Jack Williamson, page 3
“We don’t want violence.” DeFort raised his hand uneasily. “But you are a problem.”
“Your problem, sir.”
“Mr. Kell—” Looking sick, DeFort gulped and blinked. “I do feel for you. I pity all the billions we left dead behind us.”
My father heard the tremor of emotion in his voice and saw the sardonic quirk of Kell’s lips.
“Something—” DeFort gulped again to find a stronger voice. “There’s something you’ve got to understand. The impact was worse than anybody ever imagined. We’re probably the only people left alive. Our facility on the Moon was never finished. We have no resources to support a larger staff—”
“You want us to jump off the plane?” Kell grinned unpleasantly. “You’ll make room for us.”
“Kill any of us,” DeFort tried to warn him, “you’ll kill us all. Kill our chance—”
Kell touched the gun. DeFort stopped.
“Watch ’em, Shug.” Muttering to the woman, Kell swung to glance behind him. “A nest of mad rattlers. Don’t let ’em strike.”
The cabin went quiet till Navarro spoke.
“Cal?” He waited for DeFort’s baffled nod. “I don’t want bullet holes in the fuel tanks. We’d better talk.” He turned quietly to Kell. “Why don’t you tell us who you are?”
“If you give a damn.”
“We’ve got to care,” Navarro said. “We all want to stay alive.”
Kell scanned them one by one, meeting their eyes, waiting for signs of assent. Linder was pale and shaking, his shirt smudged dark with sweat. Wu nodded calmly. Lazard held a frozen stare. Navarro stuck up his thumb.
“Okay,” DeFort muttered. “Let’s hear.”
Kell glanced behind him again and moved to get his back toward the wall. Following, the woman slid her arm around him.
“Like I said, I ain’t no doctor. Fact is, I never went to any school. Mona says she had third grade. We don’t know a rat’s tit about shock waves and impacts, but we mean to stay alive.” He stopped to glare at DeFort. “By God, we will.”
“I hope we all can.” DeFort nodded soberly. “We must try.”
“We need to know each other,” Navarro said. “Tell us where you come from.”
“I don’t know.” Kell had relaxed a little, his hand straying from the gun. “I never knew my birth parents. The man I called my father said he won me in a poker game. Maybe he did, though he was not addicted to the truth. He was English, white as chalk, so he had to explain the dark freak I am. He said he’d been an actor; he liked to recite Shakespeare. Said he failed at that and found a richer role to play—” Warily, he stopped. “One he wouldn’t talk about.”
“No need for secrets now,” Navarro urged him. “We’re starting over. No need to fret about the past. If we’ve got to get along, we need to know each other.”
“If we really are the only ones alive—” He frowned, considering.
“About your father?”
“I loved him, the father I knew.” His voice softer for a moment, he glanced at the woman. “He loved me. More than his women; he must have had half a hundred women. Some tried to mother me. Some despised me. One taught me to screw. A birthday gift, the day I was nine.”
“Quite a man.” Navarro grinned. “How could he afford so many women?”
“He never said, but he did have money. Money for classy hotels. Money for travel, and we traveled a lot. Always another passport and some new name I had to learn. Sometimes another language. The women taught me to read and write, but I never went to school. He hated institutions, I think because he done his prison time, but he taught me most of what I know.
“Taught me weapons.” Grinning at DeFort, Kell seemed to relish the recollection. “Knives, firearms, bombs. The martial arts. What he called the fine art of killing without getting caught. He used to call it erasure. Keys to life and death, he used to call the weapons. He loved them like his women.
“I used to wonder why, but I never got the truth till after he was dead. I was twelve the summer that happened. We’d checked into a Bangkok hotel with his latest woman, a saucy little beauty he called Missy Ming. He went out for lunch with a friend. No friend; he never got back.
“Missy cried when she heard he was gone, but she took me with her to bed that night and left next day before the cops got there. Local police and international agents, looking for his killer. Seems he had been a high-paid hit man in the drug trade, till he met another one grade better. That was my father.”
