Lou felt physically staggered. He stared at Marcus, who was smiling easily at him.
“Me? What are you talking about?”
“It’s very simple,” Marcus explained. “All of the world’s top geneticists and biochemists have been put into exile. They’re being shipped up to their satellite prison right now. Of all the top men working on genetic engineering, you’re the only one we’ve been able to save.”
“But...”
“Oh, sure, we’ve rounded up a few of the second-string people, and we’ve brought in a couple of young pups, bright boys, but the ink is still wet on their diplomas. You’re the only experienced top-flight man we have.”
“But I’m only a computer engineer.”
Nodding, “Maybe, but your work is the key to the whole project. You’ve got the computer coding system in your hands. Unless we can get the computer to handle all of the thousand of variables that are involved in any tinkering with the genes, we don’t dare try to do anything. It would be too dangerous.”
Lou agreed, “Yeah ... you’ve got to have the computer plot out all the possible side effects of any change you make. Otherwise you’d never know if you were making the zygote better or worse.”
“Right,” Marcus said. “And you’re the only man who was close enough to the geneticists to really understand what the computer coding system must be. We’ve checked all across the world, believe me. None of the other labs were as close to success as your Institute. And none of them had a computer system as sophisticated as yours. So that makes you the key man. The fate of your friends—the fate of the whole world—is in your hands.”
Grinning foolishly, Lou said, “Well... it’s really in Ramo’s hands. Ramo’s got the whole thing wrapped up in his memory banks.”
Marcus tensed in his chair. “The whole thing?”
Lou nodded. “All I’ve got to do is run through the programs and de-bug them. Then we’ll be ready for the first experiments. Take me a few weeks, at most.”
“This is critically important to us,” Marcus said. “I don’t want you to rush it. I want it done right.”
Feeling a little irritated, Lou said, “It’s almost finished. In a few weeks, we’ll be ready.”
“You’ll be able to scan the zygote’s genetic structure, spot any defects, plot out the proper corrective steps, and predict the results?”
“To twenty decimal places,” Lou insisted. “And it’ll all be done in less than a minute of computer time.”
“If you can do that...”
“When we can do that,” Lou corrected, “we’ll be able to mend any genetic defects in the zygote and make each embryo genetically perfect. Ultimately, we’ll be able to produce a race of people with no physical defects and an intelligence level way beyond the genius class.”
“Yes,” Marcus said. “Ultimately.”
Lou sat back, Marcus smiled pleasantly and sipped his drink. Then Lou noticed, through the chirping of the songbirds, the drone of a jet high overhead. Marcus heard it too. He looked up at the silvery speck with its pencil-thin line of white contrail speeding along behind it.
Glancing down at his wristwatch, Marcus said, “That’s our next supply shipment. Your programmer friend should be on that plane.”
“Bonnie?”
Marcus nodded. “I understand she’s quite a lovely girl.” He grinned at Lou.
Pushing his chair from the table, Lou got up. “I’ll go down to meet her at the landing pad.”
“Sure, go right ahead. Her quarters are in the same building as yours. She’s on the second floor.”
“Okay. Fine.” Lou started toward the front of the house. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be bothered by Marcus or anyone else. He just wanted to see Bonnie.
“I’m afraid the car’s already down there,” Marcus said, trailing along behind Lou. “You’ll have to walk it.”
“That’s okay. See you later.”
He left Marcus standing in front of the house and started down the dirt road toward the harbor area. The jet sounded closer now, and Lou could see it circling, stilt pretty high out over the sea.
From behind him he heard the whine of another turbo-wagon. Turning, he saw Kori jouncing in the back seat as the wagon worked slowly down the rutted road toward the harbor. Lou waved and Kori yelled for the driver to stop. They lurched off together toward the landing pad.
“Going to meet the plane?” Lou asked.
“Yes. They’re bringing some equipment in for me. And some data tapes from Starfarer that came in just before I was arrested.”
“The interstellar probe?”
The road leveled out and they picked up speed. Light and shadows flickered across Kori’s face as they drove past a stand of tall palms.
“Yes. If everything was working right, these tapes might have close-up pictures of Alpha Centauri on them.”
“Really? But I didn’t see anything in the newscasts about it—”
The road wound along the edge of the harbor now, and the driver pushed the turbine to top speed. There was no other traffic. The wind tore at Kori and Lou in the back seat.
“The government kept it quiet,” Kori hollered back. “Remember what Cobryn said, back in Sicily? Alpha Centauri is a threat to the stability of the world,” Kori laughed bitterly.
The car screeched to a halt alongside the landing pad. Billowing dust enveloped them for a moment. Blinking and coughing, Lou jumped out of the car and walked clear of the slowly-settling dust cloud. Kori came up beside him, walking in a slow gangling gait.
“Are you going to be working on the probe data? Is that what Marcus wants you to do?”
Kori made a little shrug. “He said I can work on analyzing the data. But what he really wants me to do is to make some nuclear explosives for him.”
“Explosives? You mean bombs?”
“No, no, nothing so big,” Kon answered, grinning. “Just little things, toys, really. The kind that engineers use on construction jobs. Why, if you exploded one of them in a city, it would hardly take out a building.”
The plane was circling low now, its jets roaring in their ears. Lou watched as its wings spread straight out for landing and the jet pods swiveled to the vertical position. Slowly the plane settled on its screaming exhaust of hot gases, flattening the grass beneath it Through shimmering heat waves Lou saw the plane’s wheels touch the ground and the weight of the jet settle on them. Then the turbine’s bellowing whine died off, like some supernatural demon melting away
Lou took his hands down from his ears; they were ringing slightly
The hatch of the jet popped open, and a three-step metal ladder slid to the ground. A broad-shouldered young man stepped out first, then turned around and reached up to help the next passenger. It was Bonnie.
She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless blouse. Her hair was pinned up the way she usually wore it at work. Her face looked grave, utterly serious, perhaps a little scared
Lou felt something jump inside of him, and then he was running toward her, calling to her.
“Bonnie! Bonnie!”
She looked up, saw him, and smiled. Lou ran up to her, past the guy who had helped her down the steps. He wrapped her in his arms and swung her around off her feet.
“Am I glad to see you! You came! You did come.”
She looked surprised and happy and worried, all at the same time “Lou .. you’re all right. They didn’t hurt you or anything ...”
“I’m fine, now that you’re here”
Without ever letting go of her arm, Lou took Bonnie’s one travel bag from the Chinese guard who was unloading the baggage and started walking her back toward the car. Kori was still standing beside the wagon, so Lou introduced them.
Kori said, “Why don’t you two drive back to the dormitory?
I’m sure you’ll want to get unpacked and settled in your room, Miss Sterne It’ll be some time before all my junk is unloaded from the plane. Lou, if you’ll just send the car back here . .”
“Fine, fine, I’ll do that.” Lou was grinning broadly as he helped Bonnie into the back seat of the car and got in beside her.
She was very quiet as they drove away from the pad and the harbor Lou chattered about what a beautiful island it was, and how good it was to see her again. All Bonnie did was to nod once in a while. By the time Lou had carried her travel bag up to the door of her room, his own joy at being with her had simmered down to the point where he could see that something was wrong.
There were no locks on the dormitory doors, only latches that could be pushed home from the inside So Lou opened her door and gestured her into the room.
Bonnie walked in and looked around.
“This will be my room?”
“Right. It’s not much, I know, but...”
She went to the window and looked out. Turning back to him, she asked, “And your room is in the same building?”
“Downstairs”
“How many other women are in this building?”
Lou shrugged. “This whole second floor is for women, I think. And there are a few married couples living on the island. They’ve got their own houses, though.”
“I see.”
“Look, Bonnie, you’re not sore about what I said when those Federal marshals arrested me, are you? I was scared, and surprised ..”
Her face softened a little. “No, it’s not that, Lou.”
He walked over to her. “Then what’s wrong? Why’d you come if you didn’t .”
“Why’d I come?” She almost laughed at him “I didn’t get much choice Two men picked me up at the office where I had just started working and packed me off. That was it No questions, no explanations. Just enough time to pack one bag. That’s all.”
“They didn’t tell you....”
“Nothing In fact, I’m still not sure of what’s going on”
Lou sank down into the nearest chair. “But Bernard must have...”
Bonnie knelt down beside him and put her hands in his.
“Lou, I’m sorry. When I saw you there by the plane, all of a sudden I thought it was you that had me kidnapped.”
“You haven’t been kidnapped!”
“I haven’t been invited to the prince’s ball.”
He laughed at her.
“Lou, what’s going on? Is everything going crazy?”
Shaking his head, he tried to explain it as carefully as he could. The exile. Minister Bernard’s offer to help. The work that was going to be done on this island.
Finally, she understood. “You mean we’re going to stay here... indefinitely? As long as they want us to? We can’t get off?”
He looked into her pearl gray eyes and really didn’t care about politics or exilements or science or anything else. But he forced him self to answer, “We stay until we’ve finished the work that was going on at the Institute. When we show the world that genetic engineering can be done, then there’s no more point in keeping Kaufman and the others in exile.”
“But that could take years,” Bonnie said.
“It won’t take that long.”
She looked away from him, off toward the window, like a prisoner who’s suddenly realized that the outside world is forever barred away.
“I shouldn’t have asked them to bring you here,” Lou said.
She didn’t answer.
“Bonnie... if you had known... if they told you that you’d have to live on this island until the project is finished ... with me... would you have come?”
She turned back to look at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “I don’t know, Lou. I just don’t know.”
There are more than three hundred trillion cells in the human body. Counting ten cells per second, it would take more than a million years to count them all. In each cell there are forty-six chromosomes; under the microscope they look long and threadlike, and they’ve often been described as “strings of beads.” Each “bead” is an individual gene, and altogether there are some forty thousand genes in any human cell. The zygote—the fertilized egg cell that develops into an embryo and within nine months into a baby—contains about forty thousand genes, just like any human cell. Half of this number come from each parent. Each individual gene is a complex molecular factory built of deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA), ribonucleic acids (RNA), and proteins. All the physical characteristics of the resulting baby are determined by the genes. Eye color, tooth structure, basic metabolic rate, chemical balance, size of brain, shape of nose—everything is controlled by the genes in the zygote.
Lou’s work seemed simple and straightforward to him. He was training Ramo, the computer, to look over the detailed structure of each gene in a zygote and compare it to the structure of a healthy, undamaged gene.
Ramo, being a computer, knew only what his human co-workers told him. But he had two advantages that no human possessed. First, he had absolutely perfect memory. Once the “map” of a healthy gene was stored in the microcosmic magnetic patterns of his memory bank, he would never forget it, never blur or warp it, never let any emotional conditions prevent him from seeing it exactly as it was given to him. Second, Ramo could work at the speed of light, rather than the tediously slower pace of the human nervous system Ramo could scan dozens of genes and spot the imperfections in their molecular structure in the time it took Lou to count to ten
Lou often thought of himself as a teacher His job was to teach an extremely clever youngster—Ramo—how to do a very complicated job. A job that no human could do because it would take him too long, and his memory wasn’t good enough Just before the Institute had been closed, Lou had taught Ramo all the patterns of healthy gene structures Ramo knew what healthy genes looked like on a molecular level Now Lou had to teach him how to compare a real set of genes with the healthy structures he already knew how to spot the things that might be wrong with real genes, and how to show these imperfections in his viewscreens. Once this was done, Lou would begin to teach Ramo the biochemists’ remedies for fixing faulty genes. And once that was done, the immense task was finished The work of genetic engineering could begin
But, sitting at the master control desk of the computer, Lou was much less than happy The desk was a huge collection of control panels and viewscreens that reached around his padded chair in a semicircle Within the reach of his fingers were controls that touched every part of Ramo’s enormous electronic mind
Lou was frowning as he slouched in the chair He could see his own reflection in one of the dead viewscreens He looked the way he felt It was mid-morning, according to the clock, but here inside the computer building it was hard to tell There were no windows The building was frigidly air conditioned and heavily soundproofed Time meant very little to the computer
Two weeks had gone by since Lou had come to the island Two weeks, and Bonnie was still as cold and distant as she had been that first day. She worked for Lou, she did her job well. She had lunch with him most days and dinner a few times, in the tiny overcrowded cafeteria that Marcus had put up near the lab complex. She even mended a hole in his pants pocket. But she still acted more like a wary employee than a friend.
I should have never made them bring her here, Lou told himself for the millionth time that morning She’ll never forgive me for it
The phone beside him buzzed He punched the ANSWER button. Marcus’ untanned, bland-looking face appeared on the main viewscreen.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked.
Nodding, Lou said, “Some of the biochemists have been asking me to help them program Ramo to handle their work I don’t mind helping them, but it’s going to take time, and I thought you wanted me to plug ahead on the basic genetic mapping as fast as I can.”
“The biochemists?” Marcus put on a worried frown “Why do they need special computer programming?”
“They’re working on something to do with drugs that affect the chemistry in the chromosomes, or something like”
Marcus’ eyes widened for a flash second Then, he quickly regained his self-control “No, you’re quite right You shouldn’t be pulled off what you’re doing to help with that Let some of the other programmers help them”
Lou said, “Okay, fine I’d be glad to help them if they need it”
“No,” Marcus snapped “Urn, that is, they shouldn’t interfere with your work. Any way I’ll take care of it. If they come to you again, tell them to see me."
“Okay thanks. Thanks”
Marcus nodded and cut off the connection. The viewscreen went blank, leaving Lou to look at his own frowning reflection again
He worked at the control desk the rest of the morning, then around noontime phoned. Bonnie She was working with a trio of Chinese girls on the other side of the building
“I’m afraid I can’t go to lunch with you, Lou,” she said without smiling “The girls and I are eating right here at our desks, we’ve got mountains of work to do”
Lou punched the OFF button, and this time turned his gaze away from the viewscreen
It was well past six o’clock when the phone buzzed again It pulled Lou out of his total immersion in the work of teaching genetics to Ramo He suddenly realized that he was bone tired his back ached, his head was throbbing, his eyes burned. But on the main viewscreen Ramo was displaying a detailed enlarged map of the molecular structure of a single gene. And part of the map—the area of the gene that was flawed—was outlined in red Lou typed on the master input keyboard, GOOD WORK RAMO
PERFECT He muttered the words to himself as the phone kept buzzing
THANK YOU, Ramo flashed on the viewscreen
Lou reached out and touched the phone button Ramo’s words disappeared from the screen and Anton Kori’s lean angular face took form on it He was grinning hugely, showing big white teeth with spaces between them that made them look like a cemetery to Lou
“Can you have dinner with me?” Kori asked “I have a lot to talk about, a lot to show you”
“Well, I don’t know,” Lou said “I’m kind of beat “
“Oh “ Ron’s smile faded, but only a little “Maybe Bonnie can you have no objection’’ I’ve got to show these pictures to someone!”
