The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (16 page)

Two figures stood in the roadway on the left, apparently waiting for a ride in the direction she had come. Aurora slowed to ask them if they knew the way to Millford, Utah. When they turned around, Aurora was startled to recognize a pupil of hers, Kevin Mackintosh.

‘What are you doing in Nevada, Mr. Mackintosh?’ she asked, astonished.

The young man’s eyes seemed glazed. Instead of answering, he nudged his companion. ‘We really
are
high, Ron,’ he mut-

tered. ‘That chick over there looks like one of my profs.’

‘Oh, that was real good stuff,’ the other assented, looking off in another direction. ‘What chick?’

Aurora grew a bit nervous. She shifted into first, and kept her foot on the clutch. ‘Have you any idea which way is the road to Utah?’ she asked earnestly.

Kevin Mackintosh seemed not to be looking at: anything. ‘The road to you-Tao,’ he breathed. ‘The seven-fold path. Look!’ He flung up both arms to the sunset. ‘Apocalypse! The wise virgins light their lamps! The black yoni of Night accepts the flaming lingam of Day!’

‘Yeah, War of the Worlds,’ said Ron.

‘Ma’am, my buddy Ron here and I have seen Hell itself. We have seen the death of the world, in flaming technicolour. Paratroops fighting to the death with Puppet People. They arrested our friends, but we got away.’

‘Who did?’ she asked. ‘The Puppet People?’

‘No, the Paratroople People. The Army. It’s the end of civilization.’

‘Repent!’ screamed the other. ‘Did you see
Gorgo?’

‘My buddy here and I are making our way across the Sahara here without water even, and we’re going to Morocco.’

Aurora relaxed a bit, recognizing in them a couple of not-too-bright kids from the college, dramatizing their first taste of pot. ‘If you’re not particular which way you get there,’ she said crisply, ‘you can come along with me to—I hope—Utah.’

‘No thank you, ma’am. I mean really, we’re going to Morocco; Ron’s got his dad’s airline credit cards. We’ve had it to here with this country. The real scene is Morocco, with Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and William Burroughs.’ He began to sing, off-key, an approximation of ‘The Road to Morocco’.

‘I dig,’ said his companion. ‘Did you see
Casablanca?’

‘If we ever get a ride out of here. There’s nothing going by but jeeps and tanks, like in
Battleground
, and they don’t stop.’

‘Thanks,’ said Aurora, and let out the clutch.

‘Not thanks,’ Mackintosh explained patiently.
‘Tanks.’

As she started driving off, Ron looked at her and screamed, ‘O my God, I’m coming down! O my God!
THERE’S A RAT GROWING RIGHT OUT OF HER HEAD!’

‘Yeah! Hey, Ron, you ever see
The Lost Weekend?’

A sign informed her that the lights on the left were those of Piedport, Nevada, four miles off the road. As Aurora was about to heave a sigh of relief and take the turnoff—for at least Piedport would have an hotel—the town’s lights went out. She stopped and waited for several minutes, but nothing happened. There was no use, as she saw it, stopping there, when she could as easily push on to a town at least equipped with lights.

The radio gave nothing but a squeal that excited B476. None of the pushbuttons seemed to have any effect other than changing the pitch of the whine. It was odd, because it could not be later than 9:0. There ought to be dozens of stations.

Manually she found a weak station in the southeast.

‘…y’all keep them cards and letters comin’, hear? Keep fahrin’ ’em right at me, now, we appreciate hearin’ from you, neighbours … tunes you want … Here’s a wahr service bulletin, folks, seems like they had a little blackout over Calyforny way. Nevada, Calyforny, Oregon, Utah, Washington … Iowa, Kansas …’

In the middle of its alarming list, the station faded into oblivion. She found a San Francisco station, then, but it only kept urging her not to call her power company.

