05-A Gift From Earth (23 page)

The ship tilted back and began to slow.

Still slowing, it drifted over the edge.

Jesus Pietro leaned back in his seat and watched. The
Planck
was no longer supported by the ground effect. Jesus Pietro felt a sensation like an elevator starting down. He watched the cliff go by, faster and faster, a black shadow. Presently it was half the sky, and the other half was stars.

Presently the stars went out.

The ship began to grow hot. It was hot and dark outside, and the ancient walls of the
Planck
creaked and groaned as the pressure rose. Jesus Pietro watched, waiting.

Waiting for Matthew Keller.

He struggled half awake, desperate to escape the terror of sleep.
What a wild nightmare that was!

Then he felt fingers probing him.

Agony! He braced and tried to draw away, putting his whole body into it. Ms whole body barely twitched, but he heard himself whimper. A cool hand touched his forehead, and a voice — Laney's? — said, "Lie back, Matt."

He remembered it later, the next time he woke. He woke slowly this time, with the images of his memory forming around him. Again he thought,
What a nightmare.
But the images came clearer, too clear for a dream, and:

His right leg and most of his right side were as numb as frozen pork. Parts of him were not numb; they ached and stung and throbbed. Again he tried to withdraw from the pain, but this time he was tied down. He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded.

Harry Kane, Mrs. Hancock, Laney, and several others he didn't recognize all crowded around his strange bed. One was a big woman with red hands and somewhat crewish features, wearing a white smock. Matt disliked her at once. He'd seen such smocks in the organ banks.

"He's awake." The woman in white spoke with a throaty lilt. "Don't try to move, Keller. You're all splinted up. These people want to talk to you. If you get tired, tell me right away and I'll get them out of here."

"Who are you?"

Harry Kane stepped forward. "She's your doctor, Keller. How do you feel?"

How did he feel? A moment ago he'd realized, too late, that his backpack wouldn't lift him. But he couldn't remember the mile-long fall. "Am I going to die?"

"No, you'll live," said the woman doctor. "You won't even be crippled. The suit must have braced you against the fall. You broke a leg and some ribs, but they'll heal if you follow orders."

"All right," said Matt. Nothing seemed to matter much. Was he doped? He saw that he was on his back, with one leg in the air and something bulky around his rib cage, interfering with his breathing. "Did they put transplants in me?"

"Never mind that now, Keller. You just rest and get well."

"How's Polly?"

"We couldn't find her."

"She was on the
Planck
. She must have reached the drive controls."

"Oh!" Laney exclaimed. She started to say something, then changed her mind.

Harry said, "The
Planck
went over the edge."

"I see."

"You got her loose?"

"I got her loose once," Matt said. The faces were growing hazy. "She was a fanatic. All of you, fanatics. She had all the rescuing I could give her."

The room drifted away, dreamlike, and he knew the
Planck
was taking off. From a distance a woman's authoritarian crew lilt ordered "Out, now, all of you."

The doctor escorted them to the door, and Harry Kane put a hand on her elbow and took her with them into the corridor. There he asked, "How long before he's well?"

"Let go, of me, Mr. Kane."

Harry did. "How long?"

"Don't worry, he'll be no invalid. In a week we'll put him in a walking cast. In a month we'll see."

"How long before he's back at work?"

"Two months, with luck. Why so eager, Mr. Kane?"

"Top secret."

The woman scowled. "Whatever you're planning for him, you can bear in mind that he's my patient. He won't be ready for anything else until I tell you so."

"All right. I suggest you don't tell him about the transplants. He wouldn't like that."

"They're in his records. I can't do anything about that. I won't tell him anything."

When she had left them, Laney asked, "Why so eager?"

"I have an idea about Matt. I'll tell you about it later."

"Don't you think we've used him enough?"

"No," said Harry Kane. "I'd like to, but no."

Millard Parlette was near exhaustion. He'd moved into Jesus Pietro Castro's office on Sunday, night, even before the outer wall was replaced, and he’d lived there ever since. His meals were sent in, and he used Castro's cot when he slept, which was rarely. Sometimes it seemed to him, that he was at the end of his life, that he'd waited just long enough to meet this-the crisis he'd foreseen a hundred years ago.

