Worlds

  “I have to assume you left someone back there,” he said, drawing the hand laser from its holster. “He better not peep. You want to go back and tell him that?” He kept the laser pointed at the ground.

  The farmer stared at Jeff steadily, maliciously. “Ain’t no one down there. We all there is.”

  “Sure.” Jeff leaned back against the floater. “This is government business. If you cooperate with us, we’ll forget those two shots. Understandable, the way things are.”

  “The way things are” the farmer said, still staring, “is that we got no guv’ments, or maybe two. Which one might you be from?”

  “The legitimate one.” He showed his badge. “I’m a field agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  He laughed. “That don’t mean shit. It was you and those goddamn spacers got us into this.”

  “Not true. Richard Conklin’s a traitor, but most of the FBI is loyal. We’re trying to straighten things out We need help.”

  The man kept looking at him, silently but not as maliciously. “Look at it this way,” Jeff said. “If we’d meant to do you harm, you never would’ve got out the first shot. You’d be roast meat by now, if that’s what we wanted. Isn’t that true?’

  That’s right, Pop,” the young woman said.

  “You shut up,” the fanner said mildly. “What kind of help is it you want?”

  “Food, water, and transportation. We can pay.”

  “What we hear on the cube, your dollar ain’t worth bum fodder. Food’s worth plenty.”

  “We can pay in gold.”

  “Gold.” The farmer took a step forward.

  “Get back.” Jeff raised the weapon halfway.

  “Sorry. Just wanted to look at your machine. Never seen a Mercedes before.”

  “It’s a special police model. Got us all the way from Denver on fuel cells.”

  “Now, that might be worth somethin’. Once the power net gets up again.”

  Jeff hesitated. “I could kid you about that, but I won’t. It’s not mine to barter, even though well have to leave it here. It’s government property and it has a tracer signal embedded in the fuselage. If you tried to drive it you wouldn’t get ten kilometers.”

  The farmer stroked his chin. “You just said the right thing, I think.” He half-turned, and shouted down to the farmhouse. “Maw! It’s all right. They jus’ cops.” He shrugged at Jeff. “Left the ole lady and the baby down there. Didn’t know what the hell you was up to.”

  “How far you got to go?” one of the young men said.

  “The Cape. New New York Corporation.”

  “Why you want to go there?” the farmer asked.

  “Bring them something they aren’t expecting,” Jeff said, smiling.

  The fanner nodded. “Can’t do you no good there. Floater’s down in a soybean field five plat away.” He glared at one of the boys. “Goddamn Jerry comin’ back from a night on the town. Got a pigfart tractor—”

  “Methane,” Jerry translated.

  “—get you into Gainesville. You might could pick up somethin’ there.”

  So for one gold coin we got a knapsack full of dried meat, bread, fruit, and cheese, and several jugs of well water, and a ride into Gainesville. The “baby,” who was ten or eleven, traced us a copy of their map of Florida. Jeff had him draw in the areas that were state parks and recreation areas; if possible, we wanted to find an overland vehicle, so as to avoid roads and towns.

  They traded me a change of clothes—I’d been abducted in a bright red kaftan—and Jeff changed into his FBI uniform. We took from the floater a first-aid kit, compass, burglary kit, and enough armament to start our own revolution.

  The tractor ride was at top speed, about equal to a fast walk. Both of the sons came along with us, armed and alert. Martial law evidently wasn’t working too well in Gainesville.

  “Americans aren’t really bad people,” Jeff said, nearly shouting to be heard over the hammering engine. “But we’ve been trigger-happy for three hundred years. There are four hundred million firearms registered in the various states, and probably just as many unregistered. Two per person, and you can bet every one of them is greased up and loaded today. The people and the firearms.”

  I was maintaining the national average. Ten-shot laser pistol stuck uncomfortably in my belt, riot gun on my lap. It was similar to Perkins’s shotgun but worked on compressed air rather than gunpowder. It kept shooting as long as you held the trigger down, eight seconds per cassette. I was certain I could never use it.

