Presently, no lights were visible. Only the green fog remained. It continued to creep out beneath the impersonal moon, moving out and across and through until it remained and nothing more.
Schruille watched the stacked numerical analogues, the unemotional reporters which merely counted, submitted deductions of sortings, remainders … zeroes. Nothing showed Folk dying in the tubes and warrens, in the streets … at their labors … at their play.
Nourse sat weeping.
They are dead, all dead, he thought. Dead. The word felt peculiar in his mind, devoid of personal meaning. It was a term that could be applied to bacteria perhaps … or to weeds. One sterilized an area before bringing in lovely flowers. Why do I weep? He tried to remember if he’d ever wept before. Perhaps there was a time when I wept, he thought. But it was so long ago. Ago … ago … ago … time … time … wept … wept. They were words suddenly without meaning. That’s the trouble with endless life, he thought. With too much repetition, everything loses meaning.
Schruille studied the green fog in his screens. A few repairs, and we’ll be able to send in new Folk, he thought. We’ll repopulate with Folk of a safer cut. He wondered then where they’d find the safer Folk. The globe’s analysis boards revealed that the Seatac problem was only one of many such pockets. Symptoms were everywhere the same.
He could see the flaw. It centered on the isolation of one generation from another. Lack of traditions and continuity became an obsession with the Folk … because they seemed to communicate no matter what repressions were tried. Folk sayings would crop up to reveal the deep current beneath.
Schruille quoted to himself: “When God first created a dissatisfied man, He put that man outside Central.”
But we created these Folk, Schruille thought. How did we create dissatisfied men?
He turned then and saw that Calapine and Nourse were weeping.
“Why do you weep?” Schruille demanded.
But they remained silent.
15
Where the last skyway ended, the van took the turn away from the undermountain tube, and held to the wide surface track on the Lester by-way. It led upward through old tunnels to the wilderness reserve and breeder-leave resorts along an almost deserted air-blasted roadbed. There were no slavelights up here, only the moon and the stabbing cyclops beam of the van’s headlight.
An occasional omnibus passed them on the down-track, the passenger seats occupied by silent, moody couples, their breeder-leave ended, heading back to the megalopolis. If any of them focused on the van, it was dismissed as a supply carrier for the resorts.
On a banked curve below the Homish Resort Complex, the Cyborg driver made a series of adjustments to his lift controls. Venturis narrowed. Softness went out of the ride. Turbines whined upward to a near destructive keening. The van turned off the roadbed.
Within the narrow box that concealed them, Harvey Durant clutched the bench with one hand and Lizbeth with the other as the van lurched and bounced across the eroded mounds of an ancient railroad right of way, crashed through a screen of alders and turned onto a game track that followed the right of way upward through buck brush and rhododendrons.
“What’s happening?” Lizbeth wailed.
The driver’s voice rasped through the speaker, “We have left the road. There is nothing to fear.”
Nothing to fear, Harvey thought. The idea appeared so ludicrous he had to suppress a chuckle which he realized might be near hysteria.
The driver had turned off all exterior lights and was relying now on the moon and his infra-red vision.
The Cyborg-boosted vision revealed the trail as a snail track through the brush. The van gulped this track for two kilometers, leaving a dusty, leaf-whirling wake to a point where the game trail intersected a forest patrol road—a cleared track matted with dead sallow and bracken from the passage of the patrol vehicles. Here, it turned right like a great hissing prehistoric monster, labored up a hill, roared down the other side and to the top of another hill where it stopped.
Turbines whined down to silence and the van settled onto its skids. The driver emerged, a blocky stub-legged figure with glittering prosthetic arms attached for its present needs. A side panel was ripped off and the Cyborg began unloading cargo, tossing it indiscriminately down through a stand of hemlock into a deep gully.
Within their compartment, Igan lurched to his feet, put his mouth near the speaker-phone, hissed, “Where are we?”
Silence.
“That was stupid,” Harvey said. “How do you know why he’s stopped?”
