Jem (42 page)

They were at his tent, and Marge paused at the flap, staring up at the sky. "Oh, shit," she said, "it's beginning to rain." It was—big drops, with promise of more behind them.

"The casualties!" he said.

"Yeah. We're going to have to get them under cover. And that's a pity, Danny, because I was kind of hoping we could catch us a little R and R before the meeting."

In spite of everything, Danny could not help himself. He laughed out loud. "Marjorie Menninger, you are some kind of strange. Get in there and get some sleep." But before she turned, he put his arms around her for a moment. "I never would have thought it of you," he said. "What converted you to civilian values?"

"Who's converted?" Then she said, "Well, maybe it was that fucking Krinpit. If it hadn't been for him, you'd've been burying me a little while ago, too. I didn't trust him, either, but he gave his silly life to save me."

With so few of them left, they didn't really need the PA system to cope with the fifty-five or sixty persons listening, but they hooked in one speaker for the benefit of the casualties who were well enough to hear, in their tents down the hill. The rest sat or stood on the wet planks of the dance floor in the sullen, steady rain while Marge Menninger spoke to them from the little dais. She turned the stage over to Harcourt.

He said, "A lot of the data from the Greasies isn't astronomy, it's geology. They've done a lot of digging. They say there seem to be flare episodes every twenty or thirty years. There's no set pattern, but by the amount of ash and char, they think your average flare involves about a seventy-five percent increase in radiation spread out over a period of a week or more. That's enough to kill us. Partly heat. Mostly ionizing radiation.

"Now, when does it happen? Their best guess is ten days, —give or take ten days." There was a murmur from the audience, and he nodded. "Sorry about that, but I don't have the training to make it any closer than they do; in fact, I'm only taking their word. The picture I get is of slowly increasing heat over a period of a couple of weeks. I think we've been having that, and maybe it's why the weather has been so lousy. Then the flare. Surface temperature goes up to maybe three-fifty degrees. That's Kelvin—say, somewhere between where we are now and the boiling point of water. I don't
think
it goes over that, not for very long, anyway. But there are peak flares, and they're like striking a match. If anything can burn, it will. Apparently the forests burn, but maybe not right away— they'd probably have to dry out first. Then the flare recedes, the temperature comes down, the air drops out moisture, and you get rain to put out the fires. Probably a hell of a lot of rain, over a period of weeks or months. Then you're back to normal."

"Only dead," somebody called out from the audience. Harcourt spread his hands defensively.

"Maybe not. If you're in shelter, you might survive." He started to continue, then stopped himself. Margie came up beside him.

"You don't sound too confident."

"I'm not. The—ah, the geological record doesn't inspire much confidence. The Greasies took cores from more than a hundred different sites, and they all showed the same pattern —recurring char and soil, back thousands of years."

Dalehouse stood up. "Alex," he called, "why hasn't it killed off everything on the surface of Jem long ago?"

"You're asking for a guess? I guess it has. At least all the vegetation. It burns off, then regrows from roots, most likely. Seeds probably would survive, though. And those drenching rains after each flare would give the new growth a good start in fertile soil—the char's great fertilizer; primitive man used to slash and burn to get his farms started, back on Earth. I don't know about the animals. I'd guess the Creepies would be all right in their tunnels if they didn't starve to death waiting for new growth to live on. Probably a lot of them do. Maybe the same for the Krinpit, because it would take a lot to kill them off. They don't have to worry about being blinded by the radiation, because they don't have any eyes to begin with. And those shells are pretty good armor for their vital organs. Probably get a lot of mutations, but in the long run that's as much good as it is bad for the race."

"What about Charlie?"

"I don't know. That's harder. I guess a really good flare might wipe out damn near all the adults. But that's when they spawn, and the spawn might survive—also, no doubt, with a lot of mutations. I'd say evolution moves pretty fast here."

"Well, look," Margie cut in, "if all these things can survive, why can't we?"

Harcourt shrugged. "They're adapted, we're not. Besides, I'm talking about
races
surviving, not individuals. Maybe as few as one percent live through it. Maybe less." He looked around the audience. "One percent of us leaves how many?" he asked.

