Existence (35 page)

That same instant, the giant hydrogen gas cell convulsed, twitching like a giant bowel caught in a spasm. The entire pinkish tube—bigger than a jumbo jet—
contracted,
starting at the bottom and squeezing toward a sudden opening at the very top, spewing its contents skyward.

Backwash hurled Warren across the green tube. Tor managed to grab his collar, dragging him out to the walkway. There seemed to be nothing satisfying about the “air” that she sucked into her lungs, and she started seeing spots before her eyes. The little man was in worse shape, gasping wildly in high-pitched squeaks.

Somehow, Tor hauled him a dozen meters along the gangway, barely escaping descending folds of the deflated cell, till they arrived at last where breathing felt better.
Did we make any difference?
she wondered, wildly.

Instinctively, Tor slipped her specs back on. Immersed again in the info-maelstrom, it took moments to focus.

One image showed gouts of flame pouring from a hole in the roof of a majestic skyship. Another revealed the zeppelin’s nose starting to slant steeply as the tug-locomotive pulled frantically on its tow cable, reeling the behemoth toward the ground.
Spirit
resisted like a stallion, bucking and clinging to altitude.

Tor briefly quailed. Oh Lord, what have we done?

A thought suddenly occurred to her. She and Warren had done this entirely based on information that came to them from outside. From a group-mind of zeppelin aficionados and amateur scientists who claimed that a lot of extra hydrogen had to be going somewhere, and it must be stored in some of the former helium cells.

But
that
particular helium cell—the one Warren sliced—had been okay.

And now, amid all the commotion, she wondered. What about the smart-mob? Could that group be a front for clever reffers, who were using
her
to do their dirty work? Feeding false information, in order to get precisely this effect?

The doubt passed through her mind in seconds. And back out again. This smart-mob was open and public. If something smelled about it,
another
mob would have formed by now, clamoring like mad and exposing the lies. Anyway, if no helium cells had been tampered with, the worst that she and Warren could do was bring a temporarily disabled
Spirit of Chula Vista
down to a bumpy but safe landing atop its tug.

Newsworthy. But not very. And that realization firmed her resolve.

Tor yanked the attendant onto his feet and urged him to move uphill, toward the stern, along a narrow path that now inclined the other way. “Come on!” she called to Warren, her voice still squeaky from helium. “We’ve got to do more!”

Warren tried gamely. But she had to steady him as the path gradually steepened. When he prepared to slash at another green cell, farther aft, Tor braced his elbow.

Before he struck, through the omniscient gaze of her specs, Tor abruptly saw three more holes appear in the zep’s broad roof, spewing clouds of gas, transparent but highly refracting, resembling billowy ripples in space.

Was the zep company finally taking action? Had the reffers made their move? Or had the first expulsion triggered some kind of compensating release from automatic valves, elsewhere on the ship?

As if pondering the same questions, the voice in her jaw mused.

“Too little has been released to save the
Spirit
from the worst-case scenario. But maybe enough to limit the tragedy and mess up their scheme.

“It depends on a rather gruesome possibility that one of us thought up. What if—instead of hydrogen—some of the helium cells have been refilled with OXYGEN? After experimenting with a similar, programmably permeable polymer, we find that the fuel replenishment process could be jiggered to do that. If so, the compressed combination—”

Oxygen?

Tor shouted “Wait!” as Warren made a hard stab at one of the green cells, slicing a long vent that suddenly blurped at them.

This wave of gas wasn’t as cool as the helium had been. It
smelled
terrific, though. One slight inhale filled Tor with sudden and suspicious exhilaration.

Uh-oh,
she thought.

At that moment, her spectacle-display offered a bird’s-eye view as one of the new clouds of vented hydrogen contacted dying embers, atop the tormented
Spirit of Chula Vista.

Like a brief sun, each of the refracting bubbles ignited in rapid succession. Thunderclaps shook the dirigible from stem to stern, knocking Tor and Warren off their feet.

Is this it?
Her own particular and special End of the World? Strangely, Tor’s clearest thought was one of professional jealousy. Someone down below ought to be getting truly memorable and historic footage. Maybe on a par with the
Hindenburg
Disaster.

This was the critical moment. With their plan dissolving, the reffers must act. Any second now, a well-timed chain explosion
within
the
Spirit
’s great abdomen.…

While the violent tossing drove Tor into fatalism, all that invigorating oxygen seemed to have an opposite effect upon Warren, who surged to his feet, then slipped through the tear that he had made and charged across the green cell, preparing to attack the giant hydrogen compartment beyond, heedless of the smart-mob, clamoring at him to stop.

Tor tried to add her own plea, but found that her throat would not function.

Some reporter,
she thought, taking ironic solace in one fact—that her specs were still beaming to the Net.

Live images of a desperately unlikely hero.

Warren looked positively giddy—on a high of oxygen and adrenaline, but not too drugged to realize the implications. He grimaced with an evident combination of fear and exaltation, while bringing his cutter-tool slashing down upon the polymer membrane—a slim barrier separating two gases that wanted, notoriously, to unite.

*   *   *

Sensory recovery came in scattered bits.

First, a smattering of dream images. Nightmare flashes about being chased, or else giving chase to something dangerous, across a landscape of burning glass. At least, that was how her mind pictured a piling-on of agonies. Regret. Physical anguish. Failure. More anguish. Shame. And more agony, still.

When the murk finally began to clear, consciousness only made matters worse. Everything was black, except for occasional crimson flashes. And those had to be erupting directly out of pain—the random firings of an abused nervous system.

