The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (49 page)

Sirens blared overhead, too late for the blinded man’s wife and daughters, and a police helicopter came flying over Hamidia Road, high above the throngs of scared and ailing civilians. “Warning! Poison
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gas is spreading!” the copter’s loudspeakers bellowed over the heartrending cries of the frightened populace. Whirring propellers whipped up the air around Noon, but could do little to drive back the toxic cloud advancing southward. “Run! Run for your lives!”

Too little, too late,
Noon thought bitterly, while yet admiring the courage and discipline of the police officers trying to spread the alarm. The suffocating white fumes crept forward, forcing the helicopter to climb higher to avoid being caught within the toxic cloud, even as Noon’s worst fears cemented into certainty.

The chemical plant up north,
he realized. Built decades ago by an American company, Union Carbide, to manufacture various forms of insecticide. Critics had been insisting for years that the outdated and run-down facility, housing many tons of toxic chemicals, was a disaster waiting to happen; as an engineering student, Noon had personally toured the plant in the past, and been appalled by its crude design and deteriorating condition, as well as by the slipshod conduct of its poorly trained employees. Corporate greed and inertia had kept the plant in operation, however.

Until tonight, when Bhopal’s luck finally ran out.

Fools!
Noon thought angrily, gripping the pole with both his hands and ankles. Who had allowed such an obvious hazard to fester all this time, upwind of a major population center? Even knowing what he did about the plant’s defects and dangers, Noon was still taken aback by the scale of the catastrophe unfolding around him. At least four kilometers of densely packed slums and shantytowns, as well as a major railway station, he recalled, were crammed between the Union Carbide plant and this suburban district.
How many victims have there been already?
he wondered, envisioning the deadly fog as it swept through block after block of crowded neighborhoods, suffocating people in their sleep.
How many deaths?

“Thousands,” he estimated, his voice a whisper. Thousands would die—no, were doubtless dead already. He railed inwardly at the entrenched corruption and incompetence that had made this atrocity possible.
If I were in charge of the world,
he vowed,
such criminal carelessness would not be allowed.
A fierce resolve gripped him, that the world,
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overrun by imbeciles and charlatans, was careering out of control, sorely in need of a firm hand at the wheel.
Someone
needed to put this long-suffering planet to rights, and Noon could think of no one better suited to do so than himself.
Not
if
I ruled the world,
he corrected himself, fully understanding his true destiny at last.

When.

A voice from the street below intruded upon his lofty musings. “Noon!” Seven shouted, having fought his way through the tumult to catch up with the youth. Like Noon before him, he hung on to the bottom half of the lamppost to keep from being carried away by the panicked horde. “We have to get away from here!”

Was that all this colossal slaughter meant to Seven? Merely another daring mission to escape from? With a disdainful sneer, Noon dropped to the sidewalk below, his muscular legs easily absorbing the impact of his landing. “Leave me alone!” he snapped.

Twin antennae sprang from Seven’s servo. He aimed the sensors at the approaching cloud, then scowled at the sequence of beeps the wand emitted. “That’s methyl isocyanate,” he informed Noon urgently. “Even you can’t survive that.”

Despite the youth’s justifiable wrath, Seven’s warning caught Noon’s attention. He was quite familiar with MIC, a volatile and highly toxic compound that reacted violently with water. He could readily imagine what a cloud of gaseous MIC could do to a human being’s eyes and lungs.

Even still, he was not yet ready to abandon Bhopal to its ghastly fate. “But all these people!” he objected, his adolescent voice cracking. “They’re dying by the hundreds!”

“I know,” Seven said grimly. The servo’s antennae retracted and he hurriedly gave his all-purpose instrument a new set of coordinates. By now, the bulk of the fleeing crowd had moved on, leaving them alone upon the sidewalk, amid the dead and the dying. Only a few paces away, in the middle of a street, an old woman in a bright yellow sari writhed upon the asphalt, drowning in her own fluids. She was only one of many dozens, unable to outrun the choking death that had come upon her in the night. “It’s too late,” Seven insisted, his face hardening into a stoic mask. “There’s nothing we can do now.”

