Total Recall (29 page)

Quaid looked around for some way off. There was none; they were dangling below the gantry, and there was nothing else within reach. Quaid caught a glimpse of the open elevator door and saw part of a form, unmoving. That would be Melina, lying semiconscious in the elevator car, jolted by the same shock that had thrown them off. What could she do, even if alert and active? Quaid and Richter had to survive or fall together, on their own.

As they swung, Richter took advantage of Quaid’s distraction to maneuver himself close. He kicked Quaid in the crotch. Quaid managed to twist just enough at the last moment to take the brunt on his thigh, and his unanchored body swung away, diminishing the impact, but still it hurt.

The motion caused the cable to slip a little. Quaid was a little heavier, and he slid down, while Richter was pulled the same amount up.

“Don’t!” Quaid cried.

On the next swing, Richter was higher. He kicked Quaid in the ribs. Again Quaid tried to turn, making it a glancing blow, but again it was too solid a blow for comfort.

“Stupid—!” Quaid cried. “Listen to me!” They were swinging out of range of each other at the moment, but that was temporary. “If you kick me off, you’ll fall too!”

“Bullshit!” Richter replied. Then, swinging close, he kicked at Quaid’s head.

Once more Quaid was able only to decrease the force of the blow, not to stop it from scoring. His ears were ringing. “Think about it!” he exclaimed. “If I let go, my end of the cable will slip right over the top!”

Richter looked up, and finally realized that Quaid was right. He held back the knockout kick. He hadn’t been bright enough to see the danger, and wasn’t bright enough to see the solution either. Just as well.

Quaid grabbed Richter’s foot and quickly tied the dangling end of the man’s cable around his ankle. Richter furiously tried to kick him away. “What are you doing?”

Quaid pulled himself up his own cable and unleashed a furious barrage of punches and kicks at Richter, who was surprised to be attacked so foolishly. “Stop it!” he cried. “Stupid!” Just as Quaid had, moments before.

Quaid pummeled Richter, who fought back defensively, afraid to attack. He saw the void open below and was fazed by it. “If I fall, you fall!”

“Wrong,” Quaid said. With a mighty punch to the face, he dislodged Richter from his handhold. Tied at the feet, Richter fell headfirst. His momentum caused the cable to slide over the gantry, dropping him another twenty feet and simultaneously raising Quaid all the way to the gantry.

Quaid wrapped himself around the gantry and called to Richter, who was hanging upside down, like a swinging sandbag. “See you at the party, Richter.”

Richter tried to say something, but fear contorted his face as he realized he had been outmaneuvered.

Then Quaid let go of the cable. “Bottoms up!”

Eight more feet of line whipped through his hands, over the gantry, and Richter plummeted headfirst. His terrified scream followed him down.

Quaid hoped there was another quick way up. He still had to stop Cohaagen from destroying the reactor—and the whole human species.

Cohaagen and his crew were busy in the reactor control room. It was a stone chamber filled with complex mechanical systems and electronic consoles, just as in Quaid’s memory triggered by Kuato’s mindscan. All of the huge columns had tapered to smaller columns here. Sunlight poured in through the quartz ceiling. On one side was a stone wall with the hieroglyphic mandala.

Soldiers worked in different parts of the large room, planting explosives, running cable, and drilling holes for charges with jackhammers. The noise was excruciating.

A soldier drilled attentively. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up. It was Melina. Amazed, he froze.

Behind him, Quaid grabbed his jackhammer and drove it through his chest.

A nearby demo-man saw Quaid and came after him with his jackhammer. But this was Quaid’s weapon of choice. “Am I boring you?” he inquired as he bored through his opponent, plus two more who converged on him as he made his way to the mandala.

Cohaagen grabbed the detonator and hid.

Melina picked up a fallen soldier’s gun. She looked around.

A demo-man was sneaking up on on Quaid and was about to bore through his back. Melina shot the man in the nick of time.

Cohaagen connected wires to the detonator.

Quaid dueled with the demo-man at the mandala, churning him to a pulp. Then he threw down his jackhammer, yanked the explosives charge from a hole drilled in the mandala, and threw it far away.

He reached out to place his palm against the hieroglyphic stone palm, when Cohaagen called out.