“Bonnie?” Lou felt his nerves flash a warning “Dm look,
Anton—I’ll give Bonnie a call and we’ll both drop over to your place Okay?”
Kori bobbed his head up and down “Wonderful. Come to my lab. Next to the instrument repair shop. Bonnie knows where it is.”
I’ve got no right to be sore at her, Lou told himself as he angrily punched out Bonnie’s phone number. She wasn’t in her room. Glancing at the clock, Lou tried her office phone.Her face filled the screen and his anger melted.
“Oh, hello, Lou. I was just leaving for dinner.”
Keeping his voice flat calm, “Kori just called. He’s very excited about something, wants us to eat with him. Can you make it?”
“Sure.” Without a moment’s hesitation.
Lou asked, “Would you have been so free if I had asked you to have dinner with me? Alone?”
For an instant a frightened look flickered in her green eyes.
“What do you mean, Lou?”
“You’ve been seeing a lot of Kori, haven’t you?”
“Lou, I’m a tax-paying citizen or at least I was until I got hijacked here”
“So you are sore about my having you brought here!”
“Of course I’m sore!” she flashed back “Weren’t you sore when they dragged you away? Do you enjoy being an exile? Is this island any better than the satellite or wherever it is that the rest of the Institute people were sent?”
Lou heard himself mumble, “You don’t want to be around me, is that it?”
“Don’t be sullen,” she said, smiling for the first time “ Lou whatever we had going between us back at the Institute, it can’t be the same here It just can’t be”
“That’s the way you want it?”
She looked sad and lonely now “That’s the way it’s got to be, Lou”
“Yeah” He took a deep breath “Well, how about dinner? I told Kori we’d both be over”
“All right,” she said softly “As long as we understand each other”
He nodded, his face frozen into a bitter mask “I understand”
He left his office, walked around the computer building, and picked up Bonnie They walked across the lab complex in silence Overhead the trees filtered an unbelievable sunset sky of pink and saffron and soft violet Through the boles of the trees, off at the edge of the reddened sea, the sun was huge and distended as it touched the horizon
If Bonnie and Lou had little to say to each other, Anton Kori more than filled their silence The moment they stepped through the door into his cluttered laboratory/workroom, he started chattering
“It’s fantastic, you’ll never believe it, it’s like something out of the cinema
He bustled around the big room, dragging a table loaded with complex electronic gear across the floor and positioning it near the door
“Lou, would you turn on the switch for the laser?”
Kori pointed to the wall over his workbench “No, not that one! The next one, on your left. Yes”
Lou flicked the switch He saw nothing in the room that looked like a laser, but there was a hum of electrical power coming from someplace
“Wait ‘til you see this. Bonnie, the lights, please. Behind you”
With a slightly amused smile, Bonnie turned off the overhead lights. In the darkened room, Kori’s bony face was eerily lit by the glow of the equipment on his table.
“Now just a minute while I use this old slide for focusing....” he muttered.
Lou found a rolling chair and pushed it over toward Bonnie. She sat, and he stood beside her, facing the slightly luminescent viewscreen at the far end of the room. A slide came on, some sort of graph, with many colored curves weaving across it.
“Now the focus,” Kori mumbled. The graph suddenly became three-dimensional. The curves seemed to stand in the middle of the room. Lou felt he could walk around them and look at them from the other side.
“Okay, good.” Kori said, so excited that his English had a decided Slavic edge to it. “Now we see what no man has ever seen before—except me.”
The room went totally dark for an instant, and then it was filled with stars. Lou heard Bonnie gasp. It was like being out in space, stars as far as the eye could see: white, yellow, orange, red, blue—unblinking points of fire in the black depths of space. In the distance, the nebulous haze of the Milky Way glowed softly.
“Wide angle view, looking aft,” Kori explained matter-of-factly. “That bright yellow star in the center is—the sun.”
“These are the tapes from the Starfarer?" Lou asked, and immediately felt sheepish because it was such a needless question.
He sensed Kori nodding in the darkness, “It took the ship more than thirty years to reach the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. And it took more than four years just for the laser beam to carry this information back to us.”
Another moment of darkness and then another picture of stars.
“Wide view forward,” Kori said.
There was still a bright yellow star in the center of the field of view. Kori flicked through several more holograms. The yellow star grew brighter, closer. Soon, Lou could see that it was two stars.
“Alpha Centauri,” Kori said in an awed voice, as if anything louder might shatter the pictures. “Proxima is so distant and faint from its two big brothers that I haven’t been able to pinpoint it yet. It’s out among those background stars someplace. We need an astronomer here!”
Lou shared Kori’s awe. “Alpha Centauri,” he echoed.
“You were right, Anton,” said Bonnie. “This is fantastic... so beautiful.”
“Wait,” Kori answered. “You haven’t seen the best yet.”
He flicked through another dozen holograms. The double star grew larger. Lou could see that one of the stars was smaller and redder than the big yellow sun.
“What are those two flecks, near the yellow star?” Lou asked.
Kori giggled excitedly. “Flecks? Flecks indeed! Those are planets! Two planets orbiting around Alpha Centauri!”
Lou had no words. He simply stared at the screen as Kori flicked on several more holograms, closer and closer, of the two worlds. On the very last slide only the second-most planet was in view. It looked like a fat round ball, yellowish-green, streaked with white clouds.
“I haven’t had a chance to analyze the spectroscopic data,” Kori said, “but those clouds look like water vapor to me. It’s a bigger planet than Earth, probably a heavier gravity. But if there’s water, there could be life!”
It was very late when Bonnie and Lou walked with Kori back to the dormitory. None of them had eaten dinner. In their excitement over the star pictures they had simply forgotten all about it.
Kori stopped in the middle of the road, at a spot where the trees didn’t overhang, and threw his head back.
“Look at them!” he shouted. “Millions and billions of stars. And millions and billions of planets. Some of them must be just like this Earth, waiting for us to reach them. And we can! We can reach them, and we will!” He laughed loudly, and then gave a shattering shrill whistle as he swung his long arms up toward the sky.
“Hey, easy... you sound like you’re high,” Lou said.
“I am high,” Kori answered happily. “I’m drunk with joy and knowledge and power. We can reach out to new Earths. That’s enough to make any man drunk.”
Lou shook his head in the moonless dark. “Maybe we’ll need new Earths. We’ve certainly fouled up this one.”
Kori laughed. He wasn’t in the mood for seriousness. “Wait until the people of the world see these pictures. Wait until they realize what it means... .”
“I thought the government wasn’t going to let the news out,” Bonnie said.
Lou answered, “Marcus and Minister Bernard will get the pictures out to the newsmen somehow, I’ll bet.”
Her voice was quiet but firm. “Will they? Do you really think that they intend to let the world know about this? Or about genetic engineering, when we get it to work right?”
Lou stopped and looked at her. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the expression on her face.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
For a moment Bonnie didn’t reply. Then, “I’m not sure... I could be wrong. There’s nothing definite, but I’ve just got a... well, a feeling, sort of...”
“Go on.”
“Well... why do they have Anton working on nuclear explosives? What guarantees do we have that our work will be made public? Why are the biochemists working on cortical suppressors... ?”
“Suppressors?”
“Uh-huh. I just found out this afternoon,” Bonnie said. “That’s what they need the computer time for: to select the chemical suppressor that does the best job of degrading cortical activity—permanently.”
“But that would destroy a person’s intelligence,” Lou said.
“I know,” Bonnie answered. “And I think they’re planning to use Big George as a guinea pig.”
Lou felt a hot bomb go off in his guts. “No, they wouldn’t... if this is true, then...”
“Then we’ve been tricked into working for a group of people who’re planning to overthrow the government and turn half the world’s people into mindless zombies,” Bonnie said.
There was a long, long silence, broken only by the night sounds of insects from the trees and brush, and the distant sound of the surf. Finally, Kori’s voice floated ruefully through the darkness:
“Well, at least I don’t feel drunk anymore.”
It took Lou nearly a week to convince himself that Bonnie was right.
He used Ramo as his source of information and his teacher. He didn’t know very much about the work the biochemists were doing. So he followed their progress by. checking Ramo’s programs and memory bank every evening,’ after his own work was finished. Within his vast memory Ramo stored most of the world’s knowledge of biochemistry. So the computer became Lou’s teacher, and explained patiently and with machinelike thoroughness exactly what Marcus’ biochemists were trying to do.
By the end of the week Lou knew enough.
He sat on the warm beach sand, Bonnie on one side of him and Kori on the other. About two dozen people, most of them men and women from the technical staff, were on the beach or swimming in the gentle surf that rolled in from the reef. Far off on the horizon, huge towering cumulus clouds paraded like happy children across the sky.
The three of them sat a little bit away from all the rest of the bathers. Bonnie was still wet from a brief swim. Her skin was glistening with droplets of water, and prickled from chill. Or was it fear, in this warm afternoon? In the back of his mind, Lou noted with appreciation that there was plenty of her skin to be seen with the brief swimsuit she was wearing.
But he kept his face serious and his voice-low enough so that it could just be heard by the two of them over the shouting and laughter of the others on the beach.
“You were entirely right, Bonnie,” Lou said. “The biochemists are working on suppressors. They’ve already produced test samples of a drug and they’ve injected it into mice. Ramo showed me the test results. Six mice starved to death in mazes because they couldn’t find their way to the food at the end of the maze. Before they had been injected, the same mice had made it through the same mazes in less than a minute.”
“Oh my God,” Kori said. Bonnie shivered.
Lou went on grimly. “And today they asked Ramo for the complete cortical layout on Big George. There’s no doubt about it... they’re going to try the drug on him.”
“And then on a human being,” Bonnie said.
Lou glanced up at her face. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. That would be the next step.”
“What do we do?” Kori wondered aloud.
Lou shrugged. “There are only two things I can think of. First, we can stop the work we’re doing... just refuse to do any more. That would slow them down on their genetic engineering and their nuclear bombs—”
“But it wouldn’t stop this suppressor business at all,” Bonnie pointed out.
“And they already have enough bombs to destroy Messina, if they want to,” Kori said.
Lou nodded and traced a square in the sand with his finger. “Okay... then the only other thing we can do is wipe out Ramo.”
“Blow up the computer?” Kori asked.
“No... I can just erase all his programs and memory banks. Take a little time and some tinkering, but I could do it.”
“It would take more than a little time,” Bonnie said. “Ramo’s banks...”
“I know a few tricks I haven’t shown you,” Lou said grinning. “I could wipe Ramo clean in a night.”
“Really? That would stop everything they’re doing,” Kori said.
“They’d still have the bombs,” Lou countered.
Shrugging, Kori said, “Yes, but without the biological weapons they’re trying to get, the bombs by themselves wouldn’t be enough for them.”
Bonnie shook her head. “You’re forgetting something else that they’d still have.”
“What?”
“Us... or really you, Lou. If Ramo is wiped clean, don’t you think Marcus is smart enough to figure out who did it?”
“Okay,” Lou said evenly. “So he’ll know I did it. What good does that do him? Ramo will still be blanked out. Marcus will be stopped dead.”
“And so will you be,” Bonnie said. “He’ll kill you.”
“That wouldn’t do him any good.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good, either,” said Kori.
“Don’t you see?” Bonnie said. “Killing you doesn’t help him, I admit. But the threat of killing you will stop you from erasing Ramo.”
Lou nodded. “It does take a lot of the fun out of the idea.”
Kori said, “Wait... we’ve left something out of the equation. We’re all assuming that we must stay on this island----”
“You know a way off?” Lou asked.
“Weil, there are boats every few days—”
“Can you sail one? Can the three of us take over one of the boats? Can you navigate? Do any of us even know where on Earth this island is?”
Dismal silence.
Then Kori brightened again. “If we can’t get off the island, maybe we can signal someone to bring government troops here to rescue us!”
In spite of himself, Lou laughed out loud. “Okay, great idea. How are you going to signal? And who do you signal?”
Frowning in puzzlement, Kori mumbled, “Well... there’s a radio station down by the harbor.”
“Yeah, and three armed guards at the door all the time. And even if we could get in and operate the radio, and make contact with somebody, we’d be dead before any government people got to this island.”
Kori clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out on the sand. “Louis, my friend, I am a physicist, I have come up with a great basic idea. I admit that there are a few details, to be ironed out. That’s the work of engineers, not physicists.” He closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep.
Without a word, Bonnie picked up a fistful of sand and dumped it on Kori’s face. He sputtered and sat up. They all laughed together.
Bonnie stood up. “Come on, let’s take a dip before dinner. We’re not going to solve the problem right now.”
Lou got up beside her, “Maybe not. But we’d better solve it pretty fast. We don’t have much time left.”
Lou couldn’t sleep that night. He lay in his narrow bed, peering into the darkness, listening to the night sounds outside. The room’s only window was open to the sea breeze. A million thoughts kept crowding in on him. No matter how he turned or punched the pillow or forced his eyes shut or tried to relax, he still found himself lying in the rumpled bed, sticky with perspiration, his eyes open and jaw clenched achingly tight with tension.
Finally he admitted defeat, got up and dressed. He walked out into the darkness, down the road toward the laboratory buildings. And the computer.
He turned around the corner of the first lab building and went toward the fence of Big George’s compound. Down the way he could see a guard sitting by the gate, drowsing. The moon was riding in and out of scudding silvery clouds, but inside the compound the shadows cast by the trees made everything dark. Straining his eyes, Lou thought he saw the bulky shape of the gorilla sleeping on a man-made pallet of wood, straw, and palm fronds. Then he heard a snuffle and the big dark shape moved sluggishly.
“It’s okay,” Lou called softly. “It’s me, Georgy.”
The gorilla sat up and Lou could see a glint of moonlight reflected off his eyes. Big George pulled himself off the pallet and shuffled over to the fence.
“Uncle Lou,” he whispered.
“How are you, Georgy?”
“Good. I been very good.”
Lou wanted to reach out and pat him, but the wire fence was too fine a mesh to allow his hand through.
“I know you’ve been good, Georgy. Do you like it here? Has everybody been nice to you?”
“I have lots of room to play and they feed me good. But nobody comes to play with me. I’m all alone.”
“I’m sorry... I haven’t been to see you as much as I should,” Lou replied guiltily.
“But the doctor said he’d come and play with me,” George whispered.
“The doctor? What doctor?’
“The doctor,” George answered. “He was here today... or was it yesterday? Do you call it today if it was the day before tonight?”
“Never mind,” Lou said impatiently. “What doctor? Who was he?”
