Centuries ago, a British poet once wrote that Time's art was to make dust of all things. But this is not so.
If Time is capable of any "art" at all, then it is surely the continuum's ability to produce change.
And on the Earth, the passage of time brought many changes: burning skies of missile-rain, altered continents, and murdered seas. Man was of course greatly affected by these changes; and they were reflected in the greatest monuments to his successes and his failures— his cities. For the most part, they were destroyed during the first dark nights of terror; but their memory lived on in the minds of the survivors. From the cities' ashes, man was forced to rise up, Phoenix-like, and try to recapture the lost vitality of his lost monuments.
At first the changes were slow: amounting to little more than ragged bands who sifted among the cities' bones, picking them clean of any surviving links with past glories. Time passed and even the surviving pieces failed, or faded, or simply fell apart. The bands separated into tribal gatherings, pulling apart from each other by the motivations of fear, distrust, and superstition.
Some of the more resourceful and imaginative tribes survived, and their thoughts flew once more to the visions of the monolithic cities. Time passed and still, more changes were brought about; but this time not through scavenging and hording, but rather through a slow process of re-birth. Ancient records were investi-gated and old techniques were relearned, thus providing man with tools to rebuild his world.
It was realized-by the early re-builders that man's history was, by and large, a catalogue of man's mistakes. And so, the re-builders vowed to make their new world a world which would not be capable of repeating past errors. The product of their vows became, through time, the Cityplex—a kinetic symbol of good intentions gone slightly awry. The Cityplex became an ambiguous element exhibiting the characteristics of both heaven and hell, with no one available to pass the final arbitration on its status.
But in the end, man must be the solitary judge of both his victories and his defeats. If man lost the power to judge himself, he would cease to be man; he must retain the power to always be critical and never be satisfied. And the way to accomplish this crucial task is to always have dreams—dreams that surpass the stagnant realities of the present—which are in essence the seeds of change itself.
Eric Stone, Citizen of the Denver Cityplex, keyed instructions into his computer console, hunting for people who must be exterminated. He was searching foj deviant personality-types: potential criminals who could disrupt the smooth functioning of the Cityplex. By matching up detailed, accurate Profiles of the Citizens against standardized, psychological "contours" of criminal-types, Stone was able to discover and label for' liquidation any individuals who might, at some future time, commit a criminal act against the Cityplex. Ethically, Stone was taught, such action was as natural as blinking one's eye to remove an irritating particle within it. >
The computer hummed and whined and clicked through its various sequences until the final search of the day was completed. It had been an average day, with Stone finding one Citizen on his random index who was considered to be dangerous enough to be eliminated. Stone had dutifully keyed the Citizen's name and number into the reels of the Main Data Bank at the appropriate moment.
But it was now time to end his work for the day, leaving his spot in the giant white room for a member-operator of the next shift. Stone pushed back his contour chair, stood up and stretched, and pulled on his jacket. All around him, other operators did the same and they joined Stone in the long corridors which laced the building, leading to the dropshafts and elevators to the street levels.
Eric was a lean man of average height. His face was angular, accented by dark brown eyes, a straight nose, and thin, but expressive lips. His hair was a sandy color and very thick; his brow usually furrowed as if he were always locked into tense concentration. He was a fine specimen of eugenic experimentation.
He left the Main Data Bank, elbowing through the crowds, and boarded a slidewalk that would take him away from the commuter lanes. He soon switched to a walk that led to an entertainment sector.
The crowds were thinner on this belt, since most workers were travelling into the residential sectors to be greeted either by companions or licensed wives or husbands. Eric Stone was still in his middle twenties, and he had no thoughts of marriage—not even one or two year contracts. There were too many types of women that he wished to experience first. He watched the shining facades of the myriad shops slide past him: drug shops, brothels, bars, sensi-parlors, and hundreds of variations on all the themes. He anticipated his arrival at one of his favorite hang-outs, a bar/restaurant called The Phagia, and prepared to leave the walk. Seeing it, he jumped onto the receiving ramp, and headed for the entrance.
Once through the doors, Stone was immediately relaxed by the subsonic vibrations that were piped through the bar area. It was dark, but the fixtures all glowed with an entire spectra of phosphorescent colors which changed and flowed into one another as the rhythms of the background music also changed.
Stepping up to the bar, he recognized Bellow, the bartender, who immediately came over to him. "How're you doing tonight, Mr. Stone?" said Bellow.
"O.K.," he said quietly. "Give me a PCT, with ice." 10
"Sure thing," said Bellow, keying in the, request into the terminal behind the bar.
Stone waited as the dispensing hatch opened on the bartop and delivered the glass in front of him. He gave Bellow his Cit-plate and the man punched it into the terminal, removing the price of the drink from Stone's account somewhere in the bowels of the Main Data Bank.
As he sat sipping the drink, he heard his name being called from somewhere in the darkness of the room: "Eric? That you? How's it going?"
Turning, he saw a familiar face standing by the doors of The Phagia. It was Elston Kettner, an associate who also worked in the Main Data Bank. "Hey, El, what're you doing here?" Stone didn't really care, but he forced himself to be cordial.
"Same as you, I got thirsty." The bartender approached and Kettner ordered a drink. "How's business these days?"
"Not so good, they've got me in PPP." Stone sipped some of his drink passively, already under its subtle influences—he was getting depressed and he did not want to talk.
*'Hey, they've got you witch-hunting, huh? What a job!" Kettner laughed and his full, fleshy face shook from the effort. He was the product of twenty years of affluence in the government system and Stone hoped that he never attained such gross proportions.
"Is that what you call it?" said Stone flatly.
"It's an old expression. You never heard it? Well, anyway, what's it like? Do you find many?"
"I found one today."
"Hey, what's the matter," said Kettner, detecting the acid quality of Stone's response. "You don't sound very happy about it.
Stone turned to look at his associate, realizing that the man was right. He wasn't very happy about finding… what was the name?… Gianell. Until that moment, however, he had not given it any conscious thought; it was one of those things that must have been lingering tenaciously in the dark fissures of his mind. "No, I guess I'm not," he said finally. "Why, should I beT' He looked squarely into Kettner's tiny reptilian eyes.
"Well, Stone, I don't know, I just thought—"
"You just thought everybody thought like you, right?" Stone pulled out a cigarette, struck it, and inhaled deeply.
"What do you mean by that?" Kettner become more defensive.
"I mean no, dammit… I did not enjoy condemning a man to death today! There's no law that says I must enjoy what I do, is there?" Stone was somewhat surprised by the intensity of his language. Perhaps it was the drink?
"No… I suppose not," said Kettner, getting up from his stool. "Look, Stone, I'm sorry I started anything…" He looked cautiously about the bar—there were only two others near him: an older technician-type man and a young woman, who seemed to be preening herself in one of the large wall mirrors—before speaking again. "I'd watch myself… talking like that, you know?" Quickly, he got up and disappeared out the doors.
Stone watched the unctuous man leave, thinking of his warning.
Was it true what he'd said? That he was speaking dangerously? It was possible, although Stone doubted whether what he had said would be classifiable as Political Dissent.
Turning back to his drink, he noticed in his peripheral vision that the young woman at the end of the bar was watching him. Instantly, fingers of paranoia slipped into his mind and he felt his heart-beat accelerate ever so slightly, a mild spurt of adrenalin fired through his system. Could she have been listening?
Stone forced himself to look in her direction.
Immediately hs was taken by her vivaciousness. Long, tousled, curly hair that was raven-dark and deep, lean, sharply defined features: a sculptured nose, full lips, large almond-eyes, and a coppery complexion that glowed with a subcutaneal fire.
She was looking at Stone. Smiling.
This only confused him more. It wasn't uncommon for him to attract women; any other time—had he not been speaking as he had been—he would have assumed she was merely interested in making a contact. But this time, the stirrings of his libido were tempered by fear and suspicion. Looking away, feigning an interest in his drink, he watched her in the wall mirror. She was definitely watching him, yet as he studied her face and her clothes—it was the uniform of the Archives—he could not really perceive any danger in her. Still, he would avoid any contact.
Getting up from the bar, he nodded to Bellow, and headed for the doors without looking back. As he passed out into the street, he could feel her eyes following him, and it sent a chill through him. He jumped onto the closest sidewalk and stood at an angle so that he could see the entrance to The Phagia. Minutes passed as the bar dwindled from sight. She did not appear.
Stone's paranoia, however, remained. He wished to get off the streets, to find a place where he could get lost in a large crowd. Scanning the various establishments ahead on the walk, he spotted the blazing marquee of the Cephalic Maxima, a gigantic sensi-theatre where the patrons linked up with the performers.
Stone stepped off the walk and melted into the crowds that were funneling into the Maxima. He passed through the robot turnstile quickly, shuffling his Cit-
Plate in and cut of the machine, and mounted an escalator taking him to the upper concourse. He hadn't even noticed what the attraction was that night, but it didn't really matter. He hadn't especially come for the entertainment.
Taking a contour-seat next to an aisle, where he could watch the traffic along it, he pressed a button on the arm of the chair and let the headset descend. He was only vaguely aware of webbing which settled over his long hair. Automatically, sensors within the chair attuned themselves to Stone's individual cerebral rhythms. Several minutes passed before the house lights began to dim. During that time, Stone noticed that the audience was comprised mostly of young people like himself. That fact made him more comfortable, somehow.
Darkness fell over the concert hall and the stage became illuminated in a swirling bath of color. A group of musicians rose up from beneath the stage on a platform and the audience burst into spontaneous clamor: roaring, screaming, chanting. Stone watched them with a mild interest; he had already seen the group several times in the past and they were not among his personal favorites. Their music was a curious blend of classical interpretations a la Stockhausen, et al. and contemporary innovations. They were attired in translucent clothing that seemed to have an almost organic quality about it. At times, it appeared to be no more than a viscous substance smeared over their otherwise nude bodies. Yet at other times, it seemed to flow and undulate like a large amoeboid creature that had attached itself to their skin. It was a stunning, sensual effect, however, which provided an appropriate visual image for their raw and naked music.
They began playing their first selection and immediately hush gripped the audience. They were all being carried, as was Stone, into a private storm of cerebral sensation. The electronically synthesized sounds and the enzyme-monitored physiological reactions of the performers were forced through the contour-seats, and into the minds of the audience.
The effect was the creation of a massive, molecular-creature—functioning as one being, pulsing and throbbing, even though it was composed of thousands of individual organisms. Stone was caught up in beast-like movements of the crowd, sharing in the flayed-wire emotional convulsions of the music. The instruments ran through orgasmic crescendoes, punctuated by the smells and tastes of sweat and musk and desire. The audience seethed and rolled under the music's direction, gasping through every riff, every surge, every measure of electric pleasure.
The first number was abruptly over; Stone sat, like the thousands of others around him, drained. The thought of going through another hysterical sequence like that was frightening, yet the group was already gearing up for the next selection.
It was almost more than he could bear when coupled with his experience in the bar with Kettner and the girl. He wanted to slip out of the chair and leave.
The music had started and this time the instruments were weaving melodies about each other and the image was a reptilian one: serpentine and tourmaline, slithering smoothness, in an atmosphere of restrained chaos. Stone felt as if he were sliding slowly, like some primeval ooze, through a long tubular passage. It was almost impossible to resist the symbolistic power of the music.
Suddenly Stone saw the man.
He had been seated several rows above the figure, and he was vaguely aware of him standing' up facing the performers. The man's arm was pulled back and in a frozen instant, accented by the reptilian chords playing among the sutures of his skull, Stone saw the object in the man's grip.
Another second passed, glacier-like in its slowness, and Stone knew what was happening. Throwing up his arms, resisting the Circean call of the music, Stone ripped the headset from him and leaped up from the chair. But several rows separated him from the man; and he knew he could never reach him in time.
Stone could only stand helplessly stranded among the music-warped bodies, as the man hurled the object up onto the stage.
The flash wiped out the atmospheric light-show for several seconds. Stone shielded his eyes from the blue-white blossom of death that unfolded on the stage. He could feel the heat from the after-wave warming his skin as the screams began.
Looking to the stage, Stone saw electric chaos as the performers' instruments, now reduced to rubble, sparked and flamed. The musicians were gone—instantly vaporized in the fierce heat of the assasin's bomb. Everyone who had survived the explosion was" now writhing through the black visions of death—the last agonies which the musicians had transmitted to them through the sensi-equipment. Thousands of people, undergoing massive and sudden death-trauma, erupted into uncontrollable madness.
All around him, Stone felt the surging pressures of the crowd as it rose en masse and swarmed over the theatre like a rampaging horde of insects. He was caught up in the crush of bodies, pummelled and speared by flailing arms and fists. His mind still reeling from the nightmare vision of the assassination, he was helpless against the rioting mob.
He felt himself carried along for several meters as the crowd flowed first in one direction and then the other; his kidneys were speared by a sharp elbow, his eye spiked by an errant hand, a thrashing leg smashed into his groin.
The pain threatened to black him out. Slowly, his legs gave way and he fell beneath the surface of the mob, where he was trampled under its feet like a ragdoll.
Looking up into the maelstrom of tormented faces, blurred by movement and fear, Stone thought he saw a familiar face leaning over him. It was familiar; but it wasn't supposed to be.
That was when the darkness overtook him.
Unknown to Eric Stone, or anyone else in the City-plex culture, the remnants of the early exploration base on Mars still survived. Over the centuries, their population had increased from a mere handful to several thousand. Having been forced to fend for themselves after the conflicts on Earth, the technologically-influenced astronauts and scientists carved out a habitable niche beneath the fierce Martian surface.
The sand and wind, which patrolled the deserts and valleys of the planet, had made it necessary to establish permanent bases below the surface. Over generations, methods were devised to extract and use the wealth of natural resources buried within Mars. Much of the technology was preserved in much the same manner as it had been done on the Earth in the Cityplexes.
But the manner in which it was used differed greatly. A simple democracy had evolved among the scientists, which was accented with touches of socialism. There was a frontier spirit which had helped in bonding the members of the Martian Base together. They had two goals in mind at all times: to survive, and to one day return to the Earth.
It had been centuries since any free interchange of information had taken place between the two planetary societies. Although there were infrequent communications with small splinter-groups of humanity that did not, for some unclear reason, reside within the Cityplexes. In general, however, communication with the now-alien Earth was not a significant factor in the lives of the Martian colonists. It served no purpose since neither world possessed the means of reaching the other. Projects such as interplanetary travel were still beyond the resources of Mars, and they were not of interest to the rigidly-controlled governments of the Cityplexes.
But the colonists were working on a project that may someday return them to the soil of Earth:
It had begun, strangely enough, not through the efforts of men, longing for the place of their origin, but through the addition of an alien factor. An astronomer named Yuri Turgenev sat in the small observatory bubble of the main Martian Base. His primary activity that evening, as he peered through the thin, lapis lazuli sky, was a computer scan of the planet Jupiter and its nearby moons. This was being done as an assignment from the base university where Turgenev was learning the skills of an astrophysicist.
It was a simple assignment and the squarely featured young man sat smoking a cigarette as the computer-linked telescope followed the program which he had keyed into it. At intermittent sequences during the scan, Turgenev would request a visual printout of Jupiter's movements.
Late in the evening, dulled by the long hours alone with the ramblings of his own mind, Turgenev thought he had detected an error. The last printout indicated an extra moon in the Jovian schematic. Rapidly running the program through a sequence check, he saw that there was no error. A stir of elation rushed through him, as he enjoyed fleeting visions of his name being entered in the textbooks as the discoverer of a new Jovian satellite. In fact, his first impulse was to notify the main section of the base of what he had seen; but his reason took command of his fantasies and he knew what he must do.
He slept little that night as he put his satellite theory through a severe battery of tests. When he had finished, several new facts had come to light: the object, whatever it was, certainly was no moon; the object was moving at a high velocity towards an intersection with Mars' orbit. Turgenev's calculations argued that the object would arrive within three days. Fearing that it could be a large meteroid, whose impact on the surface could be catastrophic, Turgenev notified his superiors.
During the next two days, every available instrument in the observatory was trained on the object as it sped closer and closer to an orbital intersection point.
Turgenev sat before a small console, watching the ever-changing columns of data flash before him on the computer grid. Velocity, mass, density, radioactivity, etc. All the numbers kept changing as the base's instruments continued to monitor the object's approach. Suddenly, the young scientist watched the column labelled VELOCITY disappear from the screen to be replaced by totally different figures. "Something's happening here," he said softly to the others in the room.
One of the older men, Dr. Keating, reached the console first. "What's up?" he asked slowly. "Something wrong?"
"I don't know," said Turgenev still watching the velocity figures changing. "Looks like it's decelerating, real fast, too."
"Decelerating? By what means?" said Keating to no one in particular. A murmur passed through the men and women in the room.
"It's changing course, too," someone else said.
"Get a print-out of the course corrections and a projection for its parameters when it achieves intersection," said Keating.
Two men keyed in the instructions and monitored the response on the computer grids. Several seconds passed in silence except for the eternal hum of the machinery. No one wanted to be the first to suggest that it could be an alien craft, although everyone was entertaining the notion privately.
"Here we go," said Keating, as the print-out was handed to him. "Now we'll know something…" His voice tailed off as he became engrossed in the data.
Turgenev watched the man intently, wondering if Keating was imagining that it was indeed some massive ship from the stars. Keating was a brilliant man; Turgenev knew this. The older man was skilled in many of the necessary fields for survival on Mars. Years ago, Turgenev had learned, Keating had designed and implemented the water recycling system which was now being used on the Mars Base. Since Keating's revolutionary system had been devised, it was no longer necessary to spend precious energy on extracting rare water molecules from the Martian atmosphere— a long and tedious process which had always made water the most valuable commodity in the society.
The silent pause was finally broken as Keating's nasal voice interrupted everyone's private thoughts. "This is incredible," he said, shaking his head and furrowing his brow. "But these projections give every indication that we are dealing with some kind of vehicle… something that is most likely piloted by intelligent beings."
No one spoke. It was as if they were all letting the significance of Keating's words take hold in the minds. It was the realization that men sometimes endure when they discover that a particular mythology is about to come to an end. Turgenev regarded the inevitability of contact with alien intelligence and it caused shivers to course through him. "Where do they come from?" he said, as he walked to the window, opening onto the dark-blue Martian sky.
"And what do they want?"
"If they're intelligent enough to traverse the stars," said Keating, "then it's knowledge they want."
"Should we try to contact them?" asked Eva Leone, a greying, short-haired woman whom Turgenev had always admired because of the beauty which had endured the passing of her years.
"Why not? They obviously know we're here." Keating laughed and Turgenev thought he detected a touch of despair, or perhaps resignation in the old doctor's voice.
Several of the group, under Keating's direction, made the necessary arrangements to broadcast a wide-band message to the approaching object. They programmed the message—a sequence of universal, mathematical constants such at pi, the hypoteneuse, log scales; and several basic words of greeting—into the widest range of frequencies, hoping to strike some chance of the alien object's receiving and understanding it. The message was beamed up on a rigid and constant schedule for several hours, until every possible wavelength and frequency had been covered.
But there was no response.
The object was silent and everyone wondered whether the message had been received or not. Turgenev had begun to wonder, at this point, if the intentions of the beings on the craft were altogether honorable. The silence became an ominous thing. He began to conjure up dark visions of the great ship screaming through the Martian night, unleashing some unconceived of array of weaponry upon the helpless men. He thought of his own life—he had barely begun to live it, and now he faced the possibility, unconfirmed as it was, that it may be cut short. Dying young was the greatest fear in Turgenev's mind; he felt that there were so many things he was impelled to accomplish before death overtook him. Just thinking of a young death made him feel cheated. Visions of Johanna, his lover, intruded upon his dark thoughts; and he greeted them with ambivalence. He wished that she could be spared the possible threat that was at that moment decelerating into a low parking orbit over the surface of Mars. Johanna of the dark eyes and the crystal voice was to be his wife when he finished his university training; and now he feared that it may never come to pass.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Keat-ing's voice: "The speed and maneuverability are incredible," he was saying.
Turgenev blinked and looked about the room. It was filled with concerned faces—some lined with years, others smooth and young—and the hum of machinery that covered the walls. How long had he been standing there, dumb and deaf to the conversation around him? He felt foolish and ashamed of his selfishness.
Listening to their words, he learned that the object had made several new course changes, closing the gap between itself and the planet with incredible speed and agility. It was now close enough for exact figures on its size and mass: long and thin, measuring over a mile long and millions of tons in weight. If it was a ship of some kind, Turgenev thought, it was a super-giant. Something far beyond the capabilities of man.
Hours passed as the observatory staff slept in shifts, watching and tracking the movements of the alien object. When Turgenev was awakened, it was nearly sunrise. Bergman, one of the other students on the project, had achieved a visual sighting through one of the medium-range telescopes, but it was already growing too light for Turgenev to see it for himself.
Photographs were soon available and Turgenev joined the others as they were brought in from immediate processing. Nilsson, another member of the group, rushed in with a large folder, which he opened to expose a sheaf of black and white prints. Laying them on Keat-ing's desk, the old man studied them carefully, as everyone else politely craned and pushed to get a view of the pictures.
"Not bad… considering everything," said Keating, pointing to several of the prints. "Look here. Definitely not a meteoroid or any other natural object. The lines… the configuration… it's definitely a ship."
Turgenev edged in between two others who had already received some prints that Keating had begun passing out. Actually, he was disappointed in what he saw: a vast black plate, pierced by the light of undiffer-entiated stars, and a small patch of blurry white in the bottom left corner. The object was no more than several centimeters in length and Turgenev could not discern any real details at all. He could see its general shape, however; it resembled a thin cylinder with a larger pyramid-shaped nose. As he was passed other prints, made later in the sequence, he noticed the improved clarity. "These were the last ones," someone said. "Just after it entered orbit."
The words burned into Turgenev's mind like hot coals dropped from a hod. In his hand he held photographs of the ship—it was undoubtedly a ship now— with clearly defined edges and angles and odd protuberances that could be any number of unimaginable things. He became lost in the, photographs, thinking that somewhere, just a few thousand kilometers above them, hovered a behemoth from another star. He wondered if the beings aboard it were watching their efforts with amusement, tolerance, or perhaps even disgust.
That particular question was never resolved; but the events of the following two days were a historical turning point for the Martian colonists. Turgenev and all the other inhabitants of the Base watched with unerring attention as the giant ship moved through an elliptical orbit, adjusting itself slowly and carefully, until its path brought it directly overhead of the Martian Base.
On the first evening after the alien ship had aligned itself with the Base's position on the surface, Turgenev sat with Johanna on one of the observation decks ad-jacent to the observatory dome. Centuries ago, the observation decks served as living modules for the early Maritian explorers. Now, of course, a majority of the Base's installations were below ground, carved out of the planet's sandstone.
Turgenev was not due back at the observatory for several hours. He should have been sleeping, but he chose to be with Johanna—that earlier dark vision had still not completely left him. "They're all wondering what's going on up here, aren't they?" he said, holding , her hand as they looked out into the Martian sky.
"Of course they are," she said, forcing a laugh after her words. He knew it wasn't natural, and it bothered him.
"Are you scared of it, too?" he said turning to be absorbed into her eyes.
"I suppose I am, when I think about it. What do they think's going to happen now?" She tried to change the subject.
Keating seems to feel that they will make some kind of contact sooner or later…" his voice tailed off. He knew what she was thinking. "If they were hostile, they'd have probably made some kind of move by now."
"You don't really know that, Yuri," she said, softly caressing his cheek, staring into his eyes, searching for some kind of sign that she was correct.
"No. I don't…" He looked away from her. Sometimes her gaze was too powerful for him. "That's why I had to see you."
"I don't understand," she said, although he had the feeling that she actually did. Johanna was a sensitive woman—her music and poetry were regarded among the Base society as some of the finest creations in the history of the colony. She was an aesthetic mutation in the midst of cold-blooded empiricists; she was a beau-tiful creature who complimented Turgenev's scientific inclinations as neatly as oppositely-charged particles.
"If that thing up there," he pointed out into the darkness,"… if it's hostile, and if'there's trouble, I want you to know that I was serious about getting married."
"I know that, Yuri." This time she did laugh, and this time it was natural. "You're unbelievable… you've really got a knack for words." She laughed again and kissed him.
Turgenev felt immediately foolish. When he had thought about telling her how he felt, it all seemed so right, so well-phrased; but it didn't work out that way at all. Such were the tactics of Johanna: incisive and painfully honest.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But that's what I was really thinking, you know."
"Yes, I know… that's why I love you…" she kissed him again. "That's why I'm not really afraid of anything."
"No matter what happens, then," he said, standing up and looking at his chronometer, "we'll be together. I mean that, Johanna." Turgenev listened to his own words, thinking them awkward and stiff. But she smiled and nodded, remaining seated on the bench. Turgenev was glad that she had the sensitivity to penetrate his hide-bound mannerisms, and understand what he was truly feeling about her. Bending down, he kissed her once more and returned to the observatory.
The next morning they detected the first activity about the ship since it had parked above them. Radar had picked up a smaller object separating from the long ship to slowly begin a descent into the atmosphere. Keating and the others attempted to plot its entry pattern through the thin mixture of gases almost immediately; but the speed at which the ship came down made it almost unnecessary. Scarcely ten minutes passed before they had tracked the vehicle down to within 10 kilometers of the Base. It had landed at the base of the Shapley Range, a large range of jagged peaks located to the south of the Base.
Turgenev and the others quickly scanned the instruments' reports on the landing craft, and were pleased to note that there was no harmful radiation emanating from the vehicle.
"What'll we do next?" he said easily to Keating, who had aged appreciably since the alien ship had been first discovered. Turgenev studied the old man's grey eyes, the bushy, sloping eyebrows that always gave Keating the appearance of a lost puppy.
"Several things… watch and wait."
"Aren't we going out there?" Turgenev raised his voice at the old man, and immediately wished that he hadn't.
"Take it easy. There's plenty of time for that. We still don't know what we're dealing with. Remember that."
"I'm sorry, Doctor," said Yuri. "I was—"
He was cut off by Bergman, who had been manning the radar dish: "Sorry, gentlemen, but take a look at this. Hurry!"
Both men followed Bergman to the console and watched the screen which showed that the orbiting ship had begun to accelerate out of orbit. "What's it doing?" said Turgenev.
"Who knows?" said Bergman, stroking his full-face beard. "Leaving orbit, that's for sure. Should we keep tracking it?"
Keating nodded. "For as long as you can."
A group of the men and women had gathered about Bergman's console, watching the phosphorescent green blip that was the giant alien ship as it moved ever-more rapidly across the computer grid. Bergman switched to a larger field of focus as the blip threatened to disappear off the edge of the screen.
"I don't think that'll be for very long," said Bergman. "Look at the acceleration! That's unbelievable!"
"300,000 kilometers an hour" someone said from another part of the room. "I'm getting the first confirmed figures right now… still accelerating!"
Keating removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Replacing the glasses, he shook his head. "Forget it, Bergman… that thing's not coming back." He walked away from the console and sat down behind his desk, which was covered with print-outs, diagrams, and random scraps of notes and calculations.
Turgenev and two others, Leone and Cohen, followed Keating to his desk. He looked up at them and grinned. "What's the matter with you people?… you look like lost sheep! What am I, your father?"
"We just want to know what to do now," said Leone, her fingers nervously tapping on the desktop. "It looks like we've got a permanent visitor out by Shapley, that's all."
"Yes, yes… I know," said Keating, obviously drained by the experiences of the last several days. He had been keeping himself up quite well until the last few developments had taken place. "I suppose we should go out there… I want to, but I'm afraid of what we'll find."
Turgenev understood what he meant. Somehow the mother ship's departure seemed like a bad sign. But he was surprised to see Keating acting so defeated. They were standing on the threshold of a fantastic adventure, and the old man seemed unable to cross through it.
"We've got to go out there, Doctor Keating," he said finally. "Sitting here like there's nothing wrong isn't getting us anywhere. Besides, we've got the rest of the colony to answer to… there's a couple thousand people down there, who are waiting for answers."
Keating looked up at him and for several seconds, Turgenev saw the familiar radiance in his graven features. "Yes, Yuri," it was the first time he had ever called him that, "you're right. We must go… you must go, rather. I've got to get some rest, I think."
