Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden (2 page)

It
was
now. “Something has come up,” old man Rath said as he reached Rockson’s shoulder. “Something that can’t wait until morning.”

“It’ll have to wait,” Rockson countered. He had seen Rath go overboard about the importance of a minor matter before.

“It can’t, Rock; come with me,
now
. Excuse us Rona. This is official business.”

“Not on your life, Rath,” Rona nearly spat out. “This is my party, this is my New Year’s celebration. It’s the first one Rock and I ever spent together and—you’re not going to spoil it.”

“Sorry, Rona,” Rath said, twisting Rockson’s shoulder so that he was already dragging the well muscled man in the black tuxedo away. “Sorry,” Rath shouted back as he elbowed Rockson and himself off the dance floor.

Rock shouted back. “Keep my spot, Rona. I’ll be right back.”

Rona stamped her high-heeled shoes in anger. She walked back toward her seat. The party went on all around her. Rona sat down, dejected. Left by her man, left standing alone in the middle of the dance floor on New Year’s, for God’s sake. Unbelievable.

She’d finally thought she had Rock all to herself; her rival—and friend—Kim, had departed a month earlier for New Omicron City. The whole area was now snowed in. There’d been no combat for months. Rock hadn’t been on a mission, and wasn’t likely to be on one until the spring. The worst snowstorm on record. So Rona had thought she and Rockson would have some time together alone at last.

That was not to be. It was either Kim or Rath who spoiled her fun. Always. Which was worse? She frowned.
Rath
was worse. When Rath wanted Rock, it meant danger for the Doomsday Warrior. Kim would just make love to him—and at least she shared him with Rona, on alternate nights. But Rath, the bad-news man, had as usual come and spoiled it. Spoiled it all.

Rona poured herself a drink and downed the bubbly. She wondered if she should stay at the party at all. Why not go to her room and cry a little? She knew Rock was gone at least until morning, despite what he had said.

“No. I will have fun, I will.” Rona burst out, and stood up. “What the hell. I’ll get drunk. I deserve to be drunk.”

She had lots of friends here, didn’t she? She looked around. Ah, there. Rona walked swiftly over to the table where Shannon, the woman from Basic Research, had been seated with her date and two other Freefighters. The unconventional Shannon, Rona noted, had dyed her hair red and orange and blue in streaks. She wore a silver gown. Shannon was out with McCaughlin this New Year’s. Two seats at the couple’s table were empty.

“Where’s Detroit and Archer? Didn’t I see them at this table a moment ago?” she asked.

“Detroit,” the burly seven-foot-tall McCaughlin replied, “has staggered off with Archer to put Archer to bed in that infernal conduit-tunnel home he’s made down in D Section. Archer is woozy from the champagne—he can take hooch he makes himself, but the good stuff knocks him out.” He laughed.

Shannon commented. “Rona, you look stunning—where’s your date?”

Rona sat down and explained. Just as she finished, Dr. Schecter walked—or perhaps
gyrated
—over on his servomechanism legs. He insisted on dancing with her to show her the improvements in his replacement legs—his real legs had been blown off years ago in a battle. Schecter, the gray-haired genius that even now wore a lab coat—his eternal outfit—boasted, “Rona, I programmed my legs for the Charleston, the Twist, and the Waltz. Which will it be?”

Rockson walked to the main elevator bank with Rath, a premonition in his mutant’s mind that he knew what was coming. A
mission
. And a dangerous one, judging by the prickles standing his neck hairs on end. Those hairs were infallible. They always told him when he was heading into trouble.

Down in the new G Section, ten levels deeper into the hewn-out Colorado mountain that was Century City, Rockson and Rath sat down at a long polished table. Rath pulled out a third chair, though no one else was in the Security room.

Someone came in. Rockson, startled, stood up, for the man that entered was a pallid gangling sort, an albino with stringy blond-white hair, pinkish large eyes, and a small mouth.

The man’s clothing was like none Rockson had ever encountered before. Strange off-mauve color, with odd patterns flickering in and out of sight as he moved slowly to sit down. He seemed weak. He made no move to shake hands and introduce himself. Rock waited for an explanation from Rath as to the identity of this odd man.