  The farmland gave way to lowrise suburbia, then high-rises and malls. Whole blocks were burned out. There were squads of soldiers at some intersections; they saw Jeff’s uniform and waved us on.

  The city proper was a mess. Nearly half the stores were gutted, shoals of glass on the sidewalks and streets. Other stores were being guarded by conspicuously armed men and women.

  The boys had a city directory. They took us first to Honest Ed’s RV Rental, which was a smoking ruin, and then to Outdoors Unlimited. It was unharmed, and a fat man with a hunting rifle lounged in the doorway.

  “You rent cross-country vehicles?” Jeff shouted.

  “Got three,” he answered. We unloaded our gear and the boys backed up to the intersection, and roared away with obvious relief.

  “We need something that’ll get us to the Cape and back,” Jeff said. “About five hundred kilometers’ range.”

  “That’s no problem. Problem is, will you bring it back.”

  “I have no reason not to. This is FBI business—”

  “I can read.” The three letters were prominent on Jeff’s right breast pocket.

  “If I don’t make it back, you can bill the government I’ll write you out a statement, good for the replacement price of the vehicle.”

  “Now that’s just it. The money situation is really confusing. I’ve been doing business by barter, all day.”

  “I have some gold. Four thousand.”

  He shook his head. “My cheapest one’s worth twenty times that. Tell you what. Your statement, the gold, and one of your lasers.”

  “That’s against the law.”

  “Not much law around, you may have noticed.”

  “Let’s see the vehicles.”

  None of them was a floater. Jeff selected one with six large wheels; he verified the charge in the fuel cells and checked the manufacturer’s handbook. There was plenty of power for the trip.

  He wrote out the statement and signed it, then gave the man two gold coins and his laser pistol. The man asked for the holster, too. Then he handed over the keys.

  We started for the door. I heard a soft click and turned around. The fat man was standing there with a fading smile on his face, the pistol pointed in our direction. Jeff was already halfway to him in a smooth balestra. He gracefully kicked him on the chin. He fell like a fat soft tree.

  Jeff buckled on the holster and retrieved his laser. “It’s not common knowledge, but the thumbrest on an agent’s personal weapon is a sensor keyed to his thumbprint. Good insurance.” While he was talking, he checked the fat man for a pulse. “Still alive.” He found a tube of liquid solder and squeezed a few drops down inside the barrel of the hunting rifle. Then he searched the man’s pockets for the gold and the statement. “We’re felons, now. Let’s go.”

  The RVs motor was a quiet hum. The seats were soft and deep. “Ah, sportsmen,” Jeff said. He pushed a button and the windows rolled up. He said the glass had to be shatterproof but he didn’t know whether it would deflect a bullet. He told me to keep the riot gun very visible.

  We sped through the streets of Gainesville with only one incident. We both saw the silhouette of a man with a rifle, standing on the roof of a building across the street. Jeff slewed the RV to the left and we passed under him driving along the sidewalk, horn blaring to warn pedestrians. If he shot at us, I didn’t hear it.

  Jeff zigzagged through the city, following his compass. We were stopped several times by mili
tary and police road-blocks but didn’t have any trouble.

  We got oil a “truck road” south of Gainesville, a straight smooth ribbon of concrete, and Jeff got the RV up to 150 kilometers per hour.

  “If we dared to stay on these roads, we could be at the Cape in a couple of hours. But there’s bound to be trouble … ambushes, hijackers. Soon as we get out in the country well head straight southeast, toward the Ocala National Forest” We were going through an area of small factories and shabby lowrise apartment buildings.

  The road curved and Jeff slowed down abruptly. “That’s trouble, for sure.” About a half-kilometer ahead, a truck was lying on its side. At least four people were milling around it, and at least one of them was armed. Jeff turned onto a gravel path marked “Service Road,” that led behind a concrete-block factory, evidently abandoned. There was no fence in back, just a tangle of brush, taller than the RV.

