Gods of Riverworld (39 page)

No, he thought. It was not in vain, not wasted time. We have lived far longer than we thought we would when we died on Earth. Our youthful bodies were restored, and we fought and loved with the full vigor of youth and perfect health. We lived fiercely, we were active, and we worked hard for a goal. It has been worthwhile. And if we can live until the Gardenworlders come, we … no. This phase of the project will be over, and we must die to make room for the resurrected in the next.

He would worry about that when the time came. Just now, the only thing to consider was the Snark.

“There’s the screen,” Frigate said. Burton got up and walked to the console in the corner. Gull looked out from the display. Seeing Burton, he said, “Good morning. I don’t know what the matter is, but the door won’t open for me.”

“That’s strange,” Burton said. “Have you asked the Computer why?”

“Of course, but it says that it does not know.”

“We’ll see what we can do about it,” Burton said. “Meanwhile, you don’t have to starve. Get yourself breakfast, and we’ll investigate.”

When the screen had become blank, Burton asked that the screen in his bedroom be activated. It showed the room at once—Burton had not been sure that it would not have been cut off—and he saw that the bed was unoccupied. Star Spoon was not in sight, but she could be in the bathroom. He verified that his voice could be transmitted, and he called her loudly. Though he repeated her name several times, he was not answered.

“She’s gone.”

Frigate said, “Where’s her body?”

“I don’t know,” Burton said. “We’ll have to find out.”

They went down the bedroom hall, all armed with beamers. Burton and Li Po used them to burn the sealing agent off. Since the smoke had an acrid odor, which made them cough, they had to slow down the burning to give the air-conditioning time to suck the smoke away. When the last of the glossy violet substance was gone, Burton gave the codeword, and the door swung open. Cautiously, he entered first, the beamer ready. The bedroom and bathroom were empty.

“She must have killed herself by stepping into the converter cabinet and having it incinerate her,” Frigate said.

“That would make her disappearance more mysterious,” Burton said. “I wonder where she could be.”

Alice said, “You don’t seem surprised, Dick.”

“No. I didn’t think that Gull had had time to learn how to operate the Computer well enough to do all the Snark has done.”

“For God’s sake!” Frigate said. “Why would she
do
that? What did she have against us? She must hate us! Everybody! Why?”

“I think,” Li Po said, “that she has always been very sad behind that merry face she put on. She has had a bad life, many bad times, anyway, so many that she thinks of her life as all bad, too horrible to endure any longer. She has suffered so much, been raped and abused so much, and the attack by Dunaway was just too much. I think—I could be wrong, though I doubt it—that she decided that we would all be better off dead.
She’d
be better off dead.
Everybody
would be. She told me more than once that she was sorry that we had been resurrected, that it was horrible that no one could take refuge even in death. Did she ever say anything like that to you, Dick?”

“Several times.”

“There has to be more than that to it,” Frigate said. “If she wanted to be dead forever, all she had to do was erase her own recordings.”

“She’s not sane,” Burton said. “She may have it in her mind that she’s doing everybody a favor by making sure that they don’t have to suffer as she did. Also, I suppose, she wishes to insure that those who made others suffer could no longer do that.”

He was appalled, more shaken by her deeds than by anything he had ever experienced. But he did not hate her. Though she had committed the greatest sin in the world, the irrevocable and unforgivable sin, he could not hate that demented sufferer. He pitied her. Grieved for her, in fact. But he would have to kill her. No one would be safe until she was dead, and he would be doing her the greatest kindness by putting her out of her wretchedness.

He was sure that she planned to end herself eventually but not until after everyone left in the tower was dead. She would, he supposed, have liked to dispose of all in The Valley, too, but that she could not do. She would have to be satisfied knowing that they would finally pass away.

35

“Nonsense!”

“What?” Alice said.

“We don’t have the slightest idea of what’s really going on in that twisted mind. It doesn’t matter if we do or don’t. What does is that she must be stopped.”

