The Chromosome Game (19 page)

‘— Not different, Eagle. Sorry to disappoint you. Definitely not different.’

‘Well, there’s show business for you. You could certainly have fooled me.’

‘What happened to this UFO?’

‘It got the hell out of there — fast.’

*

She’d gone straight to Trell. He took one look at her and said, ‘My God, what’s the matter? You look as if you’ve seen —’

‘Trell! If anybody else says that I’m going to freak out.’

She told him what happened.

‘How did Eagle take it, do you think?’

‘All I know is, he took it seriously.’

‘I’ll tell you something, Kelda. By now, if I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t believe in a damn thing.’

‘Same.’

‘We’ll make it.’

— And that was only two days back.

*

And now, Kelda stood astride, wearing a pair of knock-out jeans, right at the uppermost hatch of the sub and bathed in sunlight. It was just as if the event Eagle reported had never happened, her natural optimism and superhealth rendered her an unforgettable silhouette against the contour of the Alps far beyond — at least to Trell.

He was way down below, in the ravine, directing hectic operations onshore.

Kelda cupped her hands and yelled down from the upper hatch, ‘No walkie-talkies up here yet, Trell! Any sign of Krand?’

‘What?’

‘Walkie-talkies.’

‘Ten-four. Can you hang on a couple of minutes? Just having a word with Nembrak.’

‘Make if fast, can you? A lot of stuff to shift.’

‘Sorry, repeat that.’

‘Make it fast, okay?’

‘Okay.’ Trell turned back to Nembrak. ‘Briefly.’

‘Right. A moment ago I saw Eagle go running up to Krand. He had something to say and Krand didn’t like it too much, I though they both looked … uneasy.’

‘Eagle okay?’

‘He didn’t give away a thing, but he’d been following Sladey and Scorda …’ Nembrak indicated a copse a few hundred metres off. ‘They’ve got hold of … something.’

‘Which something. Do you know?’

‘No. But here’s Krand coming back.’

‘Right. Don’t say anything now, Nembrak. Too many people watching.’

‘Okay.’

Krand was out of breath. The three of them exchanged hasty glances. Krand managed, ‘We’ll have to meet tonight but it can’t be in the Laundry Chute. Reasons.’

Trell nodded. ‘Something will be fixed … Krand, do me a favour? I must stay down here, this end, while Nembrak and I decide the siting of the factory … Can you get it together and nip up the gangway? … Equip Kelda with a walkie-talkie and have one sent down here for me.’

‘Sure, Trell.’

‘And while you’re at it, get an estimate from the computer on the incubation dates for livestock — calves and pigs. Okay?’

‘Yeah, sure. I could use a drink of real fresh milk;

‘You’ll have to wait a while for that!’

‘Shame there’s no way of stepping-up the incubator.’

‘Testing, testing … One, two, three.
Over
.’

Back came Kelda’s voice. ‘Okay, I can hear you.’

Trell said, ‘And you sound super … Kelda, can you switch your TV monitor to the ZD-One main hoist?’

‘Yeah, done that, go on.’

‘Is the mini-tractor on the hoist yet?’

‘Ar, no. Not yet. It’s occupied by the inflatable hot-houses. Seems the Computer is crazy for tomatoes.’

‘Damn! Can you get them up out of the way? Shove them on the conveyor, then ask the Controller if we can have the tractor on next if it’s out of mothballs. The boys are ready to start ploughing … Oh, and Krand’s gone down to ZD-One to get the latest on livestock. Can you let me know what he has to say?’

‘Sure … Trell? How are the chickens doing?’

‘The first batch had been incubated in advance of Exodus.

‘Whatever they’re doing they’re not laying … And the conveyor’s squeaking like a pond of ducks. Send some grease down, okay?’

‘Trell, are
you
in a hurry!’