"Yeah," Margie said slowly. "Well, I think we get the picture. We need to get under something big enough to stop both heat and radiation, and we need to do it in a hurry. Got any ideas on what we can make a roof out of?"

Harcourt hesitated. "Not a clue," he confessed. "Certainly the tents won't do it. Oh, and I should mention the winds. They probably get pretty fierce, with all that insolation. So anything we did build would have to stand up to maybe two-hundred-kilometer-an-hour hurricanes. Maybe more. I, uh, I thought, for a minute of using the Creepies' tunnels, and that might work—for some of us, anyway. But I doubt more than ten percent of us would live through maybe two or three weeks underground without very good ventilation and certainly without air conditioning—and that air down there is going to get
hot.
"

There was a silence while everyone considered possibilities. Then Kappelyushnikov came forward. "Is one thing we can do," he announced. "Not many of us. Maybe fifteen, twenty. Can get in return capsule and go into orbit."

"It's just as hot there," Marge Menninger protested.

Gappy shook his head. "Is only radiation. Steel hull reflects ninety-nine percent, maybe. Anyway, plenty. Only problem— who decides which twenty lucky people go up?"

Marge Menninger thought for a moment, then said, "No, that's a last ditch, Gappy. There's another problem with it: what do those lucky fellows do when they come down again? There aren't enough of us left now. I don't think twenty would be enough to survive. If we went up—strike that; I'm not saying I would be one of the 'we.' If anyone went up, it'd be just as smart to keep on going. Try to get back to Earth. Maybe go to one of the other colonies. The chances would be as good as coming back here when the whole planet's fried."

Harcourt nodded but corrected her automatically. "Not the whole planet."

"What?"

"Well, only half the planet. Our half. The part that faces Kung. The far side probably wouldn't even notice there was a flare going on. That's no good for us," he went on quickly, "because we can't live there; we don't have time to build an airtight heated dome and move everything— What's the matter?"

Margie had burst out laughing. "Son of a bitch," she said. "Shows how wrong you can be when you start trying to trust people. Those bastard Greasies aren't giving us a square count! They didn't stop fighting because they wanted to make peace. They stopped because we were as good as dead anyway!"

"But—but so are they—"

"Wrong! Because they
have
a Farside base!" She shook her head ruefully. "Folks," she said, "I was going to make a real magnolious announcement about turning the reins over to civilian government, only now I think that's going to have to wait. We've got a military job to do first. When this side of the planet goes, they've got that snug little nest on the side that never gets radiation from Kung anyway, and they couldn't care less if the son of a bitch blows up. That's going to be a nice place to be. And we're going to take it away from them."

THESE WERE THE mesas and canyons of the high desert. Danny Dalehouse had flown over them in less than an hour and seen them only as quaint patterns in an unimportant carpet beneath. Marching over them was something else. Kappelyushnikov ferried them in as close as he dared, three at a time, once four, with the little biplane desperately slow to wallow off the ground. He made more than a dozen round trips and saved them a hundred kilometers of cutting through jungle. Even so, it was a three-day march, and every step hard work.

Nevertheless, Dalehouse had not felt as well in weeks. In spite of bone-bruising fatigue. In spite of the star that might explode at any moment. In spite of the fact that Marge Men-ninger's shopping list had overlooked a supply of spare hiking boots, and so he limped on a right foot that was a mass of blisters. He was not the unluckiest. Three of the effectives had been unable to go on at all. "We'll come back for you," Margie had promised; but Dalehouse thought she lied, and he could see in the eyes of the casualties that they were certain of it.

And still he would have sung as he marched, if he'd had breath enough for it.

It had been raining on and off for nearly forty hours— mean, wind-driven rain that kept them sodden in the steamy heat even when it let up, and chilled when it drenched them. That didn't matter, either. It was regrettable, because it meant that Charlie and the two remaining members of his flock could not keep in touch with them visually. (He had had to take the radio away from the balloonist before they left— far too easy for the Greasies to intercept.) Whenever the clouds lightened, Dalehouse searched the sky for his friend. He never saw him, never heard his song, but he knew he was up there somewhere. It wasn't serious. The weather that kept Charlie from scouting danger for them kept the Greasies from providing it.