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A familiar blue fog began to form behind Seven, but Noon resisted stepping toward the shimmering portal. “My friends!” he reminded Seven, staring upward at the nearby apartment complex. His classmates from the university—Darshan, Rajiv, Zail, Maneka—were surely up there now, in a penthouse apartment belonging to Zail’s older brother. “I can’t just leave them!”

Seven followed Noon’s gaze to the upper stories of the towering concrete building. “If they’re high enough, your friends should be all right,” he stated confidently, “provided they stay indoors and keep the windows closed.” He looked north, toward the sprawling slums surrounding the city. “It’s those who live closer to the earth, or without shelter at all, who will bear the brunt of this horrible accident.”

His cold-blooded analysis of the situation fanned the flames blazing within Noon, but the brilliant teen could not refute Seven’s assessment. In theory, his friends would likely survive, unlike the gasping masses impelled into the streets by the ever-expanding cloud of poison. Already, the first faint whiffs of the MIC threatened him and Seven, causing Noon’s eyes and throat to burn.
This is it,
he realized.
My last chance to save myself.
He could either join the retreating mob in their panic-stricken flight from the gas—or take the preternatural avenue of escape offered by Gary Seven.

Misty white tendrils slithered down the sidewalk, licking at his ankles. Seven lingered at the periphery of a very different fog, one that glowed blue and radiant. “Noon!” he called out stridently, his face and figure growing indistinct within the numinous azure mist. “We can’t wait any longer!”

He was right, damn him. Holding his breath, his eyes screwed tightly shut against the searing chemical fumes, Noon swallowed his pride and ran into the roiling cloud of plasma, his fists clenched in anger and frustration. He half-expected to collide with Seven inside the incandescent haze, but he encountered no resistance at all, the older man having apparently dematerialized mere instants before. Opening his eyes, Noon slowed to a trot within the opaque blue limbo Seven somehow used to flit hither and yon about the Earth. The transporter’s electric tingle was pleasant compared to the caustic
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effects of the MIC. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, which still burned slightly, but the pain quickly faded, suggesting that no permanent damage had been done.
Not to me, that is.

Many thousands in Bhopal could not say the same. Even the survivors, he expected, would bear the scars of this day for the rest of their lives, in the form of lasting illnesses and injuries, not to mention painful memories of loved ones lost.
Never again,
he decided, a look of unshakable determination upon his youthful face.
I shall not permit it.

He kept walking forward until the mist began to thin. “Seven!” he cried out impatiently, desiring to waste no more time dealing with the crafty American’s technological sleight-of-hand. There was too much to be done, there were too many injustices to be remedied. “Can you hear me, Seven? We must speak at once!”

As he stepped out of the tingling plasma, Noon expected to find himself back in Seven’s offices in New York. Instead he had returned to his college dormitory in New Delhi, over six hundred kilometers north of Bhopal. The glowing fog evanesced rapidly, leaving the irate teenager and the older American in the center of Noon’s private room, which was just as cluttered and cozy as he had left it. An electric typewriter and pocket calculator sat atop the heavy
sheshamwood
desk, next to piled textbooks and research papers. More books, ranging from advanced engineering texts to classics of Asian and Western literature, bulged from the inadequate bookshelves or accumulated in stacks upon the simple
dhurrie
carpet covering the floor. An ivory chess set, the pieces carved in martial poses, rested on a hand-carved
chowkie
stool, beside a smallish television set perched atop a heap of painted wooden milk cartons. Light mosquito netting covered the wrought-iron posts of his unmade bed, while the Nishan Sahib, the scarlet pennant of the Sikh people, adorned the monsoon-blue wall above his desk.

The familiar setting failed to quench his righteous fury at the inexcusably preventable disaster that had befallen Bhopal. “I suppose you expect me to thank you,” he hissed venomously at Seven, “for rescuing me in the nick of time.” He angrily kicked over the carved wooden stool bearing the chessboard, scattering pawns and bishops to the far
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corners of the room. “Never mind that, while we were playing spy games at the South Pole, my people were dying, gassed to death like rats being exterminated!”