“He’s a new friend. He said he’s going to play with me when he comes back again. And I didn’t move or yell or do anything, even when it hurt.”
“What did he do to you?”
The gorilla touched the back of his head with a huge clumsy hand. “He made a funny noise back here, and it hurt a little. But just a little. It feels all better now.”
Spinal tap, Lou thought, his innards sinking.
“I promised I wouldn’t move even if it hurt,” George said.
“Georgy, listen. The doctor... he said he’d be back. When? When’s he coming back?”
“Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. This morning, most likely. “Okay, Georgy, you get back to sleep now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”
“All right. Uncle Lou. Good night.”
“Good night.”
As the gorilla shambled back toward his pallet, Lou began to know what real responsibility felt like. Big George trusts me. he told himself. He needs me to keep them from hurting him.
And then with a shock Lou realized that the only way he could save Big George would be- to destroy Ramo. He almost laughed as he stood by the wire fence in the moonlight.
Some family I’ve got, he thought bitterly. A gorilla and a computer. One of them is going to die. And it’s up to me to choose which one.
He hesitated only for a moment. Then he turned and headed for the computer building.
The door to the computer building was locked. Not by a voice-code lock, but an old-fashioned mechanical type, the kind that has a set of nine buttons that must be pushed in the right combination.
Lou didn’t know the combination. And I’ll bet Marcus has the building wired with alarms. There’d be guards swarming in here before I sat down in the control slot.
He stood there for a moment, uncertain. No sense getting shot if you can’t do the job you set out to do, he told himself. And then he smiled. On the other hand, if you’re smart enough, and quick enough, there might be a way to get the job done without killing anybody.
Grinning with his new idea, Lou walked back to the dormitory, undressed quickly, and got into bed. He set his wristwatch alarm to buzz at six, then closed his eyes. In five minutes he was sound asleep.
He had less than three hours of sleep, but Lou felt bright and ready as he stood by the fence of George’s compound again.
“Here’s some fruit I saved from breakfast,” he said to the gorilla. “Catch!”
He tossed a banana and two oranges over the fence. George backpedaled clumsily and managed to grab the banana in one huge hand. The oranges fell to the ground.
He stooped to pick them up, then jammed all three into his mouth.
“Thank you, Uncle Lou,” Big George said juicily.
Lou laughed. “You’re welcome, Georgy.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lou saw a guard walking past the lab buildings, stopping at each door briefly to touch out a combination on the lock. He talked with the gorilla for a few minutes more, then, when he was sure that the guard was out of sight, Lou walked briskly to the computer building.
The rest of the technical staff was probably just getting up, Lou thought as he glanced at the control panel clock. Sliding into the seat, he immediately started typing out instructions to Ramo.
It was mid-morning before he found out if his scheme had worked. Despite the computer room’s nearly arctic air conditioning, Lou was sweating as he sat at the control desk. He was trying to do his own work, but it was going very slowly. His mind certainly wasn’t on it.
The phone buzzed. Lou was expecting it, but it still made him jump. He touched the ANSWER button. The round Oriental face of the chief biochemist appeared on the screen. He looked unhappy.
“We seem to have a problem this morning,” he said without preamble.
“Really?” Lou said as innocently as he could.
Still frowning, the biochemist said, “Yes. We went to run a routine check of yesterday’s work and found that the data we recorded yesterday is missing from the computer’s memory bank.”
“Missing?” Lou shook his head. “Impossible. You’re probably just searching the wrong bank.”
They talked it over for nearly half an hour. The results of yesterday’s spinal tap on the gorilla, the cortical map, even some of the chemical formulas that had been stored in the computer weeks earlier—were gone from Ramo’s memory banks.
Lou forced himself to look serious. “I’ll do a complete check to find the missing data,” he said, “but it sounds to me like some of your people have goofed up. Running this computer isn’t as simple as operating a typewriter, you know. You should have let me record your data... or at least you ought to have a trained computer programmer or technician doing the job.”
“They are trained technicians!” the biochemist snapped.
Lou shrugged. “Then they haven’t been trained well enough— Okay, I’ll look for the data for you. But I’m willing to bet it was never stored properly in the first place, and it’s simply not in the memory banks.”
The biochemist was starting to look furious. “Two months of work lost!” He lapsed into Chinese.
It took them a week to figure out what was going on. Lou would spend his days at his own work, and then at the end of the day he’d have Ramo review the biochemists’ work for him. It took him only a few minutes to erase some of their material from Ramo’s memory banks. Lou never washed out very much material, just enough to slow them down.
The biochemists became a very unhappy group of people. Their chief went around screaming and purple-faced. The computer technicians who worked for (hem looked scared. By the end of the week, Lou was spending most of his day with the technicians, trying to find out why they couldn’t do their jobs properly.
Lou told nobody what he was doing. But Bonnie and Kori guessed it. By the end of the week, at dinner with them in the noisy cafeteria, Lou said to Kori:
“You’ve got to figure out some way to get us off this island. It’s only a matter of time until the biochemists figure out what’s wrong with the computer programs, and then...”
“I know,” Kori answered, hunching over the table and speaking as low as possible. “I’ve been trying to work out a navigational fix, so that we can at least find out where we are. But I’m afraid I’m not much of a navigator. And the sextant I’ve built isn’t very accurate.”
“But how do we get off the island?” Bonnie asked.
Kori shrugged. “Maybe we could build a raft—”
“Or a flying carpet,” Lou replied acidly.
That ended their discussion.
It happened the next day. Lou wasn’t really surprised when an armed guard showed up at the computer control room. It had been exactly a week since he had first started tinkering with Ramo’s biochemistry banks.
“What is it?” Lou asked, tensing.
The guard said, with a Malay lilt to this voice, “Mr. Marcus wishes to see you.”
“I’m busy at the moment. Tell him...”
“Now,” the guard said. And he hitched a thumb on the holster at his hip.
Lou nodded. “Okay, just let me...”
“Do not touch the computer controls,” the guard said softly, even gently. But his hand curled around the butt of his gun.
Lou found that his own hands were suddenly trembling, and well away from the controls. “Okay, okay, but the computer’s in the middle of a run.”
“Some other technicians are being brought in to take care of it. You will come with me, please.”
Marcus’ car was waiting outside, with another guard at the wheel. Lou climbed in and the first guard sat beside him. In a few minutes, Lou was ushered into the air-conditioned study of Marcus’ house. It was a small room, lined with books and a single large window that overlooked the sea.
Marcus was sitting at a desk in front of the window. There were a few straight-backed chairs in the room, and a comfortable-looking sofa. Marcus was talking into the viewphone on his desk when Lou entered. Without looking up, he gestured Lou to a chair next to the desk.
If he was angry, he wasn’t showing it. His face had it’s normal calm expression as he said quietly to the phone screen, “We’ve tracked down the source of the trouble and we’ll get things back under control and on schedule.”
Lou couldn’t see the screen, but heard the voice reply, “Very well. See that you do. The timing is very critical.”
“I understand. Good-by.”
“Good-by.”
Marcus pressed the OFF button, stared into the screen for a few moments longer, then turned to face Lou.
“You surprise me,” he said.
“I do?”
Marcus almost smiled. “Let’s not play games, Christopher. You’ve been sabotaging our computer programs, slowing down our biochemistry project. Why?”
“How do you know it’s me?” Lou stalled.
“It’s fairly obvious,” Marcus leaned forward in his chair slightly. “Now listen, Christopher. You’re not in the States any more. You’re playing in a different league, with different rules. I don’t have to prove it’s you who’s screwing up the computer. I think it’s you, and I’m going ahead on that assumption. I called you here to find out why you’re doing it, and to tell you what’s going to happen if you don’t stop.”
Lou felt anger rising up inside him. “Just like that, huh? Somebody’s messing up the computer and I get blamed. What happens now, do you shoot me?”
“No, nothing so dramatic,” Marcus answered. In a voice that sounded genuinely concerned, he said, “You know, I really think you’re more worried about that gorilla than about your own skin.”
“Yeah. I’m a gorilla freak.”
Shaking his head like a patient father, Marcus said, “All right, play it tough if you want. But listen to this, and get it straight. We’re going to overthrow the world government. Never mind who ‘we’ consists of. There are some very important people in our group. We’re playing for the highest stakes there are, and we don’t intend to let you or anyone else stand in our way.”
“Is that why you’ve got Kori making bombs?”
“Of course. Did you ever hear of a government that allowed itself to be pushed out of power without a fight? We’re developing three weapons here on this island: nuclear bombs, the cortical suppressor, and genetic engineering.”
Lou said, “So you can blow up your enemies, turn the survivors into morons, and then—after you’ve taken over—you can control everyone’s children.”
“That’s not one hundred percent right, but it’s pretty close.”
“It doesn’t sound like a very happy world that you’re aiming to set up.”
“Oh no? And what kind of a world do we have now? The government’s letting the cities fester worse and worse, more and more barbarians being born and pushing out into the civilized parts of the world. How long do you think it’ll be before we see something like a plague of rats sweeping across the whole world? Two-legged rats, from New York and Rio and Tokyo and Calcutta and Rome.. .every big city in the world!”
“And your answer is to bomb them out or turn them into zombies.”
“If we have to,” Marcus said, in the same tone he would use to offer a drink. “The bombs are really for fighting the government troops. Once we’ve taken over, we’ll have other means of handling the barbarians—including the suppressors.”
Lou shook his head.
“I wish I could get through to you,” Marcus insisted. “What’s this government done for you? Put you in exile, you and all your friends. When we take over, you can go back to living normal, useful lives.”
“Useful to whom?”
With great earnestness, Marcus said, “Listen to reason, will you? You and the other scientists will be among the top people in the new society. Your children will get the best genetic care that you yourselves can provide.”
“Until somebody decides he doesn’t like what we’re doing, or what we’re thinking,” Lou answered. “This government’s slapped us in exile— your friends might not be so lenient.”
Marcus sank back in his chair, as if baffled. “I don’t have the time to argue with you. We’re going ahead, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. If you don’t stop tinkering with our biochemistry project, you’re going to get hurt.”
“No I’m not,” Lou flashed back. “You need me to make the genetic engineering a success, remember? And that’s where the real jackpot is. Because you might be able to surprise the government and knock it off, you might be able to take over the whole world ... but without genetic engineering, you’ll never be able to control the world. I’m beginning to see how your minds work, and I know why genetic engineering is so important to you. You want to control everybody, don’t you? Make your own children supermen, and everybody else’s their slaves. Right?”
Marcus shook his head. “Not exactly. You make it sound ...”
“Rotten. Filthy and rotten. And that’s what it is. But you need it, and that means you need me. I’m the key man, you told me so yourself.”
“There are others----”
“Then why’d you yank me out of exile? Because it’d take anybody else at least a year to catch up to where I am. I understand the whole genetic engineering problem, and there’s plenty of it tucked away in my head, not in any computer banks or notebooks. So don’t try to threaten me, unless you want to wait a year or more for the ability to control the next generation of children.”
Marcus leaned back in his chair with a more-in-sorrow-than-anger look on his bland face. Shaking his head wearily, he said, “You still don’t realize what you’re up against, do you? Why do you think we went to the trouble of finding that blonde girl friend of yours and bringing her here? We don’t have to threaten you. If you’re worried about what we’re going to do to your precious gorilla, try to imagine what could happen to the girl. Things could get very unpleasant for her. Very unpleasant.”
Lou gripped the arms of his chair hard enough to make his hands hurt. He was fighting an instinct to spring at Marcus and smash his bland, evil face.
“Just try to control yourself and do as you’re told,” Marcus went on. “If you can behave, everything will be fine for you. But if you keep working against me ... the girl will suffer for it.”
“If you hurt her I’ll kill you.” Lou was almost surprised to hear himself say it, to hear the cold flat metallic ring of his own voice.
Marcus’ expression didn’t change. “Christopher, we shouldn’t be threatening each other. Just do your work and neither you nor anyone else will get hurt. That’s all we’re asking from you. As for the gorilla, it’ll probably be happier at its natural intelligence level that it is now.”
The greatest excuse in the world, Lou thought. They’ll be happier doing what I want them to do instead of what they themselves want to do.
Without saying another word, Lou got up and started for the door.
“Wait a minute,” Marcus called. “You haven’t said ...”
Lou turned. “You’ve got all the answers you need. There’s no way for me to stop you.”
Trembling with rage, he left the office, walked past the guard lounging outside the door, went out of the house, ignored the car still parked in front with its driver, and walked back toward the dormitory.
As he passed the lab complex, Kori came running up to him.
“Lou, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
Lou didn’t answer.
“I’ve figured it out!” Kori whispered excitedly as he pulled up beside Lou. “How to get the government troops here. And quickly! Inside a few days!”
Lou shook his head. “It’ll be too late.”
Kori grabbed his arm and stopped him. “No, I’m serious. We can do it!”
Lou said, “In a few days they’ll have ruined Big George, maybe killed him. And if we try to stop them, they’ll take it out on Bonnie.”
“What?”
“That’s what Marcus just told me. If he doesn’t like the way we behave, Bonnie’ll suffer for it.”
“But he can’t...”
“Yes he can. And he will. I bet he’d even enjoy it.”
Kori’s face turned as red as the setting sun. “That pudding-faced pipsqueak. I’ll...”
Now Lou took Kori’s arm. “Hold on. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
He felt Kori’s surge of anger fade away, saw his face return to normal, except for a sullen smoldering in his eyes.
“What do we do now?” Kori asked.
“I don’t know,” said Lou. “What was your scheme all about? How can you signal for government troops?”
“Oh that— With the navigation satellites.”
“Navigation satellites? How...”
“They have sensors on them to detect nuclear explosions.”
“They what?”
Kori started walking toward the dorm again, and Lou trudged along beside him. “It’s a holdover from the old days, before the world government disarmed all the nations,” Kori explained. “All the navigation satellites have a special array of sensors to watch out for nuclear explosions. If anybody sets off a bomb on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, or even in space, the government is alerted instantly Inside of a few hours, there’s an inspection team at the site of the explosion to find out what’s going on. An aitried inspection team With troops ready to follow at an instant’s notice."
“But nobody’s set off a bomb for
“I know, but the government still has the teams, and they even hold practice drills I was an advisor to a group of new recruits two years ago”
Lou chuckled “I guess once a government agency gets a job to do they keep on doing it, whether it’s needed or not”
“Don’t complain,” Ron said “Now then, the bombs I’ve been making are stored in caves at the far end of the island. If one of them went off, and a satellite spotted the blast, there would be an inspection team here in a matter of hours.”
“Can you set them off?”
“Them?” Kori laughed “One will be enough. If they all go off they’ll wipe out this entire island. Do you know how much destructive force even a single kiloton contains?”