Eva Leone and Doctor Cohen helped Keating out of his chair and escorted him from the main room. They headed for the elevators leading down into the residential levels. Perhaps it was just fatigue that had caused Keating to ease up the way he had. Turgenev sincerely hoped that it was so. He loved-and respected the man greatly, and it hurt to see him lapse into weakness at such a critical moment.
It took an hour to assemble a crew of volunteers for the initial voyage out to the alien ship. Turgenev was happy to be among the crew and he fought down his rampaging imagination, which was summoning up bizarre scenes at the base of the landing craft. He breathed heavily in the PLSS suit as he climbed aboard the trak with the others. Bergman was also with him, keeping the sensory equipment focused on the alien vessel. None of them carried any weapons, since weapons had been outlawed for more than a century on the Martian Base. It was senseless, anyway, thought Turgenev: what good would their weapons be against a race which could skip across the void like frogs spanning lily pads.
The Martian landscape rose up to meet their trak with a face of orange-rusted sand and strong gusts of wind. Actually, it was a mild day for surface travel; Yuri had been out on expeditions when the wind had reached a velocity of several hundred kilometers per hour. He sat in the cab of the trak, craning his neck, straining his eyes, trying to see through the shrouds of wind and sand, hoping to catch a glimpse of the alien craft.
The kilometers passed beneath their treads and suddenly, emerging from beyond a curtain of sand-strangled wind, the alien ship was visible. Turgenev watched the thing materialize as they drew ever closer: monstrous, hundreds of meters high, it looked like a colossal insect, shining blackly as it sat on six multi-jointed legs. The main body of the ship was roughly spherical, except that it was composed of hundreds of small flat-surfaced sides, so that it looked like a multi-faceted and flawlessly cut gem. Turgenev could not discern any openings or windows or other external features on its surface. Beneath the main section of the hull, he could see several pyramidal shaped structures that were probably its source of propulsion. • t
The trak ground to a silent stop, and the six men disembarked slowly, all watching the ship for any sign of movement. But there was none. The ship rested firmly in the Martian soil as if it had been sculptured out of the native rock-—motionless and dead. Turgenev led the group across the sand the last thirty meters to the base of the closest insect-like leg of the ship. The only sound was Bergman radioing back to the Base that they had reached the vessel without mishap and that he was rigging up some TV so that a visual could be piped back to Base.
Everyone stood transfixed before the massive vehicle as the Martian wind twined fingers of sand around their suits. Turgenev reached out and touched the landing leg, half-expecting to be struck down for his boldness. But nothing happened. He motioned to the others and everyone began setting up equipment that would measure and probe the thing, trying to tap its dark secrets.
Three hours later, Turgenev appeared before the camera in the cab of the trak, summing up what they had found: "If there's anyone inside, they don't seem to be taking much of an interest in us… we've tried con-tacting them by every means possible, even tapping on the hull with a wrench. But nothing doing… nobody's home."
"Bergman thinks it may be some kind of robot probe, like the kind Earth sent out way back. He could be right. We've run lots of tests and it looks like there's a lot of electromagnetic activity inside the hull, some incredibly complex signals and matrix formations. You guys might want to run them through the decoder banks and see what you come up with. So far, we can't find any way of getting into the thing. The outer shell is featureless, no markings, hatches or anything else that might give us a clue. We'll keep up until dusk, then we'll head back… How's Dr. Keating, anyway?"
"He's still… resting," said the unrecognizable voice in the helmet radio.
"You mean he still doesn't know what's happened out here?" Yuri thought that was quite odd. He knew how much enthusiasm the old man had for the project— right from the beginning, when it was first detected approaching the planet.
"I wouldn't think so," said the voice. "We've all been pretty edgy and busy since you've all went out, you know. Dr. Keating was under a lot of stress, remember that."
"Yeah, right," said Yuri, pausing and thinking about the odd detachment in the radioman's voice. "O.K., I'm signing off for now. You can keep track on the TV; it'll be getting dark soon."
Turgenev rejoined the rest of the crew and they finished up the preliminary survey without any hitches. The alien ship remained silent and immobile, oblivious to their Lilliputian scamperings about its hull and extremities. Turgenev still harbored dark thoughts of the ship coming to sudden life, shaking off its tormentors like bothersome insects; but that fear was fading. Bergman's notion that it was a robot probe was probably correct, and that there would be no real danger in that respect. Of course, the crew must still use caution in their attempts to learn more about the interstellar vehicle.
When they returned to the Base, a large crowd had assembled near the upper locks to greet them, and Tur-genev expected something of a hero's welcome. But taking off his helmet, he saw the grim expressions on their faces—among which was Johanna's—and he sensed the aura of foreboding in the air around them.
Somehow, he knew.
"What's the matter?" he asked as Eva Leone walked toward him extending her hands to his. "It's Keating, isn't it?"
Leone nodded and paused to rub one eye, trying to intercept the tear that was forming there. "While you were out there… there wasn't much they could do for him."
Turgenev felt a vacuum opening up in his viscera, threatening to swallow him from the inside out. The first wave of total disbelief had struck him. DOCTOR KEATING . . . dead. It was like some dream, in which all the scenes, all the words, just swam maelstrom-like, only threatening to make any real sense.
"How?" he said slowly, shaking his head. "I don't understand it… he was so into the whole thing just hours ago."
"His heart gave out on him," said Leone, placing an arm on his shoulder. "He never told anyone about it. This last thing must have really had him up high, and he just kept it all inside, fighting it… until it was too much."
Turgenev turned and looked at Bergman, who also wore an expression of disbelief and shock—something that didn't wear well with his usual joking personality. "This thing really meant a lot to him," Turgenev said to his friend. "I just can't believe it." He turned and left them all standing in the air-lock entrance. His eyes searched for Johanna and, finding her, he motioned for her to follow.
They walked back to the observatory in silence, each unable to say anything sufficient to comfort the other.
After they had buried Keating, Turgenev took a trak out to the alien landing craft. Its size dwarfed him and its black silhouette caused the Martian night to shine with an unnatural blueness. But he no longer felt the fear and uncertainty about the ship—it could not harm him now.
Standing there, watching the thing, Turgenev vowed that he would complete the dream that flared briefly in Keating's mind. He would unlock the secrets of the alien ship.
Stone woke up slowly. The angular corners of the room materialized and, as he focused upon them, he knew he had never been there before.
"Feeling better?" said a soft voice. Feminine. Poised. Pleasant.
Turning his head on the pillow, suddenly aware of a dull throb at the base of his neck, he saw her. She had watched him at The Phagia, and later stared down at him from the mob. "Who are you?" he said, dully.
"Jessica… Jessica Masson. You were hurt. I had you brought here."
"Here? Where's 'here'?" Stone said as he glanced uneasily about the room. It was obviously the bedroom of a small apartment, the wall glowing an ordinary soft mint light; simple, functional furnishings; few decorative pieces or ornamentation. His mind flashed over her words before she could answer, wondering what she meant by having had him brought here? Brought by whom?… was his unspoken question.
"My apartment, of course," she said, leaning back on the bed and gesturing vaguely about the room.
Stone recalled how she had watched him in the bar, and how she must have followed him into the sensi-theatre. And now, he was waking up at her place. It didn't seem right… something was very wrong. "How did you manage that? You don't know me. I could be just like that freak that threw the bomb for all you know."
"You're not," she said, pouting for an instant, her full lips revealing a hint of the sensuality that lay hidden in them. "I can tell. Besides, you needed help. No one else was in a position to do it, so I… volunteered."
Stone turned away from the soft but convincing stare of her almond eyes. He wanted to believe her, but he was afraid of doing so. "Well thanks, I really appreciate it. That was a terrible thing back there at the theatre.""
"I know, I arrived late and I hadn't gotten to a seat when it happened. I was lucky, I guess." She stood up, tossing her mane of sparkling curls away from her face. "Just a minute, I'll get you something to drink."
Before Stone could protest, she was gone from the room, and he felt embarrassed for having gotten trapped like he was. Sitting up on the edge of the bed, he felt a wave of disequilibrium wash over him. Apparently he had been thrown around quite roughly when the crowd overwhelmed him. He got up and went into the bathroom, noting that it, too, was sparsely furnished, lacking the usual frills that he had been accustomed to in young women's apartments.
The mirror cast back a gruesome image, and Stone, always conscious of his appearance, immediately began to push his hair back into place. Its sandy color was matted and blotted with blood from a cut he had taken over his left eye. He studied his face, staring into his own dark brown eyes, now dulled by sleep and possibly drugs. For what he had gone through, he didn't look too bad, he thought, momentarily forgetting the odd circumstances that he had found himself in.
"Don't worry," Jessica said, standing suddenly behind him. "You still look fine, just fine."
He snapped away from the mirror, feeling foolish and knowing that his face was flushing crimson. She laughed with a natural, bell-like crispness, and he, too, was forced into doing the same. "Come in here," she said, leaving for the bedroom. "Drink this, you'll feel better."
He followed her and joined her on the edge of the bed, taking one of the snifters from her outstretched hand. After they had both sipped some of the dark, slippery liquid, there was an awkward silence as she sat staring at him. "I'm Stone," he said finally, "Eric Stone."
"I was wondering when you'd get around to that," she said, taking another sip of her drink. "The name fits you, you know."
He wasn't sure how she meant it, but he laughed at any rate. She was a strange woman: unassuming, confident, natural in a way that he had never known in a woman before. He was attracted to her in spite of his suspicions. Her face emanated a healthy fire, a natural, lusty love of just being alive. Yet he forced himself to recall the circumstances of their meeting and he said: "All right, let's cut it out. You followed me out of the bar… why?" After he said it, he felt a slight surge of adrenalin in his system, a knot in his stomach, as he wondered if he had done the right thing.
"Nothing special," she said, tossing back her hair casually. "I saw you sitting there talking to that fat guy, and I found you interesting, that's all… I mean, is that so strange? People meet like that every day, you know."
That was true, thought Stone. In the Cityplex society, where Eugenics controlled the population, casual relationships had become a cultural norm. There were never any strings attached to anyone's lives; no commitments, no fears, nothing but some innocent pleasure. He nodded, feeling somewhat guilty. He took another sip of his drink, hiding his face within its darkness. Perhaps he was overreacting to the whole thing? He hadn't realized how much Kettner's farewell warning had affected him.
"I'm sorry," he said, looking into her bottomless eyes again, captured by them. "I guess I'm still a little shaken up by that riot. What happened back there, anyway? Did they get the guy?"
"They didn't have to. He had a smaller bomb on his body… set it off when he got out into the street. A real mess." She shook her head, grimacing.
"I don't know why they do it," said Stone, fumbling for a cigarette, finding it and lighting it. "It's crazy, it really is. All for nothing."
"They must be very unhappy people," she said, her voice sounding somehow different.
" 'Unhappy!' that's a quaint term to describe a mass murderer!" Stone gasped, almost choking on the cigarette smoke. "What the hell kind of statement is that?"
"I mean, it takes a very disappointed, miserable person to do what that guy did tonight. Think of the despair that must have driven him to that kind of madness." Her face had lost its previous carefree glow; replaced by more serious tones.
Stone nodded. "Yeah, but why did he do it? There's no real reason for it. Everyone has everything they could possibly want here. What's there to be 'despairing' about?" Stone almost had the impression that she was defending the assassin's crime.
"Oh, I don't know… maybe everybody isn't as content with the society… like we are." She sipped her drink, and this time he felt as if she were the one hiding behind it. There was something about the way she uttered that last phrase that was not convincing.
But he did not challenge her. The drink was spinning subtle webs of calm throughout his brain. He was probably making too much out of the whole thing. He was probably suffering from the backlash of his own paranoia. "Maybe you're right," he said finally. "I guess I never really thought of it that way."
"I see you work on Level One," she said, changing the subject. "What do you do there?"
He looked down at the identifying insignia on his jacket self-consciously. He thought back to the conversation he had had with Kettner. Had she been listening or not? Did she know he was involved with Triple P? He considered the possibility that she could be a Cityplex agent, assigned to him, testing him for his true feelings about the complex system of controls under which they all lived.
"I'm in Main Data Bank, just a technician, really." He knew he couldn't admit to her what he was doing there. He knew that the things he had said to Kettner were true: he really didn't want to be the one to point the finger at someone who would be fed into the nu-cleotide vats because of it.
"I work at the Phylatron, on Level Three. Ever go there?"
"Once or twice," he said, remembering his visits to the botanical geodesic. It was a giant conservatory, where the city fathers had graciously tried to preserve, museum-like, some of the last vestiges of plant life that had once covered the planet. "It's a very beautiful place, but I can't stay there for very long. It kind of bothers me to think that it used to be like that, all over, I mean."'
"I know what you mean," she said. "A lot of people feel that way."
He felt the conversation heading toward another cul-de-sac, but the drink was relaxing him. It didn't matter as much as before. In spite of the curious set of circumstances that had brought them together, perhaps he was just being too paranoid about everything. It was odd, though, that each time he felt like things were all right, she would say something that would force him to throw up his guard again.
She had been sitting there, staring at him as he pon-dered these last points. When he became aware of her eyes once more, he fumbled for something to say. It was so difficult to read her; nothing was very clear about her real intentions. Stone decided to stop worrying about everything, and rely on impulse and nerves; he quickly glanced about the room, searching for the machine.
But he saw none.
It was still another oddity about her. She was ot> viously attractive and healthy sexually, yet he saw none of the usual sexual apparatus in the room. She certainly wasn't naive, or apprehensive about having him in her bedroom. Hell, none of them ever were. Things just did not add up.
"Something wrong?" she finally said, after what Stone felt was an extremely long gap in their conversation.
"Oh, no, not really… no, it's nothing, really."
"You seemed to be far away from here. What were you thinking about?" Her face was full of concern and warmth.
"I was thinking about you," he said, not lying.
She laughed and stood up facing him, placing her drink deftly on the nightstand. "You are feeling better, aren't you?" A smile came quickly to her lips.
Stone laughed lightly. "It's only natural, isn't it?"
The almond eyes flared for an instant. "Is it now?" she said slowly, mocking him gently.
Stone didn't understand. She was a fascinating woman, a blend of warm sensuality and cool reason that melted into an enigma.
She noticed the uncomprehending look on his face. "No, of course, you couldn't possibly understand, could you?" She placed a hand on her shoulder, lightly touching the clasp which held her dress there.
Stone's mind raced ahead of her actions. What was going on? The room still remained well-lit, there was no orgasmic controller in sight, yet here she was readying herself.
"I didn't really expect…" He stopped, fascinated by her smooth, lithe motions.
He watched the clasp come loose and the folds of her silky dress fall fluid-like from her body. Naturally, she wore nothing underneath. Slowly, she made a complete turn, her back arched, arms pointed gracefully above her head. Stone accepted her sensuaToffering with his eyes: a lean but subtly muscled body, full breasts, long legs, small waist. She approached him as he remained seated on the bed. Touching his jacket lightly, she helped him remove it; she unzipped his jumpsuit and as he stood up, it fell away from him.
Then, cat-like, she slipped from him and sprawled invitingly on the bed.
Stone's brain was a roiling sea of torment and confusion. She had excited him almost instantly, yet her actions were uninterpretable. She reached out a delicate hand, touching him. He watched, as if drugged, as she caressed his shoulder, carefully sliding her hand across the front of his chest and down to his abdomen. What the hell was happening?
Suddenly, he understood what she had meant.
There would be no machine.
There was no synaesthetic rendering in the pleasure center of his brain; there was no matrix of wires and electrodes and drugs which fed the engineered sensations into his mind.
He was experiencing the real thing: the ancient, primitive, sexual rites of early man.
Gently, they eased back into the bed's softness. Stone's first physical orgasm had ended. As he lay there against her, aware of the jagged breathing of both of them, feeling the now cooling perspiration of their bodies, Stone felt his whole body trembling, reacting to the shock wave of the entire experience. His throat had become unendurably dry; he longed for something to drink, but he was too weak to ask for it. Images flashed through his mind—he strove to attach words and meanings to them. But he could not… so thoroughly cowed was he by this woman.
She stirred beneath him, touching his shoulders, as if to motion him off of her. He gently slipped away from her, settling into the bed. She looked over at him, licking her lips, brushing her hair away from her face. "You liked it?"
Stone could only nod his head. Still, the words would not come.
Jessica laughed and sat up, unashamed of her nakedness. "I thought you would, in spite of what you would've believed. It's better, isn't it?"
"I… don't know…" Stone said, forcing himself to speak, trying to regain some manner of control over the situation.
"I don't believe you," she said. "But that's all right."
He watched her as she rose and disappeared into the bathroom. He wondered why she had done it. Everything had happened so quickly, so naturally, that he hadn't had the chance to react. It was as if she had placed him tinder some kind of drug-induced trance, as if he was powerless against her. The thought was very unsettling. He both feared Jessica and was attracted to her.
She returned to the room, wearing a thin robe which followed the lines of her body, accenting it. He suddenly felt awkward without his clothes and he reached for his jumpsuit, fumbling with the zippers and slipping into it. She seemed to ignore his embarrassment, saying: "I'm sorry if I shocked you. Really, I am."
"Well, you did," he said, smiling slightly. "I've never… well, it was incredible, that's all."
"I can imagine," she said. "I've never done it the other way, with the machines, I mean."
Stone looked up at her in disbelief. "What?"
"You heard me," she said, her face a study in seriousness.
"But how? Why?"
"I just never had the desire to try it," she said, picking up a brush for her hair.
"But what about the training creches," Stone said, "you must have done it then?"
She paused, freeing the brush from a tangled strand, looking away from him. "Oh yes, the creches… yes, there, but I meant since that time."
For some reason, Stone was not sure if she was telling the truth. The .way she avoided looking at him as she spoke, the hint of uncertainty in her voice. There was so many odd things about her, besides her obvious sexual deviancy; so many other things seemed to be lying just beneath the surface of his perceptions.
He stood up, searching for and finding his jacket. "It's getting late," he said. "I have to be ready for my shift in the morning. I'd better go."
"You can stay if you want" she said, returning to his side.
He believed she meant it, but he shook his head. "No, I'd better go. But I guess I should thank you for helping me… earlier… for everything."
Jessica smiled and touched his arm. For an instant, he recalled the first time they had touched, and traces of animal electricity flashed momentarily through him.
"I understand," she said. "And you are most welcome."
She walked him to the door and he asked her what sector and level they were on. After she gave him directions, she added: "Will I be seeing you again?"
Stone stiffened slightly. "I don't know, maybe."
Jessica smiled and kissed him. He turned and began walking to the elevator at the end of the hall. She watched him until he had disappeared behind its sliding doors.
Several weeks had passed since Stone's encounter with the enigmatic Jessica. Returning to his shift in the Main Data Bank and scanning for deviants in Preventive Prediction had become even more of a chore than it had previously been. He had never felt comfortable about selecting members of his society for elimination, yet he had never articulated his feelings on the subject until the confrontation with Kettner in the bar.
And then there was Jessica.
He knew she was a deviant personality, a social aberration; he realized that he should turn her in—saving the Cityplex some valuable computer time in the process.
But he could not do it.
It wasn't the same, he thought, as he reached out to punch in another name and number from the Citizen Index. Jessica wasn't just another name and number that happened to match up with some psycho-sociologist's Contour of the average criminal. Jessica was a living, thinking, human being; and she had affected him in her own way as no one else had ever done before.
Despite the fact that he feared her strange ways, he was also attracted to her individuality. It was almost a crime to be different in any fashion within the Cityplex; yet Jessica didn't seem to be afraid of that. • Automatically, he continued the Contour matching of the Citizen on the print-out grid. Each Contour had been reading NEGATIVE although he had only been partially aware of it. Finishing the sequence, he cleared the computer for the next random selection from the Index.
Thoughts of Jessica continued to haunt his consciousness. He kept replaying the bizarre sexual scene, the conversation in the bar, the feelings of paranoia that plagued him during that entire evening.
Before he started the next matching sequence, Stone decided to use a technique that had been privy to all technicians in the Main Data Bank for a long time. Ever since the earliest days of his training in Preventive Prediction, he and his fellow operators had discussed the one most fearful thing that could happen to any of them as they manned their consoles: they had all wondered what they would do if, during a random selection from the Citizen Index, one of their own Profiles was pulled from the files.
Granted, the odds of that happening were slim, yet it could still happen; and although Stone doubted its likelihood, he had still helped in the designing of what was called a "tracer program." It was a small information bit that could be keyed into any existing information block —such as a Citizen Profile—which would act as an alarm for the technician who planted the tracer. Stone and many other technicians had succeeded in attaching tracers to their own Citizen Profiles soon after they had been given assignments in the Main Data Bank. Of course, this was illegal, but Stone would then be given a warning on his own computer grid if and when his Profile came up for Contour Matching in the Preventive Predicition Process.
Stone considered the information that must be logged in Jessica's Profile—it would most likely be very damning if she was selected for Contour Matching.
He punched in the co-ordinates for the Demographic Division. The section titles flashed on his screen as he was spliced in and he stopped on "Population and
Records" He punched the keyboard to clear it and the words SUBMIT INFORMATION REQUEST appeared.
"Citizen/Masson, Jessica," Stone typed. "Citizen number, unknown. Eugenic Classification, unknown. Age, unknown. Cityplex Classification, Archivist-Botanical, rating unknown… request full profile on above subject."
The screen flashed again, reading out a single phrase: STAND BY. Stone leaned back in his lounge-chair, waiting for the computer to retrieve all known demographic information on Jessica. Once he had this data, he could attach a tracer program onto her Citizen Profile, so that in the event that she was selected for a Contour Match, he would have foreknowledge of the event. If her Profile came up "positive" at least he could warn her of the' danger. He wondered, though, how much value there was in knowing a person was being condemned to death—there was little anyone could do to escape Enforcement once his name was placed on the list marked for elimination. Yet, it was the only thing he could do…
He was interrupted from his thoughts by the pulsing of his computer console. The grid was blinking crimson words: DATA INACCURATE. RE-SUBMIT REQUEST. Stone leaned forward in his chair, wondering what had happened. He re-keyed the information request on Jessica.
Several seconds passed as the computer flashed on STAND BY before it repeated the same response: IN A CCURA TE DA TA.
Something was wrong, thought Stone, as he reviewed all the procedures that may have caused an error in his request. Finding none, he keyed another query: "My data is correct. What is the problem? Why is there no response?"
Almost instantly, the answering message flashed upon his grid: DEMOGRAPHIC CENTRE REPORTS NO RECORD OF CITIZEN/MASSON, JESSICA.
Stone shook his head, uncomprehending the whole thing. How could Jessica live within the Cityplex and escape being recorded in the Citizen Index? Demographic kept records on every human being in Denver—it was virtually impossible to avoid.
He cancelled the request and cut loose the line to the Demographic Division. The only possible explanation was that Jessica Masson was not her real name. For some reason, she did not want Stone to know her real identity. But this thought only caused Stone's earliest suspicions to surface once more. Perhaps she was from Enforcement? He had heard stories of the Cityplex using undercover agents to test the loyalties of selected personnel.
If that were the case, then Stone had failed miserably. He was glad that he had not re-contacted Jessica since their first meeting. Perhaps that had been his saving action. Had he attempted to continue their bizarre relationship, perhaps he would have been paid a visit by the authorities.
Remembering her address, he considered running a cross-reference search, working backward to discover Jessica's real identity. He was about to key in the request when he heard the alarm.
Personnel all through the giant computer room were standing up from their seats, looking for the source of the siren that was winding through the building. Getting up, Stone moved down the catwalk to the console nearest him. "What's going on?" he asked the man named Roric, who worked next to him.
"I don't know," said Roric, a short, dark-complexioned man with a thick mustache. "Let's go check it, out."
Stone followed him and they joined a Crowd of other technicians at the nexus of the catwalk which led to the main elevators. "They caught somebody downstairs!" yelled somebody in the crowd. "… trying to screw up the Data Banks!" Stone felt himself bouyed along by the crowd as they rushed to get into the shafts which would take them down into the lower levels of the building where the giant computer hardware was located.
When the doors opened, Stone and the others raced down the corridors, past maintenance alcoves, to the large set of double doors which opened into the Central Cybernetic Units—the large nucleus of computers which controlled all the functions of the Cityplex. A cadre of guards, armed with small laser devices, halted their progress. There was a crowd of perhaps forty technicians, pushing and straining to see what had taken place. The doors to Central had been swung wide and there was another platoon of guards swarming into its passageways.
Stone inched and elbowed his way to the front of the crowd and got the attention of the nearest guard. "Hey, what happened?" he asked nervously.
The guard looked at him through granite-hard eyes, as if wondering whether Stone deserved an answer. When he spotted the Level One designation on Stone's jacket, he relaxed slightly. "Saboteurs, sir," the guard finally said. "We caught three of them monkeying with the Central Units…"
Saboteurs, thought Stone. It was a frightening idea that someone would want to disrupt the primary functions of the Cityplex. He and the others waited as the guards continued to pour into the area. He could hear others in the crowd repeat the guard's message and express their disbelief.
He watched as a group of guards appeared in the entrance to Central; they were surrounding two men and a woman. The men were dressed as security guards, the woman was wearing a maintenance uniform. Stone wondered how and why employees in the Main Data Bank Centre would want to sabotage the functioning of the entire Cityplex.
As the guards carried them out of the area, probably for quick liquidation, Stone thought he noticed something odd about their appearance. It was something that he could not articulate at first, something that was just preying on his consciousness. But while riding the elevators back to his work area, he realized what it was that had bothered him about the three saboteurs—all three had the same olive complexion, the same coppery fire in their faces. Just like Jessica.
In the afternoon, as his shift ended, Stone met several of his co-workers, Belsen and Vance, in the elevators. They were discussing the sabotage attempt. Stone realized that they had learned more details as they spoke.
"I still can't believe they tried it," Belsen was saying. He was a large, burly man, his head squared off like a cinder block, jaws moving slowly, mechanically.
"Did they cause any damage?" asked Stone, lighting a cigarette.
Vance shook his head. "No, not really… they caught it in time-." Vance was tall and thin, reminding Stone of the long-extinct heron.
"What were they trying to do?" said Stone. s
Belsen laughed, threatening to crack the stone-like features of his face. "The Benford Process… they were trying to implant it in one of the Primary Units."
"What process?" Stone wasn't familiar with the term.
"You've-probably heard of it," said Vance. "It's the 'virus program'—it orders the computer to clear all its memory and instruction cells, then it passes the command on to the next computer in the sequence."
"Yeah," said Belsen. "Cybercide at its finest."
Stone shook his head dramatically. "All hell would have broken loose if they'd made it."
"Sure… we were lucky they got caught," said Bel-sen, slapping Stone's shoulder in a friendly gesture.
The elevator reached the pedestrian level and the three men emerged mto the lobby of the building. Each one headed for different belts, exchanging casual goodbyes as they left; and Stone was once more alone with his thoughts.
He jumped on a walk and blended in with the masses. It was odd that he had experienced several bizarre oc-curences within the last few weeks. His life in the Cityplex had always been so ordered, so routine in the past. All the violence, all the "incidents of deviance" within Denver had always been so distant, so unreal, when he had read of them in the newsfax. But now, after being connected with the assassination at The Maxima and the sabotage attempt at the Main Data Bank, Stone felt somehow connected, inextricably, to some larger sequence of events, over which he had no control.
The facts of the sabotage bothered him as he continued to ride the walks towards his own residential sector. The oddest thing about it was that there were three people working together on the attempt. Such cooperation among deviant Citizens was very rare. Usually a criminal—a mutation in the Eugenic process —would act wholly on his own in carrying out his crimes against the Cityplex.
But three working together suggested to Stone that there was some kind of organized resistance working within the Cityplex. He had heard of such rumors through connections he knew in the Enforcement Centre; but he had never paid much attention to them… until now.
The next few days at the Main Data Bank were difficult for Stone. He had learned from the newsfax that the saboteurs had been eliminated—most likely they had been added to the nucleotide vats in the Eugenic Centre. But he wondered if Enforcement had gathered any information from the three criminals before they died. For some reason the sabotage attempt had effected him deeply; he could not get it out of his mind.