Kell paused, with a wry shrug at DeFort.
“He made his own law, lived his own life. Call him bad if you want, but he was good to me. He made me what I am. Taught me how to stay alive.”
“A skill still useful to you.”
Navarro grinned. DeFort nodded at the woman, and Kell smiled down at her.
“My lady friend, Miss Mona Diamond.” His tone seemed proudly fond. “A gifted singer, performing in a Juarez nightclub when we met.”
“A lie.”
With a long look at Kell, she shook her hair out of the towel and came to her feet. Tall for a woman, my father said, long-legged and well-breasted, with honey-colored hair falling nearly to her waist. Turning to the others, she opened the robe to show the tattoo.
“I never sang in Juarez.” She shook a bright-nailed finger at Kell. “If we’re all sardines in this tin can—” She paused to look around at the others. “We’ve got no room for lies.”
“True,” Navarro said. “We’ll live or die together.”
“I did want to sing, but I never got that good.” Her voice was low and likable, my father said, and it had a ring of confidence. “I come from dirt-poor people, back in the Blue-grass county. I learned to love the music and longed for my own chance to make it, but I never had the luck.
“Hard times hit us when they outlawed tobacco. The state went bust. Pa planted pot and went to jail for it. Ma got sick, and I had to keep the house. On my own when they died, I did what I had to. Waitress, hooker, topless dancer, stripper. That’s when I got the tattoo. Billed as Mona Lisa Live.”
Demurely, she closed the terry robe.
“Like Casey says, I learned to stay alive. Got hard lessons all along the way. I’ve been rich and more often broke. Casey changed my life.”
She grinned at him, affectionately.
“I’m here because he got the warning to me. You’ve heard my story. It’s been a hard fight, but I’ve had good times along the way. If the old world’s finished, like you say, I’m sad to see it go.” She stopped to look around the cabin. “Luck to you, if you want to build it back.”
“And luck to you.” Navarro grinned. “I think we need you on the team.”
“That’s our testimony.” Kell turned to DeFort. “Now let’s talk about the verdict.”
4
My father’s world was dead. He nearly died with it. The pain haunted him through the rest of his natural life and followed him into the master computer. Though the killer object had been guided to Earth by cosmic forces far beyond human knowledge or control, he found ways to blame himself.
The diary gives a glimpse of his useless brooding. If he had given DeFort better business advice, Robo Multiservice might have earned enough to let them fund a self-sustaining colony on the Moon. Human civilization might have survived there, with no need for Tycho Station. In the holo tank, he was always ready to talk about our mission, but any question about that last day made his image dim and flicker. Sometimes it vanished altogether, but if we kept on calling, the master computer would bring it back again.
“You’ve got to learn how wonderful the old world was.” His face grim, he used to pull his shoulders straighter in the old brown jacket and try to smile and cheer us on. “And remember your mission to let it live again. The whole future of life depends on you.”
“Just us?” Arne asked him once, standing with Dian and Tope and Tanya and me in front of the tank—we never needed chairs on the Moon. “Just us kids? What do you think we can do?”
“Grow up.” Tanya stuck her tongue out at him. “Even dummies grow up.”
“None of you are dummies.” My father shook his head at them, with a patient little smile. “Your job’s too big for dummies.”
“I hope we grow up able to do it.” Pepe was very solemn. “But the look of Earth scares me. I want to know how it got that way.”
The image froze for a moment. Maybe the computer was searching for the data it needed to keep the image running, but my father seemed to be remembering.
“The last day.” His slow voice was almost a whisper when he began to move again. “Christmas Eve had been a happy time. My married sister lived in Las Cruces, a city near the base. She had twins, two kids just five years old. I’d bought trikes for them. She was making dinner, baked turkey and dressing, yams, cranberry sauce—”
His voice caught and he stopped for a second.