When they got to the dormitory, Lou sent Kori up to get Bonnie. He didn’t want to talk inside of any building. Too easy to plant electronic bugs indoors. As he stood by the dormitory entrance, Lou got the feeling he was being watched. Nerves, he told himself. But he knew that if he were in Marcus’ place, he’d have guards out watching the troublemakers. And we’re going to make enough trouble to slide this island into the sea, if we have to, Lou thought unsmilingly.
They ate a quick dinner in the cafeteria and then walked out to the beach. Walking ankle-deep through the warm-lapping waves with the surf booming on the reef a kilometer out, they talked over their plans as the dying red sun stretched their shadows fantastically before them.
“I’ll need at least two days to round up the proper equipment “ Kori was saying.
“Make it one day,” Lou answered over the roar of the surf. “Big George doesn’t have two days to spare."
Kori glanced at Bonnie, then looked at Lou. “We want to do this right. If we rush, something might..."
“One day,” Lou said flatly.
Shrugging, Kori agreed “All right. One day.”
“Where can we plant the bomb without setting off all the others?” Bonnie asked
“That’s why I wanted the extra day,” Kori said, “to find the best location. Probably the best thing to do is to bury it in the beach sand across the island from the storage caves. That ought to be safe enough.”
“Will it make a big enough explosion for a satellite to see if you bury it?” Lou asked
Kori laughed. “Have no fear. A few feet of sand isn’t going to smother one of my toys.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll need two things,” Kori said, more seriously “A car to carry equipment and everything, and a diversion so I can get into the storage caves and do what I must do without being stopped by the guards.”
“What about the guards at the caves?” Lou asked
“There’s usually only one. I think I can handle him easily enough.”
“You’re sure?”
Kori drew himself up to full height. He towered several inches over Lou, but he still looked spindly. “My friend, I was a national fencing champion five years ago. I still keep in good shape. Besides that, I’m sneaky. I’ll ask the guard to help me carry some equipment and then hit him when his hands are full and his back turned.”
Laughing, Bonnie said, “My hero.”
“Never mind,” Lou said “Heroics are exactly what we don’t need. We need good, sneaky, practical action that works. I don’t want to win any moral victory, we’ll all end up dead that way.”
Kori nodded
“Okay,” Lou continued, “so you need a car and a diversion. We’ll figure that out, shouldn’t be too tough a problem. But the big question is, how do we protect Bonnie?”
“She’s got to disappear,” Kori said
“Great How do we do it?”
Silence
They walked slowly under the purpling sky. A surge of sea curled around their ankles, then ebbed away. A lone gull glided low over the waves, calling sadly as if looking for long-vanished friends
Finally Bonnie said, “Big George! I could stay in his compound for a day or so. There are plenty of trees and bushes to hide in and the guards never go in there.”
“With the gorilla?” It was too dark to see Kori’s face, but his voice sounded aghast.
“We’re friends,” Bonnie said. “We’ve known each other since George was born.”
“He wouldn’t hurt her,” Lou agreed. “Or anybody else, for that matter. Trouble is, he’d want you to play with him. You wouldn’t be able to stay hidden. He’d give you away.”
“No, not if I explained it to him.”
Kori shook his head. “I know you think a lot of that animal, and his intelligence has been boosted. But I wouldn’t plan to stay inside that fence with him for ten minutes, let alone twelve hours or more.”
“Oh, you’ve seen too many movies,” Bonnie said. “George wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
They went on talking, planning, arguing until- it was completely dark. The stars filled the night and the shimmering band of the Milky Way arched across the sky, bright and beckoning.
“Look up there!” Kori said.
In the darkness they could see his shadowy outline pointing skyward. Looking up, Lou saw one star moving silently, purposefully through the heavens, as if it had detached itself from its normal position to carry out some mission.
“Is that one of the satellites?” Bonnie’s voice floated through the dark against the basso background of the surf.
Kori glanced at his luminescent wristwatch. “Yes. And right on schedule.”
“Thank God,” said Lou.
Lou didn’t sleep much that night, and the next day at the computer building he hardly paid any attention to his work. He went through the motions, but his mind was racing, thinking about all that had to be done that night. Get the car for Kori, get Bonnie into hiding, create a diversion that will draw off the guards long enough for Kori to work unnoticed.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Lou couldn’t stay cooped up in the control room any longer. He stepped outside and took a deep breath of warm, salt-smelling air.
Then the quiet afternoon was shattered by the tortured scream of an animal. A scream of rage and pain and fear.
“George!”
Lou ran to the gorilla’s compound He got there in time to see two of the biochemists carrying a third through the gate. Big George was nowhere in sight. A half-dozen guards were clustered around the gate and more were arriving on the run, guns drawn.
“What happened?” Lou shouted
They ignored him. A pair of guards took the unconscious biochemist from his co-workers. His face was bloody and one arm was hanging at a weird angle.
Lou grabbed one of the sweating biochemists
“What happened? What did you do?”
The little Oriental looked up at Lou with fear and anger in his eyes. In a nasal, heavily-accented English he said, “Ape got frightened by injections. Anesthetic wore off Restraints not strong enough. Ape broke loose, knocked down Dr Kusawa, ran back into trees.”
“Injections?” Lou demanded “The suppressors?”
The biochemist nodded, pulled his arm out of Lou’s grasp and tottered away, following the guards who were carrying his boss.
Lou went to the gate.
One of the guards started shaking his head and motioning Lou away. “No. Danger. Keep away.”
“Let me in there. He won’t hurt me. He’s scared and hurt.”
The guards were clustered around the gate, which was now firmly locked. Most of them were peering into the trees and brush. Big George was not in sight The other guards were watching Lou.
“Danger,” said the one guard to Lou “Go away.”
Slowly, reluctantly, Lou walked away.
At dinner that night, Kori shook his head “That makes everything different. Bonnie can’t stay in there with him now.”
“Sure I can,” Bonnie said “George will be all right by now, and the guards will never dream of searching his compound. It’s a better hiding place than ever, now.”
“No,” said Lou “There’s no way of telling what those injections did to him. It’s too risky.”
They sat at their table in the cafeteria, leaning forward in a tight little huddle, ignoring their cooling dinner trays, oblivious of the fact that many eyes were watching them in the busy, noisy cafeteria
Bonnie insisted that George was all right. “Let’s go down to his compound and talk to him. Then we’ll see for sure,” she suggested.
Lou nodded agreement. Kori simply looked worried.
They walked down to the gorilla’s compound, but stayed away from the gate where the guards stood watch. They moved up onto the slope of the hill to a spot close to the trees inside the compound.
“Georgy,” Lou called out softly “Georgy, it’s me. Uncle Lou.”
A snuffling grunt, and from the shadows in among the trees a pair of baleful eyes suddenly gleamed out at them. Despite himself, Lou shuddered. Those eyes were glaring like a jungle beast’s.
He forced his voice to stay calm “Georgy, it’s all right. It’s me, Uncle Lou. And Bonnie is here, too. And another friend.”
A growl.
Lou turned to Kori “Maybe it’s a good idea for you to go away, Anton. George must be scared out of his wits of strangers right now.”
“He doesn’t sound scared.”
“He is.”
Stubbornly, Kori said, “But I want to see the gorilla’s reactions for myself. I don’t want you two make any mistakes about this.”
“Shove it!” Lou snapped, keeping his voice down to avoid frightening Big George. “You think you’re the only one with brains? I’m not going to let Bonnie take any chances.”
“Stop arguing,” Bonnie said. To Kori she added, “He won’t come out as long as you’re here.”
Kori left, muttering to himself. After another ten minutes of coaxing and soothing, Big George lumbered out of the trees and up to the fence.
“George,” Lou said, gripping the fine wire mesh of the fence. “Are you okay?”
“Head ... head hurts.”
“It’s all right, Georgy,” Bonnie said. “The hurt will go away soon.”
“Hurts... bad men ... hurt...”
Is it just me or does his voice sound strange? Like it’s hard for him to put words together. Lou felt his eyes stinging and realized there were tears in them. “Georgy, don’t be afraid. It’s going to be all right. The bad men have gone away. They won’t come back.”
The gorilla merely blinked.
Bonnie said softly. “Georgy, in a little while I’m going to come and stay with you. I’ll bring you lots of food, and some medicine to stop the hurt.
“Hurt... scared... bad men...”
“I’ll stay with you,” Bonnie repeated. “And the medicine will stop the hurting. Don’t be afraid.”
“And I’ll make sure that the bad men don’t ever come back,” Lou said, feeling anger welling up within him. “Not ever.”
“Uncle Lou...” Big George started, but his voice trailed off and he never finished the thought.
Lou said as gently as he could. “It’s all right, Georgy. No one’s ever going to hurt you again.”
As they walked away from the compound, Bonnie put a hand on Lou’s arm.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
Nodding, Lou answered, “You know... last night I couldn’t sleep. I was scared. Still am, I guess. We could all get killed tonight. But I think what was really scaring me the most was the thought that I might have to kill somebody myself. Oral least try to. But now... seeing what, they’ve done to Georgy... to a harmless animal like that... I’m not shaking from fear anymore. That’s anger.”
“It’s all right,” Bonnie said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Do you really think you’ll be okay in there with George?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll bring him some candy and sedatives. He’ll sleep like a baby.”
Lou nodded.
“You’ll see,” Bonnie said. “It’s all going to go like clockwork.”
“Yeah.” Lou glanced at his wristwatch. X minus four hours and counting.
Exactly at eleven o’clock the three of them met at the doorway to the dormitory building. They had spent the intervening hours checking final details and then pretending to go to their separate rooms for the night. Now they met in the darkness and started wordlessly for the lab complex. They had found identical black stretch pullovers and slacks among the disposable clothing supply in the dorm. Identical, but Bonnie’s sure looks better than ours, Lou thought.
There were two cars on the island, turbowagons, both of them. One was usually parked for the night at the lab complex. The other stayed at Marcus’ house.
“Do you think anybody’s watching us?” Bonnie asked in a whisper as they walked along the side of the road toward the lab area, sticking to the shadows of the trees and shrubs.
Kori whispered back, “They’ve got guards posted at the lab complex, the gorilla’s compound, the bomb storage caves, and Marcus’ house. Why should they watch us? We can’t do any harm unless we get to one or more of those spots.”
“Well, if they are watching us we’ll find out about it soon enough,” Lou said, pointing to the glow up the road that marked the lights of the lab complex.
They skirted the lighted area by detouring through the trees, making a wide circle, and doubling back to the far side of Big George’s compound. While Kori stayed well away, Lou and Bonnie walked up to the fence and softly called the gorilla.
Big George lumbered up to the fence. “Hello, Georgy,” said Lou. “How do you feel?”
“Head... hurts...”
“I’ve brought some medicine to make it feel all better,” Bonnie said. “And some candy for you.”
They talked for a few moments more with the gorilla, then Lou boosted Bonnie up to the top of the wire fence. George reached up and grasped her around the waist, his huge hands circling her completely. He put her down inside the fence as gently as a ballet dancer handles his ballerina.
Lou watched them, his innards suddenly knotting as he realized how easily Big George could kill Bonnie. But she reached up and patted his massive head. They turned and went toward the trees together as Bonnie reached into the bag at her waist for some candy.
Despite his fears, Lou grinned at the slim blonde girl and the hulking gorilla. If only Edgar Rice Burroughs could see this!
He looked down at his watch. Eleven-thirty already. Hurrying back to Kori, Lou mentally went over their plan for the thousandth time. Next step: Get Kori his car.
He met Kori, assured him that Bonnie was safe. They started back to the lab buildings. From the back of Kori’s lab, out on the fringe of the lighted area, they could see a lone guard patrolling slowly between the buildings. He looked bored and sleepy. But on his hip was a big pistol.
Kori looked at Lou and nodded. Then he stepped out and walked straight up toward the guard.
“Say there,” he called out, “can you help me? I’m trying to get into my lab here... there’s some work I have to do—”
The guard was instantly alert. “All buildings locked. No one can enter until morning.”
“Yes, I know but...” That’s all Lou heard. He ducked around the back of the building and circled it, coming up behind the guard. He could see Kori talking intently to the guard, and the youngster resting his right hand lightly on the butt of the pistol. They were standing about ten meters from the corner of the building where Lou crouched, with the guard’s back to him. Across the lighted space between the buildings, Lou could see the car they wanted.
Ten meters. Quickly and quietly, Lou slipped of his sandals, then tried to tiptoe and hurry at the same time. The sound of his bare feet on the gravel seemed deafening. The guard started to turn around.
Lou covered the last few meters with a flying leap and pinned the guard’s arms to his sides while Kori clouted him across the windpipe. He gagged and went down, thrashing, with Lou on top of him. Kori calmly leaned over, pushed Lou’s face out of the way, and chopped hard at the back of the guard’s neck. He went limp.
Lou got to his feet, sweating, panting. “Is he dead?”
“I doubt it,” Kori said. He went to the lab door and punched the buttons of the combination lock. The door opened and the lights went on automatically.
“See?” said Kori smiling, “No alarms. I rigged them this afternoon, at the same time that I changed the lock’s combination. There’s some benefit to being a physicist after all.”
Lou dragged the guard inside and stuffed him in a cabinet, then locked it. Meanwhile, Kori filled a tool kit with the equipment he wanted.
Wordlessly, they left the lab and re-locked the door. Then they went to the car.
“Are you sure you can handle everything by yourself?” Lou asked as Kori slid the tool kit onto the back seat.
“If you can keep them busy on the other end of the island,” Kori said. He pulled the guard’s pistol out of his belt. “Here. I’ll get another one from the guard at the storage caves. Do you know how to use it?”
“I think so....”
“It’s simple. Just release this catch here and it’s ready to fire. Pull the trigger and it goes off. It should have at least a couple dozen charges in it. Laser pulse does as much damage as an explosive bullet... like hitting something with an ultrasonic hammer.”
Lou nodded and took the gun. It felt heavy in his hand.
“Very good,” Kori said. “I’ll wait here until you start making noise down by the harbor.”
“Right.” Lou tucked the gun into his waistband, then saw Kori extend his hand. He took it and said, “Good luck.”
Kori grinned. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah.” If we’re both alive tomorrow.
Lou hurried through the star-lit night down toward the harbor. The road passed Marcus’ house, where the only other car on the island was parked. Lou looked around, saw no one, and then slid in behind the wheel and released the brake. The car started to roll down the slight incline and into the worn gully of the road.
Suddenly there were footsteps behind him and a man calling, “Wei! Li tsai iso sheng mo?”
Lou let the car glide to a stop, slid out, and crouched down behind the car. A light came on at the front of the house. Two guards were standing in front of the place, staring at the car. Lou pulled the gun out and set the safety release.
