Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta (10 page)

While Dr. Huer was reading the message form, Lisa 5 looked around the inner office. When her eyes—or electro-optical scanners—met Ellis 14’s, an almost visible bolt of energy passed between the two slim figures. In an instant Lisa 5 looked away, for all the world like a shy, yet subtly coquettish woman noticing the frank admiration of an attractive man.

Huer looked up from the message slip. Absent-mindedly he thanked the Lisa 5 robot again for bringing it. Then to Buck he said, “This is a report on the playback scan of the Mount Rushmore area. We had it shot from orbit. I’m sorry, Buck, it doesn’t show anything very useful.”

Lisa 5 had remained standing near Dr. Huer—and Ellis 14. Now Huer noticed her and said, “Thank you, Lisa. You may go.”

She exchanged a parting glance with Ellis 14 that all but singed the air between them to an electric-blue cinder—then moved back to the outer doorway, swaying as she went.

“I wonder if that was passion or just a short circuit,” Buck laughed.

Huer, abstractedly again, simply hummed.

“How do these robots reproduce?” Buck asked softly.

“We build them in a factory. How did you think?” Huer responded.

“Maybe you don’t have to.”

Ellis 14 said, “Captain Rogers, you should have a soma drone to replace your broken Twiki, and a new compuvisor to replace Dr. Theopolis.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Buck told the armorer. “I want to travel light on this little outing. I’ll go alone. And I intend to get Theo back. He thinks I sold him out—and I suppose I did, in a way. But if I’m responsible for his loss, then I’ll be the one to rescue him, too!”

“I hope you’re right, Buck,” Dr. Huer remarked. His voice, and his face, were those of a very worried man.

E I G H T

Fully outfitted in a military g-suit—or the twenty-fifth-century equivalent of that marvelous invention of Buck Rogers’ own era—and with all the special gear that Ellis 14 had provided him, Buck sat aboard a flashing monorail car, headed from his quarters in a smart residential sector of the Inner City, to the defense squadron ready-area of the domed metropolis’ spaceport.

His head was filled with his worries and his plans. The loss of Wilma Deering—and her presumed capture by the Draconians—had brought home to Buck the true strength of his feelings for her. These weren’t just the loyalty of a rocket jockey for his commanding officer, although that was part of Buck’s feeling; nor merely a sense of the obligations of friend-and-colleague for a fellow member of the spacefaring fraternity, although that was part of Buck’s feeling, too.

There was a stronger sensation than either of those familiar emotions. It was something that made his belly feel warm, his chest tight, and his head light whenever he thought of Wilma. It was something that Buck had heard about, read about, seen movies about, sung songs about—yet never quite believed in until now.

“Yep,” he thought to himself, “in the words of the immortal Duke Ellington tune, I got it bad and that ain’t good!”

He leaped to his feet as the monorail slid to a silent halt at the Inner City spacefield. He climbed down from the train and platform, passed through the ready-room, and crossed the tarmac, stepping between the waiting, ever-ready fighter rockets that stood prepared to blast off in defense of the Inner City and all of Earth at a moment’s notice.

He dismissed the ground crewmen who worked efficiently around the starfighters, climbed into the cockpit of his own craft, and dogged down the pilot hatch.

He started through the checklist that every pilot had to follow before any takeoff. As Buck neared the end of the list there was a bleep from his cockpit telescreen. He finished the checklist and flipped the toggle to activate the telescreen.

The screen flickered to life. A face filled its dimensions—a rounded, hairless dome, a face with small, refined, even wizened features and bright, piercing eyes that bored into Buck’s from behind a pair of old-fashioned, lens-and-earpiece spectacles.

“Huer here,” the cockpit speaker announced unnecessarily.

“Yes, Doc,” Buck answered.

“I just ’vised you to wish you—what did you people used to say?
Bon ami
!”

