Point Ultimate

by Jerry Sohl

  They moved up the beach to the flier again, sat in the shade of it.

  “You got any cigarettes up there, Spence?” Norton asked.

  “Never use them,” Spence said. “You're welcome to my pipe, though. You want it?”

  “Any port in a storm,” Norton said, rising. He took the pipe and pouch Givens offered him through the window of the flier.

  “Why don't you tell Keyes about your father, Stan?” Gillis said. “That will help him understand more about how this thing started.”

  Norton filled the pipe with tobacco. “It's quite a story, Keyes. Quite a story.” He leaned back against a wheel of the flier, smoke from the pipe eddying about his head and being whisked away by the breeze.

  “The bombs fell in nineteen sixty-nine and they were all goners, all of them, every one, all who had been working on secret government projects. My father, Lyle Norton, was an officer on one of the atomic submarines like the one we’ll be seeing soon out there.''' He pointed to the sea with the pipe.

  “He often told me how he felt, having to come back to Norfolk, knowing his work was through. It was the end of the U.S. Navy. The end of all navies, as a matter of fact. Even the Communist navies. What use were they when there were no more wars to fight? But with his qualifications, my father was placed as an engineer in a reactor motor plant.”

  Norton shrugged. “There were many men, men far more brilliant than my father, who had been working on government projects like rocket propulsion and space medicine, preparing the way for flight into space, who were left with nothing when the Communists took over. The commies weren’t interested in space. Why should they be? The world was suddenly their oyster. They had everything. So, most of them, like my father, were assigned to manufacturing centers.

  “But one by one, these specialists disappeared. A man by the name of Dr. Lawrence Brinkham started Manumit in the Rocky Mountains, lured disgruntled scientists to the laboratory he had carved out of solid rock. He and the other few who came worked out a long-range plan there. They had money, buying booster vials from corrupt occupation officers, stealing it when they could not. There were many scrapes, Dad told me. Many deaths. Brinkham even wired the laboratory to blow up if the Enemy ever found it. But they never did.

  “Dad was contacted in nineteen seventy-one. He disappeared and managed to make it to a rendezvous from where he was transported blindfolded to the laboratory. While he was there he married a young woman bacteriologist and I was born in nineteen seventy-six. It was quite a place as I remember it—an enormous, brightly lighted cave, honeycombed with work areas. It would probably look smaller to me should I see it now, for it is still there.

  “Talk about work! Those people knew how to do it. They had drive, a devotion to principle hardly equalled before or since. They didn’t know what sleep was or when to eat or even what they ate. They labored night and day and early in nineteen eighty-four they sent the first space ship up to lay the groundwork for the first space station. They shuttled back and forth for a year completing it. But they didn’t stop with that. They built the second the next year.

  “I was just a kid, but I remember how they talked about whether the Russians would be able to track the ship by radar. But they worried over nothing. They hadn’t realized how far the commies had retrogressed, for the commies didn’t even man radar stations any more. What use were they? There was no enemy to be warned of.

  “In nineteen eighty-six they sent the first space ship around the moon, returning to the space station. The next year the ship went to Mars. In nineteen eighty-eight the first settlement was underway on Mars and flights became a regular thing.”

  Norton studied the bowl of his pipe. “All the time the rest were working on space flight, my mother and other bacteriologists were working their lives away trying to crack the secret of the strain of bacteria the Enemy had developed. But they worked in vain. They were never able to find the answer and booster vials had to be sent along with each ship and it appeared as if they would always have to be provided. And sometimes booster serum was almost impossible to get.

  “It was my mother who devised a method of immunization that has finally become standard. She worked out a system of attenuation, a treatment that resembles the tapering off method used in drug addiction, with the assistance of other serums she devised. She found that if less and less booster serum is given each month, with the help of other antibodies, the blood itself is able to oppose the plague unaided and the person becomes immune and never needs another booster shot. It worked fine on experimental animals, but there was tragedy with the first human volunteers. My mother was among the first five. They all died. But others took up the work and the system was improved and of the second group of five, one survived to become immune. It finally worked out that only one person out of five stands a chance of being immunized this way. And that’s the way it stands today.