He recalled the scurrying vermin he and Seven had encountered immediately upon their arrival in Bhopal. Small wonder the rodents had been so agitated in that dismal alley; they must have scented the fatal venom approaching on the wind.
Did those rats fare any better than their two-legged brethren?
he wondered morosely.
And why was there no advance warning alerting city dwellers of the accident at the plant?
There should have been time enough to raise some manner of alarm, if only to warn people to get indoors and close their windows.
More administrative incompetence,
he guessed, his blood boiling at the needless loss of life.
Simpletons! Half-wits!

“I am very sorry,” Seven volunteered, “that this disaster has struck your country.” He stood stiffly at the back of the room, in front of a shelf crammed with used hardcovers and paperbacks. “It’s a terrible thing.”

His feeble condolences were not enough for Noon. “Then why couldn’t you have averted it?” he accused Seven, turning savagely on the older man. “Why was a satellite over Antarctica more important than that ticking time bomb of a plant next to Bhopal?”

“I’m not omniscient,” Seven stated quietly, taking no offense at Noon’s harsh words. “There was no way of knowing that this was going to happen tonight.”

“That plant was a menace that should have been shut down years ago!” Noon paced back and forth across the floor, unable to stand still. He hurled his heated reproaches at Seven like poison darts. “Everyone knew that! Why didn’t you?”

“That’s not my job,” Seven answered, refusing, much to Noon’s aggravation, to accept any complicity in the nightmare they had just exited. “What’s happening in Bhopal is a tragedy of horrendous, even historic, proportions, Noon, but it was only an industrial accident, not the start of a world war. My primary mission is to prevent mankind from destroying itself completely.” He stepped toward Noon, raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I can’t solve all of Earth’s social
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and economic problems. Nor should I. Those are for your own institutions—your own leaders and reformers—to grapple with as best they can. I’m sorry.”

Noon could not believe his ears. “Accidents happen? Is that all you can say to me?” He heard shouting, and racing footsteps, outside the room, the dormitory jolting to life despite the lateness of the hour.
News of the disaster is spreading,
he surmised, none too surprised by this development. If bad news traveled quickly, then word of Bhopal’s agonized convulsions must be crossing the country faster than a supersonic jet.

He strode across the room and switched on his small portable television set. It took less than a second to locate a special emergency bulletin, transmitted live from Bhopal. On the screen, thousands of injured victims mobbed a hospital emergency room, completely overwhelming the unprepared doctors and nurses. An ashen-faced reporter, clutching a microphone within his trembling fingers, informed viewers that equally horrific scenes were taking place at hospitals throughout the entire city. Preliminary estimates suggested that as many as twenty thousand people were in desperate need of medical attention, far more than Bhopal’s overstressed emergency services could even begin to cope with. The camera lingered on row after row of choking and sobbing Indians stretched out on hastily erected cots outside the hospital. Many more, perhaps beyond help, were left to die on blankets and mats laid out in the parking lot, largely ignored by the frantic hospital workers madly running about, trying in vain to keep up with the tidal wave of poisoned refugees.

Noon lowered the volume on the television, content to let the hideous images speak for themselves. “This is more than just an ‘accident,’ ” he spat at Seven. “This is an obscenity that should have
never
been allowed to occur. In a better world, a world under firm control, such abominable negligence would not be tolerated.” He angrily slammed his fist into his open palm. “Least of all by the likes of you!”

“Perhaps,” Seven offered by way of paltry consolation, “this tragedy will lead to positive steps to prevent future accidents of this nature. Increased safety standards. Greater awareness of the dangers of
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stockpiling dangerous chemicals near heavily populated areas. Stricter enforcement of whatever environmental statutes already exist.” His dark suit, and pious platitudes, reminded Noon, unfavorably, of an undertaker. “It is a sad but universal principle that the most lasting lessons frequently come at the highest cost. It’s small comfort now, I understand, but such disasters often spur enormous progress in the long run. I know; I’ve seen it happen before.”