Seedling

by James Axler

  They all looked around.

  "What's that?" Mildred asked, stopping and picking something up from the floor.

  Krysty frowned. "What is it?"

  Mildred uncrumpled it and held it out flat on her palm. It was a torn wrapper, made from a recyc pa­per, silver-colored with red lettering. "N-Urgee Bar," it said.

  "Energy," Doc explained.

  In smaller letters it said "pecan and cinnamon."

  Mildred lifted the paper and sniffed at it, shaking her head. "Yeah."

  Krysty took the wrapper from her and pressed it against her nose. "Fresh as—"

  "Tomorrow's sunrise," Ryan finished, breathing in the scent of pecan nuts, overlaid with the spicy tang of cinnamon. Fresh and unmistakable.

  J.B. reached for it. "This can't have been here more than a few days. Couple of weeks at the most."

  Doc had last go at the wrapper. Pressing his veined nose to it, he breathed in a great gush of air.

  "Careful, or he'll suck it up that great hooter of his and we'll never see it again," Mildred warned.

  "Either my sense of smell has deserted me or you four have breathed all the smell away. I confess I can barely catch a hint of cinnamon."

  "This starts weird and gets weirder, lover," Krysty said. "Fresh coffee and now this bit of paper. Some­one's been here very recently. That I can really feel."

  "Let's go look out that door," Ryan suggested. "We can't walk away." He looked at the open cham­ber and the far door. "Safer I go in while you lock this inner door after me." For a moment he thought Krysty was going to raise an objection, but she said nothing.

  "I'll watch through this window, and if there's any trouble—any—I'll open up here. You close the outer door, Ryan."

  "Sure." There wasn't a better man in Deathlands than J. B. Dix to have at your back.

  "Listen," Mildred said, "if these gauges are any­where near right, you'll have to pull hard to open that lock. But once you do, the air could leak out faster than goose shit off a shovel."

  "Hold your breath, my dear Ryan," Doc suggested.

  "And keep your powder dry," Mildred added.

  "Best foot forward, lover."

  "Shoulder to the wheel."

  "Chin up, chest out."

  Ryan looked at the grinning quartet of friends. "Why don't you all place an implo-gren up your asses and pull the pin?" he suggested.

  IT TOOK BOTH HANDS to work the control wheel, which meant Ryan's blaster remained tucked in his belt. Previous nightmare experiences in alien gate­ways had taught the one-eyed man to take extreme care or suffer the likely prospect of instant death.

  Despite the dials showing lower air pressure out­side, Ryan took no chances. For all they knew the re­doubt might be buried five hundred feet below an ocean, and to release the locking mechanism could mean a burst of seawater surging in with lethal force.

  He was aware of J.B.'s face pressed to the arma-glass window. His friend was ready to react at a nanosecond's warning to any threat.

  "Lock's shifting," Ryan said, his own voice heavy in his ears, the chamber muffling sound.

  There was an audio link from the main room. "Slow," the Armorer said.

  The wheel suddenly spun free between Ryan's fin­gers. He braced himself against the door, but noth­ing happened. Wiping a film of sweat from his forehead, he took the handle and began to pull at it. "Jammed," the one-eyed warrior growled.

  He braced his boot against the frame and heaved with all his strength, losing patience with caution. Then there was a great hiss of air, and the door moved toward him.

  Ryan glimpsed a bright light and a flash of limit­less desert. Then his lungs emptied, and he sank helplessly into a clinging swamp of suffocating blackness.

  Chapter Three

  "HEAD FEELS LIKE a bunch of stickies have been dig­ging around inside it."

  Mildred patted his head. "Man like you, Ryan, lit­tle loss of oxygen shouldn't be a problem. Thanks to J.B. getting you out in time and shutting the inner door."

  Ryan had already thanked J.B. for his swift re­sponse to the danger. Now he stood and joined the others by the airlock.

  "Want a look out, lover?" Krysty asked.

  Ryan took a deep, slow breath. His chest and throat hurt, and his skull was throbbing with a vicious, sick ache. The dials around the doors hadn't been faulty. The air outside was much thinner than the air within the complex.