His position in Preventive Prediction was also becoming more of a labor. As he punched each new Citizen's Profile into his console, he began hoping that it would always come up negative. He didn't want to find anymore potential criminals; he didn't want to know that he was sending anyone to a certain death.
Sitting at his console, Stone wished that he had someone with whom he could share all the recent problems he had been having. He had always been a loner—shying away from close relationships with males or females. Ever since his creche-times, it had been difficult for him to admit anyone into his circle of confidence. Stone had always rationalized that characteristic of himself, however; the few times that he had allowed anyone to get close to him, it had always proved to be a mistake. People were simply not to be trusted, thought Stone, as he keyed in another name from the Index. Too many times, he had relied on an associate to come through for him, only to be disappointed.
His console and grid pulsed with various images as the Profile was matched with the standard set of Contours. Stone paid little attention to the evaluation, still thinking about some of the recent developments in his life. But when the grid displayed the NEGATIVE signal, he unconsciously sighed, being thankful.
As he was clearing the grid for the next Contour match, he was stunned as the terminal abruptly began chattering out a new message on its own. The first words on the screen seemed to leap out at Stone, clawing at his eyes like a frenzied animal:
TRACER ALERT PROFILE/STONE, ERIC
MATCHING SEQUENCE IN PROCESS/CONSOLE 448-W
For several seconds, Stone sat rigid, staring at the message which had appeared on his grid. Sweat appeared almost instantly on his forehead; emptiness began to gnaw at his viscera. The tracer had worked—it had alerted him that his own Profile was being checked for potential criminality.
Forcing himself, Stone keyed in a monitor mode, tapping into console 448-W. He hoped that its operator would not notice that he was eavesdropping; although it didn't matter at that point.
As the connection was made, Stone watched the various Contours as they clicked through the display grid. The brilliant flashes of light symbolically representing every possible aspect of his being. Stone sat silently, waiting. The thought loomed heavy in his mind: that was his life flashing across the screen. No longer was the Profile just a random name and number; and that fact chilled him.
The matching sequence accelerated, switching into the first additional sub-category. Stone knew what that meant: the preliminary scan had picked up some signifi-cant matches, and now it was pursuing them into a more extensive scan. Stone felt a knot, a palpable lump, forming in his throat. He lit a cigarette, but the smoke only added to the dry, thick sensations in his mouth.
The grid displayed the feared red background and the single word POSITIVE blinking on and off, burning into Stone's retinae.
He had almost expected it. Somehow, he knew it was going to happen. It was as if he were a pawn in some greater game, being manipulated, and being cursed with a semi-awareness of the process.
Impulsively he stood up, pushing off the contour chair. He cleared the console, breaking off the splice into the other console. Quickly he pulled on his jacket and started down the catwalk. Roric, the man in the booth next to him, spotted him. "Hey Stone," he said, turning around. "What's the matter?… You all right?"
Stone looked at the man. He knew that it was a harmless question, but he couldn't hide the fear, the utter sense of dread that welled up inside his mind like a dark, devouring beast. He could feel the color draining from his face. "I… don't know," he said finally. "I don't feel so hot… I've got to take a break…"
Roric stood up and approached him. "Yeah, you don't look so good," he said. "Need some help?" He touched Stone's arm, offering assistance.
Stone felt the man's hand through his jacket. It was as if he had brushed against a live cable. Violently, he pulled away from the man. "No! No! Leave me alone! I'm okay! Leave me alone!"
Before the man could react, Stone was away from him, running along the catwalk. He was vaguely aware of several other operators looking up from their consoles as he rushed by them. He had to get out of the Main Data Bank; he had to get away from the whole complex of computers and the cold, impersonal death that they now represented to him.
He broke into the corridor off the catwalk and raced for the elevators. The corridors were relatively clear and he could hear his bootsteps echoing throughout the long, sterile chamber. Reaching the sliding doors, he slapped at the touch-button, his mind racing ahead of the car as it rose up to meet him. He imagined what was taking place deep within the machinery of the Data Bank: a coded information bit, bearing Eric Stone's Profile was being digested by a memory cell, while simultaneously the same information bit was being dispatched to a computer terminal in the Enforcement Centre. Once his name and potential crime (he wondered what it was) had been logged with Enforcement, police would be dispatched to apprehend him.
The elevator was taking an interminable amount of time to reach his level. Stone smashed the touch-button again. He could feel the blood pounding at his temples, the sweat cutting rivulets down the sides of his face, despite the clima-control environment of the corridor.
The sliding doors parted and Stone leaped into the car, punching frantically at the descent controls. Just as the doors began to close, a young woman approached, yelling for him to hold the car. He ignored her, leaning on the button. The doors slammed shut and his stomach lurched as he began the high-speed descent. For several seconds, he imagined that the walls of the elevator car were contracting, closing in on him, like a giant hand about to crush its prey.
He had to get a hold of himself—he was lost if he caused another scene like the one with Roric. Already they were probably coming after him from upstairs, he thought, as the doors opened on the main lobby. Stone peered out, giving a quick but cautious look at the activity in the lobby. Just a few personnel walking through, ignoring him completely. He walked quickly across the polished plastisteel floor and passed through the automatic doors, flashing his I.D. at the robot turnstile, and loping that it had not already received some programmed command to bar his exit from the building.
Once clear of the Main Data Bank, Stone rushed down an access ramp to the Rapid Terminal. It was the middle of the shift and the traffic was light. There was a sleek, teardrop-like vehicle resting in its cradle, its bays open, accepting passengers. Stone started running for the open door, hoping that it would not close before he gained access to the car. Lunging at the last second, he cleared the doors and they began sealing themselves. Before he could reach a seat, the train was already gliding silently out of the station.
Stone sank into the contour seat, catching his breath. Glancing around the car—there were only three other riders in his compartment, a woman and two older men. He was probably safe from them he thought; yet he could not escape the feeling that everyone was looking at him, that everyone was watching him.
He looked at his reflection in the window of the compartment: his long face looked haggard, pale, and sunken; his eyes, usually large and dark and vibrant, were somehow smaller now—almost birdlike in their intensity. Fear was taking control of him, he could see it in his own face. How could anyone who saw him not know that he was a fugitive?
It occurred to him that he had no idea where the Rapid was going. They had slid through several underground passages, emerging at various above-level points, but he had not taken the time to orient himself in relation to the Cityplex. His first impulse was to his apartment, but that would be suicide. That would be one of the first places they would look for him. Actually, Stone thought, as he tried to calm himself, he was more fortunate than most—at least he knew that Enforcement would be after him. Most Citizens never even got that chance.
Watching the various structures of the Cityplex rush by him, he realized that he was on an express into the residential sectors—out into the far perimeters of the Cityplex. That was bad. There would be few places for him to hide in the apartment-congested sectors. He couldn't just barge into someone else's quarters—he'd be captured for sure. He depressed the button on the arm of his seat and waited for the Rapid to stop at the next terminal. He had to get off while the train was still passing through public sectors of the Cityplex.
Seconds passed before the Rapid slipped silently to a halt. The doors greased opened and Stone leaped on the platform. He was in an industrial sector and even in the terminal he could hear the thrumming and crashing of giant machinery that caused whole sections of this sector to vibrate continually. He mounted an escalator and rode up to a slidewalk level. The walks were almost vacant here; and he felt terribly conspicuous in his Level One uniform, which was obscenely out of place in an area that usually filled with the dull gray jumpsuits of the industrial workers.
His mind raced with alternatives: how he wished there was someone he could call, someone who could help him. Was there anyone, really? Everyone he knew would avoid him as if he was some wild dog, that deserved to be shot in the streets. If he left the Cityplex itself, there would be no chance of survival. The Wild-lands, the areas beyond the domed city, were a fierce place, teeming with mutated creatures, foul air, and dangerous radiation.
He jumped a slidewalk and travelled roughly perpendicular _tto the routes leading back to the Main Data Bank, yet away from the major residential sectors. Thoughts of Jessica once more reached him. How ironic it was: in his efforts to help her escape detection from Preventive Prediction, he had found himself trapped inexorably within the web which he had helped to spin.
Yet she was the only person in the entire Cityplex he could possibly turn to. She was different from the others—Stone had known that from the beginning— perhaps she could help him.
He was desperate; anything was preferable to the mad, mindless flight through Denver's, myriad sectors. Eventually they would track him down and it would be over.
The walk was approaching a row of office-structures, which rose up above the streets like giant metallic cylinders. He left the walk and rushed into the nearest building. There was a bank of phone-cubes at the far end of the lobby and he raced passed the receptionist's desk without even looking up at her. It was too late to worry about being watched. He entered the cube and it automatically closed around him. Momentarily he felt the same sensations of being trapped as he had in the elevator; but he forced it from his mind and shoved his Cit-plate into the phone slot. As he did it, he realized what he had done: somewhere in the Main Data Bank, an alarm would be going off. His Citizen Number was now recognized as counterfeit. As far as the computers were concerned, Eric Stone no longer existed. His position would be traced to the phone-cube: already units from Enforcement would be homing in on the alarm signal.
He heard the buzzer sounding at Jessica's terminal. The screen blinked into life and he suddenly saw her face staring at him in the cube.
"Eric… I've been expecting you," she said, smiling easily.
"Jessica, listen… I haven't got time… I need help."
"I know, Eric, you've been tapped by the System… you're a dead man…"
"What? How could you know?!" Stone's mind reeled back, unable to accept what she had said. It was impos-sible. Everything was going crazy, his whole world was collapsing around him. "Jessica, listen to me… you've got to help me."
"All right, take it easy, Eric…" her voice remained calm—an interesting counterpoint to his frantic tones. "I can help… where are you now?"
"Hell, I don't know… Level Two, some office complex… look, I've got to get out of here… they're probably already tracing this call."
"Okay, listen: take the Rapid to my sector… I'll meet you in the sub-basement of my building.
The screen went blank and Stone cancelled the connection. He left the cube and raced quickly from the building. Jumping back on the walks, he selected one which would take him to the nearest Rapid Terminal. Paranoia had sunk its talons deep into his mind-flesh, threatening to thrash all control from him. He half expected the authorities to pounce on him at any second. After that phone call, they were surely on their way to his last known location.
As the access ramp to the Terminal appeared, he bounded off the walk and sprinted through the small crowd of pedestrians in his way. Several of them stopped to watch his mad flight, but no one attempted to bar his way.
The Rapid cradle was empty and he would be forced to wait for a train. This one would take him within walking distance of Jessica's sector—he would have to wait. Slowly, other passengers gathered around him on the receiving platform and he could feel the closeness of their bodies, hear their conversations.
Just then he felt the slight vibration and high-pitched whine of the turbine car as it approached the Terminal. He felt the jostling of the others as they prepared to board. Another three seconds and the train was there in front of him, opening its bays, discharging passen-gers, waiting to receive others. Stone flowed into the nearest car, carried along in the current of the others' bodies. Somehow, he felt safer in the crowd.
The doors slid shut and the train was moving slowly out of the station. He glanced back into the terminal just in time to see a corps of uniformed men appear on the platform. They all wore the white helmets and the brilliant orange uniforms of Enforcement, and they were brandishing their weapons openly.
The Rapid slipped into its tunnel and they were gone. Stone fell back into his seat, nervously wiping the perspiration from his brow. That had been too close. He wondered how much longer he could avoid the inevitable as the train slipped into the temporary comfort of the darkness.
Turgenev was standing watch when the alien ship came to life. The sun had just disappeared behind Shap-ley Range when the instruments in the cab of the trak began bleeping and dancing. Bergman and Cohen, the other two men on the watch, were behind the giant ship, setting up new sensory equipment when it happened.
"Hey you guys!…" Turgenev yelled into his throat mike. "Watch out, something's happening out there!"
Looking through the blister of the trak, Yuri saw them scurrying around the side of the ship, kicking up sand and pebbles as they ran. He jumped down from the cab to meet them and as he advanced closer, he could see movement on the dark vessel. He pointed to it and the other two men stopped and looked back over their shoulders at the thing.
Approximately three-fourths of the way down the gem-cut face of the ship, they could see a section of the hull separating and hinging outward. There was no sound. All three men stood silently as the panel continued to drop open, forming a ramp, which softly settled into the Martian soil. Turgenev likened the hatch to the mandible of an enormous insect preparing to feed.
He flicked on his suit-mike and called the Base. "Observatory Base, this is Turgenev… did you pick this up on the cameras? Looks like they're open for business."
"We've got it, Yuri… be careful out there. How do your instruments read?"
"No dangerous radiation… at least none that we can detect… When the hatch opened up, I started getting more electromagnetic disturbances, but still nothing that we could interpret…"
"All right," said the voice, whom he recognized to be that of Eva Leone. "Stand by until we can get the rest of the team out there. They want to dispatch a squad of security people to the site… just in case there's any trouble. Can you hold on until we get there?"
"Got it," said Turgenev. "Bergman and Cohen are right here with me… no trouble so far. We're waiting on you guys."
He cut off the transmission and turned to the two men by his side. "Well, this is it… what happens now?"
"Looks like it's still their move," said Cohen, looking shorter and wider than usual in his EVA suit.
Bergman nodded. "Yeah, let's get back to the trak, just in case anything starts happening."
"No, wait a second," said Turgenev. "Let's at least see if we can get a peek inside that thing… this is what we've been waiting for, isn't it?"
"Hey, you heard what Leone said… the old bag'll blow her stack if she catches us in there before she gets here." Cohen shook his head vigorously in the helmet.
"C'mon, Stu," said Turgenev, smiling at his partner. "I didn't say anything about going inside… I just want to get a look in there… c'mon." He turned away from them without checking to get their reaction. But he was satisfied to hear their crunching boots behind him.
Aside from the opened hatch, the vehicle remained still and silent. Turgenev began circling it at a wide radius until he was in line with the large opening in the hull. Turning on his search-beam, he directed it into the darkness of the ship. The tight beam was dwarfed by the dark cavernous maw of the alien ship. From the distance of perhaps 50 meters, Turgenev could not discern any recognizable shapes as they flickered in the light. He wanted to go closer but he knew the others would object, possibly keep him from doing so. It was odd that he felt no fear from the alien ship, as he once had. Keat-ing's death had somehow changed all that for him. He took another step closer.
"Hey, c'mon, Yuri… take it easy… they'll be here in another minute." Bergman's voice crackled in his helmet phones.
He turned away from the opening to the ship. "All right, I'm sorry. Let's go back and wait for them."
They all turned and trudged heavily back to the trak.
Turgenev spent the waiting minutes in silence, thinking about what was to take place. The alien ship seemed to be waiting for them; it was not here on Mars simply to explore—he was almost positive of that. The larger "mother-ship" that had deposited it here was long out of the solar system, probably never to return to this out-of-the-way part of the galaxy. It certainly wasn't a probe vehicle like the ones Earth had sent out centuries ago. The aliens had no need of probes when they could roam among the stars themselves, thought Turgenev. And its mission probably wasn't hostile, either. If that had been the case, it would have most likely wiped out the Base when it first achieved an orbit around Mars. Still, the true function of the alien ship eluded him. It seemed as if the answer were lurking in some hidden corner of his mind, but he could not bring it to light.
"There they are…" said Cohen, pointing off to the West where a roostertail of sand was quickly snaking its way toward them. He maneuvered the binox scope onto its position.
"One, two traks, and a cargo carrier—that must be the guys from security."
The three men watched as the small caravan approached. Soon the lead vehicle was trundling up alongside their own, and Eva Leone, still recognizable in the EVA suit, was jumping out of the cab like a young man instead of the older woman that she was. "All right," she said easily, "let's get going."
The other traks gathered around them and everyone began to unload new equipment and supplies. The security force, four men armed with the only weapons allowed on the Base, assembled in the lead of the group and began walking toward the ramp and hatch assembly.
Turgenev fell into line just behind the security men and the three staffers with Leone. The group stopped at the foot of the ramp and armed men ran ahead quickly disappearing into the darkness of the ship cavity. No one spoke for the fiveWnutes that they were gone from view. Turgenev stood, listening to his own breathing and the clicks of the suit's regulator. He watched the faces of those around him through their helmets. Every person's eyes were locked onto the open hatch, waiting.
"O.K., let's get going," said Leone, as she saw the security man appear in the hatch entrance motioning them forward.
They mounted the ramp and slowly worked their way into the ship. Turgenev noticed that the initial chamber outside of the hatch was very large—a cube approximately fifteen meters on each side—that seemed to have been designed as a receiving chamber. The walls were covered with instrument gauges and grids which could probably display information. They were dark and dead at the moment. At the end of the chamber, Turgenev saw a large hatch-like assembly that remained closed.
"Possibly an air-lock," one of the group was saying in his helmet phone.
"Is there any atmosphere in here?" Turgenev asked one of the women carrying a small instrument pack.
"Not now, of course, but there are traces of an oxygen/nitrogen mix," she said, pointing to the sensor-pack.
"What now, Eva?" he said, tapping her shoulder.
"Well, if this is an air-lock, I suppose we should try to close the outer doors if we want to go any farther."
Several of the party nodded in agreement, and they began to examine the apparatus which lined the sides of the chamber. Back near the entrance, one of the security men spotted a small console with four large toggle-like switches and a square plate above them. Turgenev watched the man as he cautiously touched the toggles with a gloved hand.
Immediately, the plate above the switches was activated, glowing a bright lime-green. Turgenev and Cohen stood by the plate, watching a simple pictogram appear on it. It was a graphic, fine-line construct of the ship's hull and the ramp/hatch assembly. Cartoon-like, the image changed in stroboscopic sequences as the plate described the hatch being opened and closed several times. "Eva, look at this!" he said excitedly. "It looks like an instructional device, watch…" He touched one of the toggles and the open/close sequence of the hatch was repeated.
"Let's see here," said Yuri, manipulating the first two levers on the console. "Let's try this." He pushed the first lever forward, but nothing happened. He tried the second, and still nothing happened. "Maybe that's the sequence for opening the hatch and depressurizing the chamber… Let's try this one." He pushed the third lever and almost instantly the large ramp/hatch assembly began moving silently upward like the drawbridge to some medieval castle. Slowly, the hatch sealed them into the chamber, and, it closed, the walls began to flow easily, filling the room with a soft light. Turgenev pulled the final switch on the console and they could hear the hiss of air seeping into the chamber.
"That's a normal 'air-mix' coming in here," said the girl with the small instrument pack. "We can breath it, everybody."
Turgenev looked at Leone, who was now by her side. He stared into her steel-gray eyes, as if to ask if it was all right to remove his helmet. His hands were already at the latches when she nodded and Turgenev was pulling off the helmet. The rest of the group did likewise and there were several seconds of long breaths and gasps as everyone massaged their faces, scratched their noses and rubbed their eyes—almost universal habits after wearing an EVA suit for any length of time. • "Looks like either they were expecting us, or else they breathe the same atmosphere that we do," said Turgenev.
"Yeah," said Bergman. "It's interesting, though, that they didn't try to approximate the regular Martian atmosphere… if they were expecting us, I mean."
"Maybe they're just smarter than we think," said Turgenev. "C'mon, let's see if we can get the other end of the lock open."
He walked to the far end of the lock, accompanied by two of the armed men. "Be, careful, Yuri," said one of them, Calvin Drummond, a friend of Turgenev's back at the base.
Yuri nodded as he and Leone stopped in front of a similar console next to the inner hatch of the air-lock chamber. This console displayed only two switches, however. Turgenev pulled the first one and the harch quickly slid away to the right and into the wall. They all watched as the next chamber was made visible to them, and the two security men slipped through the opening. Turgenev noticed that as soon as they entered, lights flicked on, illuminating their passage.
The next chamber was a simple corridor, leading off to the right and snaking back around the air-lock assembly to a chamber next to the outer edge of the hull. As security passed into it, followed by the group of scientists, Turgenev could see the first instances of the alien culture which had produced this ship. Automatically, as they entered the area, a holographic projection formed in the center of the room.
The guards shouldered their weapons pointing at the images which, mirage-like, shimmered before them. Seconds elapsed as the shimmering ceased and the group was staring at the holographs of what were obviously the biological forms of the aliens.
There were two bodies standing in the center of the chamber. Turgenev knew that they were insubstantial— one could walk directly through the laser-projected images without mishap—yet they looked astonishingly real. The alien images stood almost four meters tall; they were bi-pedal and possessed two limb-like arms which ended in six-fingered hands which were remarkably similar to the human hand. The shoulders of the taller of the two were broad and muscled and the head was egg-shaped—an ellipsoid, which possessed no ears or nose, although there were two large elliptical blisters that must have been its eyes, and a slit that corresponded to the human mouth.
The shorter of the two images was also much fleshier in appearance. The face seemed very similar to the first, except that the mouth opening was wider and somehow softer looking. Neither image appeared to have enlarged breasts, although Turgenev imagined that the shorter alien image was the female of their species. They were definitely humanoid beings, although their slightly yellow, hairless bodies, gave them the appearance of store mannekins, rather than super-intelligences from the stars.
Turgenev noticed that no one had spoken while the projection continued. Everyone, like himself, had been transfixed by the appearance of the alien renderings, carved out of concentrated light beams, and dominating the interior of the chamber.
He didn't mind being the one to break the silence. "I wonder if these things are life-size," he said, touching Eva lightly on the arm. "If they are, they're a race of giants… at least twice our size."
Leone nodded, unable to take her eyes off the images. She walked up, examining it as closely as possible without interrupting the laser matrices. "The detail is incredible," she said. "It's like they were actually here with us."
Turgenev nodded and took several steps past the holographic representations. Beyond them was a screen which covered an entire wall of the chamber. As he approached it, it began to glow in the familiar bright lime-green. Several geometric shapes appeared on the screen: a circle, a square, a right triangle. Turgenev watched as the animated schematics slowly gathered new details: the circle acquired a center point and a radius, the square was bisected twice diagonally, the triangle's hypotenuse was emphasized in bold line. "This looks like some kind of black-board set-up," he said casually. "Hey, that's it!" He motioned some of the others over to him.
"What is it?" asked Bergman, cradling his helmet under his arm.
*T think I've got this figured out," he said, pointing to the screen with the geometric patterns. "This ship is designed to greet alien intelligences… like ourselves… this chamber is probably a kind of 'foyer', you know, a place where we can all get acquainted." He pointed to a key-punch console beneath the screen, where one key was illuminated. "Let's try something… here."
Turgenev punched the lit key on the panel, that was obviously designed for fingers much larger than his own. New figures appeared on the screen: on one of the right angle sides of the triangle three number l's appeared; on the other side, four number l's appeared. The hypot-eneuse remained blank. One of the keys on the console began blinking a bright red; Turgenev paused for a moment and then depressed the blinking key—five times. Instantly, five number l's appeared on the hypot-eneuse side of the triangle.
"That's it," he cried. "You see it, Eva? Stu? Don't you know what this thing is?… it's a teaching machine!"
He turned and looked at them. Leone was smiling broadly, accenting her creased features. Cohen and Bergman shrugged, shaking their heads in disbelief. "That's incredible," said Bergman. "Absolutely incredible."
"No, it isn't," said Yuri. "Not really… if you think about it. This ship was probably very carefully designed. This screen here, using the simple mathematical concepts of universal shapes, is probably used to assess the intelligence of the beings who encounter if. Perhaps if we spend some time here, we can arrive at some way of communicating with the ship."
"Communicating?" Leone's voice sounded incredulous.
"Of course!" cried Turgenev, suddenly boiling with enthusiasm. "Think about it for a minute… we tracked the alien ship as it came off the orbit of Jupiter. When it drew close to Mars, it strangely changed course and homed in on our Base. What for? Obviously, they were looking for some signs of intelligent life. They must have had delicate equipment which could detect our simple installations… that's why they sent this thing down here."
"But they left, Yuri, remember? Why did they leave?" Eva asked softly, carefully.
"I'm not sure," he said after pausing for a moment. "Perhaps they are part of some survey .fleet… maybe they don't have time to stop themselves, so they drop probes down on each planet they find which possesses life."
"Is that what this ship is?… a probe?" Bergman said as he calmly gestured about the complex surroundings.
"Well, something like that… but it seems to be an instructional tool, too," said Turgenev, gaining confidence in his ideas as everyone remained quiet, interested in hearing what he had to say. "Look there, past this display… there's another hatch. It probably leads into another room where there are similar displays that will test our grasp of technological concepts. And I'm willing to bet that beyond that room, there's another, and another, and another…" Turgenev's eyes were glowing; he had an uncontrollable grin on his face.
"But why, Yuri?" said Cohen. "Why do you think some alien race would be willing to give other races any of their knowledge?"
"Oh, c'mon, don't you remember your history? Look at Earth! Men were always discovering new territories and trying to civilize the natives… why can't it be happening on an interstellar level?"
No one answered, but he saw several of the group nodding their heads. "All right, Yuri, we've got nothing better to go on. Let's suppose you're correct in your assumptions. What do we do now?" Eva Leone looked at him, not as his superior, but as someone who respected his words, and was apparently willing to go along with them. He felt embarrassed by the look she gave him, yet he was gratified at the same time.
"Well, of course, I'm not sure how this thing is set up…" he pointed to the console and the screen. "But I would imagine it has a series of simple problems which can be solved by means of a keyboard. We've got to start here."
Leone nodded and turned to the captain of the secur-ity group. "It looks like we're going to stay here for awhile. But why don't you see if we can get out of here easily, if we have to. Also, you'd better contact the Base and let them know what's been happening."
The man nodded and took one of his men back through the chamber down the corridor to the airlock. Leone waited until she heard the pneumatic hiss and the slide of the hatch before she exhaled. The slight fear that she had been harboring of being trapped in the ship had departed her. As she turned back to Turgenev, she saw that he and most of the other members of the team were already huddled around the console, gesturing, pointing, and arguing as to the proper sequence of the keyboard. ' They appeared to her to be like small children fighting one another to be the .first to solve a simple puzzle or complete the answer to a riddle.
Perhaps they were, she thought, as she joined them.
A week passed as the area around the alien ship began to take on the shape of a small colony unto itself. Permanent shelters were erected outside the ship that would be strong enough to withstand the fierce winds and sand that patrolled the Martian surface. A steady stream of specialists were brought into the ship as each new chamber was opened to them. The security team was found to be unnecessary; the ship was definitely uninhabited and had presented no physical threat to any members of the team that was conscientiously examining every centimeter of its interior.
Turgenev's initial suppositions about the ship were basically correct. The ship was designed as a series of interlocking chambers which flowed around the exterior hull all the way up to its top and then began working inward into more, large areas. The entire ship was like a giant honeycomb, with each section presenting the scientists with new and more challenging problems. Each chamber was arranged with a series of keyboards and display screens, although some of them contained mock-ups or working models of whatever principle was being discussed. By the time the Base team had entered the tenth chamber, they were already approaching the limits of known mathematical theory. By the time they had entered the eleventh chamber, several of the team had succeeded in devising a coding system which could translate the English language into the alien vessel's own computer symbols. Within hours, the team was able to communicate with the ship's learning centers verbally. It was a great step forward in the exploration of the ship's secrets, which it seemed very anxious to divulge.
Turgenev had just finished an eight hour shift within the eleventh chamber, where the ship's computer system was putting the final touches on its own interlocutory program for English and the Alien Language. He entered his bunk in one of the hastily erected shelters that now rimmed the alien vessel; he was physically and mentally exhausted. But as he turned off the lights and fell onto the cot, sleep would not overtake him. His mind was still humming with the events of the day. By the time he awoke, he thought, they would probably have gained access to the twelfth chamber.
Someone had calculated the number of honeycomb-chambers which must be contained within the ship, and the number was way up past one hundred. It boggled the mind to consider how much pure knowledge was stored within the ship's computers. The Base team had barely scratched the surface of the alien's secrets/Yuri realized that by the time they had finished the "learning program" it was quite possible that they could be headed for the stars themselves. It was almost unacceptable, unbelievable.
No longer was he plagued by the spectre of Keating's death. He hadn't realized how deeply the man's passing had affected him; but the pure excitement generated by the ship had succeeded in lifting him out of his depres-sion. Yuri's only regret was that Dr. Keating could not have witnessed the initial discoveries within the ship.
