Worlds Apart (15 page)

“We’ll just have to build more machines, then.”

He laughed, a bark. “Sister, I haven’t had a requisition granted since before the war. Psychological research is not a high priority, not this kind.”

She had been on the edge of her chair through the whole conversation. She sat back and beamed at him. “It is now.”

Charlie’s Will

“Trouble,” Jeff said. Under the blanket on Tad’s lap, two clicks as he turned the Uzi’s selector switch to full automatic.

They’d been traveling down the Tamiami Trail for two days, overgrown jungle on both sides of the old highway, some shells of deserted towns but no people. Now there were people.

First a large boy stepped out from behind a bush about ten meters ahead, holding an old shotgun in his right hand, his left palm facing out to halt them. Both mules stopped abruptly. Seven more boys filed out across the road. Only one of them had a firearm, a rusty .22 rifle, but the others all carried machetes. Jeff was surprised that three of them were black. He hadn’t seen any other racially mixed families.

The first boy didn’t raise the shotgun but kept it pointed vaguely toward them. “What you peckerwoods doin?”

“Going south,” Jeff said. “I’m Healer.”

“Yer whater?”

“
Healer
.” Tad had shifted so the Uzi was lined up on the boy, but the lead mule was in the way. “You haven’t heard of me?”

“Uh-uh. We keeps pretty much to ourselves. People come by, we don’t gen’rally talk much.” One of the children giggled. “You heal people? You got the touch?”

“I have medicine.”

He laughed. “We never did hold for that. Not even before Daddy and Ma died.”

“Charlie’s will,” Jeff said.

“What?”

“Never mind…if you have sick people I can help them.”

“Well, I’m sick of catfish. Sure could use some roast mule. Any reason you shouldn’t—”

It happened very fast. The boy started to raise the shotgun and Tad stood up abruptly and leveled the Uzi on him. He dropped it. Then there was a shot from the left that hit Tad on the chest and spanged off his body armor. Tad twisted, saw smoke and fired a burst at it. By that time Jeff had the scattergun unclamped and aimed at the boy with the rusty rifle.

There was a strange gurgling sound and a boy or young girl staggered dying through the brush, throat and chest ripped open, face gone, still holding a rifle. When the children saw it they dropped their weapons. The apparition made it almost to the road; pitched forward and lay there twitching.

“Now I didn’t tell her to do that,” the boy said.

“Right,” Tad said. “She was just walkin’ through the woods.”

“Probably others,” Jeff said. “They wouldn’t just have one girl.”

“The girls are up at the house, ’cept Judy here. She always has to git in on things.” He stared at the dying girl. “Don’t suppose you kin heal her, now?” Jeff didn’t say anything. “Whyn’t ya shoot her again. Put her out of it.”

“She’s dead,” Tad said. “Just some parts don’t know it yet. Be a waste of ammo.”

“I’ll do it, then.” He reached down for the shotgun.

“The
hell
you will.” The boy touched the gunstock but looked up at Tad and then slowly straightened again.

“What you gonna do? You gonna kill us all?”

“Probably not. No point to it,”

“What about those catfish?” Jeff said calmly. “You smoke them?” The boy nodded. “We’ll trade for some dry beef. And I’ll treat your sick, as I say. That’s what I do.”

Tad walked over to the line of boys and picked up the shotgun and rifle. He put them in the cart and went to the girl, who had stopped twitching. He toed her over on her back and scowled. “Dead.” He took her rifle.

“We’ll go get some catfish,” the leader said.

“No, you won’t.” Tad pointed the muzzle of the Uzi at the youngest one. “He’ll go. I’ll go with him. Rest of you stay here and talk with Healer.”

Nobody said anything while the boy led Tad away. “You don’t have any sick people?”

“Nup.”

“Anybody die recently?”

“Two in the fall. One last spring.”

“The oldest, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Did they talk nonsense for a while, stop eating, wet themselves—”

“They did that.”

“It’s going around.”

He looked at the other boys, pursed his lips and thought. “I guess if you had medicine for that, we could take it.”

“I’ll give you a typhoid shot, might help. When my partner comes back.”