Igan ignored the insult. It came after all from a semi-educated dolt. “You can hear him shifting cargo,” Igan said. He leaned across Harvey, pounded a palm against the compartment’s side. “What’s going on out there?”
“Oh, sit down,” Harvey said. He put a hand on Igan’s chest, pushed. The surgeon stumbled backward onto the opposite bench.
Igan started to bounce back, his face dark, eyes glaring. Boumour restrained him, rumbled, “Serenity, friend Igan.”
Igan settled back. Slowly, a look of patience came over his features. “It’s odd,” he said, “how one’s emotions have a way of asserting themselves in spite of—”
“That will pass,” Boumour said.
Harvey found Lizbeth’s hand, clutched it, signaled, “Igan’s chest—it’s convex and hard as plasmeld. I felt it under his jacket.”
“You think he’s Cyborg?”
“He breathes normally.”
“And he has emotions. I read fear on him.”
“Yes … but …”
“We will be careful.”
Boumour said, “You should place more trust in us, Durant. Doctor Igan had deduced that our driver would not be moving cargo unless certain sounds were safe.”
“How do we know who’s moving cargo?” Harvey asked.
A look of caution fled across Boumour’s massive calm.
Harvey read it, smiled.
“Harvey!” Lizbeth said. “You don’t think the—”
“It’s our driver out there,” Harvey reassured her. “I can smell the wilderness in the air. There’s been no sound of a struggle. One doesn’t take a Cyborg without a struggle.”
“But where are we?” she asked.
“In the mountains, the wilderness,” Harvey said. “From the feel of the ride, we’re well off the main by-ways.”
Abruptly, their compartment lurched, slid sideways. The single light was extinguished. In the sudden darkness, the wall behind Harvey dropped away. He clutched Lizbeth, whirled, found himself looking out into darkness … moonlight … their driver a blocky shadow against a distant panorama of the megalopolis with its shimmering networks of light. The moon silvered the tops of trees below them and there was a sharp smell of forest duff, resinous, dank, churned up by the van and not yet settled. The wilderness lay silent as though waiting, analyzing the intrusion.
“Out,” the driver said.
The Cyborg turned. Harvey saw the features suddenly illuminated by moonlight, said, “Glisson!”
“Greetings, Durant,” Glisson said.
“Why you?” Harvey asked.
“Why not?” Glisson asked. “Get out of there now.”
Harvey said: “But my wife isn’t—”
“I know about your wife, Durant. She’s had plenty of time since the treatment. She can walk if she doesn’t exert herself.”
Igan spoke at Harvey’s ear, “She’ll be quite all right. Sit her up gently and help her down.”
“I … feel all right,” Lizbeth said. “Here.” She put an arm over Harvey’s shoulder. Together, they slid down to the ground.
Igan followed, asked, “Where are we?”
“We are someplace headed for someplace else,” Glisson said. “What is the condition of our prisoner?”
Boumour spoke from within the compartment, “He’s coming around. Help me lift him out.”
“Why’ve we stopped?” Harvey asked.
“There is steep
climbing ahead,” Glisson said. “We’re dropping the load. A van isn’t built for this work.”
Boumour and Igan shouldered past them carrying Svengaard, propped him against a stump beside the track.
“Wait here while I disengage the trailer,” Glisson said. “You might be considering whether we should abandon Svengaard.”
Hearing his name, Svengaard opened his eyes, found himself staring out and down at the distant lights of the megalopolis. His jaw ached where Harvey had struck him and there was a throbbing in his head. He felt hungry, thirsty. His hands were numb beyond the bindings. A dry smell of evergreen needles filled his nostrils. He sneezed.
“Perhaps we should get rid of Svengaard,” Igan said.
“I think not,” Boumour said. “He’s a trained man, a possible ally. We’re going to need trained men.”
Svengaard looked toward the voices. They stood beside the van which was a long silvery shape behind a stubby double cab. A wrenching of metal sounded there. The trailer slid backward on its skids almost two meters before stopping against a mound of dirt.