His thoughts swam in the darkness. New images took shape in his mind's eye. Johanna… he hadn't been with her since the team had been sequestered in the buildings around the landing site. Her soft voice and softer touch had eluded him for seven long nights. He had called her that evening on the phones for the first time in a week, and she was understandably upset that he had remained out of contact. Trying to explain to her the utter urgency and tension which permeated the exploration of the alien ship was almost impossible. Johanna simply did not think in such terms. There was so much he had wanted to tell her—how just being within the alien ship caused him to sense the alienness, the presence of intelligence other than human. The sensation exhilarated Yuri in a manner that was parallel to, but no less than, the feelings which Johanna generated within him. He explained to her that the simple passage through the ship's chambers would equal a lifetime of study at the universiy; but she accepted it calmly with an air of almost bemused tolerance. Such casual response to excitement bothered him; it was as if Johanna was drifting away from him, both physically and emotionally, and he sincerely hoped that the gap between them would not widen further.
Gradually the images softened and blurred and were lost in the blackness of exhaustion. He was asleep.
Time passed quickly in the alien ship, but progress through its chambers became painfully slow as the scientists began to reach the upper limits of man's knowledge. Turgenev's team was working in the sixteenth chamber when they came to suspect that the task was getting beyond their ken. Astrophysics, plasma physics, molecular physics… these were the areas of concern in the sixteenth chamber, and the men from the Martian Base simply could not grasp some of the concepts which the alien machinery blithely tossed into their laps. The theories of a relativistic universe were like wooden alphabet blocks in comparison to the concepts which Turgenev strained to understand. What fascinated, and yet frustrated, him the most was the reality of "qua-space" or "hyperspace" which explained the star-spanning abilities of the alien ship. In one of the earlier "orientation" chambers, they had learned that the alien mother ship had originated on the fourth planet of the star NGC 1478, a binary consisting of a white dwarf and a G4 yellow, which was located thousands of light years from the solar system—much closer to the galactic core. Discovering this, the team knew that some super-advanced method of inter-stellar travel must have been afforded to the aliens.
In chamber sixteen, the elementary concepts of qua-space were first delivered to the men. And they were completely lost. There was no sense in going on until the new scientific revelations could be fitted into their present systems of knowledge. At first Turgenev was depressed by the setback, no matter how momentary it would be. He knew that with the opening of each new chamber, man would be stepping deeper and deeper into unknown waters—waters which would be surely over his head.
It took them a month to pass into seventeen; three months to enter eighteen. They never reached nineteen.
Turgenev wasn't there when the ship announced to them that they would pass no further along the learning chambers; but he had heard the story so many times since it happened that he could almost recite the scene from memory.
Leone's team had been laboring in number eighteen, slowly solving the programmed problems which demonstrated the principles of the interstellar drive—the engines of the ship—when the systems all came to a stop. The data-grid began flashing a new message to Leone's team, while a crystaline computer voice slowly filtered through the chamber vocalizing the printed words:
THE LEARNING PROGRAM IS TEMPORARILY TERMINATED. DATA RECEIVED FROM PREVIOUS TWO STATIONS INDICATE THAT UPPER LIMITS OF SPECIES'S ABILITIES HAVE BEEN REACHED. PROGRESS FROM THIS POINT ONWARD WILL BE DETERMINED BY THE LATENT ABILITIES OF THE SPECIES AS YET UNTAPPED. SYSTEMS WILL REMAIN ON STAND-BY STATUS INDEFINITELY FOR. INFORMATIONAL USE OF THE SPECIES.
The message was repeated once and then there was silence.
"Well, I guess we've been told," said one of the men to Dr. Leone.
She laughed a forced, almost embarrassed laugh, as if she felt guilty for all of man's limited intelligence on the galactic scale. "It's not really that bad,,I suppose," she said softly. "Besides, the ship's right… for the last two days I've felt like a kindergartener trying to sit in on a calculus class."
The man smiled knowingly, and shook his head. "That makes two of us… but where do we go from here?"
Eva Leone smiled broadly. "The ship's already taught us how it operates, hasn't it?" she asked to everyone in the room, turning slowly, looking into their faces. "Well, then… there really isn't much choice in where we go from here, is there?" She paused, in a rare dramatic moment, before she answered her own question: "To Earth," she said.
Turgenev's dream of returning to the place of man's origin would now take on the cloak of reality. He sat in the control room of the alien ship, which was located at the very apex—at the opposite end of the insect-like legs. The contour chairs had to be specially padded and re-designed to comfortably hold his body, which was easily half the size of the aliens'. To his left were three more contour seats identical to his own and they were filled with three of his associates from the observatory— Bergman, Dubrinski, and Grant.
Following the previous instructions from the ship's program, they acclimated themselves with the banks of complex controls which guided the ship through space. Eventually, they would be entrusted with bringing a segment of the Mars Base's population back to Earth.
He wondered what they would find.
Stone felt the subtle, changing vibrations of the Rapid car as it decelerated. The tunnel's darkness was replaced by cool fiourescence of the station lights. Looking out the window, Stone watched the blur of bodies on the platform slip past his view, and suddenly become solid as the Rapid stopped.
Movement all around him. Feet shuffling, doors opening, the crowd murmuring. Stone stood up and melted into the flow of passengers leaving the car. He stepped onto the platform casting his eyes back and forth across the station watching for the inevitable flash of orange and white.
But still it did not appear. He mounted an escalator travelling down to the Level Three where Jessica's con-apt was located. But just as the moving stairs were about to deposit him on the lower Level ramp, he sensed something … behind and above him. Turning quickly, he looked up the cascade of steps and saw the man in orange pointing a weapon at him.
Stone leaped forward, away from the escalator, as the scarlet beam burned through the base of the stairs in a shower of sparks and vaporized metal. He landed, spread-eagle on his scraped palms and chin, and he could feel the blood trickling down his jaw as he scrambled to his feet and burst through the crowd of pedestrians on the ramp. Primal juices coursed through him, powering him on. He was vaguely aware of the rush of faces— all gaping mouths and bulging eyes—as he bulldozed through them. He met one man whose back was turned to him and Stone's momentum smashed him to the hard concrete in the midst of astonished cries.
Ahead, he saw the ramps leading to the streets and the slidewalks and he made a desperate dash for them. He glanced back and saw the squad of police pouring down the damaged escalator and sifting through the throngs of frantic pedestrians. Lasers lanced errantly past him as he ran and Stone saw several citizens fall in smoking heaps as the beams seared through their flesh. It was like a nightmare—as though it wasn't actually happening—innocent citizens burned out of existence because of him. He had never known that the authorities could act so cold-bloodedly.
The ramp still loomed ahead of him but the way was clear now—the pedestrians had begun to scatter for whatever cover was available in the spacious terminal. Stone saw the ramp through blurred and tunneled vision; he would never make it before Enforcement's weapons burned him down. His legs were churning furiously, yet he moved with the dream-like slowness of sloshing through a swamp. He waited for the organ-searing burst that would kill him…
But it did not come.
Springing down the ramp in front of him, Stone saw two men, dressed in black coveralls and brandishing weapons of their own. One of them raised a rifle, sighted and fired. Stone heard the staccato report of the gun and the whine of the bullets as they ripped through the air above his head. They weren't firing at him! he thought as he continued his stumbling, falling, racing flight to the ramp. Running past the first man, who quickly nodded and motioned him up the ramp, Stone saw the second man reach into a pack at his side, produce a small object, and hurl it back toward the Enforcement squad that had taken cover after the shooting had commenced. A concrete column beside him erupted from a crimson beam and the disintegrated particles peppered his face. He continued to run upwards, hearing the chaotic screams and crashing sounds of gunfire and explosions. Stone looked back and saw the man with the gun now lying face-down on the ramp, his body almost cut in two by a laser which had finally found him. He felt the grip of a strong hand on his shoulder as the second man reached him and almost threw him up the ramp and into the street.
Still running, they turned a corner just as a robot cruiser appeared, its alarm wailing and its lights flashing like an amok computer grid. The cruiser's sensors picked up their body scents and levied a salvo of energy bursts at them as they rounded the corner. The edge of the building which they had just past was consumed in a yellow-orange blossom.
"Down here! Hurry!" cried the man in black who had helped him. Stone followed him into an open doorway of a towering building. He could hear the crunching treads of the Enforcement cruiser as it turned the corner.
The outer door slammed and they were in cool darkness. A light appeared as the man produced an electric torch from his pack. "This way," he said, between gasps of breath.
Stone wanted to ask him who he was, where was Jessica, and many other things, but he was simply too scared, too confused. The man led him along a long dark corridor until they came to a door marked REFUSE. Once inside the door, Stone could see in the light of one small lamp in the ceiling; he was flanked on both walls by hatches which opened into chutes that carried trash and waste deep beneath the cityplex and into the fusion furnaces for disintegration. The man in black approached one of the hatches, the third from the end of the room, and wrenched it open.
"Get in," he said sternly, his face an expressionless mask.
"What?" Stone looked at him. The man kept one hand on the hatch, the other on his weapon. "Are you crazy?"
"Get in… it's the only way out of here." The man checked his chrono. "Look, we don't have much more time… they'll be here any second… Do what I say!"
Stone climbed up onto the hatchway and stared at the man's face. His eyes, like Jessica's, were dark and bottomless. Stone slipped in and let go—
Darkness… Falling…
Sliding…
Accelerating… Downward…
—the sensations flashed before his purple-stained retinae with kaleidoscopic quickness. As his speed increased, Stone could feel the g-forces ripping into his viscera, threatening to crush his diaphragm, choking him. The only sound was the rush of cold air past his face and ears. He opened his mouth and his eyes in the moving darkness. He screamed…
… and woke up seeing the face of the man in black peering over him. As his senses cleared, the periphery came into focus and he saw her—also leaning over him. "Jessica!… what happened? Where—"
"You passed out near the bottom… it's all right now."
"C'mon," said the man with her. "Get him up. We've got to keep moving."
Stone felt her hands under his arms attempting to lift him. He scrambled to his feet, feeling momentary dizziness. Looking around him he saw that they were standing in the midst of an enormous room, filled with great pieces of machinery and scaffolding. Although he had never seen it, he knew it must have been the sub-struc-ture of the cityplex itself—the subterranean chambers where the fusion reactors carried out their ceaseless functions, providing Denver's power and energy.
The man was already scrambling up a ladder to a catwalk that bridged the gaps between the gleaming furnaces. Jessica motioned him to follow and together they ran across the steel floor to the ladder. Stone saw that Jessica was also wearing the black coveralls like the two men who had rescued him from the terminal. Around her waist she wore a utility belt; she carried a small hand weapon, some small grenades, and a radio.
Continuing to climb, laboring to catch his breath, Stone tried to piece together all the bizarre parts of the puzzle. Obviously there was some kind of organized resistance in operation in the cityplex, and Jessica, undoubtedly was a member of the task force. But still, there were questions which he could not answer. Why were they risking their own lives to save his? Why risk exposing their groups intentions and motives to Enforcement?
Their boots clattered across the catwalk and the man in the lead reached the far wall of the reactor room. He fumbled briefly with the hatch before it swung open to accept them all. Jessica cast several concerned glances at Stone as he stood dumbly watching their actions. He noticed the concern in her eyes, he could sense her urgency to explain everything to him. The man in black was through the hatch, and as Jessica turned to follow, she looked back and said quickly: "Later, when there's more time…" She smiled then and disappeared through the opening.
Stone followed them, running along another catwalk that was strung precariously high above the banks of machinery below them. The heights would have paralyzed Stone at any other time, yet the thought of the Enforcement troopers pursuing them banished his acrophobia instantly.
They ran to a nexus of the catwalks and cut left on another which led to a spiral ladder. "This is it," said the man. "Let's go."
He climbed the spiral quickly, cat-like in his motions, as if he did it every day of his life. Perhaps he did, thought Stone. Jessica waited until the man was clear of the walk and then she, too, began the ascent. At the top, the man shoved a hatch out of the way, and bright light poured through, washing over them.
As Stone grabbed the ladder, he heard the man above them scream. There was the bratting report of his weapon and then an explosion rocked the superstructure upon which they were climbing. Immediately Jessica scurried up the ladder and Stone cried out after her.
She disappeared through the opening and Stone heard more gunfire. He had broken into a cold sweat and he could smell the perspiration of fear and death in the air. It was thick and vile and it threatened to choke him. His hands were slippery and he strove to keep his grip on the ladder as he rushed upwards after the girl.
He emerged through the hatch, enveloped in thick roiling clouds of smoke and exploded gases. Jessica was standing over him, pulling him up. The man in black lay next to the hatch, two holes burned through his chest, charred along the edges, cauterizing the fatal wounds. Beyond him was a large hovercraft with Enforcement markings on its flanks, and ahead of them in the large tunnel where they emerged was the smoking husk of an Enforcement cruiser. It still erupted in small tongues of white flames and sparks as Stone joined Jessica.
"They were waiting for us," she said, pointing to the obliterated cruiser. "But Yves dumped a grenade on them before they got him."
"Did you know him well?" said Stone, wondering what he should say, how he should react.
"Not really… but we all know each other… in a general way, don't we?" She looked at him, hoping that he would understand.
Stone nodded. Yes, she was right. All men, if they were truly men, did know each other—and if they didn't admit to that fact, then perhaps they had ceased being men after all.
"What do we do now?" he said, feeling terribly unable to cope with what had been happening.
"The hovercraft," she said, pointing to it. "We've got to get clear of the tunnels and reach the Shields."
"The Shields?" he said, realizing what she intended to do. "You'll never get through them! You're crazy."
Jessica forced a short, but effective laugh. "Oh, we'll get through… c'mon!" She leaped into the cab of the hovercraft and made room for him to crawl in. He settled into the passenger seat, clipping the buckles into place on the seat. He was covered with dried blood and stinking perspiration, his Level One jumpsuit was ripped and ragged: he looked at Jessica as she threw the switches which warmed up the craft's turbines: she wore functional, tough coveralls, her sparkling hair tied back off her face, her eyes filled with determination and strength that Stone could feel spilling out, punctuating the close air of the cab. She was an incredible woman, he thought, as the craft lifted up off the floor and slid slowly forward, gathering speed.
She aimed the craft down the center of the tunnel and threw forward the throttle until it rested in the upward end of its notch. Their speed increased and the ribs of the tunnel's superstructure nickered over their heads until they all blended into one streaking mass above them. The tunnel ahead dwindled into endless perspective and Stone had the sensation of falling down a bottomless well.
"How long is this thing?" he said, unable to take his eyes away from the front windshield.
"About 10 kilometers," she said. "From this point to the edge of the Cityplex. We're just below surface level now."
"What are these tunnels for, anyway?"
"Not much anymore. They were used a long time ago by the ones who rebuilt the cities. They carried materials and machinery through these access tunnels… that's why they're so big."
Stone nodded. He knew that the Cityplex had been designed and constructed basically over the remains of the Old Denver almost half a millenia ago.
"How did you get this thing, anyhow?" Stone was impelled to ask her questions, no matter how silly they may have sounded to her. He had to know what was happening to him.
"We have people working at all levels of the Cityplex—operatives who are working together for one purpose…" She paused, looked away from the controls for a second and smiled at him, the way she had on the phone.
"… to destroy the Cityplex," he finished the sentence for her.
"Of course," she said. "Surely you realized that by now."
Stone nodded. "But there's a lot I don't understand yet. I mean, why? Why do you want to bring everything down?"
"It's a long story, Eric. You'll understand… later… after you've seen a few things."
He didn't know what she meant by that, but she obviously didn't want to explain herself at the moment. He looked out the windshield again. The tunnel's perspective had shrunken; he thought he could see an end in sight. But there was still time for more questions.
"When I called you… you were expecting me… How?"
Jessica laughed and glanced quickly at him. "You really don't know what's going on, do you?"
"That's funny?"
"Sort of." She returned to the controls, easing back the throttle a few centimeters.
"So tell me."
"Those people they caught at the Main Data Bank—"
"I know," said Stone, cutting her off. "They're part of your group."
"Of course," she said. "But they weren't there to plant that virus program, you know."
"But that's what the guards had said…"
"Just a cover," said Jessica, adjusting the throttle again. "The virus thing doesn't really work that well, anyway… especially in gigantic units like the ones at the Main Data Bank."
"Then what were they doing there?" asked Stone. He had an idea what the saboteurs' actual purpose had been but he wanted to hear Jessica say it.
"They were 'fixing' the Citizen Index so that the random selection would bring up some names that we are interested in… do you get it now?"
Stone nodded. "Yeah, I got it… you had them rig my name for Contour Matching… all right, I figured that. But how did you know that I would discover it in time to get away? How did you know that I wouldn't just sit around and wait for Enforcement to grab me?"
Jessica laughed again. "Oh, c'mon, Eric… we know about your 'tracers'. Do ydu think you're the first Citizen we've pulled out of that shit up there?"
Stone was somewhat taken back by the changed tone in her voice, as if she were trying to disperse any feelings of importance he may have had about himself. "No, of course not," he lied. "It's just that I thought we had kept it pretty quiet, that's all."
"Oh you had, actually," she said, her voice lilting and oftly accented once again. "None of the Level One officials knew what was going on… they never mess around with the hardware end of the Data Bank. And the techs and maintenance people would never think to search for it."
"But…" he added, waiting for her to continue.
"But you underestimate the powers of my… 'group' if you think we didn't know about it. We know lots of things, Eric."
Stone looked at her but did not reply. Her remark had unsettled him, the way she said it. She threw several other controls and the hovercraft began to slow perceptibly. Stone peered through the windshield to see the end of the tunnel rushing up to meet them. They braked to a quick stop and Jessica jumped from the cab, looking up near the curved ceiling of the tunnel. Stone looked and saw a catwalk high above them, where two men in black coveralls were standing with rifles. They waved at Jessica and she returned to the hovercraft, throwing it into motion almost before she was seated.
"We've got to hurry," she said as the hovercraft lifted up through a vertical shaft, past the two men on the catwalk who were already scrambling along its length to another flying vehicle at the surface level.
Stone watched as the craft lifted clear of the ventilation shaft and was suddenly surrounded by the humming crackling generators of the Shield. They were at one of the nexus points of the gigantic force-field which surrounded the Cityplex like an enormous umbrella. As she maneuvered the craft around in the air, facing the shimmering, iridescent-blue curtain of energy, Stone smelled ozone in the air. Its source was the atmosphere of the Cityplex coming in contact with "the energy fields of the Shield and constantly supercharging the oxygen molecules into isotopes. The men in the other hovercraft lifted off the platform near the Shield generator and lobbed grenades into the ventilator shaft below them.
Several explosions rocked the area and a pillar of orange flame erupted from the shaft between the two craft. "That's just in case there was anyone following us," said Jessica. Then she reached underneath the craft's control panel and threw a small lever. "Watch out now! I'm sealing us in." Stone drew back into the seat of the cab as the plexiglass windows silently slid up from the hull and closed them off. Jessica pressed several keys on the onboard computer and Stone saw a slight aura form around the hull of the craft. - "We're all set now… hang on!" she cried as they began to glide into the Shield itself.
Stone cringed, pressing himself deep into the seat as the nose of the ship touched the dancing curtain of energy-death. But there was no explosion, no concussion; instead the craft passed through the force-field as if it was not there. That the Enforcement hovercraft was equipped with a field generator which neutralized the effects of the Shield bothered Stone. He had never known that the Enforcement Troopers had access to the Wildlands. He had always been told that no one was ever permitted to pass through the Shield. Stone watched as the other craft also knifed through behind them.
Once clear of the force-field, the other craft veered off sharply to the right and disappeared in a burst of acceleration. Jessica kept their own craft's course perpendicular to the Shield and Stone sat transfixed at the incredible panorama which now surrounded him.
On all sides, the earth—the Wildlands—panned out to the limitless boundaries of the horizon. Agoraphobia gripped him; the sight of such barren expansiveness was a sensory shock. He staggered mentally from the vision of the desert and the cathedral-mesas which loomed all around him. "I had no idea…"he finally said as they sped over the terrain several hundred feet above the surface.
Jessica laughed and smiled at him. "You'll get used to it," she said, returning her gaze to the instruments.
Stone sat by the window of the craft, fighting his fear of the open space. He began to notice that the land was scarred and battered. Craters and rills pocked and striated the surface, giving it an eerie, forboding appearance. As they sped onward, he saw the sun, obscured partially in a heavy purple and maroon cloud layer, merging into the horizon. It was a thoroughly unfamiliar sight: the intense orange hemisphere, seeming as large as the Cityplex dome itself, dominating the stark features of the Wildlands. It was the first time he had ever seen it—recognizing it only through preserved pictures in Information Retrieval. No one could see the sun through the Shield.
"Hey, what's that?" he said, pointing to a large assembly of dark shapes scattered across the terrain to their left.
Jessica looked down and nodded. Warmechs… dead ones, of course."
Stone's puzzled glance cued her to continue.
"Oh, that's right, you wouldn't know about that, would you?"
"Jessica, will you cut it out and just tell me. I feel like something from the creches."
"Warmechs, Eric—" she paused, letting the word settle into his mind. "Robot machines of destruction. The instruments of war."
"Where did they come from?… How old are they?" Stone looked out as the hovercraft flew over a considerable concentration of the machines, which were scattered about like dry leaves, rotting and husking in the fierce cloak of the desert. They were apparently large things, equipped with heavy treads, extensors and weapons; most of them, however, were twisted and blistered beyond positive recognition.
'They came from the Cityplex," she said easily.
"The Cityplex!" Stone wheeled and regarded her as she continued to scan her instruments. She looked very official and simultaneously very beautiful. There were so many things about Jessica that continued to impress Stone; she seemed to possess every imaginable quality that was needed for every situation. If she had any flaws, Stone had not yet discovered them.
"That's right, Eric. Denver's been at war with us for over three hundred years."
"That's incredible!" Stone could not assimilate what she was saying. Nothing made any sense. Everything seemed so damned unclear to him. "War with who? I mean… why? For What?"
"With my people…" she paused as if debating whether to tell him more. "Because the Cityplex wants to destroy us."
"I still don't get it. How come no one knows about this? Why is it kept so secret? Who's fighting it?"
"Very few Citizens are aware of the fighting because there would be no positive gain in them knowing it—at least that's what the Denver government believes. Besides, if the Citizens knew that there was a whole big world out here—in the Wildlands, I mean—and that there were actually people living in it… why, hell, that would really stir things up, wouldn't it?" Jessica allowed a slight grin to accent her face, apparently enjoying the history lesson she was giving him.
Stone nodded. She was right, of course. That kind of knowledge would only stimulate the higher levels of the society to begin thinking more—about themselves, their lives, their environment, too many variables, too many uncontrollable factors. "All right," he said, pausing. "Who's been fighting this war, this genocidal expedition that you describe?"
"The warmechs and other robot devices," she said, nodding out the window at the last vestiges of the death-machines they were sweeping over. "Back there, where we just passed? That was the site of the closest battle my people ever had to the Cityplex itself. That was over 30 years ago." She stopped for a second as he listened and nodded in amazement. "Since then we've been exclusively a resistance operation—guerilla tactics, undercover sort of things. As for Denver," she gestured back in the direction from which they had come, "they have been producing drones in their Eugenic Centres to aid the warmechs."
" 'Drones'?"
"Humans, but just barely so. Highly developed physically. You know, muscled, agile, strong, but having little or no functional thinking powers. Retrograde idiots of the lowest order who can only do what they are told… and they are told to kill. It's all very simple."
"It makes sense," he said. "But I would have never believed it if I hadn't seen it. You should have seen what happened at the Rapid Terminal—they burned down about half a dozen Citizens trying to get me."
"Of course," she said, looking at him for the first time in several minutes. "Human life means nothing to Denver; as long as the machines keep working, and everybody does what they're told, that's all that counts. It's an insane way to live. Insane."
Stone could taste the venom in her words. The hate that she harbored for the Cityplex and its controllers was intense and palpable; it was one of the driving forces in her life, giving her strength and substance.
"What's it like out there, to breathe, I mean," he asked, pointing out the window and changing the subject. It scared him a bit to see Jessica display such openly hostile emotions.
"It's not too bad, really. Nothing like the propaganda you get in the dome. There's not much radiation anymore, the pollution is almost gone except for the areas around the Cityplexes where they continue to pour out all the shit they can't re-use." She flipped on the interior lights of the cabin as the last traces of sunlight slipped behind the cloud-choked horizon. "Even the plant and animal life is starting to make a new go of it. Of course, it'll be thousands of years before it can gain any solid ground, and they're plenty of new mutations that will die off and all that."
Stone nodded, as he pressed his face close to the plexiglass, straining to see past his reflection in the cabin light. The darkened plain that rolled beneath them offered him a new fascination that was hard to give up with the coming of sunset.
"By the way," he said finally, wondering why he hadn't thought of it before. "Where are we going?"
Jessica laughed. "Do you mean right now? Or eventually?"
"Both, I guess." He fumbled for a cigarette. It was the first in many hours and he anticipated the somehow relaxing sensation which smoking gave him.
"Well, the fuel won't last for more than another hour. It wasn't really designed for long-range flights so we'll just take this thing as far south as we can get in it. That's what used to be called 'Colorado' down there, below us. And we want to get all the way down the continent to what used to be 'New Mexico'."
The names meant nothing to Stone. Apparently they were names that Jessica's people had preserved from the history of the past civilization. "You still haven't told me where we're going. Eventually, I mean."
"Oh you'll see… it's kind of a surprise." She smiled and reached across and brushed his cheek with her hand. He was keenly aware of her delicate touch against the stubble of his caked beard.
"All right, if that's the way you want it, I guess there's nothing I can do about it"
She nodded and looked ahead into the darkness. Stone watched her from the corner of his eye for a moment and then began to surrender to the spectres of exhaustion which had been lurking at the threshold of his awareness. The sequence of the day's events had long since caught up with his body and now his mind was also reaching its limits. Sleep beckoned him, lulled him, until he gave in to its call…
The sound of the craft's engines whining down through several octaves stirred him. It seemed as if only a few seconds had elapsed, yet he knew that much more time had in fact gone by. Jessica was hunched over the controls, eyes intently following the instruments, her face shining under a fine veneer of perspiration that accented her features.
"Hang on, we're going down," she said calmly. "That's about the last of the fuel."
He tightened the straps that held him in the seat and watched through the plexiglass as the craft dropped quickly through the thick darkness. He felt the subtle gyroscopic motions of the ship as it fell, anticipating the jolt of contact which never came. Instead, Jessica eased the hovercraft onto the yielding desert scrubland with the finesse of long experience. She threw back the throttle and the whine of the engines died, swallowed by the heavy darkness of the night.
"What now?" Eric looked out the window at the bleak landscape.
"We wait until dawn. We'll be picked up then." She unstrapped herself and pushed open the hatch. "C'mon, let's get out and stretch a bit."
Stone followed her out into the cool darkness of the Colorado night. He felt the soft crunch of his boots in the sandy soil and the sound was alien to him. A slight breeze confronted him, slipping invisible fingers into his clothing, startling him. He smelled the air; and it was sweet, pungent, almost palpable to him. It was totally different from the controlled, sterile atmosphere of the cityplex and Stone stood silently, rigidly, trying to acclimate himself to the alien qualities of the environment.
Jessica walked around the hovercraft and joined him, reaching out and holding his hand. "Do you find it strange?"
Stone nodded. "It's eerie. I never imagined it was like this."
Jessica pointed up at the moon in the southwestern sky. It was low on the horizon, swollen and yellow-orange, yet irradiating the desert with a cool-blue light. "The moon is low," she said. "When it's like this, people say that there is 'blood' on it."
"That's an odd saying," he said, drinking in the strange sight of the moon he had never seen before, thinking of how appropriate the image actually was. "Do you know what it means?"
"It's usually taken to mean that a war is going on somewhere, or that conflict will be coming in the near future." She looked at him in the cool light, trying to smile, but not managing it. "Well, we'd better set up camp for the night. It gets cold out here. C'mon."