“Sorry, Doug. I can’t let you do that.” Quaid turned to see Cohaagen holding the detonator. He signaled Quaid away from the altar. Quaid backed off.

“Once the reaction starts, it’d spread to all the turbinium in the planet,” Cohaagen said. “Mars would go into global meltdown. That’s why the builders never turned it on.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quaid said.

“And you do?” Cohaagen’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “The great Doug Quaid, here to save the planet. Sorry to disappoint you, but in thirty seconds the great Doug Quaid will be dead. Then I’ll blow this place up and be home in time for cornflakes.”

Cohaagen sighed and shook his head sadly. He had spent so much time training Hauser, honing him into the perfect Agency machine. Together they had discussed the uses of power, of terror. Hauser had been a natural. He had also been as close to a friend as Cohaagen had ever had. He missed the man. “I didn’t want it to end this way,” he said. “I wanted Hauser back. But no. You had to be Quaid.”

“I
am
Quaid.”

“You’re nothing!” Cohaagen shouted, suddenly furious at the man who had taken the place of his friend. “You’re a stupid program walking around on two legs. Everything about you, I invented: your dreams, your memories, your pathetic ambitions. ‘You coulda
been
somebody,’ ” he mocked. “You could have been real. But instead, you chose to be a dream.” Cohaagen held the detonator with one hand, while he pulled a gun out of his jacket with the other. He raised it. “And all dreams come to an end.”

The sound of a gunshot rang through the reactor. Cohaagen fell backwards, hit in the shoulder and arm. Melina stood by the elevator, blasting away. Quaid ran to kick the gun out of Cohaagen’ s reach and saw that the man had somehow managed to keep hold of the detonator. No, Quaid thought, the man was bluffing. Cohaagen wanted to live as much as anyone. He wouldn’t be eager to set off the blast that killed him.

Cohaagen saw the doubt in his eyes. He grinned evilly. And activated the detonator.

A huge explosion shook the room, destroying almost everything except the mandala, whose charge Quaid had removed. Cohaagen had not been bluffing!

A hole had been torn in the quartz roof. A powerful suction drew everything toward the aperture. Objects and bodies twirled up in a spiral, an inverted tornado.

Cohaagen clung to a piece of the reactor. Melina lodged herself in a corner. Quaid, sucked halfway toward the hole, made a Herculean effort to crawl down against the wind to reach the mandala. It had not been destroyed, and it was the key; if it remained operative, there was still a chance! How much destruction did the reactor tolerate before it triggered its own destruct mechanism? Had the No’ui allowed for the possibility of unrelated damage, such as a meteorite striking it? Maybe it wasn’t hair-triggered. He could only hope so!

He grabbed hold of a rope made taut by the wind and pulled himself down. The dome had been holed, but as long as there was a rush of wind out the hole, there was air to breathe. When that air ran out . . .

Cohaagen pulled himself over and stationed himself between Quaid and the mandala. He knew that it wasn’t necessarily over.

Quaid held on with his left hand and reached for the hieroglyphic palm print with his right.

“Don’t do it!” Cohaagen screamed above the rushing roar. “You’ll kill everybody!”

Quaid hesitated. Cohaagen’s voice rang with passionate intensity. Quaid was assailed by sudden doubts. How did he know that the memories Kuato had allowed to surface were real? What if they had been implanted, too? If Cohaagen were right, the alien machine would kill everyone on Mars. And Quaid would be responsible.

Cohaagen kicked at him, still arguing. “Every man! Every woman! Every child!” He furiously bashed Quaid’s left hand with his heel. “They’ll die, Quaid! They’ll die!”

Quaid’s mind was suddenly filled with the faces of every man, woman, and child he had seen in Venusville, the listless faces of people who had been drained of every vestige of pride and self-esteem. People who had been used and discarded like so much human refuse, mercilessly, remorselessly, by the very man who was now pleading for their lives.

One face in particular stood out: the deformed face of the child Quaid had glimpsed briefly from Benny’s cab. That memory had not been implanted. It was as real as the pain in his left hand. What kind of future would that child have under the rule of a man like Cohaagen?

Quaid knew the answer. He’d seen it all around him in Venusville. Cohaagen was lying—again. Cohaagen was playing games with his mind—again. Cohaagen was trying to manipulate him just as he manipulated everyone else. Cohaagen would say anything, do anything, to hold on to his power.
He
was the one who would destroy every man, every woman, every child on Mars, if he was allowed to continue.

