, the blood running down my sleeve. “Gavin, you’re hurt!”

  “Flesh wound. Move us out of here before I get one in the head.”

  “Let me look at it.”

  “Look all you like when we’re on the other side of Frederick. Now—move!”

  She glanced at me as I slumped down in the seat beside her, then turned the Superb up the lighted street. But once we were out of Buxton she parked on a dark lane and I was too weak to protest when she pulled the coveralls and jumpsuit back from my shoulder.

  She studied my wound. “You won’t last to Sutton Cove.”

  I lost consciousness.

  I regained it outside a packaged liquor store on some deserted highway. She was forcing me to drink brandy against my objections that alcohol was not the treatment for gunshot wounds. Then she started to use her panties as a first field dressing, snarling, “They’re clean, dammit!”

  I remember her pouring brandy over the panty-pad. As a disinfectant I supposed. Then pouring the rest over me. Of my gasping, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Disguising you as a drunk!”

  I sank into a fog of alcohol, surfacing later to ask, “Where are you going?”

  “The nearest Settlement. At Sherando. They should take us in.” She didn’t sound certain they would. “I’ll never get you to Sutton alive.”

  I remember waking and watching her face, intent over the wheel, greenish in the dim light from the instrument panel. Of trying to tell her to slow down; she was driving like a mad Mormon. Of waking under the glare of a flashlight; the face of a policeman looming through the open window.

  And Judith saying, “I’m Doctor Zworkin. Here’s my license and ID. This specimen’s my husband—more drunk than damaged. He hit somebody his own size for oncel I’m taking him home to repair.”

  ‘Take him away, lady!” The flash went out and the head disappeared. “Call us if you want help.”

  “Thank you, officer. I Will. But I think the most he’ll be able to do is throw up.”

  A dirt road winding between wet woods. A crowd around the car. Being carried. Lying half-naked on a high table, strange faces around me, Judith bending over me. “Gavin! We’re here! At the Settlement. We’re safe!”

  “You? Are you okay?” '

  “I’m fine.” Her face came closer, gray with fatigue and concern. “I’ve got plasma running into you. You’re out of shock. But your left brachial plexus is damaged. If I don’t operate your arm will be paralyzed. I can’t promise a perfect repair.”

  I remember muttering, “Rewire it right or cut it off.” Then the stab of another needle and she faded away.

  VIII

  The golds and greens of the Shenandoah Valley glistened in the morning sunlight, and away in the distance the Appalachians faded into range after misty range. I sat on a fallen tree to rest from my long walk and enjoy one of the loveliest views in North America. Since my discharge from the Settlement hospital I had made it my custom to go walking in the early morning, exploring a little farther every day as my strength returned. On this May morning I had managed to reach the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains before having to halt and recover my breath.

  The Sherando Settlement was about five kilometers away, a cluster of stone buildings crowning a low hill, surrounded by fields of com and wheat, green pastures and grazing cattle, tree-filled gullies and winding streams. A picture of peace and calm prosperity. The only twenty-first-century intrusion was a bulldozer lumbering doWn the road from the Settlement to continue digging a reservoir at the base of the hill.

  Judith and I had found refuge here, but now that I had almost recovered from my wound it could not be my refuge for much longer. Sherando was a community of Believers, and while I admired their discipline, their organization, and the ordered life they lived, I was not of their simplistic faith. They had welcomed Judith as a fellow-Believer and accepted me only because I was with her. And for only as long as I was not fit to leave. Suspicious of me at first, as they were suspicious of all outsiders, after two months they were beginning to treat me as one of themselves. Which I was not. And neither, I suspected, was Judith.