She began unpacking an assortment of supplies from the" hovercraft. As Stone helped, he wondered how efficient this secret organization must be. It seemed as if every contingency had been thought of and provided for. They unloaded an inflatable dome-shelter, which Jessica blew up, and also a lantern, some weapons, and a small crate of food rations which bore the seal of the cityplex on the outside.
"Where did all this come from?" he asked, examining the supplies.
"Various places. The tent is ours. So are the guns and the lantern. The food we get from the con-apt dispensaries."
"What about the hovercraft? How'd you manage to get one from Enforcement, of all people?"
"We have agents in Enforcement. Just like all the other divisions of the cityplex," she said, as if uncertain as to whether she should tell him or not. "… they provide us with the things we need."
"You seem to be very well organized. I had no idea— about any of this stuff. The war. The policies. The underground resistance… I thought all the trouble was just from mutations."
Jessica laughed as she began opening the food carton. "That's the myth that the authorities feed the Citizens. It's just one of the lies—one of the many that they perpetuate."
"They?"
"The leaders of the Cityplex government," she said, sneering. "I'll bet you don't have any idea who they are."
"You know, you're right," said Stone, feeling stupid. "I've always assumed that the computers were more or less in control."
"In a way they are. But remember, somebody has to be programming all those machines. Somebody has to be running the show." Jessica adjusted the light of the lantern and unsealed the flap on the tent. "Are you getting in?" she asked.
"What about you?" Stone noticed that she was still standing, waiting for him.
"Somebody's got to stand watch," she said matter-of-factly.
"Watch? For what?" He looked around the bleak terrain, wondering what she meant.
"I told you there's a war going on, didn't I? This is the war zone, baby. If a warmech stumbles on us while we're asleep, we wouldn't have a chance." Jessica's eyes were large and round, shining in the moonlight. They bore into Stone, stunning him with their seriousness. She was so damned efficient, he thought. A real professional.
"So what happens if one of the robots does show up? What're we going to do to stop it?" Stone shuddered as he imagined one of the giant killer-machines trundling down upon their small encampment—large extensor claws snapping viciously, its laser cannon slicing through the night with scarlet lances. They wouldn't have a prayer.
Before he had finished talking, Jessica had begun walking back to the hovercraft. She opened the latch on the cargo hold and pulled out a long object wrapped in a canvas bag. "We'll use this," she said, hefting it to him casually.
He reached out, expecting a heavy impact and he was surprised at the lightness of the object as it settled into his grip. Stone felt the thing under the canvas; it was long, tubular, hollow. "What's this?"
She walked over and unzipped the canvas, revealing a metallic tube with a gunsight mounted near the center point. "This is a weapon from the past," she said, "American soldiers used it against machines very much like the warmechs—it's a bazooka." She unslung a canvas bag from her shoulder, laid it in the sand, and pulled a missile-shaped thing from it. "This is the shell. Simple rocket propulsion… set off by this trigger… right here." She indicated a finger grip under the sight. "If you can place one in the mid-section of a mech, it's all over."
Stone stroked the weapon easily. "It's incredible. This thing's got to be over 500 years old… but it looks like it was made yesterday. I don't get it."
"You'll understand everything tomorrow," she said. "Just learn how to use it for now."
"I will… but what's supposed to happen tomorrow?"
"You don't think we're just going to sit out here in the desert the rest of our lives, do you?"
"Look, stop treating me like a damn crechling. I—"
"Don't use words like that," she said, cutting him off scowling.
"Like what?" Stone was taken back by her sudden words.
" 'Crechling'," she said, almost spitting it out. "It's an ugly word. We call them 'children' where I come from."
"What's the difference?" Stone thought she was being ridiculous and touchy.
"A whole world of difference, Eric. We don't throw our infants into mechanized boxes and condition them like rats. We touch them, and feed them, and teach them. And we love them. We have no creches." She stepped back from him, staring harshly into his eyes, hoping that he would understand.
"All right," he said after a pause. "I'm sorry. I'll try to remember from now on."
Jessica's shoulders relaxed, a smile formed on her full lips. "I'm sorry," she said. "So will I, Eric… now c'mon, why don't you get some rest. I'll take the first watch."
"No, I'll stay up. I'm not tired. Besides, I'd rather talk to you and watch the sky." He turned away from her and gestured to the vault of velvet-blue that seemed to be hanging just over their heads.
"Okay, if you want to, but I'm going to want some rest in a few hours… just remember that." She picked up the bazooka and climbed up on the leading edge of the hovercraft.
Stone clambered up after her and sat down close to her. No one spoke for several minutes as they sat letting the cool breeze of the desert night wash over them. There was so much he must still learn from Jessica, thought Stone. She was so open with him, so natural; and yet she was somehow secretive. He was growing tired of feeling out of control of the situation. For days, he had felt as if he were being manipulated with no recourse. Especially with Jessica did he feel inadequate. She seemed to be so much more well equipped to survive in the severe realities of a world much larger than that of the Cityplex. He wanted to know her so much - more completely than he presently did.
"Do you do this sort of thing very often?" he asked finally, as he stared off at the distant horizon, afraid to look into her all-consuming eyes.
"Do what? What're you talking about?"
"I mean come out here in the Wildlands. What about your job and the con-apt? Were they just fakes?"
"No, not really. They're registered with the Main Data Bank, but not under my own name, of course. I usually work within the Cityplex. This is the first time I've taken an assignment outside in over a year."
"Well, just what are you supposed to be doing, anyway? I mean, you've never really explained anything to me." Stone looked at her, trying to predict her reaction from any expression she may have given away in her face. But he could find nothing. He waited as she considered her answer.
"I search for personnel for my people, I guess you could say. I'm supposed to sift through the Citizens I meet in the Cityplex and pick out anyone who I think could help us…"
"And you picked me?"
"Sort of. But you kind of picked yourself."
"I don't get it."
"In the bar, shooting off your mouth. I couldn't believe it. I mean, nobody talks like that. Not in Denver, anyway." Jessica laughed, placing her hand on his knee softly.
Inwardly, he reacted to her touch as if she had sent an electric current through his body. He fought to control his voice as he spoke: "I know what you mean… I surprised myself that night. It's hard to explain, I guess, but when I started talking to that guy, Kettner, all the things that had been bottled up inside me just started coming out. Subconscious, I guess."
She nodded, waiting for him to continue.
"I've never really had many friends," he said, feeling that it was somehow necessary to explain himself. "Oh, always played the social 'games' so that I wouldn't get tapped for any kinds of deviancy investigations and all that, but even in the Youth Centers, I was one of the quiet ones. Never did talk much."
For several minutes only the night sounds of the desert surrounded them, and Stone felt that somehow their speech was a violation of the natural environment. The longer the silence continued, the less inclined he was to speak again. Jessica must have felt it too, but finally she spoke: "I was just the opposite, really," she said, letting out a soft long breath that was almost a sigh. "I've always had lots of friends, lots of things were always happening around me."
"Don't stop," he said. "Tell me more."
"You're insistent, aren't you?"
"Put yourself in my place… wouldn't you be?" He laughed and she answered with a smile before speaking.
"Yes, I suppose I would." She brushed several curls away from her face. "All right, I'll tell you a few trade secrets: I'm twenty-five years old, I was born in what was once called Los Alamos, my ancestors were Zuni Indians, and I grew up in the major village of my people. I—"
"Just who are your 'people'?" Stone touched her knee involuntarily. He was pleased to see that she didn't object.
"Basically, we are the survivors of the ancient world war—the holocaust. We are the people who didn't enter the Cityplexes but instead wanted to stay outside and try to rebuild the Earth, instead of the cities. We believe in the beauty of a sparkling river, or a blue sky, or the crackle of life in an autumn forest. We call ourselves the Sierra."
"And my people wanted to destroy you for that?" Stone found the fact hard to accept.
"Yes. It's crazy, isn't it. Just because we were differ-ent from them." She paused for a moment, staring off into the night. She clenched her fist and pounded it fiercely on her thigh. "But that's okay. They will pay for it. We will be the ones who do the final destroying." She spit savagely as she finished.
"You really hate them, don't you?"
"Me? Ha! You should see Marcus! I love them compared to him."
"Marcus? Who's he?" Stone was fascinated by her show of emotions.
"He's the Chairman of the Council… he's running the show. You'll be meeting him soon enough. He even scares the rest of us, he's so full of hate." She shook her head as if trying to shake off some vision of Marcus and his actions.
"He sounds wonderful," said Stone, trying to make light of her words.
"Oh, he's all right, I guess. We really do need someone like Marcus. Someone who won't let us forget, someone who will keep us fired up." She turned to Stone and gently stroked his hair. "Look, we can talk about it later, when you can see more of the whole picture. Why don't you get some rest. The nights out here are long and cold, you know."
"No, I don't," he said, jumping down from the hovercraft. "But I'll take your word for it. Call me when it's my turn." She leaned down and kissed him, and once again he felt the charge of current run through him. The feel of her lips on his was still such a new and fascinating sensation for him; it was something that would keep him from falling asleep.
Leaving her reluctantly, he climbed into the shelter and turned down the lantern. Exhaustion soon came galloping over his bruised consciousness and he was wrapped in its dark shroud which matted out the visions of her touch.
She awakened him with a stroke upon his cheek.
"Can you take the watch?" were her only words.
"Of course, where's that weapon?" He reached out in the darkness of the shelter, his hand landing on her thigh. He held her around the waist, pulling her close to him.
"Not now, Eric," she said, her voice full of authority and directness. "There will be time for all things. Right now, you've got a job to do. And I'm awfully tired."
"I know," he said sheepishly. "You misunderstand me. I only wanted to feel you close to me."
She did not answer him, but waited for him to rise so that she could stretch out. He nodded in the darkness, although she couldn't see him, bent over, and hunkered out of the shelter.
The bazooka was resting on the edge of the hovercraft, and he grabbed it as he pulled himself up on the machine. He could feel its smooth polished finish under his fingers, and he imagined the pure destructive force which he now carried in his hands.
He also thought about their last exchange in the tent. It was obvious that he was falling for Jessica as he had never done for anyone else. She was beginning to fill his very thought. And he wondered what was running through her own mind about him. She had thought that he wanted to have another sexual encounter and that made him feel embarrassed. But that hadn't seemed to have bothered her—she accepted it as a natural inclination. Stone still felt guilty over wishing to lay with her, although the feelings of perversity were certainly dissipating. What had she meant when she said there would be time for all things? Did that mean that she planned to stay with him when they reached their destination— wherever that was? Stone certainly hoped so. He was becoming dependent on Jessica for his very existence, mental as well as physical. They hardly knew each other, yet he found it difficult to imagine being without her.
Looking up, he scanned the desert, remembering that he was supposed to be watching for the enemy.
The Enemy.
A week ago, it was the only world he had ever imagined could exist. Now it was an evil force, a vile philosophy that would have him and Jessica remaindered to the nucleotide vats. He shook his head, smiling at the irony of the situation. It was incredible how quickly one's life could change. Incredible also how quickly a man's allegiances could change—if only the proper catalysts were applied.
Stone looked out across the shadow-strangled landscape. The desert and its steeples of rock in the distance became images of racial memories dredged.up from misty nightmares. They were so alien, yet they were chillingly familiar in some dark and terrifying way. The clouds had drifted away in the night breeze and the moon, now smaller and yellow-white in its brilliance, was high over his shoulder. He felt so terribly alone and insignificant in the midst of such expansiveness; it was all the more comforting to know that Jessica was near him.
The hours passed as Stone continually scanned the horizon, waiting for the appearance of a warmech that would probably not appear. He watched the horizon on his left slowly grow brighter as the first fingers of the dawn reached out toward his position. The deep blue had turned first to violet, and then into pink as the sun crept higher in the sky. It was the first sunrise he had ever seen; the Shield of the Cityplex had never allowed him to penetrate its layers with his gaze. In fact, he had never even thought of what things actually looked like beyond the force-field. But now that he was witnessing the sun's explosion into day, he lacked the equipment to describe his feelings or catalogue his sensations.
He was interrupted by the rustle of canvas behind him. Turning, he saw Jessica emerge from the shelter and come toward him. "Why didn't you wake me?" she asked. "You must be exhausted."
"No, not really. I lost track of time out here. The night kind of captured me, I guess.**
"All right, well come down here and get something to eat. We're due to be picked up pretty soon."
"You said that last night, but I didn't get a chance to ask… picked up by whom?"
"My people'll be coming for us. They've been expecting us but a night rendezvous is difficult to manage so they wanted to wait until daylight." She stooped down, rummaging in the pack, retrieving containers of processed food.
"How will they know where to find us?"
"I radioed them our position while you were sleeping in the hovercraft. They shouldn't have much trouble."
He looked out across the desert. "I don't know, it seems so big… like it would take a thousand years to find us out here."
She laughed. "It's not so big, really. And we have fairly sophisticated methods of finding our way around. You'll see… Here, now, eat some of this. And savor it. It'll be the last time you eat synthetic food."
" 'Synthetic'? What do you mean?"
"My people don't eat this crap," she said, making a face of mock disgust. "We grow and produce natural foods… the way our ancestors did."
"Interesting people, these ancestors of yours," he said, taking a food container and sucking its contents into his mouth.
"Yes, we think so, too." She laughed and sat down beside him."
They sat in silence as they ate, passing the canteen of water back and forth. Then as Stone got up, walking back behind the hovercraft to relieve himself, he saw something in the southern sky. At first it was simply a black speck, bobbing and skipping across the thermal currents that loomed above the desert floor. But standing there, watching it, he saw it grow larger and resolve itself into a distinct shape: a large teardrop attached to a delta wing, with bent appendages hanging from its underbelly. It looked like a grotesquely fat insect slowly lowering itself toward its prey.
"Jessica!" he cried, pointing to the airship. "Look! Over there!"
She jumped up and joined him by the hovercraft. "It's our ship—they've found us. C'mon."
She ran back to the shelter and gathered the few things they had been using into the pack. Stone shouldered the bazooka and the ammo bag and walked with her out into the open beyond the hovercraft. Jessica stood waving both arms at the approaching ship; they could now hear the scream of its engines as it descended and grew closer.
Suddenly several bursts of flame erupted from the nose of the craft. Concussions rocked the ground as the projectiles leapt earthward. "Get down!" screamed Jessica, as she grabbed Stone and pulled him down with her, cringing in the dusty soil.
Two more missiles streaked downward, exploding in orange fireballs ahead of them. "I thought you said they were our friends!" yelled Stone as the ship wailed over their heads and pulled into a tight banking turn to return for another pass.
Jessica looked up in the direction of the explosions and pointed quickly. "They're not shooting at us… Look!"
Stone followed her pointed finger and saw a dark shape scuttling across the desert floor and rolling into the depression of a dried-up arroyo which lay about a thousand meters away from them. "What is it?" he said, straining to see what the object was that he had only caught a quick glimpse of, before it disappeared.
"Warmech," she said, getting up on her knees, reaching for the weapon which was still hanging limply across his shoulder. The ship passed over them again and loosed another volley of missiles into the arroyo. Stone watched as the fireballs marked their impact beyond the small ridge where the machine had disappeared. Then, emerging from the thick black smoke of the explosions, he saw the black killer-robot advancing toward them.
"They missed him!" she cried. "C'mon, we've got to hurry!"
She jumped and scrambled back on her knees behind the hovercraft, pulling put a shell as she went. Stone followed her, watching the machine close in on them.
"Here," she said, her voice cold and smooth, without emotion or fear. She handed him the bazooka while she slipped the shell into its rear opening; then she took it away from him and began scrambling back away from the hovercraft. "C'mon! Get away from this thing. Hurry!"
Together, they crawled quickly away from the craft and positioned themselves, lying prone, about twenty meters from it. No sooner had they lain down, with Jessica taking aim with the bazooka, when the warmech raised one of its weapon extensors and unleashed a burst of brilliant crimson into the hovercraft. As the laser sliced through the Enforcement vessel, the air was pierced by the scream and groan of wrenched metal. The ship was enveloped in a blossom of white heat and energy and the sky above their heads rained down twisted fragments of steel and plastic. The airship made another pass above them but did not fire. The warmech was too close to risk a shot.
Stone followed the insect-like flying machine as it dropped down behind them landing on the thin, jointed legs. Jessica, meanwhile, had coldly lined up the warmech in the scope of their bazooka. It was a full thirty meters high and another fifteen wide. The tread assem-bly was as tall as a man and it churned up the sand and rock like an excavating machine. Jessica waited until it had turned away from the decimated hovercraft and had successfully homed in on their position as the laser extensors raised again and was pointed toward them.
She squeezed on the trigger, and the bazooka rang like a tuning fork as the missile leapt from it.
For Turgenev, and the rest of the crew, the time of waiting had ended. They had received their last lessons from the alien ship's computers and now they were enacting the 600 year old dream: they were returning home—to Earth.
The lift-off had been smooth and uneventful. The ship and its sophisticated hardware practically ran itself; Turgenev and the three others were almost spectators to the entire sequence of events leading up to lift-off and escape from Mars' gravitational field. The ship was like a shark in warm water—sleek, quick, and responsive— as it slipped through darkness of the void. Turgenev, although he was very familiar with its internal capabilities, was continually impressed with its flight characteristics. It was a beautiful ship in every respect. There was even a complete weapons system arranged in a concentric ring around the command deck in the nose. When they had questioned the alien computers on the need for weaponry during interstellar flight, the reply was succinct and somewhat startling: there are a myriad of races in the galaxy; and some of them are hostile. It was that simple, that terrifying. Even the alien race which had built this ship—that wondrous and benevolent race—had been forced to protect itself from unknown or feared forces. Perhaps, thought Turgenev, the aggressive tradition of man was a universal characteristic of all living things throughout the galaxy.
They had named the alien ship The Keating at Tur-genev's suggestion, and he was proud to have been the one who had initiated it. Doing so, he imagined that the scientist's name would still be associated with the first journey back to Earth.
As he and the rest of the crew accelerated away from the gravitational field of Mars at better than 50 kilometers per second, Turgenev sunk back into the contour couch and allowed the onboard computers to handle all the routine functions. His thoughts drifted from the steely environs of the command deck to Johanna. It had been difficult to leave her on Mars—she would have had no function aboard the ship, he knew that—but when he was selected as one of the possible members of the crew, there was no way he could refuse. Besides, if conditions proved suitable for a mass return of the entire Base to Earth, Yuri would be re-united with her in a matter of months. He had told her that there was relatively little danger involved in the mission: the alien ship's technology seemed prepared to deal with any contingencies that may arise. Of course, she cried when they parted. He expected it. He almost wanted it. He had few sentimental notions; but Johanna certainly did. It would have been unnatural if she had not cried, he thought, smiling to himself.
"Base to Turgenev…" The receiver crackled in his headphones. "Stand by for communication from Mission Control…"
Turgenev sat up in his couch and flipped a switch in front of him, waiting. "Acknowledge, Mission Control. Go ahead."
"Yuri, this is Dr. Leone. Is everybody on the command deck?"
Turgenev turned slightly, looking at his three companions, then touched his throat mike: "Check, they're all here. What's going on?"
"I've got a special message for you from Commissioner Fiore" said Leone. "It concerns the mission…
now, open up a reception channel on the communications computer. We're going to beam it up to be recorded in your spools. Transmission scheduled with 10 seconds. Acknowledge."
Turgenev turned to Dubrinski and nodded. The blonde-haired, reed-thin engineer leaned forward and made the necessary adjustments on his control console. "Got it, Yuri. Waiting for reception."
The display console started blinking and chattering as the message was beamed on board the ship. Yuri watched intently as the characters were emblazoned onto the lime display grid and simultaneously inked on the print-out. Several minutes passed as he and the crew waited for the transmission to be completed, whereupon he radioed back Mission Control: Transmission received, Dr. Leone… any further instructions?"
"No, not at the moment… but I'll be expecting to hear from you after you've all read the message. Good luck, all of you."
The channel was closed and Turgenev and the crew were alone once more. He reached down and pulled the print-out from its collection bin and began reading:
MEMORANDUM
TO: CREW, STARSHIP KEATING FROM: GREGORY M. FIORE, COMMISSIONER, IASA MARS EXPEDITIONARY BASE
NOW THAT YOU HAVE BEGUN YOUR MISSION OF RETURN TO THE PLANET EARTH, IT HAS BEEN DECIDED BY THE COUNCIL, IN CORROBORATION WITH SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY HERE AT MARS BASE I, THAT YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING DATA CONCERNING
PRESENT MISSION. YOU WILL NOT BE CONDUCTING AN ELEMENTARY EXPLOR-'ATORY MISSION UPON ARRIVAL IN EARTH ORBIT, RATHER, YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO CONTACT AN ORGANIZATION KNOWN AS "THE SIERRA," WHICH IS LOCATED IN THE SOUTHWESTERN QUADRANT OF THE NORTH AMERICAN HEMISPHERE [106°/58.3' by 33.4°/22.8']. RADIO CONTACT CAN BE ESTABLISHED ON A FREQUENCY OF 287.3 MHz, AT A WAVELENGTH OF 1.04 m. MARS BASE 1 HAS ENJOYED A CONTINUING COMMUNICATION WITH THE SIERRA FOR ALMOST A CENTURY, ALTHOUGH THIS CONTACT HAS NOT BEEN GENERAL KNOWLEDGE THROUGHOUT THE BASE. THE SIERRA HAS BEEN ENGAGED IN A CENTURIES-LONG CONFLICT ON THE PLANET EARTH, WHICH CAN BE DESCRIBED AS BEING OF EXTREME IMPORTANCE TO THE POPULATION OF THE MARS BASE I. YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO FORM A COALITION WITH THE OFFICIALS OF THE SIERRA ORGANIZATION, PLACING AT THEIR DISPOSAL ALL THE FACILITIES OF THE KEATING. IT IS HOPED THAT WITH YOUR ASSISTANCE YOU MAY BE ABLE TO MOST FULLY PREPARE THE WAY FOR THE EVENTUAL RETURN OF MARS BASE I'S ENTIRE POPULATION TO THE EARTH. REGRETFULLY, I CAN GIVE YOU NO MORE DETAILS AT THE PRESENT TIME. IT IS HOPED THAT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THE TRUE NATURE OF YOUR MISSION MORE FULLY ONCE CONTACT HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED WITH THE SIERRA.
LET ME TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO WISH THE BEST OF LUCK ON YOUR MOMENTOUS MISSION.
Slowly, Turgenev let the print-out drop to his lap. He turned and saw that Bergman and the others had also finished reading their own copies. They all wore the identical expressions of confusion, surprise, and disbelief.
"What the hell is this?" said Bergman. "I don't get it… some kind of a joke or something?"
"Somehow, I doubt it," said Grant, who was always serious and somewhat nervous in his mannerisms. "Fiore isn't the type for tricks, you know."
Turgenev nodded easily. He slapped the print-out with his fingertips. "Did you get the semi-formal tone of this thing? They're laying this cloak of mystery over the mission but they're doing it like some inter-office memo. This is ridiculous…" His voice faded off into silence, waiting for the others to reply.
"Well," said Dubrinski. "Leone said she figured we'd be calling her back… why don't we?"
"Yeah, right," said Bergman. "What do you say, Yuri?"
"Go on. It's as good as anything else to do."
He waited for the crackle of the headphones and the voice of Mission Control. "Turgenev, here… O.K., what's it all about, Eva?"
There was a pause at the other end before Leone's voice was heard: "I wish I could tell you," she said. "But I'm afraid the Commissioner's message is just about all I know."
"C'mon now," said Turgenev. "I find that hard to believe. He said there was a war going on down there… did you know about that?"
"Well, yes, but only from second-hand sources…"
"What about this organization—the Sierra? What do you know about them?"
"Not much…" Leone paused, as if trying to phrase her answer properly. "They're a loosely-formed nation of survivors from the Holocaust… they've been living much as we have been up here."
"And who are they fighting with?"
"I'm not sure, Yuri… honest, I don't know. All I know is that the enemy of the Sierra has been felt to be an enemy of ours, also."
"You mean they… whoever they are, would try to stop us from returning to Earth?" Turgenev's mind immediately began conjuring dark and indistinct images of an enemy who would try to stop his mission from being completed.
"That's the general concensus of the Council, yes." Leone's voice almost cracked.
"But why? I don't understand it."
"Neither do I. Yuri. That's what we want you to find out…"
Turgenev sighed audibly. "All right, I guess that's all for now. If you can get us any additional facts between now and when we reach Earth, I'd appreciate it if you passed it along. Turgenev out."
"Of course… Mission Control out."
The headphones filled with the empty hum of a closed channel. Turgenev pulled them off and massaged his eyes and face slowly. His thoughts were confused and scattered. Johanna. The Sierra. War. Enemies. It was all a swirling montage of puzzle pieces that didn't seem to fit together. He wished that the ship could swallow up the millions of miles yet to come, so that he and the others could unravel the mystery of the Sierra.
He thought of the intricate weapons system of the alien ship. How much power did he control with those weapons? The thought struck him that he could very well have the means to change the destiny of an entire planet.
But weapons meant conflict; and conflict usually meant destruction… and death. Turgenev had never even conceived of killing. Killing anything. And yet, now, with the new knowledge of a war raging on the Earth, that decision was being thrown in his lap—the decision whether or not to use the alien's gift for destructive, rather than constructive, purposes.
Looking up he saw that Grant had left his chair and had come to his side. "If they had told us we were going to join a war, would you've gone?" he said, running his hand casually through his long, but thinning hair.
"I don't know," said Turgenev. "I haven't been able to sort everything out yet. Things are different now, but I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with it yet. What about you?"
Grant smiled nervously and cleared his throat. "Well, I sure would've liked to've known more about it… but if the Council feels that there's something going on down there that's worth fighting for, then I'm willing to at least check things out."
"You sound like you're not taking the Commissioner's orders completely as orders either, are you?" Turgenev snorted.
"Well, when you come right down to it… there's not much any of them can do about it, is there? I mean, with them being back on Mars and us being on Earth, the decision to help this organization… well, it's still our decision, right?"
Turgenev nodded slowly. "Yeah, that's the way I feel about it, too. Even though I respect the opinion of the Council. They usually know what they're doing, and I don't have any reason to think that they're wrong this time. Not yet, anyway."
Grant smiled uneasily and started to back away.
"O.K., I just wanted to know that I'll back you up on whatever decision you make. I'm sure the other guys feel the same way."
"Yeah, well, we'll be talking it over some more. Especially after we get in touch with the Sierra themselves."
"When will that be?"
"In a few days. We're still too far away to expect them to have the equipment sophisticated enough to receive our message. And even when we're closer to Earth, we'll still have to use the directional antennae, so we'll have to get all the data on the Earth's movements and all that. Matter of fact, you may as well get working on that now. Give me some projections on positions over the next few days and run them through the computer, O.K.?" Turgenev gave him the "thumbs up" signal, indicating that everything would be all right.
"Gotcha," said Grant, turning back toward his console. "I'll get on it right away."
Bergman, who had been listening to the conversation, spoke up: "There's no sense in worrying ourselves over this, you know."
"Yeah, I know," said Turgenev; he exhaled slowly.
"We're involved now, and there's no turning back. Besides, I'm kind of interested in finding out just who these 'Sierra' guys really are."
"So am I," said Turgenev, peering out through the viewing port at the cool-blue and starry night. "So ami."
The left tread of the warmech was consumed in a bright splash of heat and light. Stone buried his face as the air filled with shrapnel-rain; and he could feel Jessica's body brush his as she dove down beside him.
When the dust and debris had settled, he looked up— and was stunned to see the machine still erect, re-aiming its lasers at their new position.
Without thinking, Stone jumped and grabbed up the bazooka and Jessica's hand. "C'mon! Get up! You didn't get him!" She scrambled after him and they kicked across the sand for several meters before the machine's next burst of red death could strike. It vitrified the sand behind them and left the air smelling of ozone.
The airship had made another pass at the crippled warmech, which was stranded and spinning helplessly on its one good tread. One of the airship's missiles had struck its "head" and the killer robot was starting to smoke badly. But it still sought them out, spraying its laser-death in their direction. Stone knelt down, loaded the bazooka and carefully placed the machine's torso within the crosshairs of the sight. Unmoving, looming large, the warmech was an easy target. He squeezed the trigger and felt the vibration of the tube as the shell zoomed away from them.
