Forever Free (18 page)

"Perhaps it was staged, for our benefit," the sheriff said.

"What? Why?"

"I don't have any idea why. But it seems to be the only explanation that's physically possible. There would have been ample time to set it up."

"Let's play a joke on those renegades," Charlie said with a broad Centrus accent. "Everybody make it look like you disappeared on 14 Galileo 128; leave your clothing and then tiptoe away naked. Meanwhile, we'll suck the antimatter out of the Time Warp and force them to come back."

"And then jump out from wherever they're hiding."

The sheriff was annoyed. "I'm not saying it's reasonable. I'm just saying that so far nothing else fits the evidence."

"So let's find some more evidence." I gestured. "Shall we leave by the window, or the door?"

I talked to Marygay a half-dozen times before nightfall.

They'd been taking shifts on the binoculars, and hadn't seen any sign of life other than the tracks we made in the snow. They were barely visible to the best observers, though, who knew what they were looking for; the binoculars were only 15 power. So in theory, there could be thousands of people holed up somewhere.

But that hardly seemed possible, in light of what we'd found and hadn't found. Everything pointed to the same impossibility: at 12:28 in the afternoon on 14 Galileo 128, every human, Man, and Tauran disappeared into thin air.

The time was a supposition based on one datum: a broken mechanical clock on the floor of a man's workshop that was full of such curiosities. His clothes were right by the broken clock.

It was starting to get dark as we neared City Center, so we decided to put that off until we had a full day of light.

We were all dog-tired, too, and had only managed to keep our eyes open long enough to have a supper of random boxed goods washed down with melted snow. There'd been a cabinet of wine in Roberta's kitchen, but we were reluctant to take any, stealing from the vanished.

Charlie and I collapsed on the gurneys, or operating tables, in the back of the vehicle, even finding some blow-up pillows. The sheriff slept on the floor, the back of his head resting on a wooden block he'd found on the street.

He got up at dawn, evidently cold, and woke the two of us by turning on the heater. We spent a few groggy minutes regretting the lack of tea or coffee to go with our cold smoked fish and goldfruit. We could break into a house or store to find utensils and tea, and then conjure up a fire somehow. It would have been easy in Paxton, where every house had a practical fireplace. In Centrus it was all central heating and air pollution laws.

I had a sudden desire to go back to Paxton, partly curiosity and partly the irrational hope that this sinister disaster hadn't spread that far; that my home would be the same place I'd left two months or twenty-four years ago. That Bill would be there, repentant but otherwise unchanged.

We saw the trio of ships drift overhead from the west, dim gold stars in the twilight. I turned on the radio but didn't broadcast, and they were silent, evidently still asleep.

I hoped. Anything could happen, here, now.

The sheriff wanted to go to the police station first. That was the only building in Centrus that he really knew, and if there had been any premonition of disaster at the official level, we might find evidence there. We had no objection.

I wanted most to go to the communications center, where there was a line to Earth, but that could wait.

The station is half the Law Building, a four-story mirror monolith. The east half comprises the courts; the west, the cops. We went around to the west door and walked in.

Inside, it was pretty dark, and we paused for a minute to let our eyes become accustomed to it. The window wall was at minimum polarization, but it still let in only a thin grey fraction of the morning light.

The security gate stayed open in spite of the sheriff's pistol and our potentially lethal screwdrivers. We walked up to the front desk and I turned the log around and flashed it with my penlight.

"Twelve twenty-five, it says. Parking violation." Civilian clothes and shoes in front of the desk, a sergeant's uniform behind. He was probably arguing about the ticket at 12:28. The sergeant wanting him to disappear so he could go to lunch. Well, he got half his wish.

The sheriff led us across to the other side of the large room, past dozens of office cubicles, some plain grey or green boxes, others decorated with pictures and holos. In one, an exuberant spray of artificial flowers caught the beginning of the day's light.