  "I still don't understand it," he said finally. The far door remained ajar, giving a tantalizing glimpse at what lay outside the redoubt.

  They were obviously very high up, with a land­scape scrolled beneath them. It looked like late morning or early afternoon, with a bright coppery sun hanging in a sky that ranged from palest cerulean on the left side to a rich pinkish-purple on the right.

  As far as Ryan could make out through the blur­ring armaglass, the land was untouched desert.

  Rolling dunes stretched as far as Ryan's eye could see. Nothing moved. Nothing seemed to grow there. No bird flew across the flawless dome of the sky.

  "Nothing," J.B. said, as taciturn as always.

  "Nothing," Ryan agreed.

  "Not even air we can safely breathe," Mildred added.

  "So we get out of here and try another jump to some other place," Krysty offered.

  Doc groaned. "Oh, my aching heart and limbs. Oh, my muddled puddled fuddled head! Can we not remain here for a day or so?"

  "And do what?" Ryan asked.

  "Explore the remainder of the redoubt. There may be all manner of wonders. Gold from the Incas, or fine silver from the wily Pathan of the high hills. Who knows?"

  Ryan smiled and shook his head. "I know, Doc. I know."

  "How do you know, old friend?"

  "Because there isn't any fucking redoubt here, Doc."

  "What?"

  "Look around you. There's the control room. No other exits. One door into the gateway. One outside. Nothing else at all."

  "There has to be a redoubt."

  He looked stricken, hooded eyes darting from one friend to another. Then the old man realized Ryan was correct. Apart from the double airlock where they stood, the only other door bore the familiar sign: Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All Except B18 and Above Personnel. All Personnel Must Have NASA-SEC Clearance Pass at All Times.

  "Most said B18 Personnel, and I've never seen anything about that NASA-SEC pass before, ei­ther," he said.

  "Yeah." Krysty ran her fingers through her mane of red hair. "New to me, too. You see that before, lover?"

  Ryan was staring out through the small pane of armaglass, past the open door to the strange world be­yond.

  "Lover?"

  "Best get moving," he said, turning away. "Into the gateway, now." The crack of command rang on the last word.

  Nobody asked him why, and nobody hesitated, questioning what he'd seen. All followed him across the control room, through the bare anteroom and into the red-walled chamber.

  J.E was last, firmly shutting the door behind them. They sat on the floor, trying to get comfortable for the jump.

  Only then did Krysty pose the question they all wanted to ask. "What did you see, lover?"

  "Don't know. Wish we could have shut that outer door. Could've been that bringing it toward us. Kind of scented it."

  "What?"

  Then the mists came flowing from floor and ceil­ing, and the lights flickered. The mat-trans jump put an end to the conversation.

  STRANGELY IT WASN'T as painful a jump as the pre­vious one. All recovered consciousness quite quickly, though Doc suffered a nose bleed that dappled his swallow's-eye kerchief with clots of crimson.

  This time the walls of the chamber were a very pale golden color. As soon as Ryan was able to sit up and take notice, one of the first things he saw was a large vertical crack running from floor to ceiling on the wall directly opposite the gateway door. It was an ominous sign of deterioration.

  J.B. followed his gaze, then looked around the chamber. "There's another crac
k in the floor in that corner over there. See it?"

  Ryan nodded. It wasn't as long or deep as the frac­ture in the wall, but it was worrying.

  Krysty ran a hand down the main flaw in the wall. "Doesn't go clean through, lover. If it had, we might all have leaked into hyperspace, or wherever it is we slurry off to during a jump."

  The sudden image of his molecules being dissi­pated through an infinite universe sent a chill down Ryan's spine. "Let's get out of here before the walls fall down around us. Ready?"

  The room immediately adjacent to the gateway was larger than usual, about fifteen feet square, and dec­orated in a pale yellow that matched the color of the armaglass.

  There was a steel table, one of its legs bent almost at right angles, stuck in a corner. A row of coat hooks jabbed out from the wall on the right. One of them held a torn white T-shirt. The rest were empty.

  Krysty stood still and breathed in slowly while the others waited for her. "No," she said. "Nothing here. The air's very stale and flat."