Still looking into the sight, Stone watched the war-mech's mid-section rupture in a paroxysm of steel and fire. The extensors collapsed and the sensory head toppled mindlessly into the sand.
"Good shot, Eric!" cried Jessica, as she regarded the smoking ruins. She stood up and waved hurriedly at the airship, which had already set down about twenty meters from where they stood. "C'mon now, let's get on board before any of its friends show up."
Stone had hardly the chance to gloat over the victory he'had scored. It was the first time since meeting Jessica that he felt as if he had control over the situation. And already she was snatching that feeling away from him.
Ahead, as they ran, the underbelly of the airship opened up and a ramp was slid down to the sand. Stone studied the ship carefully for any markings or insignia, but there were none. The body was painted in a series of blotches of brown and tan and green. He could hear the whine of its engines as he drew closer to the craft; there were several faces peering through one of the armament blisters. Jessica edged ahead of him as they ran and bounded up the ramp. He followed her into the cool darkness of the ship and as soon as they were inside, the ramp was retracted and the ship lifted off the hot sand.
Seconds passed as Stone's eyes adjusted to the dim light of the ship's interior; he strained to focus in on the shapes that surrounding him. There were three men and a young woman, all of them wearing the black coveralls that seemed to be the uniform of the group. The men all wore thick beards and military-looking helmets —a formidable trio. The woman was likewise dressed in the black uniform and she had a hand-weapon holstered on her hip. Her face was long and thin and her features were cracked and hardened. She had the same dark complexion of Jessica but her hair was closely cropped. Very functional, thought Stone. There was no place for vanity out here.
"That was close," said one of the men. "And that was a nice shot you made back there." He extended his hand to Stone, smiling. "I'm Barkum, Jay Barkum." He pointed to the others: "And this is Mike Rivers… Bob Poole… and Emily Drakus."
Stone accepted each of their offered hands in turn, as Jessica began speaking. "And this is Eric Stone, Computer Operator from the Denver Plex. We had a little more trouble getting him out than usual. Lost Jeremy at one of the Rapid stations… Yves later on."
Barkum shook his head and grimaced. "They were two of our best men… that's too bad."
Stone remembered the man who had initially saved him from the Troopers. He looked at the group surrounding and he felt suddenly guilty for causing the death of the man named Jeremy—a man that he would never know. "I'm sorry about that… I suppose it's my—"
"Nonsense," said the one named Rivers. "That was their job. They knew the risks involved. We all do, you know."
"Well, frankly, I didn't know until very recently," said Stone, laughing lightly to relieve some of the tension that had been building within him. He felt the airship lurch as it passed through a thermal pocket and bank off to the left.
Barkum laughed with him. "No, I guess you didn't, Stone. Well, there'll be plenty of time for that. You'll be joining us now."
"You both must be exhausted," said the woman, Drakus, "Let me get you some water and rations, all right?"
Jessica nodded and the other woman crawled off into another section of the ship.
Stone watched her leave, feeh'ng suddenly hungry and thirsty. Turning back to Barkum, he spoke: "So you're called The Sierra .. . what does it mean?"
Barkum and Poole both laughed. "You know, I'm really not sure," said Barkum, rubbing his beard and smiling. "The name itself comes from an ancient organ-ization in America—it was dedicated to preserving the environment. But as for the actual meaning of the word, I'm lost."
The others shook their heads, indicating that they also were ignorant of the word's true and original meaning.
"That's interesting," said Stone. "And how long have you been together, as an organization, I mean?"
"Well," said Rivers, who was long and skinny, pale-complexioned, and wispy-haired. "A pretty long time, I guess. About three, maybe four hundred years. Way back when they started re-building the cities, our ancestors just stayed behind, stayed out here."
"Who were your ancestors?" Stone was conscious of the pointed questions, but he felt that, dammit, it was about time he started finding put what was going on.
"Oh, they were a real assortment back in the beginning," said Barkum, laughing roundly in his deep, barrel-throated voice. "Indians, drifters, stragglers from the War, and like that. Later on, as the years passed and they didn't die out, the numbers grew—malcontents from the cities joined us, other stragglers, loners who couldn't make it on their own anymore. We just grew, I guess."
"I don't get it," said Eric, leaning back against the curving hull. "I mean, you seem to be pretty well-equipped, pretty well advanced technologically… how did that come about?"
"Well," Rivers spoke again. He had a slow, easy way of speaking that was distinctly different from the crisp inflections of the others. Stone noticed that Rivers did not share the dark-featured characteristics of the others either. "That took some time, you understand… I mean hundreds of years, our people just lived like the old Indians. You know—simple huts, cook by fires, hunt with crude weapons, all that…"
"But gradually," said Jessica, who had been silently taking in the entire conversation until now. "We started to pick up some of the old ways. People from the cities joined us, they had skills that we could use. Our people learned. We developed."
"Yeah, I can see that," said Stone. "But I mean things like this ship, the guns and all… where'd you get them?"
"You'll see that when we get Home, said Poole, who was large-shouldered and blonde, and extremely good-looking, even among a whole people of finely-sculpted features. "About a century back, I'd say, some of our people discovered some ruins… from the Americans, before the War—"
"And they were underground," said Barkum, cutting in. "Big damn places, carved right out of the mountains. The first one turned up in the mountains, west of Denver Plex. It was filled with equipment and fuel and machinery from the past era. Our people worked it and dug in there, until the Cityplex found out about it… there was a big battle, lasted for months, but they finally succeeded in blowing half the mountain away." Barkum shook his head and lowered his eyes, as if he could have remembered the incident from their history.
"But by that time, using the knowledge we had discovered in the old government installation," said Rivers easily, "we had mapped out the locations of two more large underground centers that we were sure the Plex didn't know about. One of them was way east of here… place called Omaha. The other was south of Denver… that's where we're going now."
"What do you mean when you say 'government installations'… what were these places for, anyhow?", Stone said as he noticed Emily Drakus return with some jugs of water and some fruit wrapped in damp canvas bags. Everyone paused to parcel out the food and pass the jug around. The water splashed into Stone's mouth and il tasted good. He had never had anything like the fruit they offered him, but he accepted a large round and red one with shiny skin. Biting it, he felt the explosively sweet juices of the thing, and he liked it very much. Each new thing he learned from the Sierra made him more interested in them and their culture.
Barkum was roughly chewing on a piece of fruit, and as he pushed another chunk into his mouth, he spoke again: "Now what was that you were saying… ?"
"Oh, about the government places… what were they used for originally?"
"Well," said the big man, "they were basically military I guess. They built them underground so they would be safer from any large-scale attacks. That they're still here proves that they were built pretty well, I'd say."
Stone nodded.
"Anyway, the one we call Home now, it's a gigantic place dug right into the desert. It used to be a complex for testing and developing germ warfare techniques. It was also a tactical military station, and there are whole sections of the place that are filled with ships, tanks, weapons, and things like that."
"And we're riding in one of them," asked Stone, knowing the answer.
Barkum nodded. "Right. Oh, it's all right now, but in the old days, when we had first found all this equipment, it wasn't so easy."
"That's right," said Drakus. "We lost lots of good people just learning how to fly these things and operate the equipment. But in later times, it's been easier… since we've been able to infiltrate the Plexes."
"How do you mean?" asked Stone, taking another draught of the water jug from Jessica.
"Well," said Drakus, wetting her lips as she spoke, "places like Denver have a wealth of technology-trained and skilled people. Whenever we can, we pick them up to help us in our own causes. Like you of course."
"Of course," said Stone, looking at Jessica. "Then tell me. Why me? What did you want with me, that you would go to all this trouble to get me?"
Barkum and Poole grinned. "You have to ask Jessica for that one."
Stone looked back at the dark-eyed woman who meant so much to him now.
She laughed lightly. "We needed your specialty, Eric. There's lots of computer equipment at Home, and we always need more help in running it, fixing it… things like that."
"But I don't know anything about fixing computers," objected Stone, shaking his head. "I just ran them, that's all."
"That's right, said Barkum, pointing a finger at him for emphasis. "But you also have lots of valuable knowledge about the Main Data Bank, the Central Cybernetic Units, and everything else connected with the computers in Denver. Jessica said you were a Level One, right?"
Stone nodded and glanced down at the ragged jumpsuit which he still wore.
"Well," continued Barkum. "We can always use any information from Level One personnel. Besides, we don't get many from that Level."
"Really?" said Stone.
"Yeah, they're difficult to reach. Usually, that is."
"I told you I was somewhat fortunate that I saw you in that bar, Eric," said Jessica. Then turning to the others: "You should have seen him—bad-mouthing the Preventive Prediction… like he was already one of us!"
Everyone laughed and Stone felt a bit embarrassed by it all.
"I followed him, and things went on from there…" she paused, smiling at Eric. "And finally we got him out."
"It's funny that you worked for Triple P," said Poole.
"Why's that?" asked Stone warily. The man named '
Poole seemed to be suspicious. He didn't speak much, but just sat back, watching Eric during most of the conversation.
"Well," said Poole. "We get a lot of our own people from that particular process, that's all."
"That's right," said Barkum. "A lot of the people that your computers condemn to death eventually end up here." He laughed and smiled smugly to himself.
"That seems pretty tricky," said Eric. "How do you manage it?"
"We've got agents like Jessica all over that city. Some of them's only job is to pick up those poor devils that get caught by your computers." Barkum said in a slightly acid tone.
"They're not mine anymore" said Stone.
"Yeah, thafs right," said the bearded man. "I'm sorry about that. Force of habit, I guess."
Just then, the airship banked, throwing them all to one side. Someone up front yelled back to them: "Hang on back there… we're going in."
Jessica scrambled over to one of the windows in the hull. Looking out, she said, "Eric, c'mere. Look at this."
Stone joined her at the window and peered downward as the ship completed a wide sweeping turn. Below, all he could see were three small buildings. As the plane approached, he could see that they were nothing more than tiny shacks.
"That's it?" he asked sharply. "That's where we're going?"
"No, not really. Look closely down there. Around the little shacks… see those posts and the wires? That's part of the warning system—an electrified fence to keep out intruders or at least give us some warning."
"Where do we go in?" asked Stone. "One of the houses?"
"No, watch. You'll see."
As Stone peered through the thick glass, the ship glided closer toward the earth. When is was several hundred meters above the largest of the three houses, it stopped hovering there. Several seconds passed before things started happening. Stone watched as a whole slab of ground, including the houses, began to lift up as if it were the lid of some giant chest. The plane continued to hover over the spot until the moving earth had revealed an immense, darkened cavity. Out of the darkness, Stone saw a flat, square platform slowly rising up to the surface level.
"That's the landing grid. Now watch. We'll touch down right in the center," said Jessica, holding on to his arm.
No sooner than she had spoken, the ship began to slowly drop toward the platform. Stone could feel the engines straining and throbbing as they lowered them easily downward. The platform loomed larger and larger; Stone could make out instructional markings painted on the grid. There was also a row of lamps which were probably used for night landings.
"Was this all here when you found this place, or did your people do it later?"
"Oh, no," said Jessica. "This was already here."
"You mean the old civilization, the Americans, they kept things this sceret from their people? That doesn't sound right."
Jessica and the others who had been listening laughed easily. "Oh, it's right, Eric," she said. "The Americans had lots of secrets."
"That's too bad," he said. "It reminds me of a place I knew once… at least I thought I knew it." He smiled and the others joined him in the cynical remark.
The ship's landing gear touched down on the platform and as Stone watched, three men came scrambling up from a hatch on the deck so that they could tie down the landing gear to some steel rings for that purpose. Almost simultaneously, the entire grid began lowering itself back into the ground.
Stone watched until the ship dropped below the surface level and the great slab started swinging over to cover them up. When that happened, they were surrounded by the darkness, except for the few scattered areas where lamps were burning in the distance.
"That's it," said Jessica. "We get off at this stop."
Everyone stood up in the cramped quarters of the cargo hold and stood by the hatch waiting for it to swing down. When it did, Stone saw a small group of people waiting to greet them. Some of the men wore the now-familiar black coveralls, while others were dressed in light green or red clothing that designated their jobs at the landing port.
Greetings went around as some of the workers recognized the crew with Jessica and Stone. He stood with Jessica as an older man, dressed in black but carrying no weapon, approached. "Jessica!" he said, smiling. "Good to see you… Is this the new man?" he asked, gesturing to Stone.
"Yes," she said. "This is Eric Stone… Eric, this is Alexei Barkum, Jay's father."
"Hello," said Eric, shaking the older man's hand. He possessed a strong grip. Stone looked around the room, which looked like the interior of an enormous warehouse. There were four other airships tethered there, being worked on by crews of men in the light green coveralls.
"Come this way, please," said the older Barkum as he began walking across the steel flooring to a door at the end of the room. "I'm supposed to give you a quick orientation of the place we call Home, Stone. Jessica, you can come along if you want."
Jessica nodded and followed both of them. They walked through the small door which opened into a long featureless corridor of polished metal walls. "This is one of eight 'spokes' that radiate out from the core—the area we just left," said Barkum as he gestured about the hallway. "The entire installation is designed like a giant wheel. Most of the living and working centers are located in the rim itself, and there are ten levels just like this one. The elevators are in the core."
"This is incredible," said Stone, running his hand along the smooth surface of the walls as they walked. "How old is it?
"About five hundred years, or thereabouts," said Barkum, smiling proudly.
"How come it's so clean, so well preserved?"
"The desert, the air, everything in this region combines to make an excellent preserving environment. We've found ancient American warplanes older than this place… just sitting out in the open desert… in almost perfect condition… just like the day they were left there."
Stone shook his head in mock disbelief. "They just left them out in the desert? Why?"
"Because the people from back then, they knew," said Barkum. "They knew about the ways of the desert." The older man, rough-skinned, bushy eyebrows and long, graying hair, paused for a moment, before continuing: "Anyway, Stone, you've got lots of things to see, but right now, we'd like to get you some quarters—you know, get you cleaned up, some clothes, things like that."
Stone nodded and continued walking down the long corridor. They reached the end and passed through another series of doors which opened onto a wide slightly curving hallway. Stone looked down each end to see its sides gently curve away until the sweep of the wall obscured his vision. Barkum told him that this section of the installation was used for orientation of new members to the Sierra. He would be quartered here until he had finished attending some classes and mastered the job that Marcus would eventually select for him.
Barkum led him into a large room where some one issued him a large compliment of clothes and supplies. He was then ushered down the curving corridor again and into a separate section of smaller apartment-like areas.
"This will be your place for the time being," said Barkum. "You've got shower facilities, furniture, and there's an intercom over in the corner that will keep you in touch with any announcements or communications throughout the installation." He turned to go, leaving Jessica by his side in the front room of the apartment. "Get some rest tonight," he said at the door. "I'll be back for you in the morning."
Barkum left, closing the door, and Stone looked cautiously around the room. The furnishings were simple but comfortable. He imagined lhat he was the first one to use the place in hundreds of years. "This is pretty nice," he said to her as he sat down in a leather-lined contour chair. "How many places are there in this thing?"
"What do you mean, apartments?" asked Jessica.
"Right, how many living quarters does it have?"
"I'm not sure, but there's plenty of them. There are over ten thousand of us living and working here at any one time," she said.
"Ten thousand. .. that's amazing," said Stone, pausing, looking around the room. "How many 'new recruits' do you usually get from the Cityplex?"
"Oh, I'm not sure… something like ten to twenty a month."
"And they all come here?"
"Either here or the installation in Omaha, it depends on what kind of skills they have and where they're needed."
"I see… well, I want to get cleaned up, I'm kind of tired of looking like this." He got up, looking for the shower room.
"This way," she said, guiding him down a short hall. "I think I'll join you… it's been a long two days."
Stone felt a spurt of adrenalin course through him as she spoke. He remembered the first time they had been together, and he became instantly anxious over the prospect of another scene like that.
Afterwards, they lay in his bed talking.
"What are they going to do with me now?" he asked.
"Acclimate you to the Home. Find a place for you in our system, I guess. Why?"
"What about you? Are you going back to the City-plex?"
She paused for a few seconds, staring up at the white ceiling. "I don't know. I've been thinking about that myself."
"Do you want to go back?"
Another pause. Then she looked at him. Her eyes were large and deep and dark. "No… I don't."
"Do you want to stay here? With me?"
She nodded and lay her head on this chest. "I guess I do… according to Sierra custom, we are married now."
"You guess!"
"I mean yes, I do. But I'm not sure if the Council will want me to."
"Why not?" He leaned over and looked into her eyes. Somehow they were not as fearful as they once were.
"Because we all have a job to do around here, Eric. My job's been in Denver. If I want to switch back, then that means that someone new will have to be selected and trained and sent out there."
"Wouldn't they have to do that if you were killed? Like those two guys who helped get me out?"
"Yes, but I wasn't killed. That's just it. Look, we're not a bunch of machines here—we don't do things according to programs and contingencies and all that crap. We take each day as it comes. Each day—each separate one of them—that's all we've got out here. Don't you see that?"
Stone lay back in the bed, looking again into the stark whiteness of the ceiling. "Yes, I see it. And I'm beginning to believe it."
"That's good," she said as she leaned over and turned off the light. "Look, we've got some time to talk about it. Let's get some sleep now, O.K.?"
The quick cloak of darkness was enough for Stone. He barely mumbled his agreement before night's brother, sleep, had come for him.
The next two weeks congealed into a rush of new experiences for Stone. At first, the intricate chambers and passageways of the installation seemed so complex that he would never gain familiarity with them. But as time passed, he found that he could pick his way through the steel maze with little difficulty.
He saw very little of Jessica, both because of his orientation to the Sierra way of life and operations, and also because of her debriefing sessions with the espionage/undercover agents. From what Stone had learned and overheard from others, Jessica was one of the most highly regarded agents in the field.
His tours and classes took him through every major sector of the ancient American structure. And countless times he was impressed with the efficiency and the ingenuity of the builders of the place. It seemed as if they had planned for every contingency—except their own demise. Sometimes, when Stone would be walking through a long corridor, he could almost hear, in his mind, the echoing footsteps of the American soldiers and scientists walking, as they must have done hundreds of years previously, through the same passages. Whenever he had the opportunity to use or touch some object from the American past—a weapon, a machine, a photograph or a book—he felt as if he were reaching back through time into the dim past, to share in the glory of the fallen civilization.
Sharing in such memories was a new experience in itself for Stone. Life in the Cityplex seemed to him to be an eternal now: there was no past or future. Time in Denver had always seemed to have been locked in some continuous present—a place out of sync with the movement of the real world, where nothing ever changed. The Cityplex was the eternal symbol. It would always be; and the frail human lives that labored within its dome were only transient things, with little real meaning or import of their own.
How different things were in the Sierra installation! Stone gradually became aware of the differences. He could feel it in the lilt of their voices, the smiles on their faces, the very bounce in their steps. The people of the Sierra were alive; it was that simple. Everyone shared the deep, rich tones of their complexion that Stone had first admired in Jessica, and later noticed in the captured saboteuers in the Main Data Bank. Not everyone was as beautiful as Jessica, yet they all projected a healthy radiance that made them attractive in their own right. But perhaps the most impressive fact about them was their incredible drive—Stone could feel it in every person he encountered or worked with. They all seemed to radiate a fantastic industriousness, a will to devote themselves to the purposes of the entire population: to free themselves from the persecution from the Cityplex, and to reclaim the ignored land of the Earth. These goals, Stone realized, suffused the people with a will to live, a simple desire to continue to be alive, that he had never known within the confines of the Cityplex. In Denver, he reflected now, the Citizens seemed to act out their lives as if reading it from a scriptwriter's treatment. They remained alive simply because they had been instructed to do so.
His orientation was almost completed when he first met Chairman Marcus, the estimable and fiery leader of the Sierra. The elder Barkum had told Stone that he would be working in the computer rooms of the instal-lation, where he would help in re-programming the ancient, but still functional machinery, away from its earlier purposes and into new directions. But before he would begin his assignment, he and the other new members of the Sierra—seventeen other ex-Citizens from the Cityplex—would be meeting with Marcus. Barkum informed Stone that the meeting with Marcus had become a kind of traditional act within the Sierra. To Barkum, it symbolized the equality and lack of caste in their society. No one was untouchable nor unreachable in the Sierra. The simplest laborer could speak with the Chairman and no one would raise an eyebrow or close a door.
Stone was seated in a simple classroom filled with desks and other new "recruits", as Barkum had called them, when the short, but muscular man walked into the room. Stone was immediately impressed with Marcus, although he had not yet begun speaking to them. His face was full, his features blunted and plain: small eyes that were a little too-wide apart, a large lumpy nose, full lips that seemed to be twisted into a continuous sneer, longish, thinning hair that seemed to be collected into thick greasy clumps. His shoulders were broad and thick and he walked with a rolling, rocking gait that caused his arms to swing in an easy, almost arrogant, motion. He wore a simple coverall with his name stitched across the left pocket, and he had his sleeves rolled up to reveal incredibly thick and powerful-looking forearms. Stone was surprised and at the same time, impressed.
"Good afternoon, gentlemen," said the man, looking out into their midst. "I'm Chairman Marcus, and I suppose you've all heard some stories about me—well, I don't know what you heard, and I don't give a damn whether or not you believe 'em. After today, you'll all have your own ideas about me, and that'll be sufficient." He paused to watch the effect of his words on the group. Absently, he pulled out a small piece of wood, a bit larger than a toothpick, and began chewing on it.
Now then," he continued. "Now that you're all become familiar with our operation here, are there any question? Anything that still isn't clear to you?"
Someone raised his hand behind Stone. He turned to see an older man, greying at the temples, wearing glasses, beginning to speak: "What you have here, Mr. Marcus, is—"
"Hey," Marcus cut him off. "Wait a minute. No 'mister,' O.K.? Just 'Marcus' will be fine."
The older man swallowed and Stone though he noticed him blush slightly, but he continued: "Oh, of course, I'm sorry… But anyway, what I was saying—I think your people have done an incredible job in establishing themselves out here, but what I'd like to know is this: how long do you think you can hold out against the Cityplex forces? I mean, how long will it take them to find out where we're all holed up and start coming out after us?"
Marcus grinned and sat upon the edge of the desk at the front of the room. "Well, I really don't know," he said, pausing. "And when you think about it, it really doesn't matter. We've been fighting those cold-blooded bastards for a long, long time and if they find us, well, we'll just give 'em the best we've got." He pointed to the man accusingly. "But why do you want to know something like that? Don't you feel safe here?"
The man did not answer immediately. "… no, it's not that. I was just wondering how long the Sierra plans to live under siege, how long will we be living this kind of huddled, frightened kind of life?"
Marcus nodded. "I'll tell you how long!" he said forcefully as he stood up and started walking about the front of the room. "We'll go on this way as long as it takes to smash the Cityplexes. Look, you should know, better than most of us, what we're fighting for, what we want to destroy. Those domed cities are a cancer on the land! The people that live in them are by and large machines themselves—I'm sure you've all realized that since being here with us. The Cityplexes have got to go, it's plain and simple—they're little more than animals. Caged animals. The domes are like barnacles that have attached themselves to the side of a ship that has the potential of actually getting somewhere. But the barnacles don't want to have anything to do with it. They're just along for the ride. What we must do is to scrape the damn things off and get the ship moving again."
Stone listened to the Chairman's words and nodded to himself. Marcus spoke with simple logic that was all too true and irrefutable. The artificial environments of the machine-cities were not the solution to the problems of mankind. They had only served to encapsulize man, preventing him from extinction, yes, but .also preventing him from progressing. But there were other questions that would have to be resolved.
Stone raised his hand.
Marcus looked at him, cold black eyes boring into him. "Yes?"
"What about the people that live in the Cityplexes? What are you going to do with them?"
"Another good question, young man. There are several paths we could follow here. One, that which we are following now, is to slowly seep our own people into key positions within the Cityplex operation. When enough of our own operatives are entrenched, wholesale changes could be slipped into the Cityplexes and the Citizens could be re-channeled into new ways of thinking and living. This plan is the one favored by our social scientists. There's only one problem, more than one actually, with this path: it takes a long, long time—generations at the very least, and I don't feel like waiting that long. And ©f course, there's been that long war going on. The powers in the Cityplex want us all destroyed—wiped out completely, without a trace. That brings us to the other solution: if and when the Sierra can become powerful enough to carry the war to the Cityplexes, we smash them and burn them to the goddamned ground. Do it to them before they succeed in doing it to us!"
"What?" said Stone. "You would kill all those innocent people?"
Marcus folded his arms and nodded.
"But they don't even know there's a war going on!" said Stone, asserting himself amidst the murmurs growing in the room. "You can't just wipe them out."
"Why can't we?" Marcus stared at him, challenging him to answer.
"Because…" Stone faltered, his mind racing to come up with a suitable reply"… because they're human beings like yourself. They've got as much right to life as I did. You only picked me because you thought I might be able to serve some utilitarian function for you —what about all the others who weren't quite so fortunate?" Besides, with the Cityplexes destroyed, you'll need all the help you can get to get man back on his feet again—building and inventing and repopulating the earth."
"What a bunch of bullshit," said Marcus. "Do you realize what kind of chaos would result if they were able to bust through the plex dome? Do you have any idea what kind of hell would be unleashed?"
Stone admitted that he wasn't sure.
"Why, you'd have hundreds of thousands of sheep jamming the avenues and streets rioting aimlessly and helplessly. What kind of help do you think we could get out of that mess?"
"Well, I don't know, but I'd think that—"
"You'd think nothing," said Marcus. "We've already thought about the whole thing. This is a fight for our lives and our ways of life. It's only following the basic patterns of evolution—the most fit, the most adaptable and strong will survive. The rest will fall into the slime barrel. That's it. The only solution."
"I'm sorry," said Stone. "I didn't mean to get you upset, I was just trying to understand the whole situation more fully."
Marcus laughed. "That's all right. I admire someone who isn't afraid to say what's on his mind. Stick around, you'll learn a lot about why I feel the way I do." Marcus paused and turned to address the entire group. His voice changed from its usual harsh, crisp tones to a softer one. It struck Stone as odd; it was as if Marcus had suddenly felt the need to explain himself. "Listen, all of you. It's a tough job to keep a group like this going. We've done a lot of suffering at the hands of the Cityplexes. Lots of good people just snuffed out. I can't let anyone ever forget all that. We're in this thing to save our skins, and I'm the one they've picked to do the job. And I'm going to try and do it the fastest and most expedient way I can."
"Now then, tomorrow all of you will be starting your jobs here. I want to wish all of you the best of luck and I hope that you can all contribute to the causes that I've been talking about. Mankind is in a* bad fix, what with killing each other off and stagnating itself and all that. It's going to be part of our responsibility to try and get it going again."
"I really didn't get a chance to run through my little prepared speech," he paused, looking at Stone. "But I think* the way things turned out, it was just as well. I think you've all gotten the idea anyway. Thank you."
Stone watched as Marcus turned from them and disappeared from the room. The silence that followed was an indicator to how he had affected them. Marcus' mere presence was enough to command respect, but the finality of his words and the cold, calculated message of his philosophy had left a memorable mark on the new members of the Sierra. Soon after that, Barkum dismissed them and they were all free to go where they pleased.
Stone went to see Jessica, who was waiting for him in her own comfortable quarters. With the orientation over, it had been established that he would live with her. What had begun as a simple mission for Jessica had been transformed into a meaningful involvement with Stone. She had been reluctant to admit this fact to herself or to him, but during the two weeks of Stone's classes, they had been able to make many new discoveries about each other—most of them pleasant ones.
She was. reading a book when he came in.
"The book good?" he said, sitting down beside her.
'It's not bad," she said, looking up from its pages to kiss him. "By a man named Russell—an ancient philosopher."
"Philosopher? You read philosophy, too?" He laughed, kidding her.
"Oh, Eric, stop it, will you. How'd it go today, with Marcus?" She poured him some coffee from the carafe in front of them.
"Well, he's quite a guy," said Stone, accepting the cup. "I can see why everybody's impressed with him."
Jessica nodded. "He's unbelievably bright. I think he's read just about every preserved book and tape that we have from the ancient civilizations. He talks rough, but he is very intelligent. What'd he tell you guys?"