We went to the briefing room, where all the officers would gather in the morning, to review the day's plans. If the board said "12:28—DUMP CLOTHES AND GET ON BUS," at least part of the mystery would be cleared up.

The briefing room was about sixty folding chairs that had started out in orderly lines, facing a wipe-board on which the writing was still clear. It was mostly code, which the sheriff identified as case numbers and squads. The message "Birthdays today: Lockney and Newsome" probably had no hidden significance.

We went off in search of cartridges for the pistol, but in most of the little carrels there were either no weapons or more modern ones, worthless without power. Finally we found a supply room with a half-open divided door—I asked whether they still called them Dutch doors; and the sheriff said no, range doors, for whatever reason. (I've always had trouble with the language because there are so many words identical to English ones, but unrelated except for sound.)

They had more ammunition there than you could cart away with a wheelbarrow. Charlie and I each took a heavy box, though I wondered what in the world he planned to shoot with it.

He took four boxes, and as we carried them back to the ambulance, provided an oblique answer. "You know," he said, "this looks like the result of some ideal weapon. Kills all the people and leaves all the things untouched."

"They had one like that back in the twentieth," I said. "The neutron bomb."

"It made their bodies disappear?"

"No, you had to take care of that part yourself. Actually, I guess it would preserve bodies for a while, by irradiating them. It was never used."

"Really? You'd think every police department would have one."

Charlie laughed. "It would simplify things. They were designed to kill whole cities."

"Whole cities of humans?" He shook his head. "And you think we're strange."

We were back outside in time for Marygay's pass. She said they were going to de-orbit and come in on the next pass, so we wanted some real mass between us and the spaceport.

They'd decided not to wait for the others. Too much weird was going on. Antimatter evaporating was no more or less odd than what we'd been seeing, and we did know it could happen, and strand them up there.

I was sure the landing would have an unearthly beauty; I've seen matter/antimatter drives from a safe distance, or somewhat safe. Brighter than the sun, an eerie brilliant purple.

We weren't sure how little shielding would be safe, so at the appointed time we cautiously made our way down into the Law Building's second basement.

The penlight showed orderly boxes of documents and a wall of old law books, from Earth, mostly in English. There was another wall, behind a locked iron gate, with hundreds of wine bottles, some of them with labels as old as forty MF years.

I gave the lock a tug and it clicked open. I pulled us each out three bottles at random. The sheriff protested that he didn't drink wine. I told him I didn't shoot anymore, but I'd carried his damned ammunition.

There was a triple sonic boom, pretty loud even at our depth, and then a protracted sound like sheets being torn. I ran upstairs as soon as it quit.

Winded by the unaccustomed exercise, I held it down to a dogtrot going through the dead building and out the door.

Standing in the middle of Main Street, I could see the three golden needles of the ships on the horizon. Marygay was barely understandable through a roar of static from secondary radiation. "Landing went okay," she said. "Some stuff came loose and crashed around."

"How soon can you disembark?" I shouted.

"You don't have to shout! Maybe an hour. Don't you come too close before that."

We spent the time loading the ambulance with ninety parkas from the police wardrobe—better too warm than too cold—and I chose a few cases of food from a grocery down the street.

There would be plenty to eat for the next several years—unless everybody else suddenly showed up, naked and hungry. And pissed off. If one kind of magic is possible, or two, counting the antimatter—then what kind of magic might happen tomorrow?

The sheriff seemed to have been thinking along those lines himself. When we finished loading up the clothing and food and a few extra bottles of wine—one for each ten people didn't seem adequate—he said, "We have to talk to Antres 906."

"About what?"

"This. I never could understand Tauran humor. But it would be just like them to demonstrate a new scientific principle with a huge practical joke."

"Sure. Killing off a whole planet."

"We don't know that they're dead. Until we have a body, it's still a 'missing persons' case." I couldn't tell whether he was being ironic, playing cop. Maybe exposure to the big-city police station had done something to him.

