The best of john jakes, p.10
The Best of John Jakes, page 10
“Shut up and walk.” Finian pushed Cove back towards the Jersey side.
“What in heaven’s name is wrong with you, Smith?”
“Armed.” Finian whispered it so Dolly couldn’t hear. “A guy hit me. I’m armed. Can’t have more than half an hour before I blow. Cove, don’t you say anything. When we’re outside, you take care of this girl, understand? Watch out for her until she recovers. She’s free of them, I bought her that much.”
They passed a shrilling visorphone in a lighted kiosk at the far Tunnel mouth. A DOC alert was being scheduled for Philadelphia. Juve gangs were forming in the streets there, handmade knives were appearing. The mask was off. Full mobilization of combined TTIC and G/S industrial police was being ordered by Sprool. Cove clapped his hands.
Rain was falling as Finian led Dolly out of the Tunnel. Three DOC vertijets from the south were homing on Manhattan, agleam with emergency lights. Dolly murmured. Finian lifted her chin and stared into the doll-blue eyes a moment, conscious of the bomb working, working towards detonation in the flesh of his foot. He couldn’t even feel the death seed. Wasn’t that a joke?
“Cove’ll take care of you,” Finian said. He kissed her. Bewildered, Dolly called for him as he turned and walked rapidly away, not seeing the rain or the littered bodies.
He had gone but a dozen steps when something felled him and brought the dark.
Pain, incredible pain was his first sensation.
Then a warmth of flesh. Dolly bending over him. Through a slatted section of solido panel he saw vertijets winking over Manhattan. Finian wriggled, then struggled up, screaming:
“My leg…what happened?”
Crying, Dolly pressed him down.
“Cove did it. Cove operated. He hates them, Fin. He hates TTIC. Something about his wife. He said you ought to live, even with—I wish my mind would straighten out. I can’t say things all right yet.”
Finian fought the terror, the dull-fire agony. “Where is he?”
Dolly shuddered. “He packed it in a valise and ran for the Tunnel.”
In a burst of fire the centre of Manhattan Prison blew up.
When the reverberations and Dolly’s screams had stopped, the two of them clung together, listening to the hysterical automatic sirens at both ends of the island wailing as they hadn’t wailed since the Triple Play War. Confused, hurting, glad of life, guilty and fearsomely glad and yet sickened by the suddenly swarming sky full of vertijets, their flaring emergency lights promising violence across the land, violence maybe everywhere, Finian clutched the girl to his shoulder and stared at the inferno of the prison island.
“My God, I think I started a war, Dolly. Sprool said—I didn’t mean to start—”
The words tore out of him, almost animal: “Is this the only way?”
Dolly sobbed. There wasn’t any other answer, except the sirens multiplying all around in the disrupted night.
The Highest Form of Life
Human beings are egotistical creatures. As the dominant life form on this planet we have a tendency to equate power with quality. Challenges to this point of view have provided the material for some of science fiction’s most memorable stories, including the struggle between humans and insects, the only two life forms that are on the increase. However, as John Jakes shows us in this story, there can be more at stake than mere survival, and competition can take many forms.
In the lives of most men there are a very few, certain days on which they not only sense their purpose but know that a fraction of it may be accomplished. So it was with Dr. Robert Conn, when the alarm went off in the cottage in the hot Florida dawn. His mind said, 14 April, and even his own breathing had a sound of music.
All the light had a crystal reality as he dressed in the uniform thoughtfully provided by Lt. Commander Spiegel-glass, and ate all the breakfast his nerves could stand —three cups of chicory coffee. His wife and his two little boys were like sunlit ghosts. He could not reach or touch them in his excitement. Spinning the Volkswagen out of the drive for the ten mile run to the cobalt water of the Florida coast, he hoped that they understood.
He exceeded the speed limit all the way, roared through the checkstations with impossibly witty quips for each bored seaman at each check box, and braked with a stamp of his foot alongside the nuclear submarine U. S. S. Sharkbait. On the tower Sig Spiegelglass and Don Mad-dow were watching him. Neither man smiled or waved.
Conn wondered about the lack of smiles only for a moment. He found himself caught in the middle of a half dozen reporters.