  They were followers of the Teacher, living a communal life within two hundred kilometers of Greater Washington. During the thirty years since they had founded their Settlement in this Virginian valley they had converted a cluster of tem- j porary buildings into the strong stone houses which covered the crest of the hill. Starting as a band of back-to-the-soil zealots they had developed into the kind of wealthy religious commune many other fundamentalist sects had attempted but few had achieved. Like their Puritan predecessors they were pragmatic and sensible. And like my own ancestors who had settled the northeastern seaboard five hundred years before they were united in the belief that they were the chosen of God. If their God—their Light—existed and had chosen anybody, I knew He had not chosen me.

  Sherando was like a small self-contained city, inhabited by some five thousand self-satisfied citizens. Its founders must have included some wealthy converts or have had generous benefactors, for they had been able to purchase a prime site for their Settlement, and over the years they had continued to expand by buying up neighboring farms. Sherando was now the center of an agricultural complex; an affluent rural community in an affluent urban age.

  It was affluent for the same reason that most Mennonite communities were prosperous. Both consisted of hard-work- j ing farmers who eschewed luxuries and labored for God as well as for themselves. But while the Mennonites avoided such modem conveniences as electricity and horseless carriages, the Believers in Sherando employed any modem device they judged useful. They were digging a reservoir with bulldozers, they ran a high-powered radio station which kept them in contact with Settlements in other parts of the world, and they had a stock of modern weapons stored in their warehouses. They did not use any chemicals developed after 1990, those for some reason had been forbidden en bloc by their Teacher, but their farms were producing crops as rich as any in the valley. Moreover they sold at a premium to the hosts of ignorant city dwellers for whom “organically produced” meant “manure only.” In fact, they used quadravalent carbon compounds as freely as had the farmers of the twentieth century. Only those developed after 1990 were verboten.

  Sherando was a contented and fruitful community. Almost every woman over sixteen seemed to be either pregnant or suckling; its young females were still as fertile as girls everywhere had once been, a fact which outsiders were beginning to notice. Sherando was not my kind of society, but it was one of which I could approve. Judith did not.

  She had operated superbly on my shoulder, but that was the last surgery she had been allowed to do. There were already eight physicians in the Settlement and Judith, unable to give her name and qualifications, had not been accepted by them. In any case a female surgeon would not have been welcomed. The protectiveness of Sherando toward its women limited their scope and, Judith claimed, was reducing them to their old inferiority under the guise of preserving Sherando as an oasis of human fertility. Moreover, although she was as devoted a Believer as anyone there, she was by no means a Puritan. She muttered about “Islamic heresies,” and resented having to live in the hospital while I had
been allotted a room in the Bachelor Cloister. There was no spinster equivalent because there were, in effect, no unmarried post-adolescent women in the Settlement.

  There was certainly a strong Puritan strain in the place; something that Judith insisted was no part of what the Teacher had taught. Personally I found it refreshing to live for a while in a community with a firm moral code, at least while I was too weak to find its sexual restraints uncomfortable. And my stay was only temporary, while it looked as if Judith’s would have to become permanent. Unless she chose to leave with me.

  I did not want to leave until I was fit enough to go after Gerald Futrell, and though Judith had done a first-class job of nerve-splicing I had not yet recovered the full use of my left arm. I was going to need both my arms and all my skills to get within killing distance of him. As Drummond had told Judith the Attorney General was now the power behind the Administration, and was probably better protected than the President.

  So my immediate aim was to stay in Sherando until I had acquired the strength and the means to complete what was my main mission in life. And sitting on the hillside in the spring sunshine I studied Sherando and wondered about ways to avoid being thrown out.

  I could, of course, become a convert. That would have let me stay but would also have subjected me immediately to the rigid rule of life which the Believers either followed or were made to follow. I would have to surrender my guns and my money to the Settlement Council, and I would have to do whatever tasks the Council directed me to do. Nor would it be sufficient to say that I had been converted to the Light; I would have to demonstrate that I had been to the satisfaction of the Elders, the group of older men who ran the place. I doubted whether I could satisfy them; I have no great talent for hypocrisy. Becoming a convert was a stratagem of last resort; my problem that morning was thinking up a way to postpone having to make the committal.