“Thanks, Doc,” Buck laughed. “That’s French for
good friend.
I think you meant
bon voyage.
That means
good trip.
But I appreciate the thought, I really do.”

“All right, Buck. Try to stay in contact. Use your line-beam any time. And try to bring Wilma back for us, will you?”

“You bet, Doc. And thanks for the call. I don’t know why I didn’t think of using a starfighter before, for traveling around this continent. With the roads mostly shot and the trains not running any more, it sure beats the tar out of walking a Couple of thousand miles.”

He flicked off the televisor link with Dr. Huer and switched it for a video scan of the Earth from his starfighter. Then he punched the firing stud for his main power-packs and the ever-present hand of the space god slammed him back against his padded pilot’s seat.

The starfighter blasted away from the tarmac, away from the spaceport, away from the Inner City, away from the banks of what had once been Lake Michigan.

Only this time it did not continue into the void of outer space, either to orbit the Earth or to head for some more distant celestial point. It arced, instead, across the heavens over North America, headed in a sub-orbital path from northeast to southwest, to the basin of what had once been the Great Salt Lake and was now a huge, glistening white salt flat in the middle of the great southwestern desert.

In a mere matter of minutes the starfighter completed a journey even longer than the one that had taken Buck so long, when he returned on foot from Mount Rushmore to the Inner City. As the one-man rocket arced in for its landing, Buck hit the manual override switch and took control back from the ship’s computer guidance system. He guided the starfighter in for a landing, like a onetime fighter jockey making for the deck of an oceangoing aircraft carrier.

The starfighter skidded to a halt on glistening salt flats and Buck Rogers undogged the pilot hatch, climbed from the cockpit, and hit the hard, dry surface of the old lakebed.

Before him stretched an incredible sight. It was as if he had mistakenly set a course for one of the planet’s polar ice caps instead of the heart of old Utah. A sea—or rather, an “ice floe”—of dazzling, pure white stretched as far as the eye could see. Buck started forward and the “ice” crystals crunched drily beneath his flight-booted feet.

And at the far edge of the plain of whiteness there rose what might have been some relic-city left at the South Pole by a prehistoric race of nonhuman, perhaps even extraterrestrial, intelligence. Its spires rose into the air, some of them sheared off as if by a gigantic scythe, others complete to their tips where statues of golden angels sounded silent trumpets to summon long-dead multitudes to worship.

This strange vision was in the middle of the Utah desert, and the ice floe was really a salt flat, the dried residue of the onetime Great Salt Lake. And the temperature was well over a hundred degrees by the long-abandoned Fahrenheit scale of Captain Buck Rogers’ youth.

Buck sealed his starfighter securely and set out across the salt flats. By the time he reached the ancient temple at their far edge he was drenched in perspiration and his heat-sapped muscles were crying out for relief. But he grinned, and he pounded on the towering ornate doors of the temple. There was no response save the echo of Buck’s own blows.

“Sure,” he muttered to himself. “All dead.” But if the files survived . . .

He scanned the ground for a few yards around, found a half-rusted metal bar, and jammed its thin end between the edges of the two great doors. A few heaves of his muscular shoulders, applied to the makeshift pry-bar, and the doors creaked open.

Buck stepped inside.

The inside of the old temple still had an air of splendor for all that its roof and walls were falling in and its once-polished floor was thickly littered with debris and covered with thick dust and windblown sand and salt-crystals. Buck wandered through the building until he found a directory hanging crookedly from a single wall-bracket.

He rubbed away the accumulated grime from the covering of the directory and found the words,
Genealogy Section in Basement.
He picked his way through fallen fixtures and rotting rubble until he found a stairway. No point in looking for an elevator—if there was one it would surely be inoperable.

In the basement he found the genealogy section, threw open its doors and stepped into—a completely empty room!

What had happened? No files, no shelves or cabinets or stacks of crumbling papers. No trays of microfiches or racks of computer tapes.

Nothing!

