The Long Sleep (17 page)

This was the pitiful world which man had inherited when the planet's ecological systems began to break down in the late 1990s and on into the Twenty-first Century. In those Last Days, the government had constructed the inverted pyramid deep beneath the flatlands of Utah, a last bastion of mankind where more than two thousand top administrators and scientists searched frantically for some way to perpetuate the species. While hundreds of millions died from a complex chain of ecological disasters, those deep inside the Utah pyramid, Joel among them, had worked in conjunction with NASA to launch the seeds of mankind toward the stars.

They had not been trying to save mankind precisely as an old biology text would have defined the species. They were willing to alter the outward appearance to preserve the inner essence. In a hundred deep-space, faster-than-light drone probes, NASA had never discovered a planet enough like Earth to permit comfortable human colonization. Therefore, it had been necessary for them to create genetic alternatives to man and to put these quasi-human creatures on the interstellar ships which had been readied to take Earth's new children from their dying home.

The aquamen,
he thought. They hadn't been entirely a part of Galing's stage setting. They had once been real—still were real, out there on some distant world. The aquaman was a strain of human being that was engineered for survival on a marine planet.

When this work was done, when the staff of the Utah installation had seen their creations shot into space, they next studied and perfected the science of cryogenics. They had built sixteen life suspensions pods—only sixteen, because their supply of certain delicate and crucial instruments was limited—into which volunteers, drawn from a pool of six hundred, were placed for a thousand-year sleep. It was hoped that when they woke they would find themselves in a world where ecological balance had been restored through the tedious but effective processes of Nature.

However, fifty years later, all but one of the pods were damaged in the riots when rational society within the pyramid dissolved. Ten centuries later, Joel woke alone.

It wasn't the Twenty-third Century, as Harttle had said. They were just trying to break him in easy. It was much later than that. Instead, the date must be three thousand and something, A.D.

When he had come awake after ten centuries of sleep, Joel did not find paradise. The air beyond the fortress was still quite poisonous. The water was an acid that had to be refined before it could be used even for bathing. He had been shocked to find no one alive at all. Not even his wife, Alicia Corley, was alive to share the awful future with him. Her pod had been ruined in the riots, of which he found few but detailed records.

He was the last man on Earth.

For several weeks, he remained alone, brooding, contemplating suicide or a return to the pod.

But he was basically a man of action, and eventually he acted. He switched on the hermetically sealed nucleotide vats, activated the computers controlling them, and he built one dozen androids.

His thoughts drifted back to the present, his eyes to the fungus beyond the tank. He looked down at Allison. She was still sleeping, though she murmured quietly and stirred a bit. He smiled and touched her dark hair.

Originally, he had intended to treat these artificial companions as men had treated them since they'd been first successfully manufactured in 1993: as tools, as slaves, but never as equals. He wanted to hypno-educate them, assign them to various projects, then return to his pod, checking up on them for a week or two each century. Because androids were, in effect, immortal, they could pass ten thousand years searching for some way to roll back the ecological disaster.

One hitch developed in this plan, although it had not seemed like a hitch at first. He discovered, through various laboratory tests, that his own tissues had reached stasis as a result of the thousand-year sleep. They had ceased to die or renew themselves. No activity took place within them; they lay beneath the microscope like photographs, not like real cells. His tissues were reproducing only when he was injured in some way and matter had to be replaced. He was now immortal himself. He did not need to return to the pod. He was elated. However, over the months that he worked side by side with the vat-formed men and women, he began to think of them as more than animals or slaves.

He felt that they
were
equals—and soon he fell in love with the one who looked a bit like Alicia: he fell in love with Allison, a vat-born woman.

She whispered in her sleep now.

He rested one hand on her face and watched as she took steady, deep breaths.

Falling in love with an android was in the nature of a cardinal sin: a womb-born must never have sexual relations with a vat-born. Never in human history had there been such a universally held, fiercely evangelized, and rigidly obeyed rule against miscegenation. He loathed himself for loving her. He tried to overcome his prejudice, couldn't, and decided that anti-android propaganda must have been fed to him during hypno-training sessions during his early days in the pyramid. This loathing was too strong to be naturally bred. And nothing short of a point-for-point opposing, pro-android propaganda tape could cure him. Yet, without knowing what that original propaganda had been, he was unable to establish a curative program. Androids were a off-shoot of the search for viable space travelers. They were tools. Slaves. They were even pets. But they were never lovers.

They were inhuman, unhuman, not fit objects for desire.

Unable to treat his own illness, he had decided to assign the android team various research tasks and return to his pod even though he no longer required it. He hoped that another hundred years of sleep would erase either his love or his prejudice. However, he woke a century later with both: he loved her, and he loathed himself for wanting her . . .

And then?

As he watched the fungoid towers which seemed to have moved a bit on the plain before him, he strained to recall the rest of it . . . Next had come Disorientation Therapy, a drastic form of psychia-try popular in the decade before the worst of the ecological changes. He knew it was his best chance. He and the androids had stripped the pyramid of every clue to its real purpose, stored these records in hidden vaults, and structured a Disorientation Therapy Puzzle from the entire installation.

As he saw it: he would be given a temporary chemical amnesia, would be placed in his pod and, when revived, would find himself in a maze of deception and illusion: fake streets, the dungeon, the house . . . And in this weird play, Allison would be his only touchstone to reality as he struggled to solve the problem and reorient himself. With any luck he would come to need her and care for her so much, in his disorientation, that his guilt and prejudice would be easily defeated.

