Death Wave (8 page)

Aditi placed the steaming packages on the bar, and then started searching the kitchen drawers for silverware. “That was wrong of them,” she agreed.

“And what can we do about it?” he asked.

She picked a pair of forks and knives from a drawer and came around the counter to sit on the stool beside him.

“Try to convince them that it's our moral obligation to help those worlds that are in danger,” she said.

“Yes, but part of the convincing would be to go to the news media and tell the public the full story.”

As she cautiously tasted a forkful of the prepackaged food, Aditi said, “But you didn't want to do that. You said that would make me an object of intense media attention.”

He grinned ruefully. “That's putting it mildly. Yet Halleck must have realized that would be our next move, and she staged this assassination attempt to get us to come quietly to this comfortable little prison, so she could keep us out of the public's eye.”

Aditi stared at him. “You think so?”

“Yes, I do.”

Aditi chewed thoughtfully for several silent moments. At last she put her fork down and said, “Jordan, I agree with you. I think you are right.”

“You agree?”

“Yes. I agree that you are a little paranoid.”

Jordan's shoulders slumped. But he muttered, “Even paranoids have enemies.”

*   *   *

Shortly after their impromptu lunch, a young, somber-looking Spanish soldier knocked at their door, with a stoic robot holding their travel bags from the hotel.

“With Señor Castiglione's compliments,” the soldier said in almost accentless English.

“Muchisimas gracias,”
said Jordan.

The young man's face broke into a warm smile.
“De nada,”
he said. He stayed at the door as the robot trundled into the bedroom and, at Aditi's direction, left the bags on the king-sized bed. Then both the soldier and the robot left their quarters.

Once they finished unpacking, Jordan looked through the bedroom window and suggested, “Let's take a walk. It seems to be a pleasant afternoon outside.”

The same soldier was sitting on the steps of the barracks' front door when they got downstairs. He said nothing to them, but Jordan saw that he got to his feet and followed them at a distance of a few meters.

They strolled down a paved sidewalk, then hesitated at the corner of an intersecting street. Jordan turned to the young soldier. In Spanish he asked if he could show them around the base. The youngster smilingly agreed and led them up and down the well-ordered gridwork of streets, and out to the edge of the airfield.

Pointing, he showed Jordan and Aditi where the mess hall was, then said in English, “Since you are guests here, it has been decided that you may take your meals in the Officers' Club.”

“That's very gracious,” said Jordan.

“Señor Castiglione insisted on it,” the soldier replied. “I am told that he wants you to be completely comfortable here.”

“How very thoughtful of him,” Jordan said, with a cold smile.

 

MOUNTAIN VIEW

“This is where your wise man lives?” Nick Motrenko asked, puffing with exertion.

He and Rachel Amber were struggling up a steep embankment along the side of Highway 101. Traffic was buzzing in orderly fashion along the old road, every car, truck, and bus moving at precisely the speed limit, neatly spaced by their automatic guidance systems.

Rachel had borrowed a coupé from the library where she worked and parked it on the shoulder of the highway. Nick hoped the police drones patrolling the road wouldn't send an impoundment team before they got back to it.

Gulping for air, Rachel said, “This is where he told me to meet him.”

Nick frowned unhappily. The area was hardly the kind of place he'd expected. Looking around, he could see in the distance the old space museum and amusement park down by the water's edge and, farther off, the clustered buildings of venerable Stanford University. Rolling green hills were studded with row after row of government-built housing, identical as if they'd been stamped out of a cookie cutter.

He'd been skeptical of Rachel's description of this wise man, this guru whom she idolized. But she was so enthusiastic, so determined to get Nick to meet the guy, that Nick gave in and made the trip down to Mountain View with her. “The things a guy will do to get laid,” he muttered to himself.

They reached the top of the embankment and there was nothing to see. No buildings within a kilometer or so, not even a tent.

“There he is!” Rachel said, pointing excitedly.

A dozen or so people were squatting on the grass a few dozen meters away, in a sort of glade that was shaded by stately old trees. She started running toward the group, her face alight with anticipation. Nick hurried after her.

A tall, gangling black man was standing before the little group, pacing up and down as he talked and gestured with both his long arms. He was wearing what looked to Nick like a bathrobe, grayish white. As the two of them got closer, Nick saw that the robe badly needed a washing, and the man's face was stubbled with several days' worth of heavy dark beard.

“… I was like you,” the man was saying, in a deeply sonorous voice, “lost, adrift in a world not of my making, accepting the pittance that the government doled out in exchange for remaining idle, useless, impotent.”

Despite himself, Nick felt the words hit home. That's what I am, he told himself: idle, useless, impotent.

The man nodded once at Nick and Rachel as they sat down at the rear of the little group. He was really tall, like a basketball pro, but gaunt, just skin and bones. Rachel was staring at him in wide-eyed awe; Nick felt jealous.

Raising his voice slightly, the man continued, “But then I had a life-changing experience. I killed a man.”

The group gasped.

“He was a child molester. He had been convicted by the courts and released by the psychologists. But then he struck again and was arrested again. He was evil personified, and he had learned how to cheat the penal system. I was in jail with him. I had been arrested for hacking into the scoring program for the year's high school examinations. I was fourteen years old.”

The man paused. Every eye was riveted upon him. Every breath abated, waiting for his next words.

“He raped me. In my prison cell he beat me nearly unconscious and sodomized me. I thought my life had ended. I felt pain, and humiliation, and deep, deep shame.”

Again he paused. Then, “It took me years to realize that
I
was not responsible for his foul deed,
he
was. It took me years to track him down. But I did it. I found him.” Holding both his hands in front of him like claws, he said, “I killed him. With these two hands, I destroyed the foul beast.”