The
Planck
had done terrible damage to the Hospital, but the work of rebuilding was well in progress. Parlette had hired a construction firm himself, paying them out of his personal fortune. Eventually he would push a bill through the Council to reimburse him. Now workmen were painting the outer wall of his office, which on Sunday night had been yawning space.

His immediate problem was that half of Implementation wanted to quit.

The events of the previous week had bad a disastrous effect on Implementation morale. Having the Head accused of treason and deposed by force was only part of it. Elaine Mattson and Matthew Keller had done their part, castrating the Hospital with bombs and stealth. The vivarium prisoners had been freed to make slaughter in the Hospital corridors. The destruction of the
Planck
had affected not just Hospital personnel but all of Alpha Plateau, for the
Planck
was half of history.

Now Implementation was faced with a dreadful confusion. All raids on the colony plateaus had been canceled. Known rebels moved freely through the Hospital, and no one could touch them. Their attitude toward the police was rude and contemptuous. Rumor had it that Millard Parlette was drafting new laws to further restrict police power. It didn't help that the rumors were true.

Parlette did what he could. He spoke to every man who wanted to resign. Some he persuaded to stay. As the ranks dwindled, he found new ways to use the men he had left.

At the same time he was dealing with the Plateau's four power blocs.

The Council of the Crew had followed Parlette in the past. With luck and skill and work he would make them follow him again.

The crew as a whole would normally follow the Council. But a colonist revolt, in these days of a weakened, disheartened Implementation, might send them into a full panic; and then the Council would mean nothing.

The Sons of Earth would follow Harry Kane. But Kane was beyond Parlette's control, and he didn't trust Millard Parlette at all.

The non-rebellious majority of colonists would remain non-rebellious if Kane left them alone. But the Sons of Earth, with their privileged knowledge of the ramrobot gifts, could stir them to killing wrath at any time. Would Harry Kane wait for the New Law?

Four power blocs, and Implementation too. Being Head meant an endless maze of details, minor complaints, delivery of reprimands, paperwork, petty internal politics — he could get lost in such a maze and never know it until a screaming colonist army came to storm the Hospital.

It was a wonder he ever got around to Matt Keller.

Matt lived on his back, with his right side encased in concrete and his right leg dangling in space. He was given pills that reduced the pains to permanent, aggravating aches.

The woman in the organ-bank smock examined him from time to time. Matt suspected she saw him as potential organ-bank material, of dubious value. On Wednesday he overheard someone calling her Dr. Bennet. He had never thought of asking her name, as she had never thought of giving it.

In the early morning hours, when the sleeping pills were wearing off, or during afternoon naps, he was plagued by nightmares. Again his elbow smashed a nose across a man's face, and again there was the awful shock of terror and triumph. Again he asked the way to the vivarium, turned, and raised his arm to see the skin beaded with bright blood. Again he stood in the organ banks, unable to run, and he woke drenched in perspiration. Or, with a stolen sonic he dropped uniformed men until the remembered sonic backlash turned his arm to wood. He woke, and his right arm had gone to sleep under him.

He thought of his family with nostalgia. He saw Jeannie and her husband every few months; they lived not twenty miles from Gamma's major mining area. But he hadn't seen his mother and father in years. How good it would be to see them again!

Even the memory of mining worms filled him with nostalgia. They were unpredictable, yes, but compared to Hood or Polly or Laney... at least he could understand mining worms.

His curiosity had been as dead as his right leg. On Wednesday evening it returned with a rush.

Why was the Hospital treating him? If he had been captured, why hadn't he been taken apart already? How had Laney and Kane been allowed to visit him?

He was frantic with impatience. Dr. Bennet didn't appear until noon Thursday. Somewhat to his surprise, she was not at all reluctant to talk.

"I don't understand it myself," she told Matt. "I do know that all the live rebels have been turned loose, and we aren't getting any more organ-bank material. Old Parlette's the Head now, and a lot of his relatives are working here too. Pure crew, working in the Hospital."

"It must be strange to you."

"It's weird. Old Parlette is the only one who knows what's really going on — if he does. Does he?"

Does he? Matt groped at the question. "What makes you think I know?"