  Ryan could tell that for himself. So many of the hidden redoubts he'd entered had the same sour smell, a strange dullness that lingered on the tongue, flavored with a hundred years of buried nothingness. Often it bore a hint of damp.

  The control room was also bigger than usual, with eight rows of consoles, screens and comp-lights. Three out of the eight rows were down, blank and dead.

  This time the outer door was conventional, mas­sive sec steel, with automatic opening and closing in­structions as well as a manual override lever.

  "Looks like a clean evacuation," J.B. com­mented, holstering his Steyr pistol.

  "Shall I open it up?" Krysty asked, reaching for the opening controls.

  "Slow down," Ryan said. "That last one made me more careful than before. Best use the hand lever. Easier to open an inch and shut quickly. Once those autohydraulics engage, they sometimes take time to reverse."

  "Allow me, my dear young lady." Doc offered her a courteous bow, his silver hair tumbling forward to hide his face. Unfortunately the jump had made him a little unsteady, and he nearly fell over.

  "I've got it, Doc," Rrysty replied. The green lever was in the closed position, and she began to push it upward. "Stiff," she grunted.

  Doc had recovered his self-possession. "I trust we shall not be gazing out over the trackless wastes of Mars or Jupiter or wherever that last jump took us." He grinned mirthlessly, showing his perfect teeth.

  None of them had actually verbalized where the previous jump had taken them, though Ryan had wondered if they were still on Planet Earth.

  Krysty let go of the lever and looked at Ryan. "Which reminds me, lover. You never did tell us just what it was you saw through that window that made us get out triple fast."

  "Don't know."

  "What?"

  "I didn't know then, I don't know now and I guess I'll never know."

  Mildred pressed him. "Must have some idea, Ryan."

  "Sure. My idea is that it was something real big, partly buried under the sand, and it was coming our way like a run-out war wag."

  "Animal?" J.B. queried.

  "Alive." Ryan shook his head. "No point in ask­ing me any more, 'cause there isn't any more to say. Let's get this door open."

  The door was raised about three inches. No jet of foaming water had gushed through, no sand, no wriggling creatures.

  Once again Ryan missed Jak Lauren. The skinny little teenager would have been flat on the concrete, face pressed to the gap, reporting what lay beyond.

  Now it was up to Ryan to get on his hands and knees and put his face against the cold floor. He squinted with his good right eye, trying to see under the huge sec door.

  "Narrow passage. It's not like most redoubts. Ten feet across. Poor lighting. Can't quite… Yeah, lower ceiling, as well. Not a smell of anything moving."

  Krysty and J.B. were working the control lever to­gether. At a nod from Ryan they threw their com­bined strengths behind it and heaved it upward.

  "Blasters ready," Ryan reminded, holding his own gun steady.

  The door hissed slowly open, revealing the corri­dor outside. The air was still and flat, with the char­acteristic underground, tomblike smell.

  Krysty confirmed it. "Nothing shaking down here."

  "Should I close the door behind us?" Doc asked.

  "Sure. No, not yet. If this is one of those buried redoubts and we're jammed down here, I'd hate to find we have a malfunctioning door, as well. Let it be."

  Mildred pointed to a single neat piece of graffito on the near wall. Hand-lettered in white, it simply said Goodbye Cruel World. We're All Going to Join the Circus.

  "Cool dude," she said. "Must have done that at the last minute as they were finishing the evacua­tion."

  "No sign of any footprints around." J.B. crouched, head cocked to one side, the dim overhead lights re­flecting off the lenses of his glasses.

  The passage curved away both left and right, with no sign of any other doorways.

  "Which way?" Doc asked.

  Ryan shrugged. "Try left first."

  It was a dead end, a blank wall of raw stone, roughly smoothed down, a seam of quartz glittering like pewter in the half-light.

  "Right," Ryan said with a grim smile.

  "SOMETHING ODD about this place," J.B. pro­nounced, walking alongside Ryan at the head of the group. "Small, you mean?"

  "Yeah. It reminds me somehow of the gateway we found in Russia that time."

  Ryan held up a hand and they all stopped. "We haven't passed a single doorway in nearly two hundred yards. I think you've got an ace on the line. This isn't a full-scale redoubt at all."