The guards didn’t seem to know he was there. They were walking slowly toward the car. Lou stood straight up and fired over the car. The gun went crack .’crack as hundreds of joules of electrical energy were suddenly charged to invisible pulses of infrared laser light. The first guard was bowled over backward, as if hit in the chest by a giant’s fist. The second spun and sprawled on his face. Neither of them moved once they hit the ground.
His hands shaking, Lou set the safety again and tucked the gun back into his waistband. Then he forced himself to go over to the bodies and take their guns. They’re still breathing. He felt a little better as he went back to the car and tossed their guns onto the front seat.
Five past midnight. Running late. He got in behind the wheel again. He turned on the car’s headlights and saw the road running down toward the harbor. Time for Kori’s diversion. With a deep breath, Lou turned the starter key. The turbine whined to life. Lou pressed the throttle pedal firmly down to the floor. The engine coughed, then roared. Lights went on inside the house.
He raced the engine once again, then put the car in gear and roared off down the road. The shrubs and trees by the roadside blurred by; the wind tore at his face as he plunged down the twisting road toward the harbor. Lights were going on down there, too, where the guards’ living quarters were.
He came screeching out on the flat, tore into the harbor area, and pulled the car to a screaming, tire-burning, skidding stop at the foot of the lone dock. There was a small boat tied up at the end of it. The game was going to be to make it look as if he wanted to get off the island on that boat.
Men were piling out of several buildings in the darkness, shouting in languages Lou didn’t understand. He went to the back of the car, lifted the engine hood and groped for the fuel feed line. He ripped it out and felt a spurt of fuel slick his fingers. Then he went back to the front seat, grabbed the two extra guns, and fired several shots into the engine compartment, backpedaling onto the dock as he did so. The third shot did it; the car erupted in flames.
Lou raced down the dock, the burning car between him and anyone who wanted to come and get him. There were a few crates piled on one side of the wooden dock, and Lou ducked behind them. In front of him was the flaming turbowagon; through the blurring heat waves of its fire he could see men running around the dockside area, some of them brandishing guns, all looking red and lurid in the light of the fire. Behind him was the open harbor, and the small boat tied up at the end of the dock.
But somebody had already thought about the boat. Lou heard a funny crunching sound, and then the crash of breaking glass. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a chunk of the boat’s gunwale poof into splinters and vapor. Laser rifle! They’re breaking up the boat to keep me from using it. Maybe they think I’m on board it already.
Then another thought: When they find out I’m where I really am, they’ll start blasting those rifles at me!
Lou froze into a motionless, thoroughly frightened little knot of humanity, crouched behind the packing crates, trying to look totally invisible or at least as small and unnoticeable as possible. Long minutes ticked by. The fire in the car died down, the boat slid over on its side, gurgling obscenely.
Things up on dockside had quieted down. It was harder to see now, but there must have been dozens of guards milling around during the height of the blaze. Lou knew he was trapped and he was going to die. But not just yet. He realized that he had picked up a splinter in his left foot and it hurt. And his jaws ached from being clenched. He wondered how Kori was doing.
Maybe I ought to make some more noise or something, he thought. On the other hand, maybe the guards thought he had been aboard the boat and was now drowned. If I let them know I’m here, I’m just inviting them to shoot me.
He shook his head. They’re going to find you sooner or later, hero. Right now your job is to make enough noise to distract them from Kori.
Squinting out into the darkness, he could barely make out a row of what looked like fuel drums lined up neatly on the shore, near the foot of the dock. A dozen drums. Maybe fifty meters away. An easy target.
It took him five shots before one of the drums burst into flame. In an instant they all went up.
Now the shouting and running began all over again. Nobody was shooting at him, either. They were all running toward the fire or away from it. Lou watched the guards. They were good, no question of it. After the first momentary shock and surprise, they fought the raging fire with hand extinguishers, blankets, anything they could find. Finally, somebody trundled up with a portable foam generator and they started smothering the blaze with billowing white foam. But it took time, lots of time.
The fire was smoldering and smoking when Lou heard:
“Christopher! I know you’re out there on the dock. Give yourself up, you can’t get away.” Marcus” voice.
Lou almost laughed. Marcus didn’t sound angry or frightened or even very upset. He was talking as calmly as the first day they’d met. That meant that he didn’t realize what Kori was up to, or that Bonnie was hidden.
Or, Lou heard himself counter, it could mean that he’s got Kori and Bonnie and the whole game’s lost.
“Christopher, I don’t want to have you killed. Come out now and stop this nonsense.”
Like a schoolteacher scolding a kid, Lou thought.
“You can’t get away, Christopher. We know you’re sitting behind those packing crates. We...” Suddenly his voice cut off.
Lou peeked out from behind the crates. Marcus was listening to a guard who was gesturing and pointing up the road, toward the other end of the island.
“So the three of you are in on this together!” Marcus’ voice sounded a little edgier now. “All right, we’ll just find the other two and bring them out here. You can watch and see what happens to them.”
“Marcus!” Lou called out.
Everyone at dockside froze. In the back of his mind, Lou realized that it was nearly dawn. There was enough gray light to see the whole dockside area now.
“Marcus, did you ever stop to think of what a good target you make?”
Marcus jerked a step backward.
“No, don’t move!” Lou yelled. “Don’t any of you move. If anybody twitches, you’ll get it, Marcus. I mean it!”
Marcus stood frozen at dockside. He was out in the open, the nearest guard a meter or so away, the nearest cover the burned-out hulk of the car, at least ten meters away. Lou prayed that none of them knew how many shots it would take him to hit anything at this distance.
“Christopher, you can’t get away with this.”
Lou grinned. “Can’t I?”
As if in answer, the packing crate in front of him exploded in a deafening blast and a shower of splinters. Lou felt himself soaring, slow motion, tumbling off the dock, seeing the green land swing wildly and the greener water rushing up toward him. As he hit the water and lost consciousness, his last thought was that some rifleman had missed his head by just about a centimeter.
The pain woke him up. It would have been pleasant to stay asleep, unconscious, oblivious to everything. But he hurt everywhere, like knives were being twisted under his skin.
His eyes were gummy when he tried to open them. Everything was blurred, out of focus. There was a gray expanse of ceiling over his head. And faces. He tried to raise his head, but somebody’s hand pushed him back onto the pillow.
Turning his head slightly, he could make out a window off to his right. It was bright, bright enough to make him shut his eyes.
What time is it? flashed through his mind. He started to speak, but all he heard was a thick, scratchy-throated groan.
“He’s conscious,” said a voice.
Marcus’ face slid into view. Still calm. But was that perspiration beading his brow?
“That was a foolish bit of nonsense,” Marcus said without rancor “What have you done with the girl? And where’s Dr. Kori?”
Lou found the strength to shake his head.
“It’s a small island, Christopher. We’ll find them sooner or later.”
“Not before...” he croaked.
“Before what?” Marcus asked.
“Nothing.”
Marcus leaned closer. “We can find out. You can’t keep any secrets from us.”
“Go ahead and torture me... it won’t...”
“Don’t be an ass,” Marcus said. “There are drugs that will make you do anything.”
“No...”
Somewhere beyond Lou’s vision a door opened and footsteps clicked quickly toward his bed. A voice muttered something, too low for Lou to hear.
“What?” Marcus snapped. “Why wasn’t I told sooner? When did...”
Marcus’ face slid into view again. It was red now. With anger. Or fear? Lou smiled.
“Where’s Dr. Kori? What’s he doing with a bomb?”
“Planting it in your lunch.”
Lou saw Marcus’ hand blurring toward him but couldn’t move out of the way. It stung and snapped his head to one side. He tasted blood in his mouth.
“Get him talking. And quickly,” Marcus ordered.
Someone grabbed at his arm. It flamed agony. Lou saw it was red and sore with thousands of splinters from the packing case that had exploded in front of him. An expressionless Chinese doctor took his arm from the guard, held it gently, swabbed a relatively undamaged spot on the underside of the arm, and then pressed a pneumatic syringe into the area. He put Lou’s arm back down on the bed carefully, then looked at his wristwatch.
“The reaction should take a few minutes,” the doctor said to Marcus.
Marcus paced the room nervously. The doctor stood by the bed, patiently watching Lou. What time is it? Lou wondered. How much time does Kori need?
Somebody giggled. Lou was startled to realize it was he himself.
The doctor turned toward Marcus. “He should be ready now.”
Marcus came to the bed and leaned over Lou. “All right now, Christopher. Where is Dr. Kori, and what’s he doing with the bomb he stole?”
“Playing in the sand,” Lou said, laughing. It was funny, everything was so funny. Marcus’ face, the thought of Kori digging sand castles with a nuclear bomb tucked under his arm. The whole thing was uproariously funny.
“Listen to me!” Marcus shouted, his face red and sweaty. “Quickly, before...”
The flash of light was bright enough to feel on your skin. For an instant everything stopped, etched in the pitiless white light. No sound, no voices, no movement. Then the bed lifted, the window blew in with a shower of glass, a woman screamed, and a roar of ten thousand demons overpowered every other sensation.
Somebody fell across Lou’s bed. The roar died away, leaving his ears aching. People started to move again through a dusty plaster haze, crunching glass underfoot. Marcus staggered up from the bed.
Lou heard somebody say in an awed voice, “Look at that... a real mushroom cloud, just like in the history books.”
Then Lou heard his own laughter. He couldn’t see Marcus, but he knew he was still there.
“You’ve lost, Marcus. You might as well admit it. There’ll be a government inspection team here in a matter of hours. Followed by troops, if you want to fight. It’s all over. You’ve lost.”
“I can still kill you! And the girl!”
Lou was laughing uncontrollably now. The drug, he knew in the back of his mind. But there was nothing he could do to stop himself. “Sure, kill me. Kill everybody. That’s going to help you a lot. An enormous lot.”
He laughed until he passed out again.
It was pleasant to be unconscious. Or am I dead? But the thought brought no fear. He was floating in darkness, without pain, without anxiety, just floating in soft warm darkness. Then, after a long, long while, the darkness began to turn a little gray. It brightened slowly, like a midnight reluctantly giving way to dawn.
Bonnie’s face appeared in the grayness. There were tears in her eyes, on her cheeks. “Oh, Lou ...”
He wanted to say something, to touch her, to make her stop crying. But he couldn’t move. It was as if he had no body. Then her face faded away and the darkness returned.’
He heard other voices in the grayness, and once in a while the black turned gray again and he could see strange faces peering at him. He would try to talk, try to signal to them, but always the darkness closed in again.
Then, abruptly, he opened his eyes and everything was in sharp focus. He was lying in a hospital bed. The walls of his room were a pastel blue, the ceiling clean white. There were viewscreens and camera eyes in the ceiling. Lou found that he could turn his head. It hurt, but he could do it. There was a window at his left. He couldn’t see out of it at this angle, but sunshine was pouring in. A night table was next to his bed, a rolling tray crammed with plastic pill bottles and syringes and other medical whatnots. A door, closed. A single plastic sling chair standing beside it.
He tried sitting up, and the bed followed his motion with an almost inaudible hum from an electric motor. Leaning back in a half-sitting position, he suddenly felt woozy.
At least I’m not dead, Lou told himself.
His body felt stiff. Looking down, he saw that his hands and arms were wrapped in bandages. So was his chest; white plastic spray from windpipe to navel. His face felt raw. as if he’d shaved with an old-fashioned razor.
The door suddenly opened and a nurse appeared. “Good day,” she said with professional cheeriness.
“H ... hello.” Lou’s voice was terribly hoarse; his throat felt rough.
She must be pushing forty, Lou thought. She still looks pretty good, though.
“How do you feel?” the nurse asked.
He considered the question for a moment. “Hungry.”
She smiled. “Good! That’s one condition that the automatic monitors can’t record yet.”
She was gone before Lou could say anything or ask any questions.
Within minutes a food tray slid out of the wall and swung over to the bed. It was clumsy, eating with bandaged hands. By the time Lou was finished, there was a knock on the door and it opened wide enough for Kori to stick his head through.
“Hi. They told me you were finally awake.”
Lou’s voice felt and sounded better. “Come on in. How are you? Where are we? What happened? Where’s Bonnie?”
Kori grinned and pulled the chair up next to the bed. As he sat on it, he answered. “Bonnie’s fine. She’s here in the hospital, too, getting treated for radiation dosage. There was a considerable amount of fallout from my little toy, you know I stayed inside a cave until the government troops arrived, but I got a touch of it, too”
“Marcus and the others?”
“They gave up without much of a fight,” Kori said “A government inspection team ‘coptered to the island in four hours and eleven minutes after the blast. Inside of another two hours they had a little army of government troops covering every square centimeter of the island.”
“And what happened to me?” Lou asked “I remember trying to hold them down at the dock. Then somebody shot me and I fell into the water. Then…”
Kori was trying not to laugh, without being very successful at it.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well, forgive me, but you are. Do you know how they found you?”
Lou shook his head.
“You were lying flat on your back in one of the bedrooms of Marcus’ house. Stark naked. Sixty million splinters all over your face and body and arms and legs. And you were laughing. Laughing your head off.”
“Very funny,” Lou said “Marcus had me shot full of happy-juice, so I’d tell him where you were. So he could find you and kill you.”
“I know,” Kori said, still giggling “Forgive me. It just presents an odd picture.”
“Is Bonnie going to be all right?” Lou asked
“Oh yes, certainly. She’ll be visiting you herself in a day or so.”
“And Marcus and his crew?”
Kori shrugged. “In jail, I suppose. The troops took them away.”
Lou felt himself relax against the supporting bed. “That takes care of everybody, I guess. Oh! What about Big George? Who’s taking care of him?”
Kori’s face suddenly went somber. “That that’s the one bad part of it, Lou. He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Somebody shot him,” Kori said, his voice low. “We don’t know who did it. It might have been Marcus’ guards or the government troops. Bonnie was right there, and she couldn’t tell who fired the shot.”
“Killed him? But why?”
Shaking his head, Kori answered, “We’ll never know. There was a little fighting when the troops landed. Maybe it was just a stray shot. Or perhaps someone got frightened at the sight of the gorilla. At least he didn’t suffer at all. One shot he died instantly.”
“Poor Georgy,” Lou said
For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Lou asked, “Where are we, anyway?”
Ron’s face didn’t cheer up at all. “Back where we started In Messina It looks to me like we’re going to be shipped up to the satellite as soon as you and Bonnie are well enough to travel. To begin our exile.”
The doctors made Lou stay in bed for a week, while his torn skin healed and he got his strength back. He saw Bonnie and Kori almost every day. But most of the time he lay in bed, thinking. So much had happened in so short a time. Now he could think about it, look back on it and try to fit all the fragments together, to form a coherent picture of what had suddenly happened to him and his life.