It had worked. He had slept with her and he wanted to sleep with her again. He had even thought of having a family by her, if that were possible. And he felt no guilt. He was cured.

Then why did he feel that something was terribly, dangerously wrong?

He looked at Allison. She was mumbling continuously now, smiling in her sleep, slowly coming out of the drug.

Where was the danger he sensed, if indeed there were any?

Not Allison.

Something else . . .

“Joel! Joel Amslow!”

He recoiled as Henry Galing's authoritative voice boomed out of the radio receiver in the center of the tank's main control panel.

“Joel! Please answer me.”

He flicked a switch permitting two-way conversation, and he said “I'm here.”

“You're all right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where you are?” Galing asked. He no longer sounded sinister. He was worried.

“Outside the Utah fortress,” Joel said.

“You understand the illusions?”

“Too well.”

“
This
wasn't in the program,” Galing said worriedly. You weren't supposed to act like this.” He paused to get a grip on himself. “You are safe, you said?”

“Sure.”

“You better come inside.”

“The therapy was a success,” Joel said. He caressed Allison's face again.

“Oh?” Galing said cautiously.

Joel sighed and leaned back in the safety harness. He was so weary. The dead world, the rotting sky, the barren land that fell away in every direction—all this made him feel old and worn out. It was this weariness, he now thought, that made him feel there was yet another danger; his nerves were frayed, playing tricks on him. He gazed fondly at the woman on the seat beside him.

“Very successful therapy,” he told Galing. “I don't feel the way I used to . . . You people may be vat-born, formed as complete adults . . . But you've each got a distinct personality. You're as human as I am. I mean it. I no longer have to be alone.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Galing said. “But that's only half of it. Apparently, you don't know anything about what the Overmaster did to you.”

“What?”

“The Overmaster's relentless,” Galing said. “It won't give up and go away. We came damned close to being destroyed, the pyramid breached and ruined—”

“Overmaster? I'm not tracking very—”

The earth rumbled beneath the tank, trembled gently at first and then more violently, lifted up, tilted, slammed down again, and nearly overturned the elephantine vehicle.

“Joel? Is something wrong out there?”

The earth rose again. Fell again. Harder this time.

“Joel?”

“Something—”

Again the movement came, as if a bomb had exploded underneath the tank.

Joel looked up, startled, as he was thrown forward and then jerked back by his safety harness.

He saw the towering fungoid forms. Very near. Too damned near. They'd moved in on him . . .

Now, they rose above the tank like the many fingers of an alien hand, reaching down to crush him.

XXIV

Illusion?

He had been through so many illusions in the last few days that he could not help but doubt the reality of what he saw before him. Surely it was another of Galing's programs, no more real than the dungeon or the honeymoon suite. This was a fungus, nothing more than that, plant life. It could not possess the quick mobility of an animal!

The fungus flowed toward the tank in a many-fingered amoeboid mass. As it came nearer, it rose higher and higher until it seemed that the tips of those fingers must brush the polluted sky. A thin yellowish fluid oozed from it continually and sheeted down the columns of muck, was reabsorbed by the mother body before it spilled onto the ground. The hideous creature writhed and pulsed, roiled and churned within itself. It was gray the color of dead flesh and brown the color of feces. Pustules as large as basketballs punctuated it, split open and issued a disgusting, syrupy ichor.

Beneath the tank, the wriggling carpet of moss surged up for the fourth time, shook, tilted, fell back, rocking them violently from side to side.

“Joel! Galing said.

“We're under attack,” he said.

“We'll be out to help.”

“No! Stay there.”

“But—”

“You can't do anything. It's too damned big. It's the whole
world!”

This was no Disorientation Therapy Puzzle, no clever illusion; this, by God, was real!

Joel touched the solid-state control spot label REVERSE and felt the machine change gears smoothly. He gripped the wheel with both sweat-slicked hands and, as the tread churned backwards, he turned the tank to the right as hard and fast as he could.

“
Move,
you big bastard!” he said, pulling harder than he had to pull, as if he could muscle it around faster than it would go on its own.

He
had
to get out from under the falling wave of amorphous fungus, had to get back to the tunnel that led into the subterranean pyramid from which they had “escaped” only minutes ago.

This was no time to kid himself; if he didn't get into the pyramid, he and Allison were dead. Even in the tank they couldn't stand for long against the fungus.

One finger of the glistening, wet mass of vegetable matter fell noiselessly across the place where the tank had been only a moment ago. It curled back, bunched up on itself, was absorbed into the mother body. The rest of the creature, an endless hulking thing, came closer, forming a new finger to replace the old one.

Joel completed the turn and put the machine in top gear, stood on the wide accelerator plate and jammed it all the way down to the floorboards. The tank lurched, whined, and surged forward.

“Come
on
baby,” he said, as if it could hear him. “Move your big steel ass!”

A mammoth pseudopod of fungus fell on his right, a ridge of muck that must have weighed thousands upon thousands of tons. It oozed towards him, and the tip of it curled out in front of the tank, blocking his escape route.

“Damn!”

He wheeled to the left.

Another pseudopod fell on that side. It was at least twenty feet high, glimmering with yellow fluid, pustules bursting as it pressed itself in his direction.