Doomsday Warrior 01 (27 page)

“It is,” Rath mumbled.

“We finally had to give up trying to find the silos as our food and water were running low again. We charted some other territories and headed back. This weapon of theirs—we brought it back. It’s incredibly powerful. I feel that we should mount a better-equipped larger force to go back. It could mean—”

“Our ace in the hole,” Rock said. “A new weapon to fight the Reds with—a force that, from what you say— You have the pistol with you?” Rock asked, looking suddenly around for a bag.

“Down in Dr. Shecter’s laboratory. He was enthralled. Started spouting formulas, yelling orders to his assistants. They’re performing full-scale tests on it right now. It’s apparently some sort of—” Brady hesitated at the unfamiliar words—“particle beam disintegrator. Sir, I’d like permission,” Brady said, turning to Rath, “to head the second expedition.”

“Not a chance,” Rath said bluntly. “You and your men have absorbed too many rads even for Freefighters. You need complete decontamination procedures including a series of iodine and calcium injections to evacuate any radioactive trace elements. Two months minimum. That’s Century City policy,” Rath said almost apologetically.

“I have more mutant cells than anyone,” Rock said drily. “I want that expedition, Rath.”

“Impossible, Rock. You’ve been through a major engagement just days ago. Your wound is still healing, your—”

“My
expedition,” said Rockson. “You can’t deny me the right. As military commander, it is I who makes the final determination of expeditionary forces.” Rock was pulling rank now.

Rath stared at him coolly. “I’ve never seen a glutton for punishment like you. You’ve earned a rest.”

“If I’ve earned anything, it’s the right to head the second expedition.”

Rath couldn’t meet Rock’s forceful blue-purple eyes any longer. “Maybe, maybe if you get a complete physical and it all checks out—”

“It will!”

“Then—”

Brady gripped Rockson on the shoulder. “Rock, it’s something indescribable—beautiful and horrible—out there. It changed me; it will change you too.”

Rockson took the arm of the brave soldier of democracy. “For the better, Brady, just like you. For the better.”

Brady took Rockson down to the pistol range of Shecter’s experimental level. Shecter had gone over it thoroughly.

“Rock, it’s absolutely amazing. The device is as light as plastic but extremely hard. It’s molded, one piece, so I can’t open it without possible destruction to the inner workings. But from our tests, it’s equal to a whole battlefield full of tanks in terms of its power.” Shecter handed the small, curved pistol to Rockson.

Rock pointed the diminutive weapon at a red and white bull’s-eye some one hundred meters away.

“Now, look through the triangular scope on top,” Shecter said from the side. “Press the small red dot on the right side. That locks a laser sight on target. Thing actually has a mini-memory. Once you lock in the target settings, it hardly matters which way you fire—it’s programmed to head for the previously set coordinates. Now just squeeze the trigger. It has almost no pull at all.”

Shecter was right. It was like pulling a leaf, so lightly balanced was the trigger. These Technicians must have been as weak as babies to have such a infinitesimal pull. As Rock pulled back, a nearly silent response occurred. He heard the slight scream of superheated air as the black beam shot straight out from the pistol and hit the target dead center. A rough-edged circle six inches wide appeared, burnt through the foot-thick wooden target.

“That’s it! Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Brady asked, as excited as a schoolboy. All activity on the testing range had ceased and about fifteen men and women who had been testing various modified Liberator rifles and machine guns turned to focus their attention on the grizzled veteran.

Rock hefted the pistol in his hand, throwing it an inch in the air and catching it again. “It’s so light,” he said to Dr Shecter, who stood admiring the new weapon. Rock looked closely at it. It almost had the solid texture of metal but was some sort of feather-light plastic. Great to carry long distances. Rockson pressed a lever on the wall behind him that set a target with Colonel Killov’s body and face painted on it, bobbing and weaving. He took aim through the weapon’s tiny scope, got Killov’s head in the three cross hairs for a second and pressed the laser sensor. Then he lowered the pistol and casually let the weapon rest by his leg. He flipped his hand up a split-second later and fired three hundred feet at the two-dimensional Killov. Again, there was no kick, no sound. The black death-beam shot forward and bent slightly to the right aided by the memory set of the laser sight. Killov’s face melted away in a puff of bluish smoke, followed by a sharp retort from the imploding air rushing to fill the vacuum of disintegration. The Freefighters along the railing of the range all cheered. The United States had a new weapon.