  “But money was running out then, sources of booster serum were drying up, and the people in Manumit were tired of being dependent on it. It was decided in nineteen eighty-eight to vote on whether or not all in Manumit should take the treatment, knowing it would be death for four out of five. Everyone wanted to leave Earth, you see, and they wanted to close Brinkham’s laboratories and move everything to the space stations and Mars. This could not be done without their all being immune. The vote was almost unanimous for the treatment. They all took it, those on Earth, on the stations and on Mars. Those who survived buried those who did not. Our numbers shrank from two thousand to a little more than four hundred. My father was among those who survived, but he proved allergic to the dust on Mars and succumbed to it as many others had.

  “By mid-nineteen eighty-nine Manumit was on Mars with only a few immune agents left on Earth. They recruited the first contingent of PW’s who landed on Mars that year and the first child was born—Mars First, he was called. He is ten years old now. It was a small beginning, the colony was small, the hardships almost unbearable, but the nucleus of the immune grew until now there are ten thousand children there, about two thousand women who are teachers and nurses and cooks and everything else you can think of, and three hundred immune men, all preparing for the day when Earth may again be home to them."

  Norton lit his pipe again, puffed it in silence while his brown eyes stared moodily at the sea. Emmett followed his gaze, saw the sweep of beach, the breakers, and thrilled to the magnitude of the ocean and the magnificence of the story Norton had told. He had known that somewhere there would be men who would not be content under domination, that the wisdom of men would work out some way to combat it. And here it was, the Manumit, the thing he had been searching for; the job he must do was clear now. He was no longer a man fleeing one danger and stumbling into the next. He was no longer a single man, a lonely man, searching for the army of the free.

  He had found it. He had found his life.

  Manumit.

  “You may wonder about those two thousand women, Keyes,” Gillis said. “There are ten thousand children, you know, and each of them had a mother on Mars. The women are told when they reach their Point Ultimate that they are going to Mars to have their baby, that they will have treatment for immunization afterward, that only one in five will survive. They are also told that if any wish to return to their homes a flier will take them there. But to this date not one has wanted to turn back. Each wants his child to be born free of domination.”

  “It's a pity the fathers can’t go along and take their chances as well.” Emmett said.

  “Sometimes they do. Its up to the agent in charge of PW recruitment to screen both men and women.”

  Givens leaned out of the flier window. “You through with that pipe, Stan?”

  “I guess so.” Norton stood up, knocked the dottle out of it on his shoes. “Believe me, a pipe will never replace cigarettes. Not that I’m not grateful, Spence.” He handed the pipe up.

  “Ewing’s two miles at sea, Spence,” Gillis said.

  “I heard.”

 
Emmett looked at Gillis. “I’ve been sitting here and you haven’t moved. How do you know this Ewing is two miles at sea?”

  “Because a little metal device behind my ears tells me.”

  “Pushkin mentioned some metal that melts when you die. Is that it?”

  “It’s triggered to do just that when any attempt is made to put an agent under hypnotic control, whether it’s by drugs, brain anesthetic or high cycle probing.”

  “Remember my telling you we have two space stations, Keyes?” Norton said. “One of them is above you in the sky at all times regardless of the day or night. Whatever I say can be heard on Station One right now. Whatever you say can be heard there, too. The little metal transmitters send it out and pick it up. We’re in constant communication with either station and, as a result, with every other agent on Earth. You’ll get yours when you get to Mars.”

  “When I get to Mars?”

  “Of course,” Gillis said, laughing. “What do you suppose we rescued you for? You’re going to Mars, you’ll get your earphones and indoctrination. It will take a year or two, maybe a little more. Then you’ll come back and start to work.”

