Worlds Apart (12 page)

“Don’t take it yet. We’ll get a consensus and leave word with O’Hma. Any other questions?”

“No. I’ll call back in one month. Let me talk with my exwife.”

They’d signed a one-year marriage contract, partly in the hope of getting Jeff space on the shuttle. “Hello, exhusband.”

“So. How’s the weather up there?”

Charlie’s Will

Jeff heard the robot drone before he saw it. It came out of the morning haze to the southwest, banked toward him, then coasted silently overhead, releasing its package. About twenty seconds later its engines kicked back in and it sped off to the east.

The bright red parachute floated straight down and just missed getting hung up on the golden cross in front of the hospital. That would have been interesting, trying to find a long ladder before some scavengers got to it.

It was a plain metal box with no markings. No obvious way to get it open, either. He walked around it, puzzled, and was just about to turn it over when there was a faint “pop” and the top sprang open. Inside, dozens of half-liter bottles were nestled in spun glass. He filled the wagon and pulled it inside to the safe.

After three wagonloads he put two bottles in his sad-dlebags and locked up the safe. He wrapped the fuel cell in dirty clothing and put it in the bottom of his canvas bag. When he went out to get his bike there were two boys standing there, looking at the parachute and the metal box. One had a shotgun and the other had a pistol stuck in his belt. He recognized them as the two hunters from the family he’d treated for syphilis.

“Hello, boys. How’s the girl doing?”

“What girl?” said the one with the shotgun. “The girl who had the fungus, remember?”

“Oh yeah. She’s okay. What’s all this shit, we heard the rocket and saw it drop this shit.”

“It’s medicine. They have typhoid down in Tampa. I’m trying to fix it so no one up here gets it. It’s pretty ugly.”

“So where’d the rocket come from? The Worlds?”

“No,” Jeff said slowly, “you retarded? We killed those bastards a long time ago. This is from Mobile, Alabama. That’s where they keep stuff like that.”

“Yeah, Willy,” said the one with the pistol. “You never seen them?”

“Maybe I seen ’em and maybe not.” He stared at Jeff. “So you got a radio in there.”

“Not here. I have to go down to St. Petersburg. There’s a Public Health Service building down there.”

“They got fuel cells, then.”

“No, it’s a sort of bicycle contraption. It makes electricity; you have to pedal while you talk.” Jeff had actually seen such a device, in a fire station outside of Orlando, but it didn’t work. “Roll up your sleeves. I’ll give you the typhoid medicine.” So the first person Jeff gave the gift of life was a mean little punk who would have killed him for a bar of corroded silver.

The sentry on the sand road to Forest-in-Need Farm stayed hidden but said hello as Jeff passed him. They had put heads on stakes all along the road. In the week Jeff was away, the ants had polished them clean.

Tad was waiting for him at the gate. He shook hands solemnly and said, “Marsha’s got the death.”

It gave Jeff a curious hollow feeling, not quite grief. He had seen a lot of people with the death, but no one he
had known. No one he had made love to, or fought beside. “Well, let me see her.”

She was on the porch, sitting next to the bath. Jeff braced himself, but she didn’t look as bad as the others he had seen, because she had been in good health and eaten well. They were usually emaciated and covered with sores. She looked normal except for her posture, slack and immobile.

“Marsha? Say hello to Healer.”

She looked up, her eyes slightly crossed, the pupils very small. Lips parted and wet. “Healer. Squealerdealer. Where’s the wagon, dragon?” Her head lolled forward. “Fraggendragon.” A string of drool dropped from her open mouth. She caught it on the second try and played with it.

“This is the second day. She woke up with it yesterday. How long?”

“A week, maybe two. There’s nothing I can do for her.”

“I know.”

Jeff shook his head. There had been a short note with the bottles. The death was some sort of virus that was kept in check by a number of factors, the most important apparently being the level of GH in the blood. When the virus began to thrive it reproduced very rapidly, its toxins concentrating in the brain and spinal column. The frontal lobes went first, which caused the “oracular” stage of the disease, but eventually the entire nervous system degenerated. The note said not to waste antibody on anyone who had developed symptoms, because, at best, they would live on as mindless cripples.

“Let’s go into the living room,” Jeff said. “I have some news.”

They sat down at the low table. “Can anybody over-hear us?”

“They’re all out.”

“Listen…you are not going to get the death. Neither is anybody else in the family. Marsha is the last one.” Tad just looked at him.

“With the radio, I got in contact with a civil defense computer in Washington.” Jeff didn’t know how Tad felt about the Worlds, and didn’t want to risk the truth. “It told me where I could find a supply of an antibody, a medicine to prevent the death.”

“Can you…” He looked toward the porch.

“No. It would only make her die more slowly.”

“How come, why hasn’t anybody ever heard about this?”

“They came up with it too late. All the old people were dead or dying, and there was no way to distribute it. No mass communication, to even tell people about it.”

“Wait, now,” Tad said. “You’re not going to tell people.”

“I might tell some people like you, nonbelievers, so they can plan ahead. Otherwise, I’ll say it’s for something else, typhoid.”

Tad leaned back on his elbows. “I see. If I live a couple more years, people will start to wonder.”

“Even your own family. If I were you I’d stash some supplies out in the woods, then fake the death. Wander off during the night; a lot of people do it. Go someplace and start over.”

“Hard to leave.”