“Is it true you’re going to communicate with a fish this morning, Dr. Conn?”
“Not fish.” Conn smiled and polished his glasses. “Tursiops truncatus.”
“The press release says that means porpoise,” said a grating female voice.
“I’m afraid the press release writer didn’t look up the difference between the bottle-nose dolphin and the common porpoise,” Conn replied, hoping he didn’t sound too stuffy.
“You really think communication will be possible?”
Conn gestured to russet-haired Dr. Maddow watching impassively from the tower. “With Don’s impulse translator—you should have the details in those releases— anyway, it was worked out by a team of engineers and philologists at Randco—”
Over a moving ballpoint a whisky voice said, “Maddow's the philologist on the team?”
“The best in the business,” said Conn, raising his head. Maddow still wasn’t smiling. “We think the combination of a language specialist and a neurophysiologist is ideal for trying to break through and translate what Bottle-nose may be saying.”
Even as he spoke, Conn realized they couldn’t possibly be as excited about it as he, because they reached excitement by different means. Special press runs, maybe. Names announced at a Pulitzer dinner. But for Conn it was impossible to ignore the sense of immeasurable awe, of reverence, which filled him whenever he thought of the small wonders the impulse translator might work before the sun went down over the green coast tonight. Patiently and lovingly Conn repeated most of the information in the press release: the cell count in dolphin brains; the forty percent greater brain size; the precocity shown by the biggest of the creatures in the learning experience; the unmistakable twenty sounds which made up their squawking, whistling alphabet.
“Since the cell counts are the same as the human brain per cubic centimeter,” Conn said, “and the brains are bigger, and they have a language, we think we can communicate—make a first bridge between mammalian forms, as it were. It’s taken us six years to perfect the translator.”
“Would you consider this problem as difficult or important as the communication established last month by the Southwerk Mirrow with—” The reporter’s voice hesitated and a couple of heads looked skyward. “—whatever is out there?”
Conn winced, enviously. Southwerk had scored a jump on the oceanographic team. Rather stiffly he said, “That was a marvelous achievement—the definite establishment of communication with a being or beings not of our Earth who have orderly, organized speech. Of course,” he couldn’t help adding, “Southwerk hasn’t yet translated.”
“Is that a case of interservice rivalry, Doctor?” someone asked in a barbed way.
Conn laughed. “I think I’d better get aboard.” Amid Thank Yous, up he went, up the ladder, triumphant, up the steel sides toward the hot morning sky where the heads of Spiegelglass and Don Maddow floated like balloons. For an instant Conn felt totally like a god. Then he climbed into place beside them. He noticed that Maddow was staring emptily out over the gantry skeletons far across the yard.
“Ready to take her out, Sig?” Conn said.
“Why bother?” Maddow snarled. “We’ve been had.”
“What’s this?” Conn laughed nervously. “You guys trying to bug me?”
Sig Spiegelglass studied the cigar he was unwrapping. “I wish we were, Bob. Last night, around seven, Coast Detection picked up a sub out there.”
“Then beam Washington and have it clear out,” Conn said, a little irritated.
“Beam Red Square, you mean,” said Maddow sourly.
Now the matchless, empty blue heavens had invisible clouds in them. Conn felt a chill wind through his blouse. “One of the regular line jobs?”
“Uh-uh.” Maddow shook his head. “When the profile tape was developed it showed an unusual configuration. In fact they have only one like it.”
“Oh, Christ.”
Conn siezed the steel rail and stared down at the reporters drifting off. A tug hooted off the Florida coast in the lost cobalt distances, a dirty sound. Conn said:
’The Nikolai Fernoyon?”
Neither Maddow nor Sig answered when Conn pronounced the name of the almost legendary oceanographic vessel which carried three times the crew of the Sharkbait. For a long moment Conn hoped either of the men would answer in the negative. Neither did. Conn indulged himself in sixty seconds of the foulest language he knew.
Then he said, “I wish I had a knife. I wish I had a knife to castrate the dumb bastard in Washington who classifies Washington’s birthday and lets our preliminary papers in every God damn Sunday supplement in the country.”