"He's given orders that you're to be treated with an excess of tender loving care. He must have some reason, Keller."

"I suppose he must."

When it was obvious that that was all he had to say, she said, "If you've got any more questions, you can ask your friends. They'll be here Saturday. There's another weird thing — all the colonists wandering through the Hospital, and we've got orders not to touch them. I hear some of them are proven rebels."

"I'm one myself."

"I thought you might be."

"After my leg heals, will I be turned loose?"

"I suppose so, from the way you're being treated. It's up to Parlette." Her treatment of him had become curiously ambivalent. By turns he was her inferior, confidant, and patient. "Why don't you ask your friends on Saturday?"

That night they hooked up a sleepmaker at the head of his bed. "Why didn't they do that before?" he asked one of the workmen. "It must be safer than pills."

"You're looking at it wrong," the man told him. "Most of the patients here are crew. You don't think a crew would use a vivarium sleepmaker, do you?"

"Too proud, huh?"

"I told you. They're
crew
."

There was a listening bug in, the headset.

To Parlette, Matt was part of the paperwork. His was one of the dossiers lying on Jesus Pietro's desk. Its cover was scorched, like the others; but the Head's office, on the second floor, had escaped most of the damage from the
Planck
's wildfire drive.

Parlette went through all those dossiers and many more. By now he knew that the worst threat to his "New Law" was defection by the Sons of Earth. Only they, with their presumed control over the colonists, could make it work; and only they were beyond his control.

Matthew Keller's dossier was unusual in its skimpiness. There wasn't even a record of his joining the rebel organization. Yet he must belong. Castro's notes implied that Keller had freed the vivarium prisoners. He had been badly hurt invading the Hospital a second time. He must be partly responsible for the
Planck
disaster. He seemed to be connected with the mystery of the bleeding-heart symbol. A very active rebel, Matthew Keller.

Then there was Harry Kane's disproportionate interest in him.

Parlette's first evanescent impulse was to have him die of his injuries. He'd caused too much destruction already. Probably the
Planck
's library could never be replaced ..... But getting Harry Kane's trust was far more important.

On Thursday Dr. Bennet sent him word that Keller would be receiving visitors. Installing a listening bug was an obvious precaution. Millard Parlette made a note of the coming interview — at Saturday noon  — then forgot it until then.

When Hood had finished talking, Matt smiled and said, "I told you they were little hearts and livers."

It didn't go over. The four of them looked solemnly back at him, like a jury circling his hospital bed.

When they'd first come in, he'd wondered if they were all slated for the organ banks. They'd been so deadly serious, and they moved with coordination, as if they'd rehearsed this.

Hood had talked for almost half an hour, with occasional interruptions from Harry Kane and no comments at all from Laney and Mrs. Hancock. It still seemed rehearsed.
You do all the talking, Jay,
someone must have said.
Break it to him gently. Then —
But what they'd told him was all good.

"You've still got that bad-news look," he said. "Why so solemn? All is roses. We're all going to live forever. No more Implementation raids. No more being hauled off to the organ banks without a trial. We can even build wooden houses if we're crazy enough to want them. The millenium has come at last."

Harry Kane spoke. "And what's to keep Parlette from breaking all his rash promises?"

Matt still couldn't see why it should involve him. "You think he might?"

"Look at it logically, Keller. Parlette has Castro's job now. He's the Head. He runs Implementation."

"That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Kane. "I want him to have all the power he can grab, because he's the only man who can put the New Law across — if he chooses. But let's just back off a little and look at how much power he does have.

"He runs Implementation." Kane ticked it off on a finger. "He's trained his own clan to use hunting guns. That gives him most of the weapons on Mount Lookitthat. He can twist the Council around his little finger. Parlette is well on his way to being the world's first emperor!"

"But you could stop him. You said yourself that you can raise the colony against him any time you like."

Kane waved it off. "We can't do that. Sure, it's a good threat, especially after what we've already done to Implementation. But we don't want a bloodbath any more than Parlette does, or says he does. No, we need something else to hold over him."

Four solemn faces waited for his reply. What the Mist Demons was this all about? Matt said, "All right, you thought up the problem; now think up an answer."