"Simply that if he ever gets the chance, he's going to wipe the Cityplexes and all of its people off the face of the desert."
Jessica smiled. "Yeah, that's Marcus. And he means it, too."
"Is there anybody who disagrees with him?" Stone lit a cigarette. The Sierra brands were all made from lettuce. Very mild.
"Well, there're factions who disagree with his methods, of course, but just about everyone agrees that there's only one solution." She got up and walked into the other room, speaking as she went. "Oh, look, I've got something strange to show you."
Stone looked up, waiting for her to return.
"It looks like we won't have to be worrying about me returning to Denver for a while," she said, waving a white slip of paper in front of him as she sat down again.
"What do you mean?"
"Just this. I got word today that all missions to the Cityplex have been cancelled until further notice. And some of the people I was talking to this morning said they heard rumors that all the agents in Denver are being pulled out."
"Pulled out? What the hell does that mean?"
'I don't know. But everybody who's heard it seems to think that something's going on."
"Any way we can find out?" Stone drew deeply on the cigarette and leaned back on the couch. Absently, he stroked Jessica's back.
"I don't know," she said. "But whenever something's in the wind, everyone usually knows it pretty soon. I wouldn't worry about it. They'll tells us when the time is right. C'mon, let's get something to eat."
That evening, after a simple but nourishing meal, they attended a play on one of the lower levels of the installation. It was a very old play that had been preserved in the ancient tapes of the American place. A group of the more creative souls in the Sierra had adapted it and produced it for a limited production. The theater was full and Stone constantly was forced to plague Jessica for information on which the play was based. It told the story of a Duke of Gloucester, who was successfully taking over control of an ancient land called England. Stone never did fully understand the play, but he was impressed with the intensity with which it was performed, and he could sense from the reactions of the audience that it was truly a fine rendition of the original, whatever that may have been.
Afterwards, they rode the elevators to the top level and strolled out past the landing grid, up a small stair-way that opened onto the surface of the installation. Jessica took him past the guards at their posts and they walked amid the quiet ruins of small stone houses that marked the entrance to the installation. There was a large moon high aboxe them and it cut a silver-white swath through the blue aisle of night.
'Once you get used to it out here, you don't want to be penned up down there," he said.
"Exactly. That's why we're going to all come, out of there someday." Jessica gestured outward into the sprawling desert wilderness ahead of them. "All of this land out here—it belongs to men, to live on it, to work it and take care of it. We shouldn't only be using it to have wars on. It's a tragedy—an insane tragedy."
Stone nodded as they approached the crumbling shell of the ancient house. They paused at the half-standing doorframe. "This is the way men used to live." she said. "A house. A simple little thing, really, but enough to provide shelter and warmth and a feeling of peace, for those who could find it."
Stone passed his hand over the bricks, still locked into place, resisting the harsh hand of time and weather. "Do you think that we'll ever live like this again?"
"Oh, Eric, I hope so. We can't go on like this forever. It's almost as unnatural as the plexes themselves. We don't want to stay dug in the ground like little creatures hiding from predators. A house, Eric, this is the way man should live."
He nodded and squeezed her hand tightly. She responded and they walked a little further until they had reached the next of the small structures. The second one was almost completely down. Only one wall was standing and part of a wooden skeleton that had once been the roof. They sat down in the prairie grass, and it provided a soft palette for them. The wind snaked through the ruins, joining them in their silent ritual. Stone held her close and kissed her. She responded and they settled into the grass. The stars were bright above them as they loved one another.
The next day, as Eric was acclimating himself to the new work in the computer rooms, he learned about the ship and its imminent arrival. The loudspeakers crackled with the brief announcement that the ship would be landing sometime during the afternoon.
He learned from those with whom he worked that the ship was coming from Mars, the next planet out. They told him the entire history of the ancient missions to the planets and how man had reached for the stars themselves before the last great war which ended all the hopes and dreams.
"But how are they finally getting back?" he asked one of the older operators, who had been doing most of the talking.
"Who knows?" said the old man, whose face was a mass of grooves and surfaces that told the story of his long life. "Perhaps they've found a way to repair their ships. Maybe they found a new fuel? The only thing we know for sure is that they're coming."
"But why here?" said Eric. "Why are they coming here, to us?"
"Oh, they've been in touch with us for a long time now," said the old man, whose name was Ainsworth. "They've been sitting up there, just listening to our messages, cheering us on from the sidelines, you might say," He paused to chuckle to himself. "Never could do anything about it, though. But now, maybe they've come to help."
Stone could tell from the man's words that he wanted to believe that wish so very badly. Here was a person who survived much of the suffering of the Sierra's history, and who wished that it would be over during his own lifetime.
Soon they were back at work and Stone lost himself in the project of converting the large reels of tape and information into new programs. It was a tedious job, because much of the material on the old tapes had some historical significance and an entire team of investigators had to carefully screen and research the data to see if it should be erased or preserved.
That afternoon, he joined Jessica to await the arrival of the ship. They joined the crowds which were assembling by the hour on the surface all around the landing grid. The New Mexico sun was low on the horizon when Stone and Jessica reached the open grassland. Only it was no longer open and spacious. Everywhere islands of darkly tanned and smiling faces were spread out around the landing grid. Stone estimated the number to be upwards of five thousand.
They worked their way through the crowds, which were all seated in the theater of the prairie, calmly watching the sky for the first sign of the ship from beyond the sky. Stone marvelled at the atmosphere that permeated the crowd. There were groups of singers and dancers, musical instruments sent their melodies into the wind, blending with the gentle whispers of the people. It was as if everyone had come to a gigantic festival, an open-air celebration in which happiness and freedom were the only necessary requirements.
Stone could feel the warmness of the sun on his back and of the crowd in his mind. What a beautiful reception they would give the pilots of the ship, he thought. What would they think when they peered down from their ports to see this sea of swaying, singing, smiling faces. Surely this was not the face of a people dedicated to the destruction of the temples.
But, surely it was, thought Stone. Such was the strange mixture of emotions and desires that comprised a man. Never before in his relatively short life had he been made aware so quickly of the changing faces of man, of the myriad directions and actions of which he was truly capable. He looked at Jessica and she smiled at him. Her dark beauty almost screamed out at him in the midst of the crowd. He held her hand tightly as they walked into a circle of familiar faces—old Barkum, Poole, and several others. Poole was playing a harmonica and someone else was picking out notes on a guitar.
Sitting down in the group, Jessica began to sing along with the others. Stone sat silently, smiling and watching the sky. The minutes passed, as jugs of wine and shards of cheese worked their way through the crowd, but Stone kept watching the darkening horizon.
When the sun was scarlet hemisphere in the mountains to the west of their position, an awareness scurried through the crowd. One by one, and then in larger numbers, they saw something falling out of the twilight. Stone followed the pointing fingers and arms and concentrated his vision on a small patch of sky. There is was—a dark sphere, moving slowly, bobbing and drifting like a spore in the wind, growing larger and more distinct. The air was filled with cries of excitement, yet Stone kept silent, gripping Jessica's hand.
He watched the ship until its blackness, its hugeness, was almost directly above them. Its size dwarfed the entire landing grid and the crowd had to spread out quickly as it descended silently into their midst.
Sitting there, silent and immobile, the ship had silenced the crowd with its massiveness—a dark symbol of hope and fear.
When the hatch opened to the great ship, the crowd nestled in close to the landing grid, waiting and watching. Two men appeared in the hatch, wearing jumpsuits similar to the styles of the ancient American astronauts. Stone, from where he stood, saw Marcus and several others ascend the ramp and greet the two space travelers.
After the perfunctory handshakes and hurried introductions, two more astronauts appeared in the entrance, who were in turn, introduced. There was no ceremony, no band playing, no applause. Although it was most certainly a momentous occasion, the Sierra played it it carefully; low-key and business-like.
The crowds did not disperse until Marcus had disap*-peared below the grid area with the Martian colonists. Stone lingered on as the sun was lost among the distant peaks, admiring the bulk and workmanship of the ship. "She's beautiful, isn't she?" he said softly to Jessica.
"I guess so," she said, looking at the squat, faceted lines of the craft, unable to perceive much aesthetic power in it
"I wonder how they were able to get something like that together?" asked Stone rhetorically. "From what I've heard, they're had it fairly rough up there."
"We'll find out soon enough," said Jessica, "C'mon, we might as well go below. It's getting cool out here."
Turgenev could not shake the feelings of suspicion from his mind as he entered the underground complex of the Sierra people. The man at his side, Marcus, seemed to him to be a coarse, unbridled type, who could easily become an intolerable companion. But Turgenev could do nothing but listen to the man's stream-of-consciousness conversation as they walked toward an elevator shaft in the central core. Marcus was cordial, yet he was informal and he spoke unabashedly—they were qualities which Turgenev both admired and distrusted, Marcus oozed self-confidence; and that bothered Turgenev, although he wasn't sure why.
He and his crew were given a quick tour throughout the installation; and they, like Stone and the others, rapidly learned its history and the centuries-long saga of conflict between the Sierra and the Cityplex. Turgenev admitted to himself that while listening to the strong words of Marcus, it was becoming easier to understand the motivations of the man, and the desires of the Sierra people as a group. He had been completely unaware of what had taken place on the Earth during the colony's long absence.
Two weeks passed as Turgenev and his men were introduced to the various officials and leaders of the Sierra. He learned that modest communication between his people and the Sierra had been taking place for almost a century due to a serendipitous discovery by a Sierra radio astronomer from the long-destroyed Colorado installation.
The message from Commissioner Fiore kept ringing back to him as he sat in on the endless meetings and demonstrations. It seemed to Turgenev that the Sierra leaders were very much military-oriented, although they didn't admit this fact to themselves, so intense was their desire to crush the Cityplex.
"What kind of weaponry do you have on the ship, Commander Turgenev?" asked one of the young bearded Sierra leaders.
"Well," I'm not actually sure. You see—"
"Not sure!" boomed Marcus. "What kind of answer is that? You do have a weapons system, don't you?"
"Well, yes." Turgenev was taken back by the outburst. Absurdly, he felt guilty.
"Well, haven't you tested out its capabilities? These aliens you say gave it to you… they must have been far in advance of ourselves, correct?" Marcus began pacing in front of the meeting table.
Turgenev nodded, looking to his crew for affirmation.
"Well, weren't you interested, at least, in knowing what kind of protection you had while making the long trip to Earth?"
"I suppose not, Sir," said.Turgenev. "I—none of us, actually, have much interest in weapons. I think you know that we've had little conflict on the Mars Base, and—"
"I don't give a shit what you've had on the Mars Base," rasped Marcus, rolling his sleeves higher on his forearms. He was built like a anthropoid ape, thought Turgenev, and he seemed to possess similar sensibilities.
"All I want you to realize is that you're not on Mars anymore. You understand that? We've got a war to win; and you were ordered to help us do just that with that big monster you've got sitting outside. And when I want to know what kind of support we can expect from you, I want to knowl You got that?"
Turgenev nodded and swallowed hard. He could understand now why the Sierra had chosen Marcus as their leader. He was thoroughly unshakable in his convictions that he was always correct and justified in his actions.
"Well, I still can't answer you now," Yuri finally said. "Perhaps we can arrange some kind of test in the morning?"
"That's a damn good idea," said Marcus, then he laughed, revealing an uneven row of teeth. .
The meeting continued as the Sierra and the Martian colonists discussed several contingency operations for dealing with the Cityplex. The plan which was most favored was an all-out assault'on the Denver Cityplex if the weapon-system of the alien ship proved to be the factor which could throw the balance of power in favor of the Sierra.
That evening, when Turgenev returned to his quarters hi the ship, he kept reviewing the plans in his mind. He wondered what Johanna would think if she knew that he had been sent to Earth to be a soldier, to kill and destroy. Perhaps she already knew. He felt ashamed and foolish. What had he said to her when he had left? Something about a mission of peace and exploration, or some such crap. How lofty and self-important he had felt. His visions of becoming a latter-day Balboa had been chased from his mind by Marcus's words. Why hadn't they told him what the situation was here on Earth? Would he have still gone, if they had?
He didn't know.
Perhaps that was why they withheld the information: knowing the true state of affairs may have kept anyone from wanting to get involved. It was one of the disadvantages of extreme pacifism, thought Turgenev. Idealism, through time, can replace the more basic concepts of self-preservation and simple survival; and that could be detrimental to a species as intellectually complex as mankind. Even the wondrous, beneficient aliens, he thought, had included a means to protect themselves. Advanced though they were, the aliens knew that idealism in the face of harsh realities is a poor second best.
Getting up from the bunk, he went forward to relieve Dubrinski from the watch on the command deck. They had discovered that the alien vessel was so large that the landing grid could not lower it fully into the aircraft hangar beneath the surface. And being forced to remain on the surface, a large and glaring target on the otherwise barren desert, Turgenev had felt it best that they maintain a constant watch.
Sitting down at the command console, he ran through a quick check of the instruments. The ship possessed a large array of sensory devices, which swept radially about the ship. If anyone or anything approached their highly vulnerable position, Turgenev would be informed.
Hours passed and he continued to consider the alternatives. Marcus's arguments were convincing, to be sure; yet Turgenev had still not gotten used to the idea that he would be involved in bloody conflict. Bergman and the others had been reticent about the matter, even when he had pressed them for their opinions. Turgenev received the impression that they were afraid to commit themselves to any particular train of thought. If they did not wish to cooperate in the Sierra's war, Turgenev could slap them with insubordination to the Commissioner; if they did want to use the alien ship in the assault, Turgenev could accuse them of denying their long heritage of peace on the Mars Base. No, he thought, the crew won't help me—they're waiting for me. They seem to be content to ride out whatever decision I come to on the whole matter.
More time passed.
He was almost nodding off to a fitful sleep when the console began a series of clicks and hums. Opening his eyes with a start, Turgenev was shocked to see the sensors indicating large scale movement on the Northern perimeter. There was an immense field of electromagnetic disturbance—probably sophisticated machinery— moving slowly towards their position. He keyed in several other parameters—infra-red radiation uid organic-scent disturbance—and he could see an image of a large mobile force of men and machines advancing toward the installation.
Turgenev alerted his crew and notified Sierra headquarters.
The hoarse cry of the klaxon rebounded through the corridors of the installation and Stone was dragged from a deep sleep by it. "What's that?" he said into the darkness, assuming that Jessica had heard it, too.
But she was already leaping from the bed, scrambling for a light. He sat up and saw her, naked in the warm glow of the wall-lamp. "Get up, Eric! Hurry!"
"What's going on?"
"That's the alarm—we're being attacked!'*
The words sunk into his mind, sparking into life the memories of panic and desperation that he felt when he had been chased through the levels of the Cityplex. He jumped from the bed and pulled on his jumpsuit and boots. "Where're we going?"
Jessica was already dressed and by the door. He saw that she had strapped on her commando belt and was carrying a small weapon. "C'mon! Up topside. We'll have plenty of company."
Racing out into the halls, Stone was not surprised to see them jammed with human traffic. Everyone flowed into the corridors that would take them to the central core elevators. Some of them were armed and there were also those who were only half-dressed and un-armed, yet they were equally ready to defend the installation.
The elevators were full and most of the people had taken to the emergency stairwells. Stone and Jessica joined in the mad rush upwards, oblivious to the gruelling pace and the seemingly endless sets of steps. When they reached the surface levels leading into the aircraft/ hangar sectors, Stone saw Barkum and several other familiar faces directing the crowds into orderly columns and phalanxes. Weapons and ammunition were being passed out to the columns and helmeted platoon leaders were barking instructions to the parcelled-out groups.
Jessica advanced to the nearest column and asked the helmeted man for instructions.
"Just fall in somewhere. We're going up as soon as they can get that big ship off the grid."
"What's going on up there?" said Stone, as he accepted a rifle and belt of rounds from the platoon leader's aide.
"Nothing yet," said the man, his chest heaving from excitement and tension. "But there's a big mechanized force closing in on us…"
Just then the roof of the hangar area began to swing back, revealing the swath of night flecked with stars. A high-pitched whine could be heard as the airships began torquing up their engines. Men in green coveralls began directing the crowd movements away from the aircraft as they prepared to lift upwards.
As the landing grid cover swung away completely, Stone could feel the hangar deck rising upwards to the ground level. He watched as the airships, fat and swollen like giant bumblebees, began rising up above their heads. To the south, hanging like a new planet in the night sky, was the alien ship, piloted by the small four-man crew. Stone waited within the ranks of the "home-guard" squadrons, looking for the first signs of the attacking forces.
"Where are they?" he said, his words cracking off in hoarse pieces.
"Don't know yet," said Jessica. "The ship must have detected them while they were still out of sight."
Stone looked around at the orderly display of the troops. "Everyone seems so calm. Everything is so ordered. I can't believe it."
"Why not?" said Jessica, as the column of troops began moving off the hangar deck and into the fields to the west. Someone yelled that they check their weapons and ammo, causing Jessica to pause in what she was saying. They moved close to one another, shouldering in be-tween the other people, men and women alike, all preparing to fight, and if necessary, to die.
"Why not?" she said again. "We've practiced this maneuver for years."
"Years?"
"Of course. It was only a matter of time before the warmechs discovered our exact position here. We've been expecting it for a long time actually."
"Is that what's out there now?" said Stone. "Warmechs?"
Jessica nodded. "Most likely. Thousands of them, I'd guess."
The thought of thousands of those killer-robots trundling toward them made Stone shudder inwardly as he remembered their first encounter with the things. The column they had joined continued to move upward away from the landing grid to assume a flanking position on a slight ridge about a half-mile from the installation's entrance. Stone watched the aircraft—five of them—and the alien ship slowly drift northward toward the horizon and the enemy. The air was permeated with the dank smell of fear.
Turgenev was cemented to the contour chair, watching both the infra-red detector and the visual screen that displayed the flat terrain of the northern perimeter. Behind them was the installation. Just ahead was the still moving force of attackers. There was no more,question of alternatives now, he thought. The Cityplex forces had eased the burden of decision from him. No matter how one interpreted his actions now, it would always be self-defense: always an honorable action.
Through the viewing port, he and Bergman saw the first edges of the attacking force on the horizon. Pale and shallow in the moon-glow, the sea of infantry was advancing toward them. He slowed the ship's speed to almost zero, hovering effortlessly, and Dubrinski radioed the instructions along to the other Sierra ships. They descended to one thousand meters above the attacking force and Turgenev adjusted the viewing screen to a high magnification. Focusing in on the point of the enemy troops, he saw a bizarre sight: the Cityplex troops looked only vaguely human. Naked except for bands of ammunition, swords, and power-packs for their laser weapons, they marched in close ranks. Their bodies were large and muscular—superbly-formed supermen—but their heads were small, with the cranial area almost a flat slope back to the neck. Tiny mouths and blank-staring eyes.
"What the hell are they?" he asked Bergman, who was also staring in confusion at the scene on the viewer.
"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it."
The columns of troops began passing beneath the hovering ships and the Sierra craft began radioing in for instructions. Turgenev announced that he would concentrate on the rear columns of mechanized tanks following on the heels of the strange, grotesquely-shaped infantry. He knew that the warmechs were the most dreaded aspect of the Cityplex forces, and he knew that it was his ship that would be required to deal with them.
He watched as the Sierra airships broke formation and dropped into the ranks of the infantry. The air became filled with a cross-hatching latticework of scarlet beams as the ground troops collectively opened up on the airships. The ships, in turn, were unleashing racks of missiles, which, upon impact, tore large gashes in the body of the troops. Within seconds, the desert was hidden under a rising cloud of dust and flame and smoke. Turgenev watched one of the Sierra ships take a direct burst from a laser beam: it blossomed into a fire-white flower of death, whose petals quickly fluttered down upon the infantry.
"O.K.," he said, swallowing with some difficulty. "Let's go after the machinery."
The alien ship hovered closer over first rows of warmechs, which were just beginning to break formation and assume tactical positions around the ground forces, which were now feeling the counter-attack of the Sierra ground troops. Turgenev watched as the warmechs raised their extensors and aimed their laser cannons at his ship. Almost simultaneously, the blood-red beams leapt forth and struck the hull of the ship… with no effect. "How's the hull taking it?" yelled Turgenev, although, he already knew that the alien metal was impervious to lasers.
"No sweat," cried Grant, who was monitoring the normal ship functions during the attack. "It's like they weren't even there."
Turgenev nodded and consulted the computer. He requested data on the available weaponry that would do a satisfactory job on the attacking warmechs. The grid sparkled for several seconds before displaying the following message: distance: zero to twenty kilometers location: heavy atmosphere/oxygen-nitrogen system: 11011001 10/photon projectiles for metallic targets
1001001011/neutrino beamsweep for personnel targets
Turgenev read out the binary codes for the indicated weapons systems and he keyed in the first of the two weapons systems to begin the initial attack. He watched as the intricate systems of the alien ship took over. Sensors locked hi on the warmech targets. Seconds passed as the measurements were fed into the weapons bank.
Turgenev felt a slight shudder within the hull as the first salvo of photon projectiles leapt from the nose of the ship. Watching through the viewing port, he saw the blue-white capsules of energy streak downward toward the war machines. They appeared to be egg-shaped objects that crackled and pulsed, making the edges indistinct and ghost-like.
He was forced to turn away from the port when the first photon-eggs found their targets. The entire area was enveloped in a yellow-white explosion. He watched as the weapons system continued in its automatic sequence: new targets were locked in, again the hull shuddered as new projectiles were released. Just as the air had begun to clear from the first attack, another blinding flash erupted in the midst of the warmech formations.
"Damn!" cried Dubrinski. "You see that, Yuri!"
"It's unbelievable," was all that he could say, as he stared once again into the viewing port.
In the area where the warmechs had been assembled, there was now only a terribly bleak plain of glazed, vitrified sand. It looked like a gigantic, slippery mirror in which the sparkling stars were reflected. The immense energy of the photon projectiles had vaporized the warmechs so completely that there was nothing left of them. So intense had been the heat of the explosions that the very ground upon which the machines had rested was also turned into a molten mass which flattened out and gradually cooled into a diamond-like surface.
Almost reluctantly, Turgenev directed the ship back toward the columns of ground troops which were now diffused across the prairie firing into the Sierra forces and striking out against the four remaining airships.
Stone, standing on the small rise above the main body of the fighting, was still waiting for his unit to engage the first wave of the Warrior Drones. He felt no compunctions about pouring death into the mindless, quasi-human troops; he knew that they were useless for any other purpose than killing.
When he saw the alien ship in the distance unleash its first assault on the warmechs he was stunned, along with the others, from the shock waves that rushed out from the first explosions. The warmechs were simply enveloped in a brief, intense vortex light which consumed them completely. The destructive force of the one alien ship was awesome. It was truly a super-weapon; and the implications of merely possessing it were frightening.
His platoon never did engage the enemy. Just as the first wave of Drones clashed with the Sierra home guard, the alien ship had cast its giant shadow over the main body of the enemy. units. Stone felt helpless as he watched the Drones running and jumping across the battle area, their laser weapons slung low against their hips, unleashing the fiery beams of death. The Sierra troops fired back with their ancient rifles and missile batteries, but it was like the war of the flea against the elephant, until the alien ship intervened.
Stone watched, clutching Jessica's hand unconsciously, frozen by the awesome sight of humanity in conflict with grotesque parodies of itself. The Drones seemed to be absorbing the bullets with no effect; they continued to march forward, slicing into the front lines of the Sierra forces.
Suddenly Stone saw things that looked like gossamer webs drift down from the forward end of the alien ship. Now truly did Turgenev's vessel give the image of a giant insect, spinning webs of death over the enemy forces. The gossamer was actually a highly charged field of amplified, concentrated neutrinos. Like lace, the neutrino field swept over the Warrior Drones and sizzled the flesh and soft tissues from their bones. Whole platoons of the Drones crumpled into smoking heaps as the alien ship continued to lay down the lethal particle-fields. The Sierra troops pulled back and gathered into ragged but whole formations near the landing grid as the carnage continued. Stone knew that the slaughter would go on until the last Drone had fallen; for the mutants never stopped coming—such was the nature of the beast.
The Sierra forces, awed themselves by the display of power by the alien vessel, could do nothing but stand by and wait for the last of the Drones to be swept into the alien death-net. Far off on the horizon,, the remaining columns of warmechs had regrouped and were heading toward the distant horizon, their treads kicking up giant roostertails of sand to mark their retreat.
Finally, when it was over, and the air was rilled with the stench of burnt flesh, the Sierra airships gathered about the giant probe-ship like baby whales about their brood-mother. Stone watched the dark ship slowly settle onto the earth near the landing grid. He knew that this quick victory had only signaled the beginning of something far greater.
There is a strange kind of feeling that exists within an army, or a nation, or a group, on the eve of its ultimate confrontation. There have been chronicles of Great Battles throughout the history of mankind; and most of the epic-writing, and song-singing of the events seemed to have ignored the night before—when the individual spectres of death and fear encyst themselves into the dark fissures of men's minds.
Such was the eve of the assault upon Denver Cityplex. The battle at the Sierra installation had been over now for almost a week, but its fiery image still burned brightly in the minds of all those who had witnessed it. And it burned no brighter than in the mind of Marcus, who seemed to have been inspired almost spiritually by the experience.
Meetings were held and strategies were concocted. Marcus and his council of leaders planned for the ultimate attack on the Denver dome. Turgenev, although shaken by the destructive powers which he had at his command, was willing to go along with the plan of attack. The more the Martian colonist learned of the Cityplexes—especially the genetically mutated Drones —the more he knew that the Cityplexes must be destroyed.
Stone was brought into the high-level meetings, along with several other ex-Citizens of Denver because of their invaluable knowledge concerning the internal func-tions and aspects of the Cityplex. Jessica'was also included, along with the other undercover agents, because of her own special brands of knowledge and experience, gained while working within the Cityplex.
The group, more than one hundred strong, sat in a semi-circular assembly hall, discussing the final plans. It was during this series of meetings that Stone had met Turgenev. Stone seemed to be immediately attracted to the Martian because he sensed that they shared many of the same feelings about the situation that both had been thrust unwittingly into. Both men were actually outsiders —foreigners—in the midst of the Sierra people, and with each other's new friendship, they felt a bond which served to buoy up each other's insecurities.
As the last meeting broke up, Stone and Jessica approached Turgenev's table at the center of the room. "Will you join us for a while?" said Jessica, staring intently into, the small man's eyes.
Turgenev paused, his eyes darting back and forth from Jessica to Stone. He was tired from the long series of meetings and discussions. His body craved rest, but his mind yearned for companionship. "All right, I will. Thank you."
The trio left the meeting hall and traveled the elevators upwards to the residential sections to Jessica and Eric's quarters. After picking up some wine and some refrigerated cheeses, they ascended to the surface, where the moon was already high in the crystal-like clearness of the New Mexico sky..
Stone had grown accustomed to the immensity of the stars, in fact, he even enjoyed staring out into them, drinking in their boundlessness.
Turgenev noticed his upward glances. "It's beautiful, isn't it, Stone?"
"What? Oh, yes, the stars. I never saw them before coming here. Incredible." Eric shook his head and reached for Jessica's hand as they walked between the decayed houses that marked the entrance to the installation.
"Whenever I look out there now," said Turgenev slowly, "I wonder who and where are the ones who came to Mars and left us the ship."
"I wonder if they're watching us now," said Jessica. "I wonder if they know what we're doing with their gift."
"You steal my words," said Turgenev, smiling with some effort.
They sat on the prairie grass and looked out across the plain where several days previous a battle had raged. The skeletons and twisted, metal still littered the plain like dessicated leaves after a storm. Jessica uncorked the wine and passed it among them. Stone broke off several pieces of cheese and they shared it.
"Do you have someone back on Mars?" asked Jessica.
"Oh yes," said Turgenev. "Her name is Johanna. She's an artist…" He threw back his head and laughed. "They certainly don't need her down here."
"Don't say that," said Jessica. "This is only a time of beginnings. Births are sometimes violent, and this is what we're doing here. Your ship has sown the seeds of change upon the earth, and someday we'll need ones like your Johanna."