A loud pinging began. Burton started, though he had been expecting the noise, and he went to the console. The screen was displaying a diagram of a tower level section and a tiny but bright orange light was moving along one of the corridors. In the corner of the screen was:
LEVEL 4
,
CORRIDOR 10.

The others had crowded behind him. Frigate said, “What now?”

“She must have just left the room in which she was resurrected,” Burton said. “The room would have been painted, of course, so that her past-display would not be visible to her, and I suppose that the Computer shows it only when it can be seen by the subject. What I did, I told the Computer to show me where her past-display is. Star Spoon has undoubtedly commanded the Computer not to reveal her presence by allowing us to scan the halls near where she is. But one thing she cannot do is to prevent the past-display from accompanying her as soon as she leaves her room.”

“She’s intelligent,” Li Po said. “She’ll soon realize that you may be tracking her through the display. What we can do, she can do. She’ll ask the Computer to show her our displays.”

“Yes,” Burton said, “but the thing about the Computer is that whoever gets ahead of the other with his command can forestall the other. I told it not to show her where ours are.”

“She’ll know that when the Computer doesn’t show them to her,” Li Po said. “That’ll make her very cautious.”

“She would be anyway,” Burton said. “Pete, go burn off Gull’s sealant. Tell him what’s happened, give him a beamer. We need everyone we can get.”

Frigate looked reluctant to leave, but he did so at once.

“We can’t stay in this place,” Burton said. “She can’t seal up the door as long as it’s open, but she could set up something—a robot machine that would automatically beam us the moment we stuck our heads through the doorway, for instance—so we won’t stay here.”

The orange light had stopped at a shaft, VC-A3-2.

“That leads up our corridor,” Burton said. “We haven’t much time.”

He got up from the console chair and went through the doorway leading to the bedroom corridor. Frigate had just finished melting off the sealant and was waiting for the smoke to clear away. The door to Gull’s room had swung open. Burton shouted, “Tell him to hold his breath and get right out here!”

The others went to their bedrooms and got their weapons and extra powerpacks. Burton watched the screen while the others were busy. When they were all in the main room, he told them what they must do. Gull was confused and did not know all that had happened, since Frigate had only had time to give him a few facts. Nevertheless, he nodded when Burton rapid-fired instructions at him, and he ran off.

All left the apartment then, and Burton had the Computer close the door. The apartment was halfway on the corridor between two lift shafts. Star Spoon was by the fourth-floor entrance to the shaft to their right as they left their place. They sped down the corridor toward the shaft, Alice dropping behind them to enter an apartment on the right side. She would station herself in the darkened area by the door, which would be left half-open. From there she could cover the shaft entrance, about four hundred and fifty feet away.

The four men separated when they came to the cross-corridor. The lift shaft was in the center of the cross-corridor, and there were deep bays at each corner to permit traffic of big machines. The shaft could be entered from four sides. Li Po and Gull went to the right down the cross-corridor and took positions behind partly closed doors about a hundred feet from the shaft. Burton continued down the corridor and entered a room that was about a hundred feet from the shaft. Frigate was to go to the left at the intersection and take a station behind a door about two hundred feet from the shaft.

When Star Spoon left the shaft at this level, she would be the target of cross-fire from five beamers.

Burton’s room was dark except for the glow of the computer console screen. He watched the orange light, waiting for it to move into the shaft and ascend toward the third level.

“She’s certainly taking her time,” he muttered. What was she doing? Trying to imagine all the possible traps? Or had she lost her nerve?

Very early that morning, Burton had taken one hundred pounds of plastic explosive from the e-m converter. Using his flying chair to elevate himself to the tops of seven lift shafts and along the sides, working furiously, he had pressed the explosive around the entrances of the nearest shafts. He had not applied the plastic to the bottom of the entrances because Star Spoon would probably see it before exiting. By the time she had left the shaft, even if she saw the plastic on the sides, she would be too late to escape. Proximity fuses would set off the explosive.