Nick stared at the man, just as every other man and woman in the little group was doing.

“Ever since, I have lived outside of society. Ever since, I have been an outcast. But let me tell you, it is better to be an outcast than a nothing. It is better to do what you must, to rid the world of evil, than to sit by comfortably and pretend that eradicating evil is someone else's responsibility.

“You must take the responsibility on yourselves. You must rise and strike!”

 

OFFICERS' CLUB

As the shadows of dusk lengthened across the Tarragona air base, Jordan and Aditi strolled to the Officers' Club for dinner, with their airman “escort” walking along beside them. He stopped at the steps to the club, though.

Almost blushing, he said in a low voice, “I am not an officer.”

“I'm sorry,” Jordan said in Spanish. “Thank you very much for guiding us.”

“De nada,”
the young man said, smiling shyly.

Inside the Officers' Club, Castiglione was standing at the bar chatting with a pair of men in crisp, well-fitted uniforms. One was gray haired, with a chest full of ribbons. The other was obviously younger, probably the older officer's aide, Jordan thought.

The club occupied the entire ground floor of one of the smaller buildings on the base. It was far from plush, with wooden tables scattered across the plank floor and plain undecorated lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling rafters. Jordan almost expected to see the floor covered with sawdust. There was a stage at the far end of the room, with acoustical equipment and microphones stashed to one side of it.

Jordan smiled at the lone bartender, a squared-off robot with four extensible arms, its metal body anodized army brown and a serial number stenciled across its chest. No gossiping with that bartender, he thought. No soulful philosophic conversations long after midnight.

Smiling brightly, Castiglione introduced Aditi and Jordan to the two officers, a captain and a colonel in the Spanish Air Force. Jordan got the impression that they were both in the intelligence service.

“You are comfortable here?” the colonel asked in English as the bartender stood mutely awaiting their orders.

“Quite comfortable, thank you,” Aditi replied.

Jordan asked the bartender for amontillado for both himself and Aditi.

“Not for me,” she said.

With a knowing smile, Jordan said, “That's all right. I'll drink both of them.”

Castiglione guffawed.

Dinner was pleasant enough. Both the officers knew of Jordan's old reputation as a diplomat, and both were curious about Aditi and her fellow natives of New Earth.

“The entire planet was built by your people?” asked the colonel.

“By our Predecessors,” Aditi responded.

“Predecessors?”

“Intelligent machines,” Jordan explained. “Millennia old.”

“Incredible.”

Jordan explained, “It was their Predecessors—the intelligent machines—that discovered the death wave that's approaching us.”

“Death wave?” the captain asked.

As Jordan described the deadly wave of gamma radiation expanding through the Milky Way galaxy at the speed of light, Castiglione said lightly, “It won't reach our vicinity for another two thousand years. We have plenty of time to prepare for it.”

“But there are other intelligent species,” Aditi countered, “on other worlds much closer to the wave front. We must help them, or they will all die.”

“I suppose we should, sooner or later,” said the captain.

“Sooner,” Aditi said. “Those creatures will die if we don't reach them soon enough.”

“And it will take years, centuries even, for us to reach them,” said Jordan.

With a wave of his hand, Castiglione said, “That's a matter for the World Council to consider. For the present, why don't we order our dessert?”

*   *   *

After dinner, Castiglione walked them back to their quarters, chatting amiably about nothing of consequence.

At their door, he smiled at Aditi and said, “I hope you have a pleasant sleep.”

“And the same to you,” said Jordan. But he thought unhappily that Castiglione would dream of Aditi.

Once they went to their bedroom Jordan sat on a corner of the bed and began to slowly take off his shoes.

“You look … pensive,” Aditi said.

He looked up at her. “Ever since we returned from New Earth, something has been bothering me. Tonight I finally realized what it is.”

She sat beside him, a questioning look in her eyes.

“Nothing's changed,” Jordan said.

Aditi blinked at him.

“I've been away from Earth for nearly two hundred years, and this world is pretty much the same as I left it.”

“But the flooding has changed the shapes of the continents, hasn't it?”

“Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. The
people
haven't changed. They're pretty much the same as they were when I left for New Earth, nearly two centuries ago.”

“Are they?”

“Oh, the technology has advanced a bit,” Jordan conceded. “Even without Mitch's energy screens, they've made progress in transport and energy. I understand they've learned how to use green plants to generate electrical energy. And I suppose there've been new breakthroughs in biomedicine and elsewhere, as well. But…”

“But?”

“The
people
haven't changed,” he repeated. “Their attitudes haven't changed. We've brought back irrefutable evidence that there are other intelligent species scattered among the stars and they shrug off the news as if it's nothing important.”

Aditi pondered that for a moment. “Perhaps it will simply take more time for the importance of the news to sink in.”

With a shake of his head Jordan responded, “I don't think so. I think the people of Earth are locked in outmoded ways of thinking, and they're not going to change.”

“We've only been here three weeks, Jordan. Give them time to adjust their attitudes.”

“No. They're not going to adjust. The World Council doesn't want them to adjust. And the Council holds the keys to power, controls the news media, controls their lives. They're burying their heads in the sand, just as they did with climate change.”

“You think so?”

“Twenty billion human beings, living cheek by jowl on this planet. They're locked into a mind-set that can't accept change. And Halleck's World Council is happy to keep things that way.

“It's a side effect of longevity,” Jordan continued. “When people can live for centuries, their attitudes, their prejudices, their worldviews live for centuries with them. The world's birth rate has sunk almost as low as the death rate. New generations are too small to have much effect on society. People like Anita Halleck—even Douglas Stavenger—can remain in power for centuries. Society doesn't change. It can't! Not with the same people in charge, with the same ideas and attitudes they've carried around with them for two, three hundred years.”