Collected short fiction, p.767
Collected Short Fiction, page 767
His stomach burned.
Dad? Is the world about to end?
His mind saw them now, Beth and the kids, all three huddled together in helpless terror. Beth—in her wedding gown, as he liked to recall her from the photo in his wallet, gravely demure and still almost a child. Roger in his Little League cap, the freckled smile slowly fading into dazed bewilderment. Amy, begging him to make them safe.
“If there is a God,” Duvic muttered again, “I guess we’ve let Him down.”
Gale fumbled in his pocket for a broken roll of Turns and chewed two of them. Duvic hurried silently to bring water for him.
“Dr. Gale?” Rhymer was suddenly at the door. “Systems check completed, sir. We’re up and ready now.”
Klebold was waiting beside the interfacer, two nurses with him. They unwound the bandage from his head. He had to strip and lie face up on the cold metal bed. A ventilator fan blew icy air on his naked scalp, and he shivered in spite of himself.
“Nice trip, Doctor.” Duvic bent over him, pretending confidence. “Keep your cool. We’ll be debriefing you in a few more hours. Try to note and remember every perception, every sensation, every mental event—”
Klebold muttered something at the nurses, and they brushed Duvic away.
Lying still, Gale shut his eyes against the blaze overhead. His mouth felt parched, that stale coffee still bitter in his throat. Too late to ask for water. He felt the nurses spreading their web of snaky cables around him, smearing adhesive, sticking their cold telemetry to his naked flesh. Their swift fingers caressed his itchy scalp. The wires stung when they pulled, hooking the big computer to his brain.
He felt the bed moving. The Delta Psi Effect required radiation shielding, or Duvic thought it did, and the bed was sliding him under the shield. Into the maw of the never-fed beast. A dark narrow box, coffin-shaped, walled with thick lead.
“Okay?” Duvic’s breathless voice. “Okay, Ben?”
He opened his eyes. They were all leaning intently over the creeping bed. Janssen, dark hawk-face set hard. Rhymer, pink tongue flicking like a snake’s tongue across those glinting drops. The nurses, frowning down. One caught his eyes and tried to smile. Duvic lifted a jittery hand as if to wave farewell.
“Don’t move!” Klebold commanded him. “We’re calibrating.”
Motion stopped. The beast had swallowed him. Something thumped. The heavy lead jaws thudded shut. Total darkness. Total silence till he heard the faint sigh of air from a fan. His scalp stung where the wires came out. The air was too cold. He shivered, and even that small movement woke pain in his skull.
He waited.
Nothing. Fading purple spots lingered in his vision where lights had glared. He felt a faint vibration of the whole machine, as if the beast had belched. That ceased. It was digesting him. Nothing else that he could feel, yet he knew what was going on.
Klebold would be metering a very careful voltage into the implants. Testing input and readout. Accessing microprocessors and silicon memory. Probing for synaptic responses. Carefully, gingerly, meshing computer software and softer living tissue, accelerating the slow chemical complexity of many billion live neurons to the light-speed of many million kilobytes of semiconductor microcircuitry.
Groping in the dark for any feel of the machine, for any sense of that vast computer power switched into his brain, Gale felt only the slow dead throb of the brick-heavy chips. His scalp prickled and burned, but he couldn’t touch it. He was suddenly sweating, hot drops itching as they ran off his forehead, but the sensors were on him everywhere. He mustn’t move at all.
He looked again for light, but even that visual purple was gone. The lead box was utterly dark. Coffin-shaped, dark and still as any grave. Listening in the utter quiet, he began to hear his pulse. Rustle-thud, rustle-thud, rustle-thud. Very faint, very slow. At least it said he was still alive.
Outside, the nurses would be at their post beside the machine, intent on their oscilloscopes, charting his vital signs. Rhymer roving everywhere, watching them, watching the machine and the soundless computers around it, checking items off his clipboard, nervous tongue flicking.
The others would be gathered in their little plywood control cubby. Klebold punching and twisting at his half-circle of keyboards and monitors and meters, getting jittery as Rhymer now, worried about bugs in his software. Duvic and the general behind Klebold, the general silent and rigidly straight, gray-stubbled jaw clenched on the stump of that dead black cigar, Duvic hovering over him, whispering urgent words that he ignored.