“We’re wasting time,” Maddow said dispiritedly. “The Fernoyon has an instantaneous press transmitter. If they’ve made contact, they’ll wait until we go out in the torpedo, and then Tass’ll break the story they’ve already got set in type.”
“Maybe they don’t have a translator,” Spiegelglass said hopefully.
“So maybe they’ll tap in on us,” Maddow snapped back. “And before we can transmit, they’ll have the message in their sheets and how are we going to prove them liars?”
“If they don’t have the dingus,” Sig said, “you could screw them by not putting out in the torpedo.”
Even though he had a sick, wasted feeling in his stomach, Robert Conn shook his head. “No, we have to go out. I don’t care if they do tap us. I don’t care whether some crummy witch doctor in Africa thinks the Fernoyon did it and we didn’t, just so long as I’m there, just so long as I know.” Conn’s pale face burned like a coin hit by the sun. Spiegelglass picked up the tube and talked around his cigar:
“You gentlemen down there stand by. We are about to participate in another in the series of ever-popular U.S. propaganda defeats.”
“Of all the lousy, crapping luck,” Maddow said harshly. He spun on Conn. “And you stand there saying it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t,” Conn said, trying to convince himself. “Once you get over acting like a six year old and realize that we aren’t supermen in this country—that what we’re doing, we’re doing for everybody—” He seized Maddow’s shoulders. Deep below the two men a faint fury from the reactors tingled up through the soles of shoes. “We’ve made contact wth something in space and now we’re making contact with another mammalian life form, real contact, intelligible—”
“We think,” Maddow sneered. “Bottle-nose probably speaks Ukrainian.”
Conn was getting a little hysterical: “It’s the human race doing it, man himself, Don. Don’t you see, it’s—”
“Unless you gentlemen would like to float to Jacksonville,” Spiegelglass said around his cigar, “I would suggest we go below.”
Maddow ducked down, preparatory to obeying, but could not resist a last thrust at Conn as his russet head vanished down into the artificial gloom: “Sorry, Bob, but I can’t see it. I have an American flag tattooed on my buttocks, and when I’m flatulent I play patriotic airs. I’m funny that way.”
“If you don’t want any part of an experiment like this,” Conn shouted furiously, starting down the ladder after him, “You should have put on your American Legion cap and gone home a long time a—”
“If you don’t please get off my tower,” said Sig Spiegelglass, “I’ll kick you both in the ass. We’re already forty-two seconds overdue.”
Thus, with Conn and Maddow sulking on either side of the twenty-foot cylinder they called their torpedo, the V. S. S. Shark bait moved slowly out between the gantries into the mercurial blue swell of the sea.
The intricate ritual of command, the soft blink of colored lights went on around them. Conn gazed furiously at the russet-haired Maddow, wondering why Maddow couldn’t see the triumph of it, regardless of who won the propaganda advantage. Besides, the presence of the gigantic Russian oceanographic sub might be sheerest bluff.
Then, with a start, Conn recalled the intense personal feeling he had experienced upon waking that morning. What had happened to it? This was his mystery and miracle, his and Don’s. Gradually the hastily-assumed attitude of the tower grew less strong.
A similar process was apparently taking place in Maddow's mind. After all, they were grown men. Before too many minutes had elapsed, they were speaking, though not laughing. For Conn, the personal mystery of it would not return, knowing as he did that he might not be alone in the victory now. All that was left for him, and for Maddow too, it seemed, was a kind of defeated gray calm, and a desperate clinging to the expressions of “doing it for all men” which Conn had so suddenly espoused in the heat of argument. But they were friends again.
On the color television a green hairline showed the Florida coast far behind.
’Take her down, please, Mr. Olufson,” said Spiegel-glass.
Then came the sensation of incredible power, the nonexistent yet palpably real surge and tingle that got inside Conn’s bones when he watched the watery line sweep up and obliterate the sky on the screen. Cobalt shaded to emerald. And from out of a lucite panel on four stanchions, strange echoes began to bounce and sing. There was a low note and several higher ones. Every face in the mixed lighting—red, green and a bit of blue—showed that the low note was wrong.
“That’s Fernoyon,” said the Conner, adjusting his earphones.
“Right in the middle of the school?” Maddow asked.