“Kind of handy,” Rock said, handing the pistol back to Shecter. “How long does it have before the charge—or whatever—wears down?”

“Beats me,” Dr. Shecter replied. “We’re still working on that one. Hasn’t been recharged since it’s been here and I’d say we’ve fired it at least two hundred times. It has other features as well, Rock. At least some we can find. And I’m sure we’ll uncover much more about this weapon as time goes on. Just take this adjustment here.” He pushed a calibrator on the side until it was next to the number one. “There—it’s broad-beamed now. Could set a barn on fire at one hundred yards if you held the trigger a few seconds.”

“Does this thing have a safety?” Rock asked, staring at the pistol.

Shecter smiled back. “Sure does. Just pull this switch here.” He reached around with his thumb to the top of the pear-shaped butt of the pistol. “It’s as safe as a Liberator,” Dr. Shecter said.

“I’d hate to burn my foot off by accident when I put that thing in a holster,” Rock said, looking skeptically at the head scientist.

“It won’t be American feet that will be burned by this,” Shecter said, putting the pistol carefully back into a gun box specially made for it. “I just pray to God Almighty that we can learn to duplicate them.”

Twenty-Three

T
welve hundred miles to the north and west of Century City, a small man, dressed in a stained, gray laboratory smock, ran crouched over through a narrow circular tunnel only inches higher than he was. His large, hairless head, shaped like an egg, and huge brown eyes without eyelashes or brows above them gave him a top-heavy look, as the rest of his three-foot-tall body was shrunken and pale. Thin, splindly arms and long, bony hands with fingers as narrow as pencils trembled as he walked. His legs were hardly more than stalks that carried him shakily along the barely lit tunnel.

“I must relay data,” Ullman, the leader of the Technicians mumbled to himself. “The others will be in timesynch, waiting for information reception.” They would be sitting, the thirty-two of them who still survived, in the computer room, silent, waiting. And he, the thirty-third, Ullman. Ullman the Quantum. He who computed the trajectory of things and their time relationships. They were waiting for Vorn, the hunter, to bring back food. But Vorn existed no longer. His molecular stasis had been violently interrupted by a large carnivore with a powerful need for sustenance.

Ullman clicked a small transmitter button on an odd plastic device on his thin, synthalum belt and a round, steel hatch at the end of the tunnel slid smoothly open. Ullman stepped through, steadying himself against the wall as he prepared to climb a towering metal ladder above. Dizzy! Again. More and more now the spells came. Food? The disease? Who could calculate for sure. But he knew there wasn’t much time left. For he or the others. It was equated already—their fate. Death equals

  Food/Health²  
Rad. units x .3176

The equation was known. These things were simple. Absurdly so. Mathematics showed the truth to the infinite power. Still, they didn’t want to die. They were, after all, human. Descended from humans. Even with their super intellects and their mathematical genius, the emotions of survival still stormed inside. What living thing goes willingly? Ullman mused. None—not a thorn tree, not a speck of lichen, neither a snar-lizard nor a hydrabeast gave up its atomic essence willingly. Nor would he.

The leader of the last of the Technicians, all three-foot-two-and-a-half inches, sixty-nine pounds of him, looked up the dark cylindrical silo looming overhead like the dark jaws of the radioactive heavens. He wrapped his thin, chalk-white fingers around the third bar of the ladder and began his ascent, letting out a deep sigh. Every step was torture. His body had never been strong, but in his youth he had been able to run sometimes and lift objects as heavy as chairs or video consoles. Now, like all the Technicians, he was as weak as a baby. The mind of an Einstein in the body of an arthritic skeleton.

Ullman pulled himself up, rung by painful rung. He knew just how many steps it was to the fourth level where the people would be waiting, huddled together around the main console accepting data. He would have to tell them. There would be no more sustenance.