Why? he thought bitterly. Why Big George? The main reason we tried to go against Marcus was to save George, and he was the only one that didn’t get through it all right. Lou thought of the bomb explosion and how it must have terrified the gorilla. The last few hours of his life must have been hell for such a peaceful, gentle animal. We didn’t do right by you, George, Lou said silently. I’m sorry.
Looking toward the future, Lou was just as bleak. They were going to exile him, of that he was sure. Kori was more optimistic, though.
“After all we’ve done for the government?” Kori said one afternoon, at Lou’s bedside. “Risking our lives to stop Bernard’s attempt at a coup? They won’t exile us, they’ll give us medals. You should get an award anyway, you’ve set a new international record for splinters.”
Lou grinned with the young physicist. But inwardly, he knew the government couldn’t let them go free. They would tell the world about the exile, and the government would never be allow that.
There was something different about Bonnie. She was up tight, holding back something that she didn’t want Lou to know.
One afternoon, as they strolled together through the busy hospital corridors, he asked her
“What’s bothering you?”
She didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Does it show?"
He nodded
“I’ve got to make a decision,” Bonnie said Her gray eyes looked troubled, sad.
“About Kori and me?”
“In a way. You see, Lou, I’m not officially on the list of exiled persons. I can go back to Albuquerque, if I want to. Or I can go with the rest of you to the satellite.”
“And stay for the rest of your life.”
“Yes”
He took a deep breath
If you married me. he said to her in his mind, you’d have to share my exile. So I can’t ask you for that. I can’t even mention it.
She was staring at him, trying to read his face, looking for something and not finding it
Aloud, he said, “Bonnie, you might never allowed to make that decision. You’re in pretty deep with us now. The government might decide to exile you along with Kori and me.”
Bonnie stopped, right there in the corridor. “They can’t do that; they wouldn’t.”
“They might,” Lou said “And if they do, it’ll be my fault.”
“There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you two!” Kori ran down the corridor, dodging between frowning nurses and muttering patients Breathlessly, he told Lou and Bonnie, “The General Chairman, he’s asked to see us. To talk to us. Tomorrow morning. The General Chairman!”
Lou turned to Bonnie. For the first time, he felt hope. If not for himself, then at least for her.
Despite his anger, despite his hatred of what had been done to his life, Lou felt as awed as a peasant in a palace when the three of them were ushered into the General Chairman’s office. Bonnie and Kori, he saw, were also wide-eyed and silent.
The office was impressive. It covered the entire top floor of the tallest tower in Messina, stretching from the elevator doors where they stood to the sun-bright window-wall where the Chairman’s old fashioned ornate desk stood.
“Come in, come,” said the little man behind that desk, in a voice cracked with age.
They walked silently across the thick carpeting, past a ten-foot globe showing the world in color and relief, complete with networks of tiny satellites orbiting around it. The whole globe hung in mid-air, suspended magnetically. The entire office was decorated in shades of green, dark jungle greens for the most part. The furniture was all richly polished natural wood. There was a scent of orchids and other lush tropical aromas in the air. And the climate control for the big room was warm, moist, almost sticky.
“Forgive me for not rising,” the Chairman said “I suffered a slight stroke recently, and the doctors want me to exert myself as little as possible.” His voice was soft, gentle, and friendly, with an undisguised Brazilian accent. He was small, slight, his bony face high-domed and haloed with wisps of white hair, his hands fragile. He was very old. His skin was white and powdery-looking, laced with networks of fine etched wrinkles.
“However,” the Chairman went on, “I did very much want to meet the three of you. Please sit, make yourselves comfortable. Would you like anything to drink? To eat?”
Lou shook his head as he pulled up a leather-cushioned chair. He sat between Bonnie and Kori, and the three of them faced the Chairman.
Before the silence could become awkward, the Chairman said, “I want to express my personal thanks for your courageous actions on the island. You prevented an uprising that might have taken many lives.”
“We did what we had to,” Lou said
The Chairman nodded. “It must have been quite a temptation, though, to put in with Bernard’s people and avoid going to exile.”
Shrugging, Lou answered, “As far as I’m concerned, we were in exile on that island. There was no difference between the way the government has treated us and the way Bernard’s people were treating us. The government was a little more polite, maybe. That’s all.”
“Besides,” Kori added, “I think we all felt that the people running the island would be worse than the people running this government, if they got the chance.”
With a smile, the Chairman said, “Thank you. It’s good to know that we are not completely at the bottom of the list.”
Ron grinned back at the old man.
Somehow their smiles irritated Lou. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like the exile is still in effect, and we’re going to be shipped out to the satellite.”
The Chairman’s face grew somber.“ Yes, I am sorry to say. If anything, this attempt by Minister Bernard to seize power proves the wisdom of the exile. Your work on genetic engineering is simply too powerful to be used politically.”
“So we spend the rest of our lives in a beryllium jail!”
“What else can we do?” The Chairman waved his frail hands helplessly “We are not monsters. We have no desire to make you suffer. We will supply you with everything you desire aboard the satellite. Anything.”
“Except freedom,” Lou snapped
“Regretfully true,” said the Chairman. But now there was a hint of steel behind the softness of his voice. “If I must choose between the welfare of twenty billions and two thousand or so, I will choose the twenty billions. The mere knowledge that you might soon be able to control human genetics has already triggered one attempt at revolution. I will not see the world destroyed. We have worked long and hard to avert destruction from war and from famine. I am not going to permit destruction to come from a test tube or a computer. Not if I can help it.”
“But what about Kerf? The work of the rocket scientists doesn’t really threaten the world.”
“Perhaps not,” the Chairman admitted. “I must confess that I didn’t realize anyone except those working on genetic engineering had been sentenced to exile. Someone in the bureaucracy considers the starship scientists a threat to world stability. I must find out why. If they cannot convince me that you are a threat, Dr Kori, then you will be released from exile and free to resume your normal life You, and any of your colleagues who have been placed in exile.”
Before Kori could say anything, Lou went on, “And Bonnie, here what about her?”
She murmured, “Lou, you shouldn’t.”
“No, I want to find out about this. Bonnie wasn’t sentenced to exile. She was picked up like the rest of us, and then released. She came to the island and found out what’s going on. Now where does she stand? Is she going to be shipped off with the rest of us or not?”
If the Chairman was angered by Lou’s insistent questions, he didn’t show it. “Miss Sterne is not a scientist nor an engineer. There is absolutely no reason for her to be exiled. Unless she wishes to accompany you, for her own personal reasons.”
“You can really say that with a straight face!” Lou raged. “You can sit there and promise her freedom when you know you don’t mean it!”
“Lou, what are you saying?” Bonnie reached out for his arm.
The Chairman’s eyes narrowed. “Explain yourself, Mr. Christopher. Why do you call me a liar?”
Almost trembling, Lou said, “If you let Bonnie go, if you let Kori go, what’s to stop them from telling the newsmen about this exile business? What’s to stop them from telling the whole world? Will you want them to sign a pledge of silence, or will you do surgery on their brains? Because we both know you can’t risk having them tell the world about what you’ve done to the scientists....”
“Why not?” the Chairman asked gently.
“Why... why? Because the people of the world will demand that you release us. They’ll want genetic engineering... they’ll want us free. You can’t throw two thousand of the world’s top scientists into prison and ...”
The Chairman silenced Lou with an upraised hand. “My brave, impetuous young man, you are completely wrong about so many things. Firstly, I do not lie. When I offer Miss Sterne her freedom, and raise the possibility of freedom for Dr. Kori, I am not lying. Why should I? Please do me the honor of granting me honest motives.
“Secondly, the people of the world already know about your exile. We have not kept it secret. There would be no way to do so, even if we desired to. You cannot whisk away so many prominent men without anyone knowing it.”
“They ... they know?”
“Of course they know. And they do not care. Do you think that the teeming billions on Earth care about a handful of scientists and engineers?” The Chairman shook his head. “No, they care about food, about jobs, about living space, about recreation and procreation.”
“But genetic engineering. I thought...” Lou felt as if he were in a glider that was spinning out of control.
“Ah yes, your work,” The Chairman said. “I admit that if you were on Earth and showing the world, step by step, that it could be done—then there would soon be an enormous demand for it. Catastrophic reaction. Everyone would want his next child made perfect.
“But today, you are only talking about the possibility of doing this sometime in the future. You might be successful next week, or next year, or next century. I confess that our public information experts have tried to make it sound more like next century than next week. And having you all out of the way has made the job that much easier.”
“And... nobody cares?”
The Chairman looked truly sad. “The people are quite accustomed to talk of scientific miracles. Rarely do they see such miracles come true.”
“But the food they eat, weather control, medicines, space expeditions...”
“All part of the normal, everyday background,” said the Chairman. “Once a miracle comes true, it quickly becomes a commonplace. And the people hardly ever connect today’s commonplaces with your talk of tomorrow’s miracles. So your promises of genetic engineering do not excite most people. Grasping politicians, yes; hungry workers and farmers, no.”
“So it’s over... completely finished. No way around it.” Lou sank back in his seat numbly.
“I am afraid so. I have lived with this problem for more than a year now, trying to find some alternative to exile. There is none. I am sorry. Somewhere, we have failed. We build gleaming technologies to turn ourselves into devils.” The Chairman shook his head. “I am ashamed of myself, of the government, of the entire society. We are doing you a dreadful injustice.”
“But you’re going ahead and doing it,” Lou muttered.
“Yes,” the Chairman shot back. “That is the most terrible part of it. I hate this. But I will do it. I know you can never accept it, never agree to it, never understand why it must be done. I am sorry.”
The four of them lapsed into a dismal silence.
Finally, the Chairman said, “As I told you, I will personally examine the matter of the rocket scientists. Dr. Kori, I cannot promise you your freedom, but I do promise to try.”
Kori nodded and tried to look grateful but not too happy, glancing sidelong at Lou.
“And Miss Sterne,” the Chairman went on, “you are free to go whenever you wish. The government will furnish you with transportation back to Albuquerque,, or any place else you may desire to go. And you will be reimbursed for the troubles that you’ve been put to, of course.”
Bonnie said, “Sir? Would it be possible for me to go to the satellite? On a temporary basis?”
Lou stared at her.
“Most of my friends are there,” Bonnie said, looking straight at the Chairman and avoiding Lou’s eyes. “Maybe I’d rather live there than anywhere else. But I can’t tell unless I’ve tried it for a while.”
The Chairman folded his hands on his thin chest and gazed thoughtfully at Bonnie. He looked as if he knew there was a lot more to Bonnie’s request than she had stated.
“How do you think the others will feel, knowing that you can return to Earth anytime you wish to?”
Bonnie’s face reddened slightly. “I... I would only stay a few weeks. I’d be willing to make a final decision then.”
“A few weeks,” the Chairman echoed. “And then you would make a decision that would be irrevocable... for the rest of your life?”
She nodded slowly.
A little smile worked its way across the Chairman’s wrinkled face. “I can picture Kobryn’s reaction. Highly irregular. But—very well, you may have a few weeks aboard the satellite. But no more.”
“Thank you!” Bonnie said. And then she turned, smiling, to Lou.
It was literally another world.
Lou never saw the satellite from the outside. He, Bonnie, and Kori were tucked into a shuttle rocket that had no viewports in the cargo / passenger module. They sat in padded plastic contour chairs amidst cylinders of gas, packing crates of foodstuffs, motors, pumps, furniture. Lou swore he could hear, through the airlock that connected to a second cargo module, the bleating of a goat or sheep.
The satellite was huge, of course; a small town in orbit. From the inside it was a strange, different kind of environment. For one thing, you always walked uphill. The corridors all curved uphill, in both directions, because the satellite was built in a series of giant wheels, one within another. Most of the living quarters were in the largest, outermost wheel, where the spin force almost equaled the full gravity of Earth’s surface. It took no extra physical effort to walk along the constantly uphill corridors because you didn’t have to work against the spin-induced gravity.
His compartment—you couldn’t call it a room—was a marvel of compactness, plastic-trimmed with aluminum spray paint. Lou thought of it as a cell. An astronaut would feel comfortable in it; a scientist on duty in a satellite for a month would put up with it; Lou realized he’d be living in it for the rest of his life.
Edmond Dantes had a bigger cell than this.
Life had already settled into something of a dull routine in the plastic little world. Lou, Kori, and Bonnie were met by a greeting committee when they stepped through the airlock from the shuttle rocket. They were shown to their quarters. After he had unpacked his lone travel bag, Lou received a phone call from Mrs. Kaufman, who was acting as her husband’s secretary now, asking him to meet with the Director’s Council right after breakfast the following “morning.”
Time, of course, was completely arbitrary aboard the satellite. So everyone ran on the same clock, set on Universal Time. When it was midnight in Greenwich, England, it was midnight aboard the satellite.
Lou spent his first “evening” prowling through the uphill corridors. He couldn’t find Bonnie, didn’t know where her quarters were or what her phone number was. Same thing for Kori. He could have asked someone,- but instead he started walking along the main corridor. It was completely featureless, bare plastic walls broken only by bare plastic doors. All alike, except for tiny room numbers on them.
There were other people drifting through the corridors, most of them strangers, but a few men and women that he had worked with at the Institute. They nodded recognition or mumbled a hello. If they were surprised to see him, or wondered why they hadn’t seen him before this, they didn’t show it in any way. All Lou could see in their faces was a vague guilt, a shame at being locked up here.
Like the living dead, Lou thought of them.
The only change in the long, sloping, featureless corridor was that every ten minutes or so there was a spiral ladderway that led up toward the next wheel, in closer to the hub of the slowly spinning satellite. After passing several of them, Lou decided to go upstairs and see what was there.
The ladderway ended in another curving corridor, much like the first one, but smaller, narrower, with doors on one side only. This left side must be an outside bulkhead. Lou expected the gravity to be lighter in this second level, but if it was he could • detect no difference. Which meant that the satellite must be much larger than he had envisioned it. He began to realize how big the satellite would have to be to hold two thousand scientists and their immediate families.
As he walked aimlessly along the corridor, he came to a section that was dimly lit. Only a few dull red light panels overhead broke the darkness; it was barely light enough to see your way along. Ahead of him, Lou saw a motionless figure. As he got closer, he recognized him.
“Greg! Hey, Greg!”
Greg Belsen jerked as if startled, then turned to see who had called him.
“Greg!” Lou said, smiling and reaching out to grab his friend’s shoulder. “Boy am I glad to see you!”
“Hello, Lou,” Greg said quietly. “I heard they finally got you here.”