“We wouldn’t try nothin’.”

“Sure.”

Tad returned after a few minutes with eight girls, three of whom had infants, and six small children toddling alongside, apparently none of them mutants. He had a plastic bag of greasy smoked fish and another ancient rifle. The girls had tried to shoot him with it but couldn’t make it work.

Jeff gave them their shots and a few sticks of dried beef. Then they took the oldest boy and one of the girls hostage, to discourage pursuit, and left as it was getting dark.

There was no moon but enough starlight to tell road from jungle. They were surrounded by creepy reptilian noises, croakings and slitherings. The mules went slower and slower and finally refused to go on. Jeff had to turn on a light to make them move, using up irreplacable electricity and providing a beacon for followers. But overall it may have been safer: more and more often, as the night went on, they came upon large rattlesnakes slumbering on the warm road surface. Best to give the creatures ample warning.

About midnight they came to a wide spot in the road that had once borne the improbable name Frog City. Jeff gave both the hostages sleeping pills and, once they were safely asleep, left them in an abandoned shop, along with the old weapons, no ammunition. Tad took a pep pill and they continued east, figuring to keep moving through the night and most of the next day.

By noon they were still in the Everglades. No human contact, no sign that they were being followed. The snakes
had retired to the bush at dawn. There were alligators, some large, but they kept their distance. Long-legged birds of many varieties entertained them. The weather was beautiful, bright and cool, and under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant outing. But they might be coming up on a real logistics problem.

Long before the war, roads like this had become anachronisms, since almost all intercity transport was by floater or subway. The roads were useful for floater navigation and in some areas were kept up for the benefit of bicyclists and hikers. That was the case with the Tamiami Trail, a scenic path connecting Tampa with Ciudad Miami.

But they didn’t want to go through Ciudad Miami. It was hard enough to get along with the various families when they spoke English. Neither of the men was fluent in Spanish, so they had to find a road south sometime before they got into Miami’s metropolitan area. But their simple map didn’t show how far that area extended. There was only one road going south before they got to US 1, which hugged the coast and was definitely in Spanish-speaking territory. That was Florida 27, and it was a dotted line: “no maintenance.” They didn’t know how old the map was. There might be bridges out or areas that had subsided and flooded, or the road might have become thoroughly overgrown and impassable, perhaps indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness. Or it might be in the middle of a Hispanic suburb; there was no way to tell until they got there. Jeff had never been to Florida before he’d brought Marianne O’Hara down to escape the war, and Tad had rarely left his parents’ commune, never going this far south or east.

Their fears were groundless, as they might have deduced from the fact that they’d met nobody coming west on the Trail from Miami. There was no Ciudad Miami. They noticed a funny smell; before either identified it as salt tang, they could hear the unmistakable sound of waves breaking. The vegetation subsided to young mangrove
scrub and clogged weeds that crawled over the road. They tied up the mules and picked their way over a slight rise to stand on a beach of fused glass.

6

O’Hara had asked for fifteen minutes at the next Start-up meeting. The committee, plus advisers and assorted hangers-on, had grown too large to hold meetings by cube conference. They had to commandeer a cafeteria between shifts.

With considerable competition from the noise of the clean-up crew, O’Hara outlined the hypnotic induction process and said that she wanted the resources to build and operate at least a dozen of the machines.

Stanton Marcus, an old man who had been Policy Coordinator for ten years while O’Hara was growing up, was at the meeting even though he wasn’t officially part of the committee. He raised the first objection.

“It’s a very clever idea,” he said without much enthusiasm, “but I don’t think that it needs to be given high priority. Could I see that list?” O’Hara handed him the two-page list of specialties for which she wanted aptitudes induced. He read it slowly, nodding and breathing loudly through his nose.

“In every case, there’s only one person left who is qualified,” she said.

“That’s just the point,” he said without looking up. He finished the list and handed it back, then put his fingers together in a steeple and frowned importantly.

“As you say, many of these people are indispensable. They’re indispensable to New New as well as to your eventual colony. You propose to take them out of circulation for two weeks and put them through a grueling physical ordeal. Many of them are quite old.”

“Dr. Demerest says there’s no danger.”