‘Too right. While the weather holds let’s make the best of it. Fact is, soil tests show that the ground is very poor for crops. Seems like there’s been one hell of a dry season followed by torrential ram, so until that fertilizer starts biting —’

‘— Okay, save the weather forecast, I’ll get on with the programme.’

‘Fine … Over and out. Eagle? Where the hell is Eagle?’

Eagle walked up quite casually. Somehow he felt an inner calm. He knew what he was dealing with now, in people like Sladey and Scorda; the very seriousness of the problem kept him low-key and unexcitable. He could understand Trek’s sense of urgency, though. In Provence, Autumn would end very abruptly. There was one hell of a lot to do before Winter set in. But some of the apples in the barrel were rotten. Eagle saw it to be a major part of his job to help sort them before they contaminated others in the batch — the weaklings … people like Frume and Prenda and Kendip, hardly even names to him, he tried hard not to think of them as non-people, but they were easy targets for planned insurrection and calculated sabotage.

Eagle was mentally weeding them out, one by one; not planning any action one way or the other, but conscious of the threat …

‘Eagle, can you help Krand break some of the horses?’

‘Horses! They look more like zebras to me.’

‘No stripes.’

Eagle’s almost imperceptible smile signified the inauguration of a private joke. ‘The stripes are very carefully concealed.’

‘Seriously.’

‘I
am
being serious. I’ve been studying those horses. They’re not the same as the one in the picture-books, Trell. Very wild and sinewy. They’re strong and they mean business. They’ll take some breaking, no doubt about that. And if we do it wrong they won’t want to know, believe me.’

‘If anybody can do it, you can.’

‘All right. But we’ll know all about it when those secret stripes suddenly show.’

‘So you’re on?’

‘But whether I
stay
on is a horse of a different colour, like I said, zebras.’

‘Fine … Now, from among all these people who have we for the soil-enrichment? — Who’s best in that research team?’

‘There’s Mendra-118 — if you can drag her away either from Milem or her mirror.’

‘We’ll try. Can you go get her?’

‘Trell, if Milem sees me with her I won’t be around to break the zebras.’

‘Risk it … Hi, Mendra. And it seems to me the sun has tanned you almost as black as Milem himself. How do you manage it?

Mendra ran an appreciative hand over her thighs. ‘I manage it with sun-lamps. I’m no nature girl but it works.’

‘It works all right … So what can you and Milem manage on the ploughing deal? You’ve made your survey?’

‘On the Ridge the top-soil is all washed up. There’s been erosion on a huge scale, Trell. Whatever our ancestors did to the weather they weren’t thinking much of our chances.’

‘What about the top-soil farther along? — beyond Kasiga Ridge?’

‘It’s better than this but you’d need a bulldozer to make the ground flat enough to till. It puts us between the devil and the deep blue sea: The soil yonder is okay but the ground isn’t flat enough to be arable; and the surface on the Ridge is so weak that nothing would grow. And underneath all that silt there’s just clay.’

‘So what’s stopping us muck-shifting so that we have richer topsoil on the patch where the mini-ploughs will function? — Add a bit of fertilizer and how will the ground here on the Ridge know the difference?’

‘That makes sense. Trell, but how do we shift hundreds of tons of earth? With our bare hands?’

‘If necessary. Or we put a hundred people on the job, using shovels.’

‘So show me a hundred shovels.’

‘We make ’em in the forge.’

‘Where do we get the metal?’

‘If you’re as bright as you are suntanned, Mendra, you’ll search the ship for objects made out of iron … the kind of iron we can work. I know they won’t last all that long but until we have steel I guess they’ll have to do the job, okay? … Can you and Milem organise a group of volunteers to start shaking-out that soil, using whatever we have for the present?’

‘Trouble is, Trell, I doubt if … if some of the incubants will respond to any authority vested in Milem. His particular colour is not a-la-mode this year.’

‘If they do not, Mendra, just let me know and I’ll get Eagle to have the zebras stampede them straight away into the sea.’

‘Zebras?’