“Your decision. I’ve got enough medicine for more than twenty thousand people, so over the next few years I should be able to get almost everyone in the area. Sooner or later people will have to accept the fact that the death was only a disease, and that people aren’t getting it any more. But it may be hard on the first people who live into the mid-twenties. Going against Charlie’s Will.”

He nodded slowly. “What I could do, I could wander off like you say, wait a few years, and come back. Say I went a little crazy but it cleared up.”

“That might work.” Jeff pulled over his saddlebags and took out the hypo. “Here, I’ll get you first Rest of the family at dinner.”

The two men spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fix the auxiliary pump outdoors, but it turned out that a plastic washer was broken, and they didn’t have anything to replace it. Jeff took the pieces and said he would try to find one.

He felt a little out of place, being the only person with clothes on, but he didn’t want to burn. He enjoyed watching the family work and play, strange contrast to the last bloody time he was with them. The two-headed baby had died, and its mother seemed relieved. Jommy was playing catch with the younger children; they threw the ball slowly so he could manage with one hand. The two boys with typhoid had recovered enough to do light chores.

“Who takes over after you leave?” Jeff said softly, while they were reassembling the broken pump.

“Guess it’ll be Mary Sue. She’s seventeen.”

“Not too bright, though.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Downright stupid, actually.” He leaned into the wrench with savage force, then tugged back on it. “Hell. We’ll just be takin’ it apart again…why not you?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you take over. The family’d accept you, and you know as much as anybody, and you can look up whatever you don’t know.”

“I’ve got to get the vaccine out. Have to keep moving.”

“I don’t see why. Half the people you give it to’d kill you just for the hell of it, if they weren’t afraid. You don’t owe them nothing.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to take a long view of it. What’s going to happen to me when I’m
really
old? If things don’t change. I might have another fifty years left. Maybe a hundred, if we get things going the way they were before the war.”

“How old are you, anyhow.”

Jeff hesitated. “Thirty-five.”

“Wonder if you’re older than Big Mickey, down at Disney World.”

“He looks a little younger. But he can’t remember when he was born; I talked to him once.”

“You know, I went to see my great-great-grandfather once. He was 120.1 don’t know if I’d ever want to be that old. He could hardly get around.” He finished tightening the last bolt and stood up. “It really changes your whole way of looking at things. I could live another hundred years too.” He shook his head and whistled.

Jeff stayed at the farm overnight, working out tentative plans with Tad, and then for three weeks pedaled around Hillsborough County, giving “typhoid” inoculations, ending up back at Plant City. The sun was about an hour from setting as he locked bis bicycle and pulled the wagon down the sidewalk to the hospital entrance.

Someone had tried to batter in the unbreakable glass doors. They were almost opaque with overlapping white shatter-stars, and a shotgun or scattergun blast had punched a neat round hole in the middle of one.

Inside, a tile mosaic wall had been defaced with a smeared lopsided cross topped by a C. It smelled recent.

He rushed upstairs, knowing what he would find. The hunters had not believed his story about the pedal-powered radio in St. Petersburg. They had found the radio room and taken apart every piece of equipment, evidently with a crowbar. Wiring ripped out and cast aside. Circuit boards scattered over the floor, crushed.

Jeff righted a chair and sat for a long time, thinking. Until dark he sat, considering various things he might do to the boys, but most of them involved wasting ammunition and putting himself in some danger. He forced himself to think practically.

He ought to go back to Forest-in-Need. Put a wellarmed family between himself and this kind of madness.

Forget the plan he and Tad had made, forget the antibody; let them have their short furious lives and Charlie’s gift.

But to be completely realistic, he was probably safer moving on, protected by his Healer pose. If Tad’s family gets attacked every couple of months, and a couple of people die in every attack, how long could he expect to survive? Marianne could work out the probabilities for him.

That was a factor. If he stayed with the family he would never talk to Marianne again. If he went on the road with the medicine, he might find another working radio. There was a family down by Bealsville that had mules and had offered to trade for his bicycle. A mule could carry a lot of medicine.

And if he stayed here for another year or two, people might wonder why the grownups he treated never got the death. Logic was a rare commodity in Plant City nowadays, but it would only take one person making the connection.

It would be good to go farther south, with winter coming on. The days were fairly warm, but last year there’d been two nights of frost. Whatever was happening to his joints didn’t like cold. He would wake up almost immobilized with pain. It was warmer down in the Keys.

1

O’Hara found Room 6392, hesitated, and knocked firmly. The door slid open. It was a small room with nothing but a table, two chairs, and a cot. A woman stared at her from the other side of the table. She was an older woman, in her sixties, face a web of worried lines, chin resting on interlaced fingers, no expression in her tired eyes.

“Come in, O’Hara. Sit down.” She did; the door closed behind her. “Aren’t you happy with your job?”

“May I ask who you are?”

“I’m on the Board, of course. I can’t tell you my name.”

“We’ve met once before. You administered the preferment and aptitude tests to my class, ninth form.”

She smiled slightly. “Thirteen years ago. You have a remarkable memory for faces. Aren’t you happy with your job?”

O’Hara settled back in her chair. “I haven’t made any great effort to keep that secret. No, I’m not particularly happy. Is that surprising?”

“Why aren’t you happy?”

“It’s not a job for a nontechnical person. It took months for me to gain the confidence of the people whose work I coordinate. Some of them still see me as an interloper.”

“Would you care to name them?”

“No. I don’t think they’re wrong.”

“Yet you haven’t filed for a transfer.”

“I assumed the Board had a good reason for giving me the assignment