  "Stairs ahead, lover. I can just see them. Terrible light. If only Jak was… You know."

  "I know."

  Rrysty took him by the arm, her eyes fixed to his face. "I sometimes thought… Don't laugh at me for this…"

  "Won't."

  "That Jak was kind of like the son you never had. You ever think that?"

  Ryan took a deep breath, nodding slowly. "Course I did. And you did the same, didn't you?" He waited a moment, watching her face. "Sure. Krysty, there's still plenty of time."

  "Is there?" she said bitterly. "Oh, is there plenty of time, Ryan?"

  "Yeah. There is. And when the time's right, we'll do like we've said. Stop and rest and find that quiet place."

  "And raise us a family. Boy for you and a girl for me…" Her emerald eyes were dull, oddly lifeless. She turned away, letting go of his arm.

  "Krysty…?"

  "Forget it." She moved toward the stairs ahead of them. Her hand came up to brush back the bright hair, which was now gathered protectively around her face. Ryan wasn't certain, but he thought she was crying.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS A wide staircase with broad treads and a sturdy handrail. Ryan joined Krysty at its bottom, followed by the other three. "See the top?" he said, aiming to restore peace.

  "No." Her voice sounded a little strained and muffled. She coughed. "Dust in my throat. Sorry, lover." Krysty touched him lightly on the arm, so they both knew what she meant.

  "Goes high," J.B. observed, straining his head back.

  "Must've been an elevator," Mildred suggested, looking around them. "We haven't passed any other entrance or exit, and all that techno-shit must have been brought down some other way. They'd never have manhandled it down those stairs, would they?"

  "Fair point and fairly put, Dr. Wyeth, if I may say so."

  "You may, Dr. Tanner, you may."

  "There." Ryan pointed. "The sort of design that makes an elevator look like part of the wall."

  The doors were painted slate-gray, textured so that they resembled the concrete walls on either side. Ryan was surprised to see that it was only a single elevator.

  It contributed more fuel to his idea that this wasn't a normal redoubt at all. Apart from anything else, it felt smaller.

  The neat black button was set into a mat-gray panel, with a tiny silver
arrow pointing up.

  "Probably sec-listed personnel only," J.B. said.

  "Let's see." Mildred reached out and pushed the button.

  Nothing.

  Mildred pressed the button again. From some­where above they all heard the sound of gears engag­ing, a grinding hiss, then a steady, whirring noise.

  "By the…" Doc began, his jaw dropping in amazement.

  Ryan's blaster had leaped into his hand, respond­ing to a subconscious reflex. J.B. had also drawn his pistol.

  "Taking a long time to come down to us," Krysty complained, head on one side, listening to the sound of the elevator's steady progress.

  There was the distinctive pinging noise of its arriv­al, a sound that meant nothing to Ryan, Krysty or J.B., very little to Doc and everything to Mildred.

  "Sweet Jesus on the Cross!" she exclaimed softly. "The thousand memories that thin little bell brings back to me."

  The doors slid open about an inch, then stopped moving.

  "Press the button again," Krysty suggested.

  Ryan did, but nothing more happened. He gave the doors an angry kick, the steel toe caps denting the gray finish. The metal quivered, then the doors jerk­ily began to open again.

  The elevator was nearly twenty feet across, far larger than ones that Ryan had seen in ruined build­ings across Deathlands. Its walls were plain gray, with a small rectangular mirror set in one. There was a simple control panel near the open doors. Inside was a rusting bicycle wheel and a battered black hat.

  "Nothing else," Mildred said in a surprised voice.

  Ryan stepped into the elevator, keeping a cautious eye on the heavy doors. He bent and examined the wheel and the hat. "Just garbage," he concluded.

  He chucked them out. The hat flopped like a dy­ing bat into the corner by the stairs. The wheel clat­tered and jangled, spokes breaking, until it rolled against the corridor wall.

  "Now what, lover?"

  He brushed dirt off his fingers. "I don't see much choice about the direction. Up. Only choice is how we do it. Feet up the stairs of ride the elevator. Anyone got any feelings about that?"

  "I never liked elevators," Doc told him. "Always had the feeling the cables would snap."