Interfacing. Had it happened?
They knew no more than he did.
Gale’s head throbbed again, keeping time to that slow rustle-thud, rustle-thud. Trying to escape it, he turned his mind to Beth and the kids. Three long days. Or was it four? Cruel days for Amy, if she thought the world was ending. What was happening to them?
He looked in his mind at the little white house he had bought when he moved them here, bought too high because launching the project had been pushing him too hard. Gone shabby now, the lawn neglected, the fine old elm diseased and dying. The woodwork needed paint. Beth had found another leak, this last one in the back bedroom closet. Wrapped up in the project, he had never been quite fair to Beth, dragging her a thousand miles from her parents and the sea she loved and her hospital job.
Too late to help that now.
Dawn just breaking, the town was still asleep. Her old station wagon was parked on the drive. Ninety thousand miles, and the right fender bent, but at least he’d been saving to replace it. Her birthday surprise—
A sudden scream of tires. A police car lurched around the corner and roared away, siren howling. Up and down the street, lights came on. Beth’s window lit, Amy’s, Roger’s. The whole town was waking, half-dressed people running out of houses, staring up at lights flashing in the sky.
Bright points of hot blue fire, small and high. They made no sound that he could hear, but they left small red-glowing puffs that faded slowly back into the dark. The same silent bombs that took out Washington? Would red rain follow?
The front door opened. Beth darted out, still in pajamas and the red silk robe he gave her for Christmas. Arms loaded with coats and blankets, she ran to the station wagon. Roger stumbled after her, Little League cap and glove and bat hugged to his skinny chest. He stopped to gaze into the sky. Amy followed, whimpering and shaking her head. She wanted to wait for Dad to come home.
The town blacked out. Street lights and house lights gone. A moment of midnight, till the head lamps of cars began to come on. Beth screamed to wake Roger and dragged Amy into the car. The starter growled. The old Chevy shook and roared and plunged into the street, trailing bitter smoke. It vanished into chaos, running from Armageddon.
The lab had been dark for a moment, until emergency generators coughed and droned. Lights flickered on. Standing with the nurses, Duvic peered at the dead oscilloscopes and turned heavily to shrug at Rhymer and Klebold and the general, who huddled beside the dark machine.
“Dead.” Duvic’s restless hands spread and fell. “Brain-dead from the moment we energized the implants, so far as his life-signs ever showed. Heart stopped now.” A sad grimace. “We fooled ourselves. All but Ben himself, if you remember. Always the skeptic. Always suspecting the Delta Psi Effect was only a chance statistical fluke.”
Outside, in the gray half-dawn, the red rain was falling into panic and terror. Its fine hot drops seared the flesh they touched and knocked people down. On pavements, it hissed into a thick red mist. Those who breathed it gasped and died. The cars they drove veered and crashed.
The sun rose upon a low red fog and the hush of death.
Gale looked for the old station wagon and found its burned and crumpled metal still smoking in a ditch. He didn’t need to probe inside it. Dad? Can you make us safe? Not from Armageddon. They were dead, and all the world. His own body, too, since the experiment began. So why was he alive?
With no will to move or think or feel, he found himself drifting away from the burnt-out car, away from the silent town and the dying continent and the whole sphere of Earth. The flow of time had changed. He watched the planet turn beneath the sun, the Americas lit for a moment and went dark again, Africa and Europe and Asia sliding after them into night. Red haze spread and thickened. The green of the temperate zones bled scarlet. Redness stained the blue of the sea. Wide white swirls of cloud grew slowly crimson, until he knew the planet was truly dead.
“Why?” He watched the red world spin. “Why can’t I die?”
“Because you are eternal.” The voice spoke from nowhere, not with words. He found a brightness shining near him, not with light. “Because your work has only now begun.”
“Are you—” He hadn’t come to search, but he remembered Duvic. “Are you God?”