“Foods you’ve never had, but we liked them for Christmas. I’d been off in California, raising funds to finish the station, but we’d made plans for the holidays. My father and mother were coming from Ohio. Nobody expected—”
He stopped to shake his head, lips shut tight.
“The station wasn’t finished. Not yet ready for anything. We had left it on standby, with only the Robos there. Dr. Wu was coming out from Baltimore after the New Year, to bring more frozen cells for the maternity lab—”
“Her cells?” Tanya asked. “The cells I was born from?”
“Cloned,” Arne muttered. “Clones aren’t born.”
“Dummies are,” Tanya told him.
“Please,” my father scolded them gently. “You did grow from the cells your parents left frozen in the cryostat. Your own lives did begin in the maternity lab. But clones aren’t dummies.”
“Your mother—” Arne poked his finger at Tanya. “Your mother was a machine.”
“So was yours,” she said.
“A wonderful machine,” my father said. “Nearly as wonderful as a woman’s body might have been.”
“Why did we have to be clones?” Arne asked. “Why weren’t we just born?”
“Cal’s wife did want live people at the station,” my father said. “But it’s too small for any colony that could support itself. He planned the station to last a thousand years, or a million if it had to, with no aid from anywhere. The Robos and the master computer can wait here forever, with the frozen cells waiting to be cloned and cloned again, whenever you are needed.”
“Now?” Arne scowled. “When all the Earth is dead?”
“Maybe not entirely dead.” My father frowned, sucking the pipe as if he had tobacco in it. “It’s time for a survey expedition to find that out. You must test the seas for microscopic life and test the air to find if you can breathe it. We can plan then for what your next generation can hope to do when their own time has come.”
The image shivered, as if about to vanish.
“Wait!” Tanya called. “I hate to see you so sad. It must have been dreadful when the asteroid fell, but weren’t you happy to get away?”
“Not really.” My father froze for a moment as if the computer had stopped again. “Not when you think of all we had losl. Our families and our homes and our friends. All the good things we had ever known and loved and planned for. All—”
His face twitched, but he gave us a thin little smile.
“All but hope. Hope for you and what you can do.”
The image stopped again till Pepe called, “Go on. Tell us all about the impact.”
“All about it?” He sighed and shook his head, and put the pipe in his jacket pocket. “The people who really knew are dead. Nobody will ever know how it was for them, but I can tell you what I saw. We should have had a better warning. The big rock—asteroid or comet; nobody had time to fret about a name for it—was still two days off when the Robos picked it up. They did what they were programmed to do, which was to verify the sighting, compute the orbit, and estimate the time of impact, but they had been told our Earth base would be shut down for Christmas. We’d lost a whole day before they tried to signal Earth.
“Thirteen hours.” My father’s lips bent down over a neat little tuft of red-gray beard. “That’s all we had left. Thirteen hours to get the survival team together. To load the ship and fuel it. To get us off alive. And at first DeFort was afraid to spread the news. Afraid of panic that would kill any chance at all.
“And his wife—”
He stopped to shake his head and suck at the dead pipe.
“She was Mayu Ryokan. A marine biologist, she was somewhere on the Indian Ocean, not far from where the impactor fell. She was drilling the sea floor for cores that might carry records of past impacts and mass extinctions. They’d spent their honeymoon on her research ship. He wanted to call her, but he couldn’t tell her anything. She was too far for him to reach her anyhow. You can imagine how he felt.”
“Why isn’t he here?” Tanya asked. “Cloned like us?”
“Because of her. They were desperately in love. She had promised to give up her own career when the station was finished, and be with him, but she didn’t want to be cloned. She said one of her was enough. We have his tissue in the cryostat, but she had never given hers. He didn’t want to be cloned alone.”
He made a stiff little face.
“I wasn’t so eager myself. I did leave a cell specimen, but I’m no scientist. No expert at anything. I was arranging to give my place to a noted anthropologist, but he was out of reach when that day came, off on a dig in Chile. And, well—”
He drew a long breath when he moved again.