‘They are doing everything in their—I mean, everything possible to restore service. I’ll just repeat the wire service bulletin with that message from the Pentagon: “The blackout has been caused by a generating plant short in Nevada, following an experiment the full nature of which cannot be divulged, but which was vital to our national security. Power will be restored as soon as possible.” That was the Pentagon’s message. Now, once again,
do not call
the power company. …’

She began to see military vehicles parked along both sides of the road. Apparently they were abandoned, or the occupants were playing possum. Perhaps there was more to what Mackintosh & Company had said than she’d supposed. And the blackout …

She pulled off the road and parked. Knowing the potential danger of Project 32 was disturbing, but having the danger become actual was too horrible to understand at once. She needed to skirt the thought, she decided, switching off the lights. She needed to contemplate the calmness of the sky.

It was brighter than she had ever seen it, since the farm in Minnesota. There were no lights below to blot anything out, and she was stunned by the heavens’ brilliance. There were Sirius

and Alderbaran, pointing to the Pleiades, Orion between them. There were Castor and Pollux. She thought once more of the nights when she had learned their names, peering through one of her father’s cracked, unusable telescopes.

At this time of year the farm would smell of corn and creak with crickets—as it did through nearly three seasons of the year. Unperiodically, through the night, the farm’s only ‘livestock’, the Rooster, would crow. Any time was dawn to the Rooster; he was like the broken clock on the mantel and the broken clock in the hall. Periodically, her father had set out to fix one of the clocks, but she never heard one of them tick.

He invented a chicken-skinning machine, but somehow hadn’t the heart to try it out on the Rooster, or indeed any chicken. So, though it was a fine-looking implement, they both agreed, it stood out on the lawn, becoming finally a rusty fixture, a perch for the Rooster when he announced the 11 p.m. dawn.

On the lawn were scattered further ornaments and perches as the years went by—A hot air balloon that leaked. A kind of mechanical birdbath shower which birds avoided. An improved kind of sewing machine. And about 168 telescopes, the first begun at Aurora’s birth, that is, at her mother’s death, the last left uncompleted seventeen years later.

Each time, he would grind lenses diligently for a day or two, then veer off into some other project. Of all the telescopes in the yard, the only one which worked was one he’d bought at a rummage sale and repaired with scotch tape. Through it Aurora had squinted at the Square of Pegasus, Vega and Cassiopeia’s chair, the same unchangeable stars she now looked at out the windshield.

A black, hideous shape came between her and the stars. The car door opened and a thick-necked dwarf in uniform climbed in beside her. He left the door open for a moment, to look at her in the light.

‘Keep cool, baby,’ he growled, waving a gun. ‘I’m General Grawk of the US Air Force, and I never raped a lady in my life. Never had to, if you get my meaning. Course there’s always a first time, ain’t there? Haha.’

‘What do you mean by this? Get out of my car!’ She said it in her most severe schoolmarm voice. He chuckled.

‘I’m commandeering this car, lady. National emergency. Maybe you heard about the big power failure?’ He thumbed his

chest. ‘I did that Anyway, I need a car and driver, and you’re elected.’ He moved over a bit closer. ‘It don’t have to be all
that
bad, you know.’

A faint squeal sounded from under the general.

‘Get up! You’re sitting on my pet rat!’ she shrieked.

An instantaneous transformation took place. One moment he was a confident, grinning, aggressive little ape; the next he was screaming and vaulting into the back seat. The body of B893 lay flattened on the seat cushion. Aurora picked it up by the tail. It was dead. A strange smile played across her features as she lifted it, turning in the light.

‘RATgetthatRATawayfromMEgetitawayRAT!’ he screamed.

‘Get out of my car. Now.’

The gunbarrel swept B893 out of her hand and out of the open door. Grawk climbed back into the front seat and looked at her with a changed—a more respectful—expression. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘Pretty cool. Pet rat, eh? That was good. But let’s get rolling, now. Turn right at the next milestone.’ He slammed the door. Aurora did not move.

‘I have another pet rat in the car with me,’ she said coldly, savouring each word. ‘A
live
one.’

‘WHERE?
O God, is it
on me?
Where?’

‘I have it safely out of your reach, for the moment. But unless you throw your gun in the back seat and start behaving like a gentleman, I shall
stuff this rat down your collar!’