Rath said, as a way of introduction. “Rockson, this is Peth Danik. He’s a stranger in these parts. Our security forces found him wandering some miles south of here. He was about to be eaten by one of our more unsavory animal friends—a snow leopard. He spent two days in the hospital being treated for hypothermia and a host of other things. His eyes were nearly shot, but you know Schecter—he fixed them up pretty well. Danik’s story is a strange one indeed. I want you to hear it firsthand. I believe that what he has to say impacts our security, and the security of everyone on Earth.”

“Please begin.” Rock requested of the stranger.

The story Danik told in a strangely intoned voice was indeed bizarre. He was, he claimed, from an unknown, completely sealed off city buried in the Mexican mountains. A place called Eden. A totally contained biosphere closed off from the world since the war back in 1989.

“We of Eden, until recently, all wanted our city to be forever hidden to the surface world. After the bombs fell, after the nuclear war, we believed the world was no longer a fit place to live. We expected that it never would be livable again, ever.

“Eden is a ten-mile-long, mile-wide world unto itself. It is a total ecosystem, self-renewing, self-contained. It has a salt lake, with the microscopic creatures like diatoms and algae that a real ocean has, and it has a marshland area too. Also there is a desert-in-miniature. It is the area directly under our artificial sun—too hot to inhabit. The sun, protected by a force field, is a lithium-ion crystal that can burn for a thousand years. Not quite the same spectrum as the sun that warms the surface world. It never can be turned off. That is why there is a planetarium. Every citizen in Eden spends one night a month under the stars projected inside our planetarium. It was the belief of the constructors of Eden that mankind
needs
a little nighttime, a change from eternal sun. The planetarium is where I learned of the stars, and how to tell direction by the stars. When I came to the surface, and determined to travel north with my companions, who all perished on the journey I’m sad to say, I used the North Star to guide me.

“Eden is much bigger, but far less developed, than Century City. Our city was designed to sustain seven thousand people—and there are that number there now; the third and fourth generations of the original inhabitants.”

Rockson spoke up. “You say that it is a complete ecosystem—a miniature self-renewing world like the Earth, in miniature. Yet you fail to mention the terrain that on Earth helps recycle the air and water. You didn’t mention rain forests. Without trees, the Earth’s oxygen supply would diminish and all life would die out. In the 1980s mankind was on the verge of destroying the Amazon jungle in Brazil, where most of the Earth’s atmosphere is regenerated by the trees. Then, of course, the war came, and one of its few beneficial effects was to stop the exploitation of the Amazon jungle. Do you understand what I’m getting at? A salt lake is part of an ecosystem, but how about greenery? How about trees?”

“I understand, Rockson. I omitted something. The engineers of Eden had built substitutes for trees. They made machines that mimic the properties of the rain forest—a giant filter that uses geothermal energy to strain the air of harmful waste gases and replenish it with oxygen. Plus there is some air supply available from natural caverns, deeper under the Earth. Pure cold air. And we have some plants—mostly in the marshlands adjoining our lake. Everything in Eden—or almost everything—is recycled. Carbon dioxide exhaled by the people is used by the plants—like on the rest of the Earth. They absorb the carbon dioxide from exhalation, and provide oxygen—helping our artificial means to do so. Some of the human waste was supposed to be used to feed the algae in the water and fertilize crops—but this system was never completed. We have been living on canned food and some plastic-sealed dried food.”

“No crops?” Rath interjected. “Why, that’s terrible. Even here in Century City—and this is a city that doesn’t seal itself off—we have hydroponic gardens. Without fresh food, your health, even your ability to procreate, must suffer and—”

“Yes, it is a problem. When the—trouble—began, I proposed getting supplies of fish and seeds from the surface, so that we might eat better, but Stafford—our dictator, who I will explain about momentarily—says all things from the surface are evil, contaminated. We suffer ill health as you have stated, and breeding for us is impossible. Sex does not exist in Eden. We had our last child ten years ago. We are dying out.”

Two

R
ockson was amazed by Danik’s story so far. He asked, “Who created Eden? How was such a project begun back in the twentieth century? Who had that vision?”