These might be useless, since she might take a distant shaft. But if she passed close to a mined opening, she still might set off one.

He looked down the corridor and through the opening of the shaft. Then he glanced back at the screen. Ah! The orange light was ascending the lines indicating the shaft near which they waited.

He crouched by the door. A few seconds later, a transparent vehicle, in the center of which Star Spoon sat, rose into full view. It halted, suspended in the shaft, allowing him to see it in all its details. It was much like the armored chair that he had fashioned except that there were more heavy beamers than in his.

He could only see her back until she turned her head to give him a half-profile. She was expressionless.

The armor would resist for a while the ray of a beamer on full-power. Only if the ray could be kept on one spot could it penetrate the armor. And Star Spoon would keep her vehicle moving.

What was discouraging was that, if she was killed, she would be resurrected elsewhere in the tower. Any victory by her enemies was only a half-victory for them and a temporary setback for her. Yet they had to keep fighting and hope that they would catch her before she could kill herself or be killed. Or that her record-spheres would be found out and, eventually, she would be in the same situation they were. The next death would be the final death.

Burton had expected her to appear in an armored vehicle, and he hoped that its armor would absorb just enough of the explosive shock to knock her out. That was why he had lined each entrance with only 3.57 pounds of the explosive. As it was, he was not sure that he did not have more than he needed for his purpose.

He said, “Go on! Go on! What’re you waiting for?”

The moment the vehicle moved from the center of the shaft toward the opening, he would step back, and, pressing his fingertips into his ears, would stand by the wall out of the way of the direct shock waves. So would the others.

At last, Star Spoon made up her mind. She had looked down the corridor straight ahead and seen that all the doors to the apartment suites were open but one. She would know that the door was Burton’s, and she would, he hoped, believe that all five were holed up in it. Her survey of the corridor at right angles to the one straight ahead had shown her that all the doors on both sides were open. That was as it was almost everywhere in the tower.

Satisfied that she was headed toward the exit, Burton backed away a few feet from the door. Then he lost consciousness; he never heard the explosion.

When he came to, his smitten senses not yet fully recovered, he was coughing on the burning fumes pouring around him. He sat up, his back against the wall, and tried to get up but failed. His strength had gone for a walk and his wits had scattered like picnickers before the sudden appearance of a bear. When he did manage to get up, he staggered across the room, the air of which was getting somewhat clearer as the air-conditioning sucked the smoke away. The screen still glowed, showing the orange ball down the corridor around the corner. He dimly realized that this was where Li Po and Gull were stationed.

At least, he knew who he was and where he and the others were. His movements were slow, though.

“Got to get out there, get her,” he said. His lips had moved with the thoughts, but he could not hear his own voice anymore than he could hear the voices of himself and Isabel, his Earthly wife, from the past-display on the wall near the door.

By the time he had reached the door, he could think clearly enough to know that something had gone wrong. The explosion had been far more violent than it should have been. Could he have miscalculated so much, or had something unforeseen happened?

He looked around the side of the doorway, realized then that he had dropped the beamer, went back to retrieve it, and returned to the doorway. The smoke was a thin veil now. He could see the far-strewn pieces of the vehicle on the floor. The sphere had been made of some shatterable material. The explosive lining the opening nearest Burton had gone off. Probably, a piece of the machine shot through this opening had activated the fuse. The additional explosion had doubled the effect of the shock waves, but even that was not near enough to account for the violence that had knocked him out.

The vehicle must have contained a large amount of explosives, and this had gone off when Burton’s trap had erupted. Or perhaps it was a coincidence that the explosives in the vehicle had gone off just as the vehicle cleared the entrance shaft.

The thing operating the vehicle had been an android, the exact duplicate of Star Spoon, who had sent it ahead as a sacrifice.

Burton’s head still hurt. His thoughts had been climbing a steep hill, struggling to get to the top, where they could re-form and become a potent force. Most of them had gotten up the hill, but they were not yet organized enough. Why had the past-display accompanied the false woman and not the real one?