  Emmett gave him a long look. “You’re in contact with every other agent?” He recalled Johannes’s question about the serial number of the sleeper and his mumbled questions as he sat on the sawhorse in the implement shed. The reason for that was clear now. He was asking the space station for information!

  “Of course. Didn’t I just say so? Why?”

  “You could contact Johannes now?”

  “Through the station, yes.”

  “Well . . .” He tried to control his agitation. “Could you ask about the gypsy band? The one I was with? And—and could you ask about a girl named Ivy?”

  Gillis looked away. “There’s no need to ask, Keyes. I’ve got bad news for you.”

  “Bad news!”

  “Some of it bad, anyway.” He set his lips together, frowned and looked at the sand. “The gypsy band was wiped out. They tried to escape from their captors. The occupation police wanted them to do just that. It makes things easier for them.”

  “Ivy—too?” His voice was a whisper, his hands were clenched at his sides, his fingernails knifing his palms.

  “That news isn’t so bad, Keyes.” Gillis looked up and grinned. “She managed to escape, Johannes said.”

  “Thank God for that,” Emmett said, sighing with relief. “Thank God for that. Does Johannes know where she is?”

  “Well . . .” Gillis put his tongue in his cheek, cocked an eye

  at Norton. “Maybe he doesn’t right now, but--”

  “For heaven’s sake, tell him,” Norton said. “I can’t stand it either.”

  “She’ll be here in about two minutes,” Gillis said. “Johannes said she swore she’d kill herself if she couldn’t see you again, demanded he take her to you. There was just no controlling her, he said. Quite a woman you’ve got there, Keyes.”

  “She’s coming here?”

  “I’d be looking toward those trees, if I were you, Keyes,” Gillis said, getting up and pointing to the woods beyond the beach. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  Emmett jumped up and ran around the flier, shading his eyes with his hand, looking over the treetops.

  First there was nothing, then suddenly a flier zoomed over the trees and hissed past them, making a wide sweep of the beach. It turned and settled softly to the sand near them.

  The door opened.

  Ivy stepped out.

  She stood there, a trim figure, slim and dark, her hair blowing in the breeze, her eyes glowing.

  “Ivy!” Emmett ran.

  Ivy ran.

  He held her close and found she was trembling. He kissed her. He felt her cheek, brushed her hair with his hand.

  “Oh, Em! I was so afraid you were lost,” she said, clinging to him.

  And he kissed her again, wanting to hold her to make sure this was reality and this was really the Ivy he knew and loved.

  “All right,” a voice boomed and Johannes came up to them.

  “Doesn’t an old friend rate? After all, I brought her to you, man."

  The blond man was the same. Tall, strong and blue-eyed. He was smiling.

  “Thanks,” Emmett said, grasping his hand warmly. “Thanks, Johannes, for bringing her to me.”

  “It’s something I’d do for anybody in Manumit, Keyes,” he said.

  Ivy took his arm. “Johannes has been telling me all about Manumit and why all those women were taken across the country and how they go to Mars. ... I had no idea! Why, it’s going to be thrilling, our going to Mars, of all places! Isn’t it wonderful?”

  He brought her around to face him. “Our going to Mars, Ivy?”

  “Of course! You don’t think you could leave me behind, do you?”

  “But you can’t take the treatment, Ivy! Only one out of five makes it. There’s no booster serum on Mars, you know.”

  “I don’t care, Em. I’m going with you.”

  Emmett looked around helplessly. The others looked away.

  He turned back to her. “I love you, Ivy. Believe me, I do. But I don’t want you dead.”

  She looked at him steadily. “I’d rather be dead than left behind, Em.”

  “The sub’s there,” Spence cried.

  They looked toward the sea. It seemed far out to Emmett, that speck on the water. But it was there.

  “We’d better get going,” Gillis said. “Ewing won’t like it if we don’t. He doesn’t like surfacing for very long, you know.”

  They climbed aboard the fliers.

  In a few moments they were headed out to sea.

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