“No more than you.” He felt the brightness shining through him, thawing his desolation. “We are mind, evolved from matter as we ourselves in later time may evolve again into future beings closer than we are to God as you conceive Him.”
He tried to grasp that. With no skull now, nor microchips implanted, he felt no pain. At last he gathered himself to ask, “What is this work that I must begin?”
“We foster new life, as we ourselves were fostered. Here you have known us at the edge of failure, hard-driven to meet the extinction of your planet. Through the final effort that you perceived as merely random chance, we have kept your mind alive. Now you have a debt to pay.”
Feeling hope awakened, he asked how to pay that debt.
“You may know about the new supernova?” the brightness asked, and he remembered. “Its shockwave will soon be forming new stars in the molecular clouds around it. New planets will be born. Life can be kindled upon them, and mind for you to nurture. Guiding its evolution when you can, you may create wiser worlds than yours was.”
Now at last Gale began to understand Duvic’s tormented life and the Delta Psi Effect and the project’s desperate history. The wounds he carried might never wholly heal, but the wounding world was gone. The new ones could be kinder. If Beth and Roger and little Amy were born again, he could make them truly safe.
Knowing that, he felt a kind of joy.
1992
The Birds’ Turn
Jack Williamson made his first appearance in F&SF in 1958. By then, he had already been publishing in the sf field for thirty years. Over thirty years later, he is still one of our premier authors. Tor has just published his forty-eighth novel, Beachhead. Were pleased that he has returned to these pages with a strong sf story, “The Birds’ Turn.”
THE SIBERIAN FLU had spread fast out of the northern latitudes, already the deadliest strain in history. Our chance to stop it lay with Hugo LeMoyne. I was a science writer then for the old New York Times, and had come to Atlanta to ask him.
He was to be a key speaker at a symposium on the viral diseases at the Centers for Disease Control. Hesitant when I phoned, he finally let me come up to his hotel room. A modest young redhead, he looked more like a college quarterback than a Johns Hopkins researcher, and he seemed oddly diffident when I asked if he had really developed the ultimate virus killer.
“Maybe so.” He shrugged. “Maybe not.”
Closemouthed at first, he relaxed as we talked. He had dodged other reporters, he said, and admitted me only because he recognized my name. Warming to me, he confided that he was still jittery about his promised announcement.
“I’m just not sure.” He got up to open his bag, found a bottle of com whiskey, and poured two stiff shots before he spoke again. “What I’ve got—or think I’ve got—is a new angle on immunology. It looks good in the lab. It seemed to prove out in the initial animal tests, but I wanted more of them.
“I was counting on another month before the meeting. What I didn’t expect was this Siberian epidemic and the way Cranley has pushed up the date in the hope he’d get a new way to fight it. I’m not ready to promise anything.”
I begged for details. When I promised to keep them confidential, he gave me a preprint of his report. The flu viruses were parasitic DNA, he explained, clever enough to get into human host cells and trick them into breeding more parasitic DNA.
“Tricks call for tricks.” Suddenly confident, he lifted his drink in boyish elation. “I’ve built a decoy. A target molecule, bioengineered from the viruses themselves. It offers binding sites to attract and capture them. Splits when it has eaten two of them, to make two new decoys.”
“If it does prove out—” Awed, I raised my own glass to him. “A new age in medicine!”
“Don’t print anything yet,” he cautioned me. “Not till I hear what Nordman says.”
“Nordman?” The name startled me. “Eric Nordman?”
“Our top virologist.” He nodded. “He’s trusted. His verdict can guarantee the human tests I need. Or kill me altogether.”
He hesitated, frowning into his glass for half a minute before he decided to go on.
“I was a postdoc at his Albuquerque research center. Learned a lot from him, and admired him till we fell out over my interest in an antiviral agent. He turned his back on me. I never learned why.” He looked back at me. “You know him?”
“I did, years ago.”
He sipped his drink and waited.
“My best friend once.” I sifted through the memories. “My roommate at Cal Tech. We did the Peace Corps together. Our wives were girls together in Texas, and we had a double wedding. Years since we’ve seen them, but we’re getting together tonight, out at a place called Raventree. Ill give him your room number.”