Buck stood, stunned, gazing at the cavernous, vacant vault. Suddenly he was buried under half a dozen muscular bodies. Buck flailed out with arms and legs, struggling to free himself of the grip of his unanticipated assailants. He landed a solid right to the jaw of one attacker, felt a satisfying impact as he planted one foot in the belly of another.

He freed an elbow long enough to land it in the Adam’s apple of a third, and over the turmoil and confusion of the free-for-all, heard the man gasping and retching desperately.

An arm clamped around Buck’s face, the beefy muscle closing off his nose and mouth in an effort to smother him into submission. He managed to get his teeth open, then clamped them ferociously into the arm. With a howl of outrage his attacker released his grip, yanked the arm away with a sound of tearing cloth—or flesh!

The force of the man’s reaction spun Buck out of the grip of his remaining assailants and he sprawled a few yards across the untenanted floor of the room, leaped to his feet and drew his laser-pistol. Before he could get off a single bolt he was dealt a vicious, treacherous rabbit punch from behind. He was stunned, his knees buckling beneath him.

Through dimming eyes he saw a huge Draconian lunging toward him. He managed to squeeze off a bolt at the attacker but the Draconian’s momentum carried him forward and he collided with Buck, the two of them collapsing to the floor. A hand reached into the tangle of flaccid limbs and seized Buck’s laser-gun. Thick fingers adjusted the setting and another bolt was fired—this time at Captain Buck Rogers!

The gloom and partial unconsciousness that he had been fighting increased, then disappeared into total nothingness.

The giant Draconian starship received the little shuttlecraft into its hangar bay, the movable plates of the bay’s outer shell rotating on their gimbal joints as servomotors whined. The hatches of the shuttlecraft swung open as soon as air-pressure indicators showed a safe level of atmosphere inside the bay.

Draconian-uniformed crewmen swarmed around the shuttlecraft as it unloaded. Two of the six Draconians aboard the shuttle were carried out on stretchers, two went toward a debriefing room, and two headed for the first-aid station. The prize prisoner, Buck Rogers, was brought out on a stretcher. He was transferred from stretcher to rolling cart and checked over at once by a Draconian medic, who looked up from his medic-probe readouts and nodded his satisfaction.

On the control bridge of the starship, meanwhile, commands were issued to put the engines of the behemoth into star-warp mode. With an acceleration almost imperceptible to the occupants of the mighty hulk, the ship accelerated past conventional speeds, through the perilous light-speed zone and into warp-space where all of the normal laws of time and dimension are called into question.

As those crewmen brave enough to watch the normal universe turned inside out gazed in awe through the viewing ports of the ship’s bridge, Buck Rogers opened his own eyes. They were still somewhat bleary, his ears still rang and his body ached and tingled as if it had been struck by a bolt of lightning—which, in a sense, it had.

The room in which Buck found himself was a sumptuous stateroom aboard the Draconian ship. The furnishings were soft, rich, clearly designed for the pleasure of one whose sensuous impulses were routinely indulged to the ultimate degree.

And, looming above Buck, the carefully calculated casualness of her posture designed to show off the luxuriant, tempting curves of a generously proportioned torso, was the Princess Ardala. Last unmarried daughter of the Emperor Draco, Ardala was heiress-apparent to the throne of the greatest interstellar empire in the known history of the universe.

The Draconian Empire stretched from Canopus to Tau Ceti, from Ophiuchi to Wolf-35. It took in stars, planets, and nebulae, worlds of incredible mineral riches, magnificent wildlife, and intelligences and civilizations so perfectly humanoid that no earth-born visitor could detect a difference—as well as some so totally alien that no ordinary man could look upon them and still retain his sanity!

The Emperor Draco had fathered thirty children in his lifetime—or, thirty that he was willing to acknowledge as royal offspring. By an incredible medical anomaly—or perhaps, simply, by a wildly astonishing run of chromosomes on the cosmic wheel of fortune—all thirty of the royal offspring were daughters.