Her ears also appeared to be useless. There was no real sound, other than a low, irritating humming that would not go away.

Only one conduit to the external world still appeared to be functioning.

The voice. It had been hectoring her dreams, she recalled. A nag that could not be answered and would not go away. Only now, at least, she understood the words.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

After a pause, the message repeated.

And then again.

So, it was playing on automatic. She must have been unconscious for a long time.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

There was an almost overwhelming temptation to do nothing. Every signal that she sent to muscles, commanding them to move, only increased the grinding, searing pain.
Passivity
seemed to be the lesson being taught right now. Just lie there, or else suffer even more. Lie and wait. Maybe die.

Also, Tor wasn’t sure she liked the group mind anymore.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

On the other hand, passivity seemed to have one major drawback. It gave pain an ally.

Boredom. Yet another way to torment her. Especially her.

To hell with that.

With an effort that grated, she managed to slide her jaw enough to bring the two left canine teeth together in a tap, and then two more. The recording continued a few moments—long enough for Tor to fear that it hadn’t worked. She was cut off, isolated, alone in darkness.

But the group participants must have been away, doing their own things. Jobs, families, watching the news. After about twenty seconds, though, the voice returned, eager and live.

“Tor!

“We are so glad you’re awake.”

Muddled by dull agony, she found it hard at first to focus even a thought. But she managed to drag one canine in a circle around the other. Universal symbolic code for “question mark.”

The message got through.

“Tor, you are inside a life-sustainment tube. Rescue workers found you in the wreckage about twelve minutes ago, but it’s taking some time to haul you out. They should have you aboard a medi-chopper in another three minutes, maybe four.

“We’ll inform the docs that you are conscious. They’ll probably insert a communications shunt sometime after you reach hospital.”

Three rapid taps.

The voice had a bedside manner.

“Now Tor, be good and let the pros do their jobs. The emergency is over and we amateurs have to step back, right?

“Anyway, you’ll get the very best of care. You’re a hero! Spoiled a reffer plot and saved a couple of hundred passengers. You should hear what MediaCorp is crowing about their ‘ace field correspondent.’ They even backdated your promotion a few days.

“Everyone wants you now, Tor,”
the voice finished, resonating her inner ear without any sign of double entendre. But surely individual members felt what she felt, right then.

Irony—the
other
bright compensation that Pandora found in the bottom of her infamous Box. At times, irony could be more comforting than hope.

Tor was unable to chuckle, so her tooth did a down-slide and then back.

The Voice seemed to understand and agree.

“Yeah.

“Anyway, we figure you’d like an update. Tap inside if you want details about your condition. Outside for a summary of external events.”

Tor bit down emphatically on the outer surface of her lower canine.

“Gotcha. Here goes.

“It turns out that the scheme was partly to create a garish zep disaster. But they chiefly aimed to achieve a distraction.

“By colliding the
Spirit
with a cargo freighter in a huge explosion, with lots of casualties, they hoped not only to close down the zep port for months, but also to create a suddenly lethal fireball that would draw attention from the protective and emergency services. All eyes and sensors would shift for a brief time. Wariness would steeply decline in other directions.

“They thereupon planned to swoop into the Naval Research Center with a swarm attack by hyperlight flyers. Like the O’Hare Incident but with some nasty twists. We don’t have details yet. Some of them are still under wraps. But it looks pretty awful, at first sight.

“Anyway, as events turned out, our ad hoc efforts aboard the
Spirit
managed to expel almost half of the stockpiled gases early and in an uncoordinated fashion. Several of the biggest cells got emptied, creating gaps. So there was never a single, unified detonation when the enemy finally pulled their trigger. Just a sporadic fire. That kept the dirigible frame intact, enabling the tug to reel it down to less than a hundred meters.

“Where the escape chutes mostly worked. Nearly all passengers got away without injury, Tor. And the zep port was untouched.”

Trying to picture it in her mind’s eye—perhaps the only eye she had left—took some effort. She was used to so many modern visualization aides that mere words and imagination seemed rather crude. A cartoony image of the
Spirit
, her vast upper bulge aflame, slanted steeply groundward as the doughty
Umberto Nobile
desperately pulled the airship toward relative safety. And then, slender tubes of active plastic snaking down, offering slide-paths for the tourist families and other civilians.

The real event must have been quite a sight.

Her mind roiled with questions. What about the rest of the passengers?

What fraction were injured, or died?

How about people down below, on the nearby highway?

Was there an attack on the Artifact Conference, after all?

So many questions. But till doctors installed a shunt, there would be no way to send anything more sophisticated than these awful yes-no clicks. And some punctuation marks. Normally, equipped with a tru-vu, a pair of touch-tooth implants would let her scroll rapidly through menu choices, or type on a virtual screen. Now, she could neither see nor subvocalize.

So, she thought about the problem. Information could in-load at the rate of spoken speech. Outloading was a matter of clicking two teeth together.

Perhaps it was the effect of drugs, injected by the paramedics, but Tor found herself thinking with increasing detachment, as if viewing her situation through a distant lens. Abstract appraisal suggested a solution, reverting to a much older tradition of communication.

She clicked the inside of her lower left canine three times quickly. Then the outer surface three times, more slowly. And finally the inner side three more times.

“What’s that, Tor? Are you trying to say something?”

She waited a decent interval, then repeated exactly the same series of taps. Three rapid clicks inside, three slow ones on the outside, and again three quickly inside. It took several repetitions before the Voice hazarded a guess.

“Tor, a few members and ais suggest that you’re trying to send a message in old-fashioned Morse code.