Lou’s smile vanished. This wasn’t the same Greg he had known at the Institute. The nerve had been taken out of him. Then he saw why Greg had been standing at this spot. There was a viewport in the wall: a small circle of heavily-tinted plastiglass. And outside that viewport hung the Earth. Rich, blue, laced with dazzling white clouds, beckoningly close, alive. It was swinging around in a slow circle, the reflex of the satellite’s spinning motion.
“She’s only a few hundred kilometers away,” Greg said in a soft flat voice that Lou had never heard from him before. “Less than the distance between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. You could go to one of the airlocks and practically jump back home.”
Lou’s blood ran cold.
Lou finally met Bonnie and Kori again the following morning, after a fitful, tossing few hours of dream-filled sleep. They all arrived at the autocafeteria at about the same time, and found each other at the “menu”—actually a wall panel studded with selector buttons. Only the breakfast buttons were lit. The cafeteria could seat perhaps fifty people, at long narrow tables. It was nearly empty.
“No morning rush to work, at least,” Kori said, trying to sound cheerful.
When neither Bonnie nor Lou answered him, he shrugged his bony shoulders and turned to the selector panel to study the available choices for breakfast.
“Are you supposed to meet with Kaufman and the Council this morning?” Lou asked Bonnie.
Kori answered, “Yes, at nine-thirty,” while Bonnie shook her head no.
Surprised, Lou said to Kori, “You are? But you’re not from the Institute. Why would Kaufman want you to report to him?”
“Your Dr. Kaufman has been elected head of this colony,” Kori answered. “Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t. I thought it would be Professor DeVreis—”
With a shake of his head, Kori said, “DeVreis died of a heart attack his first day here.”
“Ohh.” Somehow, Lou felt as if someone close to him had died. He hardly knew DeVreis, but it seemed so unfair for a man who had lived such a rich and useful life to be tossed into exile, to die here, in this place.
Kori turned back to the selector panel and tapped buttons for orange juice, eggs, muffins, sausage, and coffee. Almost immediately a part of the panel slid back to reveal a steaming tray bearing his order.
“Well,” he said, “at least the food looks good.”
Sure it looks good, Lou found himself thinking. You’ve got a chance of getting off this jail.
Turning to Bonnie, he asked, “Kaufman hasn’t sent word to you?”
She shook her head. “No, nobody's said anything to me about meeting with the Council. I guess they’re going to ignore me unless I decide to stay permanently.”
Lou agreed. “Well, I’m supposed to see them at nine.”
He was a few minutes late. It took him longer than he had expected to find Dr. Kaufman’s office, which was in the second wheel.
It was a long and narrow room, just long enough to have a slight curve to the floor. Kaufman’s desk was at one end, a long conference table at the other. All the furniture was made of plastic and light metals; it all looked temporary and cheap.
Kaufman sat at the head of the table. He had lost weight, Lou saw. There were new lines in his still-proudly handsome face. His thick hair seemed a shade whiter than it had been at the Institute. Greg Belsen, Kurtz, Sutherland, and two strangers filled all but one of the remaining chairs. Lou took the last chair, at the end of the table.
After introducing the two new faces—representatives from labs in Europe—Dr. Kaufman said, “We’re all trying to accustom ourselves to our new environment. The reason for meeting with you this morning is to ask you to select some sort of project for your working hours.”
“Project?” Lou asked.
“Yes,” said Dr. Kaufman. “I don’t believe that we should sit around and do nothing. The government won’t let us have the major types of facilities that we need for our old work—”
“There’s no computer aboard?”
Greg almost laughed. “No computer, Lou. No big toys for any of us. No electron microscopes, no ultracentrifuges, no microsurgery equipment—nothing but early twentieth-century stuff: optical microscopes and Bunsen burners, the kinds of things you buy kids for Christmas.”
Lou felt his lips press into a grim tight line.
Dr. Sutherland explained, “The government doesn’t want us to do anything more on genetic engineering. Even here. They’re afraid that if we start making progress again, we’ll smuggle the information back to Earth. And that’s exactly what they don’t .want.”
It all made horrible sense to Lou. “But...what are we supposed to do up here? Turn to rust?”
“Nothing of the sort,” Kaufman said, waving his hand in a negative gesture. “We may not have modern equipment but we can still do good science. We’ll simply have to be more ingenious, more inventive, and make do with the simple equipment that we’re allowed to have.”
Allowed to have, echoed in Lou’s mind. This was a jail, no two ways about it.
“For instance,” Ron Kurtz said, leaning forward on the fragile-looking table, “I’ve never had the time to really write up all the work I’ve done over the last three or four years. I’ve published a few little notes in the journals, but now I can sit back and write up everything carefully, the way it ought to be done.”
To be published where? Lou asked silently. In the chronicles of wasted time?
“It’s quite clear that we won’t be able to make any further progress in genetic engineering,” Kaufman said, taking charge of the discussion once again. “At least we won’t be able to follow our previous route, which required large-scale equipment. So we’re all trying to evolve ideas for useful research that can be accomplished with the laboratory equipment that we now have.
We’d like you to think about what you can do, and how you can do it.”
A computer engineer without a computer. Then Lou thought of Greg’s elaborate lab back at the Institute, millions of dollars worth of automated chemical analysis equipment. No wonder he’s ready to jump ship.
Aloud, he said, “Okay... I’ll try to think up something.”
He started to get up from the table.
“Oh yes,” Kaufman added. “You must have some very interesting tales to tell about your adventures over the past several weeks. Maybe you’d be good enough to tell the whole population, tonight, over our closed circuit Tri-V system.”
That caught Lou by surprise. “Well, I don’t know...”
“Of course you will,” Kaufman said. The discussion was ended.
Lou stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then the others started to get up. He turned and headed for the door. As he stepped out into the corridor, Greg said from just behind him:
“Don’t get up tight about being a Tri-V performer, buddy.”
Lou turned to him. “Easy for you to say.”
Greg put an arm around Lou’s shoulder and they started up the corridor together. “Don’t worry pal. All you’ll have to do is sit down with me and one or two other guys and we’ll talk. That’s all. You won’t even know the camera’s on you. It’s simple.”‘
“My big chance in show business.”
Greg smiled, but there was sadness in it. “Listen... we’re all going a little crazy for something to do, something to talk about. It hasn’t been easy, suddenly finding yourself cooped up in this squirrel cage....”
They were heading toward the dimly-lit section of the corridor, where the outside viewport was.
Lou asked, “And what’s your scientific research project for the next fifty years?”
“You don’t want to see a grown man cry, do you? Weren’t those guys pathetic in there? They’re talking about re-doing Calvin’s work on photosynthesis or writing their memoirs. Lord, they’re just going to fill in some time before they curl up their toes and die.”
“That would be very patriotic of them,” Lou said. “The government would be awfully pleased if we all just passed away. nice and neat, without a fuss. It’s exactly what they want down there.”
“Hmp.”
They were in the darkened part of the corridor now. Greg stopped in front of the viewport. There was Earth, swinging slowly, majestically, in rhythm to the satellite’s spin.
“That’s what makes it hard,” Greg said, staring. “Seeing her out there. Knowing she’s only a few hundred kilometers away—”
Lou grabbed his arm. “Come on, snap out of it. Let’s get some coffee. You going back in to talk with Kori? He’s due to see the Council at nine-thirty.”
Pulling himself away from the viewport, Greg said, “I know... but I’m not going back in there. Those guys are looking more like a morticians’ convention every day. I think I’m going to go crazy... and soon, too.”
Lou tried to laugh at him. It sounded hollow.
It was an empty day. Lou spent it prowling through the satellite’s different levels, the wheels within the wheels. He found a fairly decent library, a tiny auditorium, some small telescopes and other astronomical gear scattered here and there. And there was an extensive hydroponic garden running all the way along one of the smaller, innermost rings. The big event of the day was watching a shuttle rocket link up to the satellite’s main airlock, at the zero-gravity hub, and unload fresh food and medical supplies.
He called Bonnie for dinner, and they went together to the cafeteria.
“Do you know where Kori is?” Bonnie asked as they put their trays down on a table.
Lou shook his head. “And I’m not going to look for him. I’d like to have you to myself for once.”
She smiled at him.
They ate with very little conversation. Finally, as he toyed with a gelatin dessert, Lou burst out:
“God, this is awful! Depressing! It’s just terrible—How in the name of sanity are we supposed to stand it! To spend the rest of our lives like this!”
She reached out and touched his hand. “Lou... people are staring at you.”
“Bonnie, get out of here. Tell them you want to get off on the next rocket. Don’t stay. Get out while you can.”
“It does look bad, Lou,” she said quietly, trying to tone him down. “But it’ll get better. I know it will. Right now, everybody’s still sort of in shock. Nobody’s used to this yet. It’ll get better—”
“No. It’s going to get worse. I can feel it. Everybody’s so hopeless! There’s no purpose to their lives, there’s nothing to live for!”
“They’ll adjust,” Bonnie said. “So will we.”
“We?”
Just then, Kori came striding into the cafeteria, long-legged, loose-jointed, and spotted them. He ambled over to their table, smiling broadly. “I’ve been looking every place for you.”
Looking up at him, Lou snapped, “How can you be so blazing cheerful?”
Kori shrugged, “Well, I had good news for you. Greg Belsen said you’d be glad to hear it. But if you don’t want me to tell you...”
“All right... all right. Sit down, wise guy.” Despite himself, Lou was grinning back at Kori. “Now tell me the good news. I could use some.”
“Well... on the shuttle rocket today they brought my holograms. The ones from Starfarer. Dr. Kaufman said I could show them tonight, and you won’t have to talk about your glorious adventures after all.”
“Great,” Lou said. “Best news I’ve heard all day.”
“Greg said you’d be pleased.”
Lou walked Bonnie back to her quarters, while Kori went to find the special compartment that had been set up as a Tri-V studio.
“You can’t stay here in jail.” Lou told her as they walked down the corridor, “I won’t let you.”
“But I can’t go back to Earth and know that you and Kori and the others are trapped here. I just can’t, Lou.”
“Do you think it’ll make me feel any better knowing that you’re staying here because you feel sorry for me?”
They were at her door now. “I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “It’s lousy no matter which way you look at it.”
Lou nodded agreement.
“Would you like to come in and watch Kori’s show?”
“Sure... I tried watching Tri-V shows beamed up from Earth for a while this afternoon. It kind of hurts; comedies and love stories and newscasts... all of it happening where there are cities and trees and mountains and wind and...”
“Stop it!” Bonnie snapped.
He looked at her. “It hurts,” he said.
She put her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder. “I know it hurts, Lou. I know.”
A loudspeaker set into the ceiling broke in: “Tonight’s special showing of photographs from the Starfarer mission will begin in five minutes.”
Bonnie straightened up, looked briefly into Lou’s eyes, and then turned to open the door.
They sat side by side on the sofabed, the only sittable piece of furniture in the cramped compartment, and watched the viewscreen set into the wall next to the door. The listened to Kori’s voice explaining what the pictures showed, watched the stars, the myriad stars. They saw Alpha Centauri again, and focused on the fat yellow-green planet with its ice-white clouds.
Then suddenly Lou was on his feet, shouting:
“The stars! That’s the way out! The stars!”
He felt as if someone had just lifted a heavy mask from his eyes.
Bonnie was standing beside him, her eyes wide with bewilderment. “Lou, what is it? What’s wrong?”
He grabbed her and lifted her off her feet and kissed her.
“The stars, Bonnie! That’s our escape, that’s our purpose. Instead of staying here in exile, we can leave! Head for the stars! We can turn this prison into mankind’s first starship!”
“Flatly impossible,” snapped Dr Kaufman
Lou was standing at the end of the conference table in Kaufman’s office Kori was sitting at his side The members of the Council showed a full spectrum of emotions from thoughtful skepticism to outright scorn
“It’s absolutely impossible, the most ridiculous suggestion I’ve ever heard,” Kaufman continued
Lou held on to his steaming temper “Why do you say that? The scheme is physically possible”
“To turn this entire satellite into a starship? Accelerate it to the kind of velocity that Starfarer reached, or even more? Nonsense!”
Kori said, “With the kind of fusion engines we now know how to build, we could accelerate this pinwheel to reach Alpha Centauri in less time than it took Starfarer. After all, the Starfarer was launched nearly two generations ago, it’s a primitive ship, compared to what we can do now.”
“But your own pictures showed that Alpha Centauri’s planets are not enough like Earth to serve as a new home for us,” said Mettler, one of the Europeans on Kaufman’s Council
“You’re missing the point,” Lou countered “The important thing is that Alpha Centauri has planets. Barnard’s Star has planets, they’ve been detected from Earth. Seven of the nearest ten stars are known to have planets, one of them is bound to be enough like Earth to suit us.”
“Yes, I know. But it might take you a century or two to find a fully Earth-like planet.”
“Let me ask something else,” Charles Sutherland said in his nasal whine. “Have you thought about the structural stresses on this satellite when you hook a fusion drive engine to it?”
Kori answered, “I’ve done some rough calculations. It doesn’t look too bad. I’d need a computer to do the job properly, of course.”
“And there’s no computer here,” Sutherland said, grinning sardonically. “And the government won’t give us one. Neither will they give us fusion engines. So the whole scheme is meaningless.”
“I think they would give us anything we asked for,” Lou said, “if they knew they’d be getting rid of us. Permanently.”
“Oh, it’ll be permanent, all right. One way or the other,” Sutherland said
Kaufman frowned. “By even asking for permission to try such a stunt, we’d be telling the government that we’ve given up all hope of ever being reinstated on Earth. We’d be admitting that we expect to be exiled for the rest of our lives.”
“Don’t you expect to be here for the rest of your life?” Kurtz asked.
“No!” Kaufman slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “I have friends who are working right now to end this nonsense. I’m sure they are. And I’m sure that they must be making some headway. And so do the other leaders from the other laboratories around the world. The government can’t keep this farce going forever.”
Lou shook his head. “I’ve talked with the General Chairman himself. There’s no doubt in his mind that we’re here to stay.”
“He’s a feeble old man. He’ll be replaced soon.”
“By Kobryn,” said Mettler. “Who is not going to hand out any pardons.”
Greg Belsen turned to Kori, sitting beside him. “You really think you can do it? Get us out to the stars?”
“Of course. It’s only a question of getting the right equipment and support from Earth.”
“And finding the right planet,” Lou added.
“The planet needn’t be exactly like Earth,” Greg mused. “We could modify our children genetically, so they’re physically adapted to the conditions on their new world.”
“But the rest of us could never live on that world,” Kaufman said.
“Mmm... well,” Greg said, “it’s just a thought; we’d still be able to make a homework! for the children, even if we couldn’t find one exactly suited for us. I think it’s worth the gamble. Let’s try it. If nothing else, it’ll give us something substantial to work on.”