“The money came from an American millionaire. Edward Renquist. Renquist was obsessed with the idea that World War Three was inevitable. This was because Renquist’s own father perished in Hiroshima.”

“Was Renquist’s father Japanese?” Rath asked.

“No, his father, Johnathan, was an American POW in Hiroshima at the time the Americans nuked it—thus ending World War Two. Jonathan survived the blast—unlike most of the city’s inhabitants—because the jail was a solid building on the outskirts of the city.

“The cell he was in had a hole blown in it, though. He survived by immersing himself in a cesspool, breathing through a reed. Unfortunately, he was discovered the next day by crazed survivors. Since he was an American, like those who dropped the bomb, they tortured him to death—peeled his skin off inch by inch with surgical scissors.

“Renquist was born the day his father died. He grew up to be a brilliant youth and patented many inventions from the age of twelve onward. He was always fearful, though. Mankind used atomic weapons in Japan, in 1945, and Edward Renquist was certain the nukes would be used again.

“He decided he would survive nuclear war when it came. He created the concept, the design, the specialized equipment to build a self-contained buried world, a sealed biosphere—and called it Eden.

“He wanted to decide who would live in the survival city. After the war, which he knew would come, after the nuclear destruction was unleashed by the irrational minds of mankind, he wanted to start fresh, with nothing but brilliant men and women. He wanted a new world, with himself in charge.

“But Renquist didn’t live to take advantage of his creation—he was killed, most likely in the vaporization of Austin, Texas, just two days before he was to join the people he selected in Eden. The city was sealed off. Its location was always a closely guarded secret, and if someone did survive to try to find it, they could hardly do so—a half mile of rock was avalanched over the site by special machinery automated in advance for that task.

“My great-grandfather Ralf Danik was one of the original groups chosen to survive the war in the radiation-free city. He was an engineer of the waterworks of Eden. My ancestor, and the others with him, had no idea if the system they had created would work. If not, they would all suffocate, or starve, or die of disease. But it did work. And since it had been sealed off before the fallout from the bombed cities came, it was radiation free. The only radiation-free place in the world.

“The people of Eden have never had news of the outside world—none at all. Most of us in Eden believe we are the only people in the world. We live from generation to generation inside the cave. Safe. Secure. But gradually growing weaker. No one knows just why. Perhaps mankind just wasn’t made too live so long in caves. By my generation—the fifth—nearly all of us were sterile. And a movement arose.

“Some of us—I was the leader in the effort—said we must dig our way out, that we must attempt to live on the surface again. Preliminary probes with detection equipment were burrowed up in pipes to the surface. They showed higher radiation than normal, less oxygen. But it was liveable, basically. I wanted the tunnel to be widened—I wanted us out.

“That’s when the election was held. We had democratic elections of our council every seven years. I ran against a man named Stafford, a scientist who was convinced we should stay underground, that we should devote all our efforts to restore our genetic structure, so that we could have children better adapted to living underground. He was—and is—convinced there is no way for us to exist on the surface. He said our babies could be born in artificial uteruses, if women couldn’t give birth.

“My party, the Surface party, won the election handily, but Stafford broke into the century-old store-houses of weapons, and his followers armed themselves and pulled a coup d’état.

“I and the others who had been freely elected were hunted down and killed one by one. Our only hope was to reach the surface. And six of us made it—through a series of ancient construction tunnels that had failed to collapse entirely after the burial of the city.

“It was a wild world we encountered. Supplyless, we decided to head north, toward the United States—or where the United States used to be. We were Americans. We hoped to find other Americans. But all we found was death.

“You must understand—underground we had no idea it was winter. Bitter cold. It was never any season underground. We had forgotten the word. We had forgotten the meaning even for bird and cloud—and for one other concept I learned on the perilous trek to this place:
beauty
. For this world of yours, regardless of the dangers, is beautiful. None of us were sorry to leave Eden. We weren’t really alive down there.

“I really didn’t know exactly where we were heading . . . Our records showed a place called Denver was near the mountains called the Rockies. We found an old map in an abandoned house and some clothing. Rags, but they were warmer than our thin clothing.