Glisson returned, squatted beside Svengaard. “What is our decision?” asked the Cyborg. “Kill him or keep him?”
Harvey gulped, felt Lizbeth clutch his arm.
“Keep him yet awhile,” Boumour said.
“If he causes no more trouble,” Igan said.
“We could always use his parts,” Glisson said. “Or try to grow a new Svengaard and retrain it.” The Cyborg stood. “An immediate decision isn’t necessary. It is a thing to consider.”
Svengaard remained silent, frozen by the emotionless clarity of the man’s speech. A hard, brutal man, he thought. A tough man, prepared for any violence. A killer.
“Into the cab with him then,” Glisson said. “Everyone into the cab. We must get …” The Cyborg broke off, stared out toward the megalopolis.
Svengaard turned toward the strings of blue-white light glittering far away and cold. A winking golden flare had appeared amidst the lights on his left. Another blazed up beyond it—a giant’s bonfire set against the background of distant, moon-frosted mountains. More yellow flares appeared to the right. A bone-chilling rattle of sonics shook him, jarred a sympathetic metal dissonance from the van.
“What’s happening?” Lizbeth hissed.
“Quiet!” Glisson said. “Be quiet and observe.”
“Gods of life,” Lizbeth whispered, “what is it?”
“It is the death of a megalopolis,” Boumour said.
Again, sonics rattled the van.
“That hurts,” Lizbeth whimpered.
Harvey pulled her close, muttered, “Damn them!”
“Up here it hurts,” Igan said, his voice chillingly formal. “Down there it kills.”
Green fog began emerging from the wilderness some ten kilometers below them. It rolled out and down like a furious downy sea beneath the moon, engulfing everything—hills, the gem-like lights, the yellow flares.
“Did you think they would use the death fog?” Boumour asked.
“We knew they would use it,” Glisson said.
“I suppose so,” Boumour said. “Sterilize the area.”
“What is it?” Harvey demanded.
“It comes from the vents where they administered the contraceptive gas,” Boumour said. “One particle on your skin—the end of you.”
Igan moved around, stared down at Svengaard. “They are the ones who love us and care for us,” he mocked.
“What’s happening?” Svengaard asked.
“Can you not hear?” Igan asked. “Can you not see? Your friends the Optimen are sterilizing Seatac. Did you have friends there?”
“Friends?” There was a broken quality to Svengaard’s voice. He turned back to stare at the green fog. The distant lights had all been extinguished.
Again, sonics chattered through them, shook the ground, rattled the van.
“What do you think of them now?” Igan asked.
Svengaard shook his head, unable to speak. He wondered why he had no sensory fuse system to shut off this scene. He felt chained to awareness through sense organs gone abnormal beyond any previous experience … a permissive aberration. His senses were deceiving him, that was it. This was a special case of self-deception.
“Why don’t you answer me?” Igan asked.
“Leave him alone,” Harvey said. “We’ve griefs of our own. Haven’t you any feelings?”
“He sees it and does not believe,” Igan said.
“How could they?” Lizbeth whispered.
“Self-preservation,” Boumour rumbled. “A trait our friend Svengaard doesn’t seem to have. Perhaps it was cut out of him.”
Svengaard stared at the rolling green cloud. So silent and stealthy it was. The great reach of darkness where once there had been light and life filled him with a raw awareness of his own mortality. He thought of friends down there—the hospital staff—embryos, his playmate-wife.
All destroyed.
Svengaard felt emptied, incapable of any emotion—even grief. He could only question, What was their purpose?
“Into the cab with him,” Glisson said. “On the floor in the rear.”
Ungentle hands lifted Svengaard—he identified Boumour and Glisson. The driver’s unemotional quality confused Svengaard. He had never before encountered quite that abstract detachment in a human being.
They pushed him onto the floor of the van’s cab. The sharp edge of a seat brace dug into his side. Feet came in around him. Someone put a foot on his stomach, recoiled. The turbines came alive. A door was slammed. They glided into motion.
Svengaard sank into a kind of stupor.