  “Hang on,” Jeff said. He slowed down and did something with the levers mounted by the steering wheel. The motor’s pitch dropped to a loud growl and we crawled into the brush.

  It wasn’t encouraging. There was nothing to see but green, in every direction. We’d go a few meters and fetch up against something immovable, back up and try a few meters in another direction. After a half-hour of this, we were suddenly in the clear: Jeff knocked over a wooden fence and we were speeding over a manicured pasture.

  “Horse farm.” He pointed to a group of the animals staring at us from a safe distance. “Well be all right if we can keep away from buildings. One farmhouse per day is plenty.”

  Every kilometer or so, we’d slow down to break through another fence and take a new compass reading. We had to detour around a large lake (the RV would function as a boat, but Jeff said it would be very slow and too tempting a target), but then shot straight south across farmland to the Ocala National Forest.

  The forest was full of trees, no surprise. Jeff weaved around while I tried to make sense of the bobbing compass, telling him to bear right or left, averaging rather south of east and east of south. But it seemed safe; we encountered a few jackrabbits and armadillos, but none of them was armed.

  We came upon a sand road that bore directly southeast, so decided to chance it. We were able to maintain a speed of thirty to forty kilometers per hour, slithering through the woods. Green shade and silence on both sides. I guess we got complacent.

  Suddenly a metal cable jumped up from the sand in front of us. Jeff tried to stop but we slid and slammed into it. Out, he said, and kicked open his door and dived. But I was tangled up in the seat restraint again, and this time it almost killed me. Just as the buckle clicked free, a bullet smashed through the windshield and peppered my face with glass fragments. I felt a hot splash of involuntary urine and broke a fingernail getting the door open, fell to the ground and crawled behind a tree, blasting the riot gun in various directions.

  46

  What happened behind their backs (3)

  Almost every nation on Earth denounced the United States for its cruel assault on the helpless Worlds. Every country in Common Europe withdrew its diplomats (though most of them were on their way home already), and even the Alexandrian Dominion asked for a formal explanation of the action.

  The Supreme Socialist Union announced that a state of war existed between their countries and the United States, until such time as the legitimate revolutionary government was installed. Systems were unlocked and thumbs hovered over buttons.

  More than a century before, the combined weapons systems of the United States and the Soviet Union (now one-third of the SSU) had grown to the point where they could completely exterminate a planet of eight billion souls. Since no planet in the Solar System had anything like that number of people, they did the logical thing. They signed papers agreeing to limit the rate of growth of their weapons systems. A few misguided idealists on both sides suggested that it might be wiser to stop the growth of the systems, or even dismantle a few weapons. But more practical men prevailed, citing the lessons of history, or at least current events. The “balance of terror” worked, first in the short run; then in the long run.

  When South America blasted itself back to the nine-teenth century in a nuclear round robin, the major powers made sage and pious remarks and quietly congratulated each other on their mutual sanity. When the Soviet Union was bloodily preoccupied with its Cultural Consolidation, the United States did not take advantage; neither did the resulting SSU attack the United States during the year of vulnerability that followed its Second Revolution.

  For one and a half centuries after the primitive pyres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the systems and counter-systems grew in complexity and magnitude. More and more agreements were signed. Peace was guaranteed so long as the systems worked.

  The systems broke down on the American side on 16 March 2085. The same madman who had tried to kill the Worlds sat at a console under a mountain in Colorado. He turned forty keys and played a magnificent arpeggio on the buttons beneath them.

  47

  Firefight

  There were a few seconds of silence after my spree with the riot gun. Then two shots, pause, two more. They were on Jeff’s side, but he didn’t fire back. I hoped it was because he didn’t want the laser to give away his hiding place.