‘One of Eagle’s jokes … Anyway, tell me if there’s trouble. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

*

Krand gazed up at the tractor as it emerged on the hoist. To Sakini he said, ‘Sure does seem weird to see that thing after all these years. Do you and Inikas remember it?’

‘Sure we remember it. So what? It’s got smaller, though.’

‘You’ve grown bigger.’

*

Trell and Krand stepped out into the Autumn night.

Cool winds, coming up from the richly-scented mountain territory of Africa, then cleansed of sand over the Mediterranean, and finally checked-out, re-oxygenised and desalinated by the organic ombudsmen — starfish, crab-life, shore gulls and tundra — that straddled the south coast of France … these sensuous winds fanned the horses and the trees, the lakes and the natural orchards, the ravines and foothills, with less than one part in 103 of carbon-monoxide or nuclear fallout to contaminate it. Air like this was unique to Futureworld; the sulphured squalor that people had breathed since the Industrial Revolution — the coal-dust, smog, crude oil, lead, aerosol effluence and a thousand other toxic impurities — had at last disseminated upward; doing a power of no good to the ozone layer but at least leaving the lower atmosphere to its own delicious minerals, and animal flavouring, and subtle honey released by magnificent foliage. You could see glowing objects in the sky quite unlike the hazy, streaked star-blurs viewed, even through powerful telescopes, in the Twentieth Century. Venus was so bright in Futureworld that collision seemed imminent … yet it held its place with precision in orbit. The moon, a mere crescent this night, reflected enough photons for you to read a book at bedtime. Distant galaxies, normally so far displaced by the red-shift that they would have been invisible to the naked eye during Man’s soiled reign of back-yard rape, thrummed with vibrant light and illuminated the pathways overhead that were signposted to infinity.

Trell didn’t want to speak; to disturb one molecule of such delicious nectar seemed to him to be an inexcusable intrusion. But the spell had to pass; there were lives to be led and they were not being led in the direction he felt productive. And what Krand was telling him now, as they strolled on the invigorating slopes of Provence, deeply disturbed him …

‘Trell. They heard it all. The meeting on F Deck.’

‘How?’

‘I found …
this
. In the Laundry Chute.’ He took a small object from his pocket.

‘Radio-mike.’

Krand said, ‘I guess our preparations for that meeting weren’t quite as discreet as we thought. Who had the mike put in that room? — My guess is Sladey.’

‘But, Krand! I don’t see that they could have heard a damn thing. But the time we were all up in there —’

‘— You don’t know the half of it. Our friends the enemy were equally interested in the private talk you had with Kelda after you’d told the computer to go take a running jump —’

‘So they moved that radio-mike …’

‘— Strictly for your benefit, Trell. You know what —’

‘— I do know. Let’s take first things first, though. By the time you, Eagle, Kelda and I were up on F Deck —’

‘— the computer was all set for torture. True. Which would be fine with me if Nembrak hadn’t told me a couple of hours ago that dating from then a new line had been run to one of the cassette machines.’

‘Recorded the whole of our meeting!’

‘Check. Now I see another angle on this dream of Fulda’s.’

‘Get to practicals. Item: After that horrendous torture business, those hoodlums somehow used the radio-mike to eavesdrop on Kelda and me. How? Who moved it? Couldn’t have been Sladey and his official mob, on account of they were getting an original type of lullaby from the auto-nurses in the Treatment Room … a Treatment with which I’m becoming increasingly in sympathy every moment —’

‘— So you are human? We had the idea you spanked the computer for that episode.’

‘I’m still glad those hoodlums were worked over … Anyway I’m damn sure they were in no shape to hook-up new mike circuits by then. Who does that leave?’

‘Kendip The FlipFlop … a member of the great non-people brigade, Trell. He had a mind like a knife-switch.’

‘Too many of those around.’

‘Too right. Lean on them for a split second and they hook up to a different circuit. Now Kendip has Flopped over to Sladey.’