Turgenev nodded slowly and smiled. She was right, he thought. "Yes, I suppose you will." But inwardly, he wondered if he, or Johanna, would be alive to see that distant day.
Stone, who had been sitting quietly, his eyes still locked onto the paths of the stars, finally spoke. "Tomorrow, Yuri… are you afraid?"
Turgenev paused as he fumbled with a small pebble he picked up from the prairie. "I don't know if I have any right to be scared," he said, laughing lightly. "Especially when I think of the power in that thing."
He pointed to the alien ship. "But… yes, I am afraid. Afraid of dying of course, but also of what I might do tomorrow, of what I may have to live with for the rest of my life."
Stone nodded. He knew what Turgenev was trying to say. He admired the Martian colonist for his honesty and unpretentiousness.
"We'll all have something to live with after tomorrow," said Jessica, her words sounding like the war-rhetoric of Marcus during the meetings.
No one spoke for a long time. Stone held Jessica close to him as they offered each other sips from the wine. Turgenev, sitting alone, seemed to be thinking of a distant place, his eyes searching among the thousands of nightsky beacons—one of them held life that was close to him, despite the millions of miles.
Stone stole a look at his watch. It was late. "We're assembling at dawn," he said softly, as if he were reluctant to break the quiet spell they had conjured about themselves.
"Isn't it always that way?" asked Turgenev.
"What?"
"Nothing, it was supposed to be a joke. Sorry." Turgenev stood up. "You're right. We need some rest."
Stone helped Jessica to her feet and the three of them walked back to the hangar area in silence.
When they made love that night, Stone was deliberately slow in carrying it out. He sensed that Jessica, too, wanted to savor the last, quiet moments they would have together, until the larger issues were decided. Each kiss, each touch, perhaps because they wanted it to linger, seemed to disappear all the more quickly into the never-ending well of the past.
Finally, everything would live only in their memories, and they fell asleep holding each other, but oblivious to the fact.
The dawn came swiftly, casting the desert in its soft orange glow. Stone had assembled with the rest of the task force just north of the landing grid, where he could see the Sierra airships being administered to by the . ground crews in green. From where he stood, he could see the flaring wings and double-nacled openings of the ships' engines glowing warmly, preparing to lift off. In his midst sat the group of personnel carriers—great armored, treaded beasts—that resembled lumbering insects with blistered carapaces and weaving antennae.
The task force to the Cityplex was comparatively small—roughly two thousand land forces, and all of them continued in the personnel carriers and tanks which could rumble across, the desert at better than 80 kilometers per hour. The Sierra airships would accompany them, giving them ground support should they encounter any vanguard divisions of warmechs during their trek to Denver, which would take the major portion of the day to reach. Marcus's plan was to keep the alien ship in reserve until the Cityplex forces were completely deployed. The Sierra task force was to serve more or less as a decoy, drawing out the Drone battalions and war-mech divisions into the open plains below Denver, after which, the alien ship would sweep into their midsts and methodically eliminate them.
Suddenly the air was filled with the whine of the armors' engines and the ground forces began entering the carriers. Stone was a member of the team whose job it was to enter the Cityplex with the first assault wave if and when the Shields could be penetrated. Stone, Jessica, and the rest of their platoon's objective was the Main Data Bank.
He climbed into the personnel carrier and huddled into the tightly cramped rows of benches with the other troops. Jessica was by his side, outfitted, as was he, in the now-familiar black coveralls. They wore helmets of thick plastic, with clear visors and auxiliary air hoses in case of a gas or bacteriological assault. Stone peered out through one of the observation slits of the vehicle as they began to move through the desert, and he could see the small force slowly moving together in a ragged formation northward through the open land. How absurd they appeared, he thought. Forty pieces of armor and a handful of aircraft taking on the super-fortress of Denver. At first, he thought, the Cityplex forces might be equally amused.
The long hours of the journey passed and soon the giant dome of Denver dominated the now-evening sky. A giant hemisphere of pale yellow, and in the foreground, illuminated by its afterglow, stood the ranks of killer-machines and battalions of Drone Warriors.
Stone stood in the observation blister of the armored vehicle and peered through binoculars at the impressive sight. Many kilometers of desert were required to encompass the display of might. Eric studied the forces. The Sierra was outnumbered by at least ten to one, probably twenty to one. And of course, the divisions of the enemy he saw were only the first lines of defense. There was no way of knowing how many troops were waiting off-stage to come streaming into the field when and if they were necessary. Looking up, Stone scanned the sky, searching for a trace of the alien ship and Tur-genev's crew. Aside from the Sierra ships, which had just begun to drift ahead of the armored formation, the sky was empty.
The driver's helmet radio crackled and he received orders to stop, as did the other armored vehicles. "This is it, soldiers," he said, "the end of the line."
Stone hurried back to the troop compartments where Jessica was waiting for him. She helped him into his backpack and gave him his automatic weapon. The carrier had opened its bay doors on both sides and already the troops, men and women, dressed in the now-familiar black coveralls and plastic helmets, had started pouring through onto the sand. The plan called for leaving the personnel carriers behind the front lines, and spreading out the Sierra forces. If they had stayed in the vehicles, they would have made too concentrated targets for the warmechs and their laser cannons.
Stepping out into the desert air, Stone looked ahead where the airships were making their first strafing runs into the sea of Drones. Missiles leaped forward from beneath their wings, leaving smoking tracers in their wake. Incendiaries blossomed in the ranks of the onrushing mutant forces, scattering flesh and steel in the sky in a star-white mist. The air became a cacophony of sound: the whine of the carriers' engines, the air torn apart by the speed of the aircraft, the cry of the Drones, which sounded like the high-pitched keening of an insect horde.
Suddenly Stone was running towards a shallow ravine. A platoon of Sierra had taken shelter there from the long-range burst of laser fire* which had already begun stitching the sand around them in a pattern of red death. Jessica dropped down by his side, aiming her automatic rifle into the closest concentration of the enemy, which were only several hundred meters distant from them. Stone sighted one of the pin-headed, atlas-bodied horrors in his scope and squeezed off three rounds. After the involuntary flinch from the report, he watched his bullets rip into the flesh of the Drone and slam it earthward. Overhead, one of the Sierra craft dropped low and fired a burst of missiles into the main body of the mutant forces, enveloping them in jellied fire that crackled and singed the air in frpnt of them with furnace-like fury.
Great avenues were suddenly formed in the throngs of Drones as the giant, clanking warmechs made their moves. Stone could see the intelligent tactics at work: the Drones had spread themselves thinly across the front of the battle lines, while the warmechs had flanked the maneuvers on both sides. They also cut two large channels up the middle to form double pincer arms which could eventually divide the Sierra forces and destroy them. Behind the main enemy advance, Stone saw a phalanx of warmechs with their extensors raised high, forming a formidable battery of anti-aircraft deterrents. They waited patiently until the next pass of the Sierra airships, and then, like clockwork, all fired simultaneously, throwing up a fence-like pattern of laser bursts that intercepted the vanguard airships, and sliced it into many flaming pieces. Stone nudged Jessica, who looked up to see the smoking pieces of the jet rain down.
The front line of Drones and warmechs was closer now. Fewer were falling from the ancient bullet assaults of the Sierra forces and their laser lances were burning large holes in their ranks like a fire racing outwards from a swath of oil cloth. At any moment Stone expected a scarlet beam to slice through his position, vitrifying the sand and vaporizing their flesh in an instant. Looking down the line, he could see the point of the Sierra forces buckling and pulling back as they merged with the first edges of the Drones, who had now put aside their laser rifles and were wielding the giant razor-edged assault-swords. So strong and agile were the Drone Warriors that one sweep of their massive sword arm could cut a man in two; and even as Stone watched, several Sierra soldiers fell to that very tactic.
On the western flank, where Stone was positioned, the sweeping maneuvers of the warmechs and the Drones grew closer to them. He could smell the perspiration of fear as it clung close to the earth in the heavy atmosphere of smoke and flame and laser light.
The sun was almost down but the sky was filled with the light of the dome and the fire of the battle. Stone was amazed to see how well the small Sierra task force had held on so far—only about one quarter of their strength had been eliminated due to their defensive positions among the ravines and arroyos that intersticed the battle area. The Drones and mechs, on the other hand, had sought no cover, choosing rather to march headlong into the fury of the battle, confident that their superior numbers would eventually throw the momentum in their direction.
Above him, the scream of another Sierra airship broke the din round him as it received a full burst from the warmech battery. It became a massive fireball which streaked over the field of bodies and steel and plowed up the sand and rock in a spectacular explosion. Someone dropped down beside him, dodging a burst of laser fire that danced in the sand ahead of them, gradually burning down the side of rock that afforded them protection from the assault. Jessica crawled up the rise and looked out: "They're almost on us, Eric! Get a bazookaman up here, quick!"
Stone turned and motioned to a rocket team that had been huddled behind him. Together the three of them scrambled up the rise to join Jessica. She pointed out into the enemy formations where the leading pieces of the warmech pincer were closing in on them. The bazooka team aimed and fired and the first warmech blossomed into rapid flame, slowing to a stop. The other machines paused to trundle around their fallen comrade, and the pause was enough time for the bazooka team to reload and place a shell into the chest of the second mech. Another explosion, more destruction, more steel rain filled the sky. But the third vanguard machine had zeroed in on their position and both laser extensors were raised in their direction. Stone saw the twin beams of death leap into their midst, charring the man with the bazooka instantly into a black clump of smoking flesh. Jessica was thrown upward from the force of the blast, as was the other man with the ammunition, which self-detonated over their heads, scattering the man into pulpy fragments.
"Jessica!" Stone cried as he saw her crumpled body several meters away from the explosion and down the front face of the ridge. Looking out, he saw the wave of Drones approaching them, the steel of their swords reflecting the fires of the battle. The warmech had swiveled on its massive turret and was re-aiming for another burst on Stone's position and he knew that he had only several seconds to act. Leaping down the ridge, he swept up Jessica's limp form and began dragging her back to the safer cover of the stone rise. A laser burst chewed into the sand at his heels as he ran, dragged down by the weight of Jessica's unconscious body. Someone came up behind him, spraying a stream of lead into the closest Drones, who fell meters behind him. Throwing her body over the ridge, Stone dove himself, jumping up immediately to empty his weapon into the wave of ghostly-white flesh that was ahnost on top of them. He could see the hollow stare of the mutant-killers as he leaned on the trigger of the rifle.
That was the last thing he remembered before the whole scene went from brilliant white to complete blackness.
After an indeterminate time, consciousness returned to him and a man was looking down at him, his head blocking out the dark blue, star-strangled night. "What… ?"
"It's okay," said the soldier. "That was close, but we're okay." He pulled Stone to a sitting position and pointed up into the night sky. It was now dominated by the massive bulk of the black alien ship, the nose of which seemed to glow with a sun-fire of its own—such was the intensity of its strike into the enemy midst.
The soldier pointed up at the ship. "Just laid an egg right in front out there! Wiped out the whole mess of 'em."
Stone nodded numbly as he fought to clear his mind. Jessica] Rolling over, scrambling to his feet, he searched the area where he had left her before the photon blast. The ridge was almost gone now and beyond its frag-ments lay the twisted, congealed mass of smoking rags that had been the pincer force of mechs and Drones. One photon burst had burned a huge crater into the now mirror-glazed earth. Stone stood up and looked. All around him men were running forward. The wave of Drones had huddled into tiny pockets of resistance that were being swallowed up by the gossamer strands of the neutrino field. The air was thick like syrup in Stone's lungs as he inhaled the choking stench of charred tissue. He stumbled forward, looking for Jessica; but the mass of movement became a blur in his mind from which he could differentiate nothing.
Someone grabbed his shoulder from behind and swung him around. "Hey soldier! Where're you going without your weapon?"
Stone stared into the face, faintly illuminated by the glow of the Cityplex, which somehow seemed brighter, closer. The face was familiar but he couldn't place it. "Stone!" said the man. "What's the matter with you?"
Eric looked into the man's eyes. It was the younger Barkum. "Jessica," he finally said. "Where's Jessica?"
Barkum wiped his face from under the helmet visor. "This way, c'mon. We just found her injured."
Injured. The word hung heavy in Stone's mind. Nightmare visions raced through his mind as he followed Barkum through a path of mangled bodies and blood-stained earth. Ahead of him the Sierra troops were slacking up, watching the remaining two airships and the almost invulnerable alien ship sweep through the remaining fragments of the Cityplex forces. Even the explosions which still ripped the night sky seemed more distant, less intense than before.
They approached a large circle of men and women, some of whom were stretched out on the ground in front of an armored vehicle. Stone saw her propped up against one of the massive treads, sipping from a canteen. She wore a large bandage across her forehead.
Dropping down beside her, the rest of the world— the battle, the troops, the lasers and the death—all quietly and politely disappeared for him. "Jessica," he said, placing a dirty, calloused hand to her cheek. "I thought—"
"I know, Eric, so did I." She placed her hand in his and leaned over to kiss him. "They found me right after the blast. Turgenev was cutting it pretty close, wasn't he?"
Eric laughed. "You should see him now. It's like a shooting gallery out there."
Jessica stood up. "Well, let's go," she said, trying to ease her helmet over the bandage on her head.
"WKat? You're not going anywhere," said Stone. "You're going to stay here till it's over now."
"No, I'm not, I'm going with you." Her eyes were wide and full and bottomless in their intensity. Her mouth was pulled into a tight pattern of determination that, threatened to break into a smile at any second.
Stone smiled and shook his head. "Of course you will. Sorry. Just being overprotective, I guess." They both laughed as they stood up and followed the ragged formation of Sierra troops that were slowly advancing upon the great dome.
As they walked, Stone stopped to pick through the rag-heap piles of Drone bodies, where he spied an intact laser rifle and powerpak. Strapping it to his back, he spoke: "This might come in handy, don't you think?"
Jessica nodded and looked ahead where the silhouette of the alien ship was a great black teardrop on the surface of the dome's energy shield. "Look," she said. "He's almost at the shield."
All over the battlefield, the Sierra troops seemed to pause as they watched Turgenev's deathship approach the dancing air of the shield wall.
Perhaps a thousand meters ahead, Turgenev sat in the command deck, re-arming the weapons system for the final assault. Today he had been the dark destroyer, the angel of death, swooping down among the mutant shock troops and dispensing lethal doses of the alien energy. The images of the explosions and the fiery fields of the neutrino net had been burned into consciousness as if a hot iron had been applied to the back of his skull. The console of the alien ship seemed to pulse beneath his fingertips; and he had the vision of himself, riding astride some giant dragon as it hovered over the frail things of men, merely waiting for his command to drench the wretches with his death-fire.
The vision persisted as he stared out of his viewing port into the face of glowing energy shield. Beyond the energy curtain, he could barely discern the soaring shapes of the city structures. He snapped his head back and his imagination loosed its hold upon him. Bergman was speaking to him through the helmet radio, giving him the final analysis of the shield wall—its design seemed to be able to absorb any charge that was sent into it, using the dispersed energy, by incorporating it into its own field matrix. He fed this mformation into the weapons systems computer and watched as the alien machinery arrived at the proper sequence of weaponry which would break down the shield. Turgenev activated the weapons panel and watched as the first salvo of photon bursts leapt into the shield.
The atmosphere outside the ship became like a roiling viscous liquid as it danced in the energy fires that came to life. Then the ship poured forth a stream of super-dense particles—starstuff itself—into the photon-fires. The densely packed neutron particles cleaved through the energy shield like steel entering flesh. Great, bright haloes of blue-white light emanated from the ruptures in the force field, causing Turgenev to turn his head away from the port. The console clicked through its sequence, automatically analysing the effect of its assault and printing out the next phase of the attack operation.
Seeing this, Turgenev and Bergman keyed in the proper response codes and watched again.
More photon bursts were poured through the ruptured shield wall, devouring with incandescent fire the massive field generators on the perimeter of the dome. As the machines were vaporized in the star-heated fires, the yellow glow of the shield faded into a faint electromagnetic mist, carried away by the night wind. Turgenev peered through the vanishing shield into the city itself, seeing the ghostly towers and empty avenues.
From their position outside, Stone and Jessica watched the shield collapse in a brilliant display of light and fire. A hoarse cheer rose up from the ranks of the Sierra, which blended in with the turbine whine of the armored carriers as they churned forward into the outer perimeters of the cityplex. Overhead, the two Sierra airships, flanked the alien ship, hovering like insects over a helpless floWer that would soon be tapped of its life-juices.
Stone stood in the observation blister with binoculars glued to his face. He strained to get a glimpse of the movement within the city itself. What were the Citizens doing at this point, he wondered. Did they know yet that their world was crashing down about their heads? Did they know that the war "they" had been waging was finally coming to an end? Through the glasses, he scanned the first columns of buildings and sweeping Rapids tubes, but saw no sign of life. All was still.
The armored vehicles marched through the outer edges of the Cityplex and Stone and Jessica peered out to see the twisted wreckage caused by the assault of Turgenev's ships. Fire-storms raged along the perimeter and there were no attempts to extinguish them. The streets and slidewalks were devoid of movement, although here and there, Stone could see the stilled body of a Citizen who had been caught in the fierce blast of heat from the collapsed shield wall.
Suddenly the carrier's radio crackled: All Units, attention. Stone recognized Marcus' gravel voice. We are approaching a high concentration of lethal gas clouds— presumably neuro-toxic—take all precautions necessary.
Nerve gasl thought Stone. It was hard to imagine that the Cityplex leaders would do it. Sensing defeat, the Cityplex and chosen hari-kari rather than surrender to the Sierra forces. Stone pulled down his visor and sealed his helmet to the fittings around the neck of his coveralls. He activated the air regulator and the atmospheric niters.
Looking through the binoculars again, as the vehicle trundled down a long promenade, lined wtih the motionless belts, Stone saw the cerise-colored gas snaking through the streets ahead of them. If there were any Citizens left outside, they would be dead by now. Turning a corner and climbing a freight ramp, Stone directed the driver towards the core-area of the Cityplex where the Main Data Bank was located. They passed large clumps of bodies of the Citizens where they had dropped while trying to crowd the access ramps to the Rapids and the larger office buildings of the sector. In several places were the flaming wrecks of hovercraft, still containing the charred and mangled bodies of the Enforcement Troopers—their bright orange uniforms now stained with dark blood or transformed into ashes.
It was as if the Cityplex had just given up in one final collective breath. Stone peered upwards into the towering structures of glass and steel; he saw lights, but no movements, no signs of life. Jessica came forward and he gave her the binoculars. "Can you believe it?" he said, shaking his head. "All those people… innocent bastards. They probably never knew what this was all about."
"I don't get it," said Jessica. "It doesn't make sense. Why would they choose to destroy everything?"
The driver laughed. "Maybe they knew that this was all coming down anyway. If you ask me, they just saved us the trouble."
Jessica looked at Stone. His face was twisted into a mask of ambivalent emotions. "It's all right," she said softly. "I understand, Eric."
Stone wondered if she actually did. His mind was torn between conflicting emotions. He knew that the causes of the Sierra were worth fighting for; yet he also knew that thousands upon thousands of innocent human beings had been slaughtered that day. He looked out into the once-familiar streets and avenues. The place that had been his only home until the Sierra had forced their way into his life. Oh, he was thankful for that—-otherwise he would be among those who now littered the sidewalks like discarded rags. But to look upon the utter desolation of the Cityplex was the final reality thrust into his face, and he was recoiling from the shock of it. Up until that point, the thought of Denver being destroyed was just a cloudy, nebulous image in his mind —something that they talked about, but which could not be readily realized. But now, Stone was witnessing the death of the great organic machine—the Cityplex—and he could not fight back the guilty feelings of sorrow that seeped through him.
"I'm sorry" he said to Jessica, blinking his eyes. "It was strange to see it like this, that's all."
She nodded and touched his face lightly with her hand; she smiled as if to say that it was all right. Then she looked through the blister at the cityscape ahead of them and she gestured to Stone. "There it is," she said.
And he looked out and saw the Main Data Bank looming ahead of them—a gigantic concrete cube whose size dwarfed even the alien ship that had nestled down somewhere in another sector of the city. The armored carrier eased up another ramp, its treads grinding and churning over the steel and concrete walkways and slack slidewalk belts. The driver rammed the vehicle through the lower level concourse, causing great sheets of buckling glass to shower down. They smashed through the doors and trundled into one of the receiving lobbies, and Stone looked out to see the tiled floors covered with the bodies of the Level One operators. The lethal nerve gas had seeped everywhere through the Cityplex; he doubted if anyone survived.
The vehicle stopped and the bay doors dropped open. Stone eased his way to the door and jumped down, waiting for Jessica and the others. He motioned for the small group to follow and they headed for the elevators at the far end of the room. None of the cars were operable, however, having been jammed between floors. Stone then led the group down the long, winding stairs that descended into the depths of the building where the Central Cybernetic Units were located. The entire way was littered with bodies, all lying in rigid positions of shock and agony. After Stone passed enough of them, he became calloused to the sight; as he rounded each bend of the stairs, he grew to expect the sight of more bodies. It was interesting how the human mind could adapt itself to any situation, and eventually accept it as normal.
Finally they entered the central corridor, at the end of which lay the giant double doors into the core of giant computers which ran the Cityplex. The doors were sealed but Stone and two others dropped their laser weapons to their hips and depressed the triggers. The walls of the corridor glowed cherry red as they reflected the light of the tight beams that sluiced into the steel doors, carving them into butter-like slivers. When the hinges gave way and the doors fell clanging to the floor, the group rushed through and began setting their detona-tion charges in strategic places among the rows of humming machines.
Moments later, Stone waited for the team to rush out of the great chamber. He stood for a moment taking a last look at the great thinking machines—the machines which had controlled the lives of millions of people. No more would "their cold decisions be transmitted across the Cityplex networks, no more would men be created or destroyed like tin soldiers in a foundry, no more would man be enslaved by the nightmare products of his own mind. ,
Stone turned and left the room, joining the group who were already fleeing up the long stairs to the surface levels. There was one question that still plagued him as he ran silently up the steps; where were the humans who controlled the Cityplex, who were the final programmers who had set these cybernetic wheels in motion, and whose decision had it been to unleash the nerve gas upon the population?
Just as they reached the lobby where the armored carrier awaited them, Stone heard the subterranean rumbles that marked the fiery destruction of the cybernetic units. The echoes of the explosions rolled upwards, and the vibrations shook the walls of the entire Data Bank building. Stone jumped into the cab and the vehicle lumbered out onto the concourse.
As they watched from the carrier the effects of their detonations had begun to be seen. The great towers of light and glass had begun to wink out for the last time, and the illuminated avenues and Rapid tubes lost their internal glow, fading into the dull greys and blacks. The Cityplex was dead.
"It's over, Eric," said Jessica, laying her head on his shoulder as the vehicle trundled back through the avenues, its headlights carving ghost-white holes in the black ruins.
"Is it?" he said. "I was just wondering about that." He told her about his thoughts about the ultimate human controllers, and where they could be.
"I've thought about that, too, Eric. But, you know, I don't think there were any humans in charge of this place."
"Why do you say that?"
"I don't. I just don't think it would have ended like this if we had been fighting men. Men don't give up like this, especially if it's a fight for their entire world, which was what the Cityplex would have been for them. Look at the Sierra—they fought an irrational crazy war with the Cityplex for centuries. And until the alien ship came —why there was no way we coulefc have ever beaten them."
"But still you hung on, kept fighting," he said.
Jessica nodded. "That's right, even though, logically, it made no sense to keep holding out—the odds were way against us."
Stone nodded. "But the Cityplex gave up. The odds were too high against it after the warmechs were eliminated and the Shield collapsed, so it just shut itself down… hmm, that's interesting."
"It makes sense. I don't think we were ever at war with humans, Eric. The Cityplex was a giant organic/mechanical being in itself. The Citizens were only an incidental aspect of its very existence. It's possible that the Cityplex could have functioned as a separate entity without any humans within it at all."
Stone shook his head. The chilling possibility of that happening was all too real. "Well, it doesn't matter any more," he said finally. "If there is anybody left in here now, they won't have the computers to help them anymore." He looked out ahead of the vehicles lights and saw that they were arriving once more at the point of entry to the Shield wall. There were a large group of armored vehicles already assembled there, and he saw Marcus' flag hanging on the weaving antennae of one of the larger assault tanks.
From the distance, Stone could see several fires burning and circles of men around them. As they drew closer, they could hear the chorus of voices singing and laughing. The vehicle clanked to a halt, the assault bays were flung open and the troops rushed out to join in the spontaneous celebration. Jessica stood up, ready to join in the exodus, but Stone grabbed her arm and pulled her back to him.
"Wait," he said. "There's time for that"
She smiled and put her arms around his neck, placing her cheek against his. She kissed him as the voices in the darkness had just begun another song.
Without the dancing air of the energy shield, and exposed to cruel, unsympathetic light of the rising sun, the Cityplex appeared ashen and grey. From a distance, its towers rising upwards resembled the naked rib-cage of some great fallen beast—decayed and bleaching in the light of day.
At the base of the crushed Cityplex, the Sierra camp was stirring. Already, word was flying through the camp that Marcus was planning another task force to attack the remaining Cityplexes to the East: Chicago and St. Louis. But any such offensives would have to wait until the alien death-ship returned to Earth. Turgenev, always shy and introspective, could not hold up under the uproarious adulation which he received around the victory campfires. By morning, he and his crew were already streaking back to the Mars Base. When he returned, he would have a large part of the colony with him, including someone named Johanna. They say that he left a message for Jessica, just before the great ship lifted off: "I'm going for Johanna," he had said. "I have a feeling they will be needing her here… now."
Other rumors said that the Sierra people back in New Mexico were already streaming forth from their underground bunkers, making their way northward to the ruins of Denver.
Stone stopped a man passing their tent. "Yo! Can you get a medic in here?"
"What's the matter?" asked the man. "Someone still hurt?"
"Not exactly," said Stone. "But there's a woman in there, and she seems like she's kind of sick."
The man nodded and disappeared between the rows of tents and vehicles.
Stone re-entered the tent to find Jessica lying in a crumpled, semi-foetal position. There was a rim of vomit on her lips.
"Sick again?" he said easily.
"Yes. I'm sorry, Eric. You wouldn't understand. Did you send for a medic?"
He nodded. "It's not that cut on your head, is it?"
She shook her head and laughed. "Hardly! Oh, Eric, how could you know. Please, wait until the doctor gets here; I want to talk with him first, then I'll explain."
He nodded easily, trying to understand her cryptic phrases, but could find no meaning in them. Why should she wish to keep secrets from him now? Walking out into the open air, he looked off into the ruins of Denver, wondering what new turns his life would be taking now.
Footsteps stirred him from his thoughts. The soldier had returned with a medic. "In there," he motioned into the tent. The medic entered and the soldier stood by Stone.
"Did you hear the word?" said the man. "There's a group forming to go east into the Midlands?"
"Where's that?" said Stone, only half-interested.
"Way east of here. It used to be the best farm land in the whole continent. A lot of people want to get out there and reclaim the soil, start growing things and living on the land again."
Living on the land, thought Stone. It seemed like a fine idea, to leave the places of war and death, with a wife, and perhaps begin a new life.
Just then, the medic reappeared. "You can go in now," he said, smiling and patting Stone on the shoulder. "And congratulations."
"What?" said Stone, but the man had already turned away.
He went into the tent and saw Jessica sitting up, awaiting him. She was smiling, and her long tousled hair fell down in black cascades around her perfect face. She looked beautiful, and not very sick at all.
"Feeling better?"
"Now that I know for sure… yes."
"Know what for sure?"
"Sit down, Eric."
He sat down and she reached out for his hand and placed it on her abdomen. "I'm pregnant," she said smiling.
He looked up and saw two small tears forming in the corners of her eyes. "You mean… ?"
"Yes, of course," she laughed. "A baby, Eric. Our baby."
Then he pulled her close to him and he kissed away her tears, tasting the salty-sweetness in his mouth.
The tears were the essence of life to him—sharp, yet tender, bitter yet sweet. And it was she who had taught him to recognize such things for what they really were. Together they would continue, giving birth to their child as they had helped give birth to a new era of life and peace upon the earth.
And so, Stone realized, can one reap from the seeds of change.