But this time Quaid would stop him.

“Bullshit!” he shouted at Cohaagen. He stretched and placed his right palm against the hieroglyphic hand.

He felt a tingle. A voice seemed to speak in his mind.
Done
.

An awesome low-pitched rumble shook the control room. It was starting up! The other controls must have been mere window dressing, or intended for spot adjustments. Cohaagen had destroyed them, but it might have been like breaking the knobs off a radio: it might make it hard to adjust, but the guts of it remained operative.

All the mechanical systems started to move. The ancient machinery creaked and groaned. Hundreds of rods simultaneously descended.

Cohaagen’s armhold receded into the floor. He had to let go. He was sucked up to the ceiling and out the hole.

The rods dropped out of their sheaths into the pegholes in the ice. The whole glacier, far below, started to glow. The process was starting, and operating on its own now; Quaid’s action had been enough. The chemical processes would begin, and the nuclear fusion, and would continue until all Mars had air and heat and liquid water.

Melina was sucked closer to the hole. Quaid let himself be blown over toward her and tried to hold her in place. If they could just hang on until the pressure equalized—but that seemed impossible. First it would drop, here, finishing them.

All the junk in the abyss was regurgitated. There were more bodies, rifles, pieces of moles, rocks, sand. When it was all gone, and the air pressure dropped, the two of them would die too—but Mars and mankind would be saved. At least he would die in Melina’s arms; if he had to go, that was the way he wanted to do it.

The chamber filled with a hurricane of mist. It had a strange smell, and was warm and damp.

It was the air and water vapor from the reactor! Already the process was operating to make the new atmosphere!

More refuse was disgorged. Benny. Richter, still trailing his length of cable.

Melina was pulled toward the hole. Quaid clung to her but was drawn along with her by the unremitting wind. In fact, it was stronger now, as the No’ui’s factory gained momentum. Quaid knew that most of the air was going out through other vents, all around the planet, but as long as this hole remained, it would leak out here too.

They sailed up toward the dome, still linked. Quaid stretched out and tried to block the hole, but the pressure was too strong. It doubled him over, shoving him and Melina out.

Outside the wind quickly dissipated. Quaid and Melina dropped to the side of the volcano, a few yards from Cohaagen’s body. That was a grotesque thing, its eyeballs ruptured, tongue swollen and protruding, and blood at the ears. Cohaagen had had countless people executed by depressurization for such minor things as resisting false arrest; now he had been served similarly. That was justice.

The air was drawn out of Quaid’s lungs. He and Melina gasped for breath.

Quaid squinted, trying to protect his eyeballs as long as possible. Even in this hopeless state, he was fighting for life, for just a few more seconds!

A mammoth geyser of water vapor and gas was spraying out of the dome, forming a huge white cloud. The warmth of it blasted out at them.

Quaid grasped Melina’s hands and felt her fingers squeezing his. They were dying together, knowing that Mars and mankind would live.

The mountain vibrated as the No’ui equipment intensified its operation, and wind tore out of it. The dirt was shaken from the side of Pyramid Mountain, revealing traces of an actual alien pyramid underneath. Its nature had been concealed, but now it needed to be hidden no longer.

Quaid’s and Melina’s mucous membranes started to bleed. They clung tightly to each other’s hands, knowing that this was the end.

Then the expanding cloud engulfed them. Drops of warm water splattered against their bodies, and bits of fluff sailed by. Those were the winged seeds of the special plants the No’ui had engineered, he knew, being flung out on the wind, to take root and start converting the hostile Mars soil to organic matter so that regular terrestrial plants could grow there later. It was the start of the terraforming of Mars, making of it an Earthly paradise. He was very glad he had seen this before he died.

Then he realized that he was breathing! Melina was panting beside him. They drew in more air, hungrily. They looked at each other. Was this the other side of death, and their spirits were breathing free?

The cloud moved on, but they still could breathe. They looked up.

The red Martian sky was turning blue in the region above the mountain.

The new air was spreading out, and they were close enough to receive its benefit! That was why they had suffered but not died, and now the air was thickening, and they were breathing almost normally! They were not dying after all!