Lizbeth seated above him heaved a deep sigh. Hearing it, Svengaard was roused to a feeling of compassion for her, his first emotion since the shock of seeing the megalopolis die.
Why did they do it? he asked himself. Why?
In the darkness, Lizbeth gripped Harvey’s hand. She could see in an occasional patch of moonglow the outline of Glisson directly ahead of her. The Cyborg’s minimal movement, the sense of power in every action, filled her with growing disquiet. The scar of her operation itched. She wanted to scratch, but feared calling attention to herself. The Courier Service had been a long time building its own organization, deceiving both the Cyborgs and the Optimen. They’d done it partly through self-effacement. Now, in her fear, she sank back into that treatment.
Through their hands, Harvey signaled, “Boumour and Igan, I read them now. They’re new Cyborgs. Probably just a first linkage with implanted computers. They’re just learning the price, shedding their normal human emotional reactions, learning to counterfeit emotion.”
She absorbed this, seeing them through Harvey’s deduction. He often read people better than she did. She reread what she had seen of the two surgeons.
“Do you read it?” he signaled.
“You’re right. Yes.”
“It means a total break with Central. They can never go back.”
“That explains Seatac,” she signaled. She began to tremble.
“And we can’t trust them,” Harvey said. He pressed her close, soothing her.
The van labored up through the foothills skirting open meadows, following ancient tracks, an occasional streambed. Shortly before dawn, it swerved left down a fire-break and into a stand of pines and cedars, squeezed its way through a narrow lane there with its blowers kicking up a heavy cloud of forest duff behind. Glisson pulled to a stop behind an old building, moss on its sides, small curtained windows. Pseudo-ducks with a weedy patina and grass-grown signs that they hadn’t been animated in years, made a short file near the building—pale moon-figures—in the light of a single bulb high up under the building’s eaves.
Turbines whined to silence. They could hear then the hum of machinery and looking toward the sound saw the dull silver outline of a ventilator tower among the trees.
A door at the corner of the building opened. A heavy headed man with a big jaw, stoop-shouldered, emerged bl
owing his nose into a red handkerchief. He looked old, his face a mask of subservience.
Glisson said, “It’s the sign. All is safe here … for the moment.” He slipped out, approached the old man, coughed.
“A lot of sickness around these days,” the old man said. His voice was as ancient as his face, wheezing, slurring the consonants.
“You’re not the only one with troubles,” Glisson said.
The old man straightened, shed the stooped look and subservient manner. “S’pose you’re wanting a hidey hole,” he said. “Don’t know if it’s safe here. Don’t even know if I oughta hide you.”
“I will give the orders here,” Glisson said. “You will obey.”
The old man studied Glisson a moment, then a look of anger washed over his face. “You damn’ Cyborgs!” he said.
“Hold your tongue,” Glisson said, his voice flat. “We need food, a safe place to spend the day. I shall require your help in hiding this van. You must know the surrounding terrain. And you will arrange other transportation for us.”
“Best cut it up and bury it,” the old man said, his voice surly. “Been a hornet’s nest stirred up. Guess you know that.”
“We know,” Glisson said. He turned, beckoned to the van. “Come along. Bring Svengaard.”
Presently, the others joined him. Boumour and Igan supported Svengaard between them. The bindings on Svengaard’s feet had been released, but he appeared barely able to stand. Lizbeth walked with the bent-over care that said she wasn’t sure her incision had healed despite the enzymic speed-up medication.
“We will lodge here during daylight,” Glisson said. “This man will direct you to quarters.”
“What word from Seatac?” Igan asked.
Glisson looked at the old man, said, “Answer.”
The oldster shrugged. “Courier through here couple of hours ago. Said no survivors.”
“Any report on a Dr. Potter?” Svengaard croaked.
Glisson whirled, stared at Svengaard.
“Dunno,” the old man said. “What route he take?”
Igan cleared his throat, glanced at Glisson, then at the old man. “Potter? I believe he was in the group coming out by the power tubes.”
The Eyes of Heisenberg Page 12