‘You—you’re kidding.’ Long silence. ‘There couldn’t be another—is there?’ Another long silence, then the gun thudded into the back seat.

‘Now, general, I’ll drive you where you wish to go, if you’ll tell me what this is all about.’

‘We’ll head for NORAD HQ in Colorado. That’s safest,’ he said in a shaken voice. ‘I can’t tell you what I’m doing here—it’s a secret.’

‘If it has anything to do with Project 32, you may tell me,’ said Aurora and handed him her purse. ‘My identification is in there.’

‘Who are you?’ He fumbled in the purse, held up a card and trained a penlight on it ‘Aurora Candlewood, Ph.D., Special Psychological Consultant for Project 32. A young kid like you? What does the fancy title mean, kid?’

‘If you are going to tell me what I think you are going to tell me, it means Project 32 needs me badly.’

‘I’ll tell you what we need,’ he said. ‘We need a good dragon-slayer.’

‘Right. Now suppose you tell me a little more about the dragon?’

‘Rudis indigestaque moles’

O
VID

As the car picked up speed the conversation within slowed, until, by the time they were flying into the outskirts of the deserted city, the five had grown strangely silent.

The car swerved, slowed, bumped down steel rollers into an unlit tunnel. Cal felt it buffeted by blasts of steam and water; he could smell the suds. There was the scream of saws on steel, and the dead blackness popped and flashed with livid gleams. By their uncanny light, Cal saw he was alone. The four others, the car, everything familiar was gone but the third of the seat to which he was still safety-strapped, which moved forward on invisible tracks to some rendezvous of its own.

He crashed through double doors into a room full of blood-red light, full of well-dressed mute figures. Mannikins, he thought with relief. In the corners, naked mute limbs in charnel heaps. The upper half of a dummy, weakly upright, slid down an inclined oily countertop, cracking the wall with its face and falling back. A bell sounded distantly. Sprinklers drizzled on the non-existent fire, while delicate water-wheels revolved beneath them. In the atrosanguinous shadow, the dummy’s smashed face and nose-hole received the rain.

* * *

Brian Gallopini found himself inexplicably alone, as the seat to which he was fastened moved into dry yellow sunlight. Light blazed white-red on his retina; he squinted at the globes. Artificial suns? No, goldfish bowls, fishbowls of gold lofted on levers to the sun, a sun-offering. The goldfish floated belly-up.

* * *

Cats crawled along upper shelves, going from nowhere to nowhere. A few of them wore gold or silver watches strapped about their middles. One paused, near enough for her to read the watch. It was wrong. Daisy saw the date change from 7 to 8 with a click. The cat gave a tiny scream and moved faster. It was only then Daisy noticed it was pulling a little pie tin full of machine parts.

* * *

Dipterous toy helicopters roamed the room, weaving fine copper wire in peculiar, meaningless patterns. Jack yawned.

* * *

Every can seemed to have rusted enough to admit a few bacteria. The buildup of gas was terrific, as Harry gladly demonstrated. He plunged his knife into a can that exploded black juice over his hand. He laughed.

‘Sauerkraut!’ he said. ‘Rotten sauerkraut!’

Cal did not laugh. ‘It’s odd. Most of the stock is gone, and the rest is rotten. In only a few days. Mysterious. Is there anything left?’

Harry laughed again. ‘Nothing to write home about,’ he said, plunging his knife into another can. It squittered black and grey curds.

Later Cal would see how the system incorporated these exploding cans into a sort of ‘internal combustion’ engine, using an old auto cylinder block, reloading eight cans after every revolution. But just now he was watching the shopping carts.

* * *

Ferriferous were the stately wheels of the sumptuous ‘ironclad’, or locomotive, which stood upon rails of ferric metals, burnished bright. It looked powerful, and appearances, in this case, were not deceiving, for it fairly chuffed with impatience to be off. Steam issued forth and hissed insistence into the ironic fists, then the behemoth moved down inclined grooves towards an enormous loop-the-loop. Roaring up to 110 miles per hour, the leviathan looped and looped again. Switched into the vertical circle (¼ mile high), it would continue thus until it ‘ran out of
steam’, as it were.