“But his trials were done with students, were they not? Young people?”

“They were. But the Mazeltov studies included several people who were over a hundred, both as programmers and receivers.”

“Receivers?” someone said. “Why give a person that old a new aptitude?”

“Autopsy,” she said bluntly. “They wanted to look for changes in the brain’s chemistry or gross structure.” Back to Marcus. “None of them died, though, before the war. It’s just not that dangerous.”

“You have access to those subjects’ medical records?” Marcus said mildly.

“I wouldn’t find anything. Mazeltov and B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah stayed independent of the Public Health data pool. As you know.”

He smiled. “They were always mavericks. The point is, you can’t really say that it won’t affect the health of these irreplaceable people.”

“I can only say that none of the subjects has died. And Demerest had the process done to himself, both ways, in his eighties.”

“Still in the bloom of youth,” Marcus said, and some of the committee laughed. “I’m not saying that your idea is a bad one, just that you have a false, if forgivable, sense of urgency about it. After all, it will be more than a century before you need most of these people. You’ll be in close contact with New New all that time; it’s not as if you’ll be sailing off the edge of the world. All that is involved is a simple transfer of data, which, it seems to me, can and ought to be done at New New’s convenience—without taking vital people off the job at a time when they are most needed.”

Berrigan came to O’Hara’s defense. “Stanton, you’re talking to hear yourself talk. Once these personalities are on file, they’ll be as useful to New New as to us. Where
is New New going to be when these people die?”

“I’m sure replacements are being trained.”

“Not for all of the categories,” O’Hara said. “This cabinetmaker, for instance. His skills are useless to New New, almost useless, since he works only in wood. They might be vital to us, if we decide to use the planet.”

“I suppose we can spare him,”

“He’s a hundred and twenty years old and can’t leave the zerogee ward. But there are others, as Dr. Berrigan says, whose profiles New New ought to preserve for its own sake.”

“It certainly is worth considering. I’ll recommend that Policy look into it.”

“I did that more than a week ago,” O’Hara said. “Nothing has come of it.”

He gave the youngster an indulgent smile. “Realities, O’Hara. You aren’t on Policy track.”

“I am indeed.”

“She’s Grade Sixteen,” Berrigan said. “You’d think
somebody
would’ve paid some attention.”

“Well. You know how busy things are.” He rubbed his chin and squinted at O’Hara. “I remember you now. You’re the woman with all the degrees. Two husbands on Engineering track. You caused a certain amount of discussion at board meetings.”

“You’re saying she shouldn’t expect too much cooperation from Policy,” Berrigan said.

“Engineering, either,” he said. “O’Hara, you’re neither fish nor fowl; you can’t grease anybody’s track. Things are busy, as I say, and it’s just the wrong time to start yet another new program. You’re offering Policy people an extra workload but no real career enhancement is attached to it.”

“That’s why it was so much fun to work with you, Stanton,” Berrigan said. Their terms had overlapped. “You’re so above politics.”

“Oh yes. Engineering track is never concerned with anything but the abstract merits of a proposal. So I suggest we put it to a vote.”

“Not ‘we,’ Stanton. You’re only here to liven things up. Discussion?”

A grossly fat man named Eliot Smith raised his one flesh limb—both legs and an arm were mechanical replacements—and said, “I’m not in favor of a simple yes-or-no vote. Almost all of us have mastered arithmetic… O’Hara, would you put those figures up on the screen?” She tapped out a sequence on her portable keyboard and the flatscreen on the wall lit up with the information she’d shown during her presentation: dollar equivalents of manpower and materiel requirements for one through twenty machines, and a column showing price-per-machine for each number. (The unit cost dropped steeply for up to nine machines, and then leveled off.)

“Okay, now give me control. Smith 1259.” He unfolded his own keyboard while she typed in his number.

“Now there’s no such thing as an objective analysis here. You gotta go through the whole list of professions and give each one a weighting factor, and everybody’s factors would be different. Me, I wouldn’t take ten of those cabinetmakers for one mediocre vacuum welder. But then I’ve never been on a planet and don’t understand why anybody wants to bother with it.