“I did get back to the base. So did your natural parents. We fueled the ship and loaded what we could. Kell stopped the mob. We got away in time. I’m not sure I was ever really glad, or anybody was.”
He shook his head, looking down at Dian.
“I remember your mother, after we were safe in space. She had opened her laptop to write something and found she couldn’t. She sat huddled over it till Dr. Wu gave her something that put her to sleep.”
“Your silly mother.” Arne made a face at Dian. “My father was braver.”
“Maybe not.” My father laughed. “Pepe’s father was the cool one. He was our pilot. He took us all the way out to orbit before he gave the controls to Cal DeFort. He’d brought a liter of Mexican tequila. He shared it with Kell and Mona, and finally slept till we got to the Moon.”
“It’s dreadful to see.” Dian gazing up at the Earth, speaking almost to herself. “The rivers all running red, like blood pouring into the oceans.”
“Red mud,” my father said. “Silt colored red by all the iron that came from the asteroid. Rain washes it off the land because there’s no grass or anything to hold it.”
“Sad.” When she looked at him I saw tears in her eyes. “You had a sad time.”
“Tell us,” Tanya said. “Tell us how it really was.”
“Bad enough.” He nodded. “Climbing east from New Mexico, we met the surface wave coming around the Earth from the impact point. The solid planet was rippling like a liquid ocean. Buildings and fields and mountains were jumping toward the sky and dissolving into dust.
“The impact blew an enormous cloud of steam and shattered rock and white-hot vapor up through the stratosphere. Night had already fallen on Asia. We passed far north, but we could see the cloud, already fading and flattening, but still glowing dull red from the heat inside.
“Clouds had covered all the Earth by the time we came around again. A rusty brown at first, but the color faded as the dust settled out. Higher clouds condensed till the whole planet was bright and white as Venus. It was beautiful.” His voice fell. “Beautiful and terrible.”
“Everybody?” Whispering, Dian wiped at her tears. “Was everybody killed?”
“Except us.” His plastic head nodded very slowly. “The Robos here at the station recorded the last broadcasts. The impact made a burst of radiation that burned out communications halfway around the planet. The surface wave spread silence farther.
“A few pilots in high-flying aircraft tried to report what they saw. The Robos picked them up, but I don’t know who was left alive to hear anything. Radio and TV stations went off the air, but a few hardy souls kept on sending to the end. A cruise liner in the Indian Ocean had time to call for help. We picked up a reporter’s video of the shattering Taj Mahal.
“An American astronomer had guessed the truth and called the media. We caught a White House spokesman trying to deny it. Just a sudden solar flare, he said. His voice was cut off before he finished. Watching from a thousand miles up, we saw the great wave rolling up out of the Atlantic. It washed all the old cities off the coast. The last words we heard came from White Sands. A drunk signal technician wishing us a merry Christmas.”
Tanya asked, “What happened to Mr. DeFort?”
“I don’t think he cared.” My father shrugged. “He’d fought too long to get the station built and felt too sad for all he had lost. Most of all he grieved for his wife. He was never happy here. Never slept much. He spent half his time in the dome, looking back at Earth. It was still a huge white pearl, dazzling with sunlight but mottled with volcanic explosions. We never saw the surface. The third year, he decided to go back—”
Arne was startled. “Was he crazy?”
“We begged him to wait till the clouds broke enough to let him look for a safe spot to land. He kept imagining survivors somehow hanging on. Finally Pepe took us down. I went along to keep a video narrative. Under the clouds, all we saw was death. The heat of the impact had burned cities and forests and grasslands. Oceans had risen as the polar ice thawed. Lowlands were flooded, coastlines changed. The land looked like you see it now, black and barren, bleeding red mud into the seas. No spark of green anywhere.
“He had Pepe land us on the shore of a new sea that spread far into the Amazon valley. I got a whiff of the air when we opened the lock. It had a burnt-sulfur stink and set us all to coughing. In spite of it, he was determined to get samples of mud and water to test for any surviving microscopic life.