He reached the living level after what seemed like an eternity, his body pressed to the limits of its strength. He felt terribly tired, his small lungs were heaving for air, his pale face was splotched with dots of red, a sickly smelling sweat covering his forehead and flesh with a clammy dampness. He pulled himself onto the landing and stared out at the wide concrete expanse, with a single brilliantly lit room at the other end. Even from here, he could see them, at the window, staring out, with the remaining functioning computer whirring behind them, flashing amber and green signal lights.

He walked slowly across the expanse, his huge eyes able to see clearly into every corner of the football-field-size level. At the far ends of the floor were the stacked chairs, tables, dishes and belongings of the original inhabitants of the silos. The accessories were far too big for the Technicians to use and so the goods had all been dragged off nearly thirty years ago, to make way for a planned scientific complex of factories, a highly ambitious plan to begin manufacturing some of the Technicians’ revolutionary inventions. A plan that had never materialized. The last two generations had grown weaker from disease and slow radiation poisoning of the highly hot soil that still covered the silos. Plutonium, strontium, iridium—radmetals with half lives of up to twenty thousand years. They had grown weaker and infertile. Fewer and fewer children had been born—until, in Ullman’s generation, not one. They were dying. It seemed ironic somehow. After putting all their power and energy into pure science for the last hundred years, to somehow better mankind, and perhaps someday reclaim America—the Technicians had let their bodies waste away, smaller and smaller, until now they were literally disintegrating into nothingness. And soon they would be nothing, like Vorn.

Ullman reached the living quarters and again pushed a match-head-sized button on his control belt. The door slid open and the leader wearily trod up the three metal steps to the large, open computer room. The people looked at him. All of them stared silently, trying to read his thoughts—Reva, Ret, Karlo, Oeten, Spath, Nasqwar and the others. They looked, their eyes dark as he had ever seen them, dark as midnight without moon or stars.

“No,” Ullman whispered softly. “No, there is no sustenance, There is no Vorn. They are negative quantities.”

“What was his final equation?” Oeten asked, his toothless mouth moving like a piece of drooping rubber.

“He equated Carnivore x Food Factor = Death for Passing Technician. I have returned from the sighting. I propelled for three cycles through the radlayers. Look at my protective covering.”

He held out his spidery arms which had been singed and blistered with red bumps from the sun’s rays and the radioactive sands for three days. He had never been above ground for more than two hours in his life, and now he had spent three cycles looking for Vorn. “I survived by Q = VR² x constant .29998/water-heat loss.”

“.2 return probability,” Reva said softly, looking at Ullman with longing. She had prayed to whatever gods there were for his safe return. She felt hidden factors for the leader. Though he had never accepted input on his sexual energy bands.

“I beat the odds,” Ullman grinned sarcastically for a moment, then let his face fall back into its usual dead, thin-lipped expression of hopelessness.

“My people,” Ullman said, letting his wasting body collapse onto a plastic semi-seat. “We, the Technicians, are at the end of our continuum. We can no longer receive sustenance factors to maintain our physical structure and without carbohydrate and protein fuels we shall soon be energyless.

  Physicality = FF³ x .78002  
Energy Loss x Age

“Anyone wish to equate?”

There was silence. They all knew the answer. Vorn had just kept them functioning at a minimal level for years. His forays into the outer world had brought back elk and deer and buffalo backs. Somehow they had continued to survive. But no longer.

“What is our function now?” Naras the Exponential asked, staring wide-eyed at Ullman.

“Our function is as it has always been—to explore every area of mathematics and physics. To uncover the secrets. The secrets that our ancestors—the Americans—had only just begun to discover before they and the Russians stupidly decided to end it all with energy dispersals to the realm E = 1,000,000 megatons of TNT + rad and heat factor of 7,926,786.30098 Death Quotient.”

“They were so close to so much,” Norad said wistfully. “If the old world had had what we’ve uncovered—the energy sources, the spectrum control—all Homo sapiens could have lived in comfort and peace.”

“Ah, Norad,” Ullman said compassionately. “You’re mind dreaming again. What is, is. We are here and we are extinction. Extinction within two or three cycles.”

“There is the paste,” Exeter the Algebraic said, referring to the rancid flour stored for a century. It was edible—barely.

“Yes, the paste,” Ullman echoed. “Very well, we will go and get more. I will require an exponent of three. We will have to carry the container three levels. And the last one caused sickness, physicality disruption.”