“Center, and not moving.”
Maddow’s face was the color of the sea outside. “So we do their work for them, Robert?”
“It is their work, in a way,” Conn said, but the words felt hollow on his tongue.
“Philosophers I got to have,” Spiegelglass said, bis head floating blue in the half-lit maze of pipes and lights and bouncing eerie echoes. “Stop being such big social brains and climb into the torpedo. I’m carrying orders, you know. We’re shooting you in twelve minutes. If something sticks out, it’s not my fault.”
The Sharkbait pulsed quietly, moving outward and downward through the plankton and the great pastel anemones, downward through whirling darts of phosphorescence brighter than stars in a liquefied cosmos of achingly beautiful green. As if to emphasize the importance of the coming contact, Spiegelglass activated all the annunciators throughout the sub. While Conn and Maddow peeled their uniforms and squeezed into the flexible black skin suits, there was not a sound on the entire submarine except for the low note counterpointing the steadily noisier higher ones that signalled the dolphin school.
Through the sealed plastic soles of the suit Conn felt the reactors under the plates like his own heartbeat intensified. Maddow, all business, slid back the double-hinged cover of the torpedo. Just under the curving forward plate in the narrow miniature sub, a row of green eyes like six eyes in a line gleamed on the ultra-simplified dials of the translator control. Maddow raised his hand in an Alphonse-and-Gaston gesture.
Conn’s face, haloed in black plastic, shone with sweat. “I don’t want to go.”
“The Kremlin got you buffaloed, sport?”
“It’s such a rotten shame, after so long—”
Maddow laughed. “I sang that chorus in the last set.”
“I know, but—” Conn wiped his face, feeling faint. “All of a sudden—”
“‘It’s man,’ you said.”
“No.” Conn shook his head. “It’s me, first.”
“I suppose it’s probably some of both,” Maddow said, his voice surprisingly soft. “And that’s probably why we make so many rotten mistakes. If—”
The annunciator squawked with the voice of Spiegel-glass: “Will you both please cut out the penny philosophy and haul your pratts inside that thing? Four minutes.” So there was no more time for Conn to wonder why he felt both triumphant and defeated, when nothing at all had happened.
He crawled up over the torpedo and wriggled out prone on the port side, facing the plate and the six green eyes in a line. Maddow came in after. On his back he took care of the gasketing while Conn snapped controls that closed the cover. With much cursing Maddow wriggled over on his belly. Beneath them an oiled track moved. Ahead of the plate a black hole opened like an iris to swallow them. Conn had never felt more afraid in his life.
“The talker,” Maddow hissed in the humid, sweating dark.
Their only companion for the next two minutes was the voice of Sig Spiegelglass, counting steadily and tonelessly. The last whisper of his one-count was drowned in a whoosh and roar. The black burst open and became green, white-streaked and furious, and they were launched in the deeps.
As the torpedo began to lose speed Maddow asked, “See anything?”
“Up ahead, I think,” Conn replied. “But don’t use the light. I wouldn’t want to frighten them if we can help it.”
“The vanes, at least.”
Maddow raised on his elbows, his head jammed against the ceiling, and manipulated two of three rods with lucite handle-grips. The nose of the torpedo dropped a degree. Over the hiss of his own breathing Conn heard the light bubbling of the tiny reactor and the whispers of the controlled air system. He stared out into the miraculous green gloom of the undersea until he thought his eyeballs would burst. An instant before the image came permanently into his brain, his nerves felt it:
“There they are. Cut everything but the stabilization.”
The bubbling dropped off. Maddow breathed, “Christ. They’re beautiful.”
And they were. Conn counted two dozen before giving up, long graceful shadows, some almost inky, others grayer, but all ghostly, on their underbellies and the undersides of their jaws. Among them were giants Conn estimated to be well over the twelve foot average for the species. Some of them moved lazily, in a random pattern. Others, racing up for the surface, created a sort of basket-weave effect, lacing in and out among the big females swimming belly up for courtship. One flashed near. Conn thought he saw an eye gleam. At least he knew that the eye could be watching him, because the eye could see better than fifty feet, and if inside that bottle-shaped head lodged a brain that could interpret—