  The silence stretched on. What if he were dead? Then so was I. I was pretty well hidden, behind a tree and a fallen log, but the man who was shooting (I assumed he was a man) must know about where I was. But then he also knew I had the riot gun. Maybe he would leave. Could I find my way to the Cape alone? I could take the compass out of the RV and walk southeast, maybe a week—

  “Don’t move, bitch.”

  He was hardly two meters away, crouched behind a tree. All I could see were his face and a hand gripping a large pistol. On the word “bitch” we both fired. He missed me. I thought I’d missed him, too, but then he stood up from behind the tree, gaping at the shredded remains of his hand, bright blood pulsing. He said “Oh” softly and started to run. A green laser pulse hit him at chest level and he fell to the ground, skidding.

  I stood up trembling, trying to control sphincters. Jeff shouted, “There’s another—” and I felt a sting on my neck and heard a gunshot. I slumped down beside the RV and put my hand to my neck; blood streamed down my arm. I felt myself fainting, put my head between my knees, and fell over sideways. I was dimly aware of gunfire, and green laser light, and some orange light, too. I passed out.

  I woke up with Jeff spraying something over my neck. He pressed a cotton pad against the wound, and took my hand.

  “We have to move. Can you hold this in place?”

  Half the forest was in flames. I nodded dumbly and let him put my hand over the bandage. He lifted me up and put me inside the RV, slammed the door shut and ran around to his side. It was getting hot.

  We backed up away from the flames and took off through the woods. “It’s not a bad one,” Jeff said. “Flesh wound. We ought to have it stitched up, though.” When we were well away from the fire, he stopped long enough to tape the bandage in place.

  “You feel up to navigating?” he asked. “I don’t think we ought to follow that path anymore.”

  “Let me out first.”

  “Need help?”

  I got the door open. “No, I’ve been doing it for years.” I squatted behind the RV and relieved myself. All very rustic, with the sweet pine smoke and leaves to clean up with. Then I politely threw up for a while, on my hands and knees, everything in proper order, wouldn’t be nice to do everything at once. Jeff must have heard me being sick; he was holding me for the last of it, and had brought out a plastic jug of well water. I rinsed out my mouth and held on to him while the dizziness passed, not crying, his shirt front salty between my teeth. The taste of him calmed me.

  I pulled up my pants and buckled them. “Let’s go. I can navigate now.”

  “Are you sure?” I was suddenly, helplessly furious at his professional calm.

  “Doesn’t anything ever g
et to you?”

  He shook his head slightly. “Not while it’s happening.” He walked me back to the RV door. “Let’s get to Cape Town and have a nervous breakdown together.”

  There was a loud boom and something silver flashed overhead, leaving a solid-looking column of vapor behind.

  “Christ,” Jeff said, “I hope that’s not nuclear.”

  48

  What happened behind their backs (4)

  Both sides had defensive screens of automatic lasers and antimissile missiles, and they were remarkably efficient: not one bomb in thirty found its target. There were lots of bombs, though.

  Nearly two billion people died in the first ninety minutes. In a sense, they were the lucky ones.

  One missile containing a biological agent, the virus Koralatov 31, went off a few seconds too early, and dispersed its deadly aerosol into the jet stream over Lincoln, Nebraska. It didn’t infect anyone for several days. But in the weeks and months and years to follow, it would settle and thrive all over the world.

  Only deserts and the poles were safe. No one would know that.

  49

  Cape Town

  We only missed the Cape by about forty kilometers, over-shooting it to the south. We crossed the Indian River by moonlight, churning through the water at an agonizing crawl There was a bridge in sight, but we’d had one ambush too many.

  Merritt Island. Lights off, we sneaked north up darkened residential streets. All along the eastern horizon the sky was red and boiling grey; we supposed it was a forest on fire.

  This was the first part of Earth I ever saw, close up, gliding in on the shuttle. So full of industry and promise.

  A green-white flash dazzled us, followed by a low rumble, like thunder but deeper and more sustained.