There were twelve of them still toiling toward the Greasy camp. They had left the rest of the survivors—the highly impermanent survivors, if this expedition didn't do what it was supposed to—back at the base with orders to look as though they were twice as numerous as they were. Margie herself had transmitted the last message to the Greasies: "We are beginning construction of underground shelters. When the flare is over we can discuss a permanent peace. Meanwhile, if you approach we will shoot on sight." Then she pulled the plug on the radio and crawled into Cappy's plane for the last ferry trip.

They had less than ten kilometers to go—a three hour stroll under good conditions, but it would take them all of a day. It was scramble down one side of a ravine and crawl up the other, peer over the top of a crest and scuttle down its other face. And it was not just the terrain. They were all heavily loaded. Food, water, weapons, equipment. Everything they would need they had to carry on their backs.

The red cylinders marked "Fuel Elements—Replacement" were the worst. Each cylinder contained hundreds of the tiny clad needles and weighed more than a kilogram. Twelve of them made a heavy load.

At first they took turns carrying the puzzle pieces that would unite to form a nuclear bomb. One of the tricks was to make sure they didn't unite prematurely, and at every stop Lieutenant Kristianides supervised the stacking of knapsacks so that no two bomb loads were within a meter of each other. The chance was very small that they could in fact be dropped, kicked, or jostled into a configuration of critical mass. Making that happen on purpose when desired had been a serious challenge for some of the best munitions experts on Earth; for that purpose they carried another twenty kilos of highly sophisticated casing and trigger. Without that there was no real danger—or so Marge assured them all. But they were careful anyway, because in their guts none of them believed the assurance. Perhaps not even Marge.

At the end of the first march Margie had gone through the party, checking loads. When she came to Ana Dimitrova, sitting hugging her knees next to Danny Dalehouse, she said softly, "Are you sterile?"

"What? Really! What a question!" But then Margie shook her head.

"Sorry, I'm just tired. I should have remembered you aren't." And she grinned and winked at both Dalehouse and Ana; but when they picked up packs again Nan's load was changed to water flasks, and limping old Marguerite Moseler was carrying the fuel rods.

Margie looked terrible, and at every stop she seemed to look worse. Her plumpness was long gone. The bone structure of her face showed for the first time in years, and her voice was a rasp. More than that, her complexion was awful. When the Krinpit had buried her for two hours, its molting juices overrode her defenses. A day later she had broken out in great purplish blotches and a skin discoloration like sunburn. She said it did not hurt; there, too, Dalehouse thought she lied.

But he thought she was telling the truth about one very important thing, and perhaps that was the reason he could not repress a feeling of cheer. The bomb they were carrying would not be used.

He had been the one to propose it, and she had accepted the idea at once. "Of course," she said. "I don't want to destroy their camp. I want it, all of it—not only for us, but for the future of the human race on Jem. The bomb's best use is as a threat, and that's what we'll use it for."

He said as much to Ana at their last halt before coming in sight of the Greasy base. "She's planning for future generations. At least she thinks it's worth keeping your chromosomes intact."

"Of course," said Ana, surprised. "I have that confidence too." And so, Danny Dalehouse was discovering, did he. Bad as things were, he had hope. It carried him through that last belly-crawl, three hundred meters in the drenching rain, into the muddy cave that was their point of entrance for the burrower tunnels under the Greasy base. It sustained him while Major Vandemeer and Kris Kristianides painfully and gingerly assembled the parts of the detonator and fitted the fuel rods into it. It survived after Margie and Vandemeer and two others wriggled their way into the abandoned courses and disappeared from sight. The part of his life, of all their lives, that they were living through at that moment was misery and fear. Maybe worse than that, it was self-reproach; they were doing something that Dalehouse could not think of as noble or even tolerable. It was a holdup. Armed robbery. No better than a mugging. But it would be
over.
And a better time would come! And that hope kept him going for two full hours after Margie and the others had crawled away. Until Kris Kristianides, looking scared and harried, checked her watch and said, "That's it. From now on, everybody stay inside. Face the wall. Hands over your eyes. When the fireball comes,
don't look up.
Wait ten minutes at least. I've got goggles. I'll tell you when you—"