In one of the vehicle's many latched drawers, labeled only by number, we found a radiation counter. It didn't need a power source in daylight. I pointed it toward the ships, and the needle gave a little quiver, well below the red sector labeled LEAVE AREA.

"So? Let's go on in."

"Inverse-square law," I said. "We'd probably get fried if we got within half a klick." I was guessing, of course; I didn't know anything about secondary radiation.

I thumbed the radio. "Marygay, have you asked the ship how long it will be until you can disembark?"

"Just a second." I could hear a vague mumble mixed with the static. "It says fifty-eight minutes."

"Okay. We'll meet you there about then." I nodded to Charlie and the sheriff. "Might as well get started, and keep an eye on the counter."

Going back was a lot easier than coming in had been. We wallowed across a ditch and then drove along the level mud that paralleled the broken-up road. We did wait for fifteen minutes at about the two-kilometer mark, watching the needle quiver less and less.

What to do with 90, or 150, people? Food was not a problem, and shelter was just a matter of breaking and entering. Water was a problem, though.

The sheriff suggested the university. It had dormitories, and a river ran through the middle of it. There might even be a way to jury-rig electricity, I thought; I remembered seeing a field full of solar collectors just off campus, and wondering what they were for—teaching, research, or maybe a backup power supply.

Our ambulance had just crawled onto the landing field when the unloading ramp on Marygay's ship rolled down. People wobbled down it carefully, tentatively, in groups of five, which was the capacity of the elevator down from the SA pods and control room.

When she came down in the last group, I let out a held breath and realized how tense I'd been, ever since we'd admitted the possibility that they could have been marooned up there. I went halfway up the ramp and took her in my arms.

The other two ships were emptying out as well, people milling around the ambulance trying on parkas for fit, chattering away with the release of tension and happiness at reunion—it had only been a couple of months, subjective, but that twenty-four years was somehow just as real.

Of course everybody knew what we had found, or not found, on the surface, and they were full of apprehension and questions. I avoided them by taking Marygay off to "confer." After everybody was on the ground and in warm clothes, I went halfway up the ramp and waved both arms for attention.

"We've decided to set up temporary quarters at the university. So far, this ambulance is our only working vehicle; it can take ten or twelve in at a time. Meanwhile, let's all move indoors, out of the wind."

We sent the ten biggest, strongest people first, so they could get to work on breaking into the dormitory rooms, while Charlie and I led the others to the cafeteria where we had found our first planetside meal. They walked silently by the eerie piles of old clothing, which had some of the appearance of bodies felled by a sudden disaster, like Pompeii.

Food, even old boxed fruit, cheered them up. Charlie and I answered questions about what we'd found in the city.

Alysa Bertram asked when we could start planting. I didn't know anything about that, but a lot of the others did, and there were almost as many opinions as people. None of the ones who'd come from Centrus were farmers; the farmers from Paxton were unfamiliar with the local conventions. It was obvious, though, that it wouldn't just be a matter of picking up where the previous tenants had left off. Farming around here was specialized and technology-intensive. We had to devise ways to break up the soil and get water to it without using electricity.

Lar Po, also no farmer, listened to the arguments and seriously suggested that our best chance for survival was to find a way back to Paxton, where we'd have a fighting chance of growing enough to feed ourselves. It would be a long walk, though.

"There's plenty of time to experiment," I reminded them. "We could probably survive here for a generation, scavenging and living off the ship rations." A few weeks on the ship rations, though, would drive anyone to agriculture. That was undoubtedly part of the plan.

The sheriff came back with the welcome news that they'd found a dormitory on the river that didn't even require breaking into. The rooms had electronic locks, and power failure had opened everything up.

I sent Charlie out to start setting up work details. We had to have a water system and temporary latrine as soon as possible, and then organize into search parties to map out the location of resources in the city.

Marygay and I wanted to go downtown, though, to look for two more pieces to the puzzle. The Office for Interplanetary Communications.