“Thanks.” He nodded absently, as if something bothered him. “We worked two years together, but I never understood him.”
He wanted to pour another drink, but I had to meet Susan, who had spent the day shopping. She seemed exhausted when I found her, red-eyed and sneezing.
“Just the sniffles.” Being Susan, she tried to make light of her discomfort. “A guinea pig, if your medical experts need me.”
Reviving a little as we drove out of the city, she seemed as eager as I was to see Eric and Monica. The only real genius I had ever known, he had been a red-bearded giant with the drive of a modem Viking. We used to call him “Eric the Red.” I thought I knew why LeMoyne found him hard to cope with. Stronger and sharper than nearly anybody else, he was sometimes arrogant. I’d loved him, envied him, sometimes hated him for the easy way he beat me at everything.
Susan had brought Monica to be his blind date when we stopped to see her in Texas on a drive West after graduation. An instant capture. He kept her in the car after they dropped us off, took her to bed in his motel, proposed at breakfast, and had her ready to join Susan and me in that double wedding when we got back from the Coast.
Out of school, the four of us had served together with the Peace Corps in Africa. Hopeless as the cause was, I recall those hard years with a kind of joy. We were young. Susan and Monica were beautiful and brave. Helping trapped people fight disease and desperation, I felt good about the effort, even after we all came home with malaria. My diaries made my first science book.
Eric, however, came back bitterly unhappy, because of course we had to leave disease unconquered, most of the overcrowded continent still mired in hopeless need. Not used to defeat, he quit the corps to do his own research. He and Monica dropped out of our lives. Reading his papers, I knew he had become a top authority on viral mutations, but the note from him had been a happy surprise.
Monica will be with me at Atlanta symposium. He scribbled it on a blank scrap of computer paper. Can you and Susan cornel One more word in her neat hand: Please!
As delighted as I was, Susan got Monica on the phone that same night to set up our weekend together. Raventree Lodge was a fine old antebellum mansion, out toward the Blue Ridge from Atlanta, rebuilt into a small conference center. The symposium staff was gathering there to finalize the agenda.
The manager gave me the fax from Eric when we checked in.
Sorry we can’t be with you. The brief message perplexed and disappointed me. Monica’s heartbroken. Too bad this had to happen so soon.
What was happening too soon? We had no clue. He had always been unpredictable, expecting me to understand him better than I ever could.
We canceled their reservation and followed our luggage up the magnificent stair. Our room at Raventree is burned into my mind. It was huge and high, floral paper time-stained and fading on the walls. The antique mahogany wardrobe smelled of slow decay, but the old black bellman chattered brightly about past guests as he opened the windows and showed us the view, trying valiantly to make us welcome.
Susan was crushed by the fax.
“Call New Mexico,” she told me. “I’m afraid—”
She left the sentence unfinished and sat on the side of the bed while I dialed Eric’s number. I got no answer. Trying to cheer her, I beckoned her to the big window. The view was really splendid, rolling hills already gold and scarlet with autumn and the far Blue Ridge hazily blue, but she was too sick by then to look.
I wanted to get a doctor, but she shook her head.
“Just these pesky sniffles.” She managed a pale smile. “Get us a round of mint juleps. Classic Southern medicine. Granddad admitted they’d never cure a cold, but he said they kept you from caring.”
The request surprised me, because she so seldom drank. She was shivering before the bellman came with the juleps. After a single sip of hers, she took a hot shower and crawled into the old four-poster. Breathing heavily, she seemed to be asleep. I sat across the room with my laptop, writing a summary of LeMoyne’s preprint and framing questions about it for Marshall Cranley, who was to chair the symposium. When the phone rang, I hoped it might be Eric or Monica, but it was only a secretary.
“Dr. Vargas? Can you hold for Dr. Cranley?”
I said I’d hold.
“Bad news, Vargas.” His voice was hoarse and harried and apologetic. “Nobody knows how bad, because Washington is trying to sit on the panic, but the symposium’s dead. When LeMoyne heard Nordman couldn’t come, he checked out and got a flight back to Baltimore. Without the two of them—”