“Until the government refuses to give you what you need,” Kaufman muttered.
“Let’s vote on it,” Greg suggested.
“Now wait,” said Kaufman. “Before there’s any voting...”
But there were already three hands in the air: Greg’s, Ron Kurtz’s, and Mettler’s. With a shrug, Tracy, the other European on the Council, added his hand. Only Kaufman and Sutherland were opposed.
Kaufman snorted. “All right. We’ll look into it. Dr. Kori, you can ask your colleagues to help you with the rocketry and astronautics work.” From the tone of his voice, it was clear that Kaufman expected the older rocket scientists to regard Kori as a madman.
Some of them did just that. They shook their heads and walked away from Kori, unbelieving. But a few accepted the idea. More as an amusement, perhaps, than a real possibility. But they toyed with the notion, they started jotting down notes, equations. Within a week the handful of rocket scientists and engineers aboard the satellite were all hard at work, no matter how implausible some of them thought the scheme to be. They soon took over all the desk top calculators in the satellite, watching the numbers flickering fluorescently in the viewscreens, getting more enthusiastic each day.
Greg Belsen was eager from the beginning. He started looking into the possibilities of deep-freezing people, putting them into suspended animation in cryogenic sleeping units. It was done on Earth, in rare medical emergencies, for a few days at a time. Greg wanted to put most of the satellite’s seven thousand people into cryogenic sleep for decades.
“Either most of the people are going to sleep most of the time,” he told Lou, “or we have to rebuild this ship into a gingerbread house. Do you have any idea of how many megatons of food seven thousand people can eat in a century or so?”
Gradually, some of the other biochemists started working with Greg. Even a few of the geneticists let themselves be dragged into the problem, although it was well out of their field.
Within a month, Lou was asking a very suspicious government computer expert for time on high-speed computers. After a week of checking with Earth-bound scientists and government officials, the computer man allowed Lou to establish direct radio and Tri-V contact with a huge government computer in Australia.
“They’re double-checking everything we do,” Lou told Bonnie, “to make sure we’re not slipping in any work on genetic engineering. Slows us down,, but we’re getting there just the same. Kori says he can’t see anything to stop us. If we can get the engines built and the radiation screens, and the other equipment, that is.”
Bonnie nodded at him. She had begged the authorities for more time to stay on the satellite, to help with the work Lou and the others were doing. The General Chairman himself signed the papers that let her stay indefinitely. But if Lou had really looked closely at her, he would have seen that she never smiled anymore, even though she tried to.
It took six months before they were certain. Six months of hectic work, calculations, conferences that lasted all hours, arguments, cajolings. Six months in which Lou saw Bonnie maybe twice or three times a week, sometimes not that often. And always he talked of the work, the plans, the hopes. And she said nothing.
Then, abruptly, Lou was telling Kaufman, “There’s no doubt about it. We can turn this jail into a starship. We can freeze most of the people. We can reach the stars. Now we have to get the government to give us the equipment we need.”
Kaufman said reluctantly, “I’ll ask for a conference with the proper authorities.”
Shaking his head, Lou countered, “The General Chairman once told me that if we needed anything, we could ask him. I’m going to call him. Directly.”
It was one of those moments when time seems to have snapped, and you’re back in a spot where you had been months or years ago. Exactly the same place.
Lou stood in the General Chairman’s office again, Bonnie and Kori beside him, as the elevator doors sighed shut. The room was unchanged. The Chairman called to them from his desk. The past six months aboard the satellite suddenly seemed like a remote and unpleasant dream. Did I actually live aboard that plastic prison? In that artificial little world? After a drive from the rocket field, through the green farmlands and bone-white villages, through the scented winds and steady call of the surf, through the noisy, crowded, living city—the satellite seemed totally unreal.
The Chairman listened patiently to their story, nodding and rocking in his big leather chair, steepling his fingers from time to time, even smiling once or twice. Then Lou finished talking.
For a long moment, the Chairman said nothing. Finally, “Your ingenuity amazes me, in a way. And yet, somehow, I am not truly surprised that you have come up with an amazing idea.” He looked at the three of them, his dark eyes clear despite his many other signs of age.
“I will not presume to comment on why you want to leave our world entirely,” the Chairman said. “I suppose that even death among the stars is preferable to you than a long life of exile.” He laughed, softly, to himself. “I never expected to be faced with such a decision. I never expected man’s first attempt to reach the stars would be made under conditions such as we find ourselves in.”
“Then you’ll allow us to go?” Lou asked eagerly. “You’ll help us, you’ll give us the engines and ...”
The Chairman silenced him with a spindly upraised finger. “You say that there are many among you who are opposed to this idea... many who do not wish to fly toward the stars.”
“Yes,” Lou admitted. “Our work to date has simply shown that it’s physically possible for us to make the journey. Dr. Kaufman and many of the others—especially the older people—don’t want any part of it.”
The chairman sighed. “You realize, of course, that it all comes down to a question of money. Everything does, it seems. Sooner or later.”
“Money?”
Nodding, the Chairman explained, “It will take billions to outfit your satellite for a journey to the stars—”
“We’ve figured that out,” Lou said. “It’s expensive, but still cheaper than keeping us in orbit indefinitely. This way, you pay one big bill and we’re gone. If you keep us, you’ll have to feed us, doctor us, everything—”
“I feel like Pharaoh arguing against Moses,” the Chairman complained. “I would be perfectly willing to spend what must be spent and help you on your way, if that is what you wish. But—what of those who don’t wish it? I cannot keep some of you in orbit and still spend the money necessary to send the rest of you out to the stars. It must be one or the other. It cannot be both.”
“Then we’ll have to vote on it,” Lou said.
“Yes,” said the Chairman. “I suppose you will.”
So they left the Chairman’s office, went back down the whispering elevator and into the car that took them back through the semitropical seaside farms of Sicily, toward the rocket field. But now the grass and sunshine and cottages were cruelties, sadistic reminders that the satellite, was real and permanent and they were only visitors in this beautiful world; their prison awaited them.
They rode in the back of the open turbocar in silence, eyes wide and all senses alert to drink in every sight and sound and fragrance that had been commonplace all their lives but now were small miracles that they could never expect to experience again.
A second car followed a discreet distance behind them, and somewhere overhead a helicopter droned lazily. They were prisoners, no doubt of it.
As they got close enough to the rocket field to see the stubby shuttles standing in a row, Bonnie turned to Lou.
“You shouldn’t have brought me with you today, Lou. You shouldn’t have.”
Surprised, “What? Why not?”
“Because I’m not as strong as you are,” she said, shouting over the wind and turbine whine. “I... Lou, I can’t leave all this, not permanently. It’s bad enough in the satellite, when you can see the Earth outside the viewports. But to leave forever... to go out into that blackness... Lou, I can’t do it. If they vote for going to the stars, I’ll come back to Earth.”
“But I thought...”
Even Kori, sitting on the other side of Bonnie, looked shocked.
“I’m sorry, Lou... I can’t help it. I checked this morning. The government will still let me return, if I want to. I can’t leave Earth forever, Lou. I just can’t!”
“But... I love you, Bonnie. I can’t leave without you.”
She put her head down and cried.
Lou sat tensely in front of the Tri-V cameras. Next to him sat Dr. Kaufman, in an identical sling chair that creaked under his weight.
They were in the special compartment that had been turned into a Tri-V studio. Everyone in the satellite was watching them as they explained their positions on Lou’s starship proposal.
As Dr. Kaufman spoke in his vigorous, emphatic manner, driving points home with the accusatory thrusts of a stubby forefinger, Lou’s mind was far away.
He kept seeing Bonnie’s stricken face when she admitted that she would never go with him to the stars. Kept seeing the green countryside, the lemon orchards and vineyards, the safe blue sky and friendly sea that he would never visit again.
“I can’t leave Earth forever, Lou. I just can’t!”
Can I? he wondered. Can any of us? Turn our backs on the whole world, on a billion years of evolution? Is that what I want them to do? Is it what I want to do?
Dr. Kaufman was saying, “It is desperately important that we all realize exactly what is involved here. No one has ever built a manned starship. No one has even attempted to. You all know that we get supplies from Earth, every week. Even though we have closed-cycle air and water systems, we still need replenishments of air and water at least once a month.
“As long as we remain in orbit around the Earth we can get those supplies and replenishments whenever we need them. But if we leave Earth, if we try this foolhardy scheme for going to the stars, we must have air and water and food systems that are absolutely foolproof. Now, I realize that manned missions to
Jupiter and Saturn have used closed-cycle systems, and they’ve worked quite well for periods of up to six years.
“But this star-roving we’re talking about will take decades! Perhaps a century or even more! Why, none of us are even sure that a truly Earth-like planet exists out among the stars.”
Kaufman shook his head, making a lock of his gray mane tumble over his forehead. “No, this star-roving idea is too risky, even on purely technical grounds. We just don’t know how to build a starship. And even if the best engineers on Earth were assigned by the government to help us, we wouldn’t be able to keep the ship in working order, once we left Earth. We wouldn’t be able to repair it and maintain it. How many engineers are there among us? A handful. We’re research scientists, not grease monkeys!”
Lou was listening with only half his mind. The other half was remorselessly reminding him: Life is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics, just as all physical processes are. You can’t get anything without paying the price. Not anything. If you want the stars, you must leave Bonnie behind. If you want Bonnie, the price is perpetual imprisonment.
What’s the difference? he asked himself. Would it be so different, pushing this beryllium nuthouse toward the stars? We’re all going to spend our lives inside this shell, wherever it’s going.
He answered himself, Don’t try to cop out. Heading for the stars gives everybody an aim, a purpose. Staying here is riding an orbital merry-go-round for the rest of your life, without hope, without anything but that big blue world hanging in front of your eyes, reminding you every minute of what’s been taken away.
“And remember,” Kaufman was saying, “that as long as we stay in orbit here, there’s always the chance that the government will have a change of heart, that we’ll be freed. Once we break away, once we start out for the stars, there can be no turning back. It’s an irrevocable step. None of us will live to see us reach our destination. Our children will age and die aboard this vehicle. Perhaps our grandchildren may find a world they can live on. Perhaps. That’s a very thin hope on which to hang the lives of every man, woman, and child among us.”
Kaufman stopped talking and leaned back, making the chair creak again. He turned expectantly toward Lou.
Suddenly Lou’s mouth felt dry and sticky, his palms moist with perspiration. The cameras were on him now, it was his turn to speak. Should he try to convince them, or should he toss the whole idea away?
He looked past Kaufman’s handsome features to the big electronic board that had been jury-rigged along the far wall of the studio. There was a light for every person aboard the satellite aged fifteen or older. When Lou finished speaking, they would all vote. A green light would show for each yes vote; a red one for each vote against the starship idea.
“You can’t miss,” Kori had told him before the Tri-V broadcast had started. “Most of the no votes will come from the older people, the over-thirties. But we outnumber them. I just checked the population figures.”
Greg had added, “We fought like kamikazes to get them to drop the age limit down to fifteen. After all, those kids are going to spend more of their lives in this pickle jar than any of us will.”
“All you need to do,” Kori had said, gripping Lou’s arm earnestly, “is to make a strong speech. Put it on the line for everybody. The kids will vote for going to the stars. I know they will!”
Now Lou sat there looking into the cold eyes of the cameras, but seeing Bonnie’s face, hearing her voice, watching her tears.
He heard himself clear his throat. He shifted uneasily in the chair. Then he said:
“Dr. Kaufman has pointed out some of the technical risks in trying to reach the stars. He’s perfectly right. It is dangerous. Nobody’s done it before. I don’t know—nobody knows—if we can make the engines and air pumps and water recyclers work for a century or more without fail.”
Lou hesitated a moment. “Dr. Kaufman also told you that if we stay here in orbit around Earth, there’s always the chance that we might win a reprieve. We might regain our freedom and be allowed to return to Earth and take up normal lives again. That’s also true. It could happen.”
Again he stopped, but only for the span of a heartbeat. Only long enough to call silently, agonizingly, Bonnie... Bonnie...
Then, “When I first came aboard this satellite, Dr. Kaufman asked me to go on Tri-V and tell you something about what had happened to me. I’m going to do that now.”
And he told them. He told them about the Federal marshal and his ride to New York. Told them about the man’s unhappiness at missing his family picnic. Told them of his night in New York, the gangs, the knives, the running, the terror. Told them how the Institute looked, emptied of everyone but Big George. Of his arrest, his arrival in Messina, his audience with Minister Bernard. Told them of the island, of Marcus, of what they planned to do, how they wanted to use genetic engineering and the offshoots of their biochemistry as weapons alongside an arsenal of nuclear bombs. Told them of what they did to Big George, and what they wanted to do to all mankind.
And finally he told them of the gently implacable General Chairman, of how he admitted that their exile was a horrible injustice, but could see no other course of action. And the people, the great masses of people, the twenty billions of people for whom they were being sacrificed, the people who knew of their exile but didn’t care.
“This is the world we’ve been exiled from. A world where a few people can destroy the lives of the best scientists on the planet, along with the lives of their families. A world where savages rule the cities and civilized monsters battle to control the government.”
He turned toward Kaufman. “This is the world you want to go back to! So let’s assume that we’re allowed to go back; let’s assume that the government changes its mind and frees us. What will they do with our work? Can we trust them to use our knowledge? Can we trust them in any way? What’s to stop them from exiling us again? Or quietly having us killed? Nobody cares about us. All they want is the power that our knowledge can give them. The kindest thing they were able to do was to exile us!”
Looking directly into the cameras, Lou said, “We have no one to turn to but ourselves. The choice is ours. We can orbit this planet, slowly dying, and hope that someday the government will allow us to return. But do we really want to return? I don’t. I’ve seen that world down there, and despite all its beauty I don’t want to return to it. In this universe, with all its stars and space, there’s got to be some place where we can make a better world for ourselves and our children. I say we should go to the stars.”
Lou collapsed back in the chair, feeling weak and trembling inside. Then the lights caught his eye. The vote shocked him: the green lights overwhelmed the few red ones.
Somewhere behind the cameras, people were laughing and clapping their hands. Somebody whistled shrilly. A door opened and Lou saw Kori and Greg heading toward him, grinning.
Lou knew that Bonnie was in her compartment. Packed and ready to leave. She was probably past tears now. Crying wouldn’t help anymore. The pain won’t be eased by tears, or words, or regrets.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Kaufman said, shaking his head. “Everything we need and desire is here, and you’re going to force us to turn our backs on it all. You’re making us leave our homes and head out into emptiness. There’s nothing out there for us, Christopher. Nothing!”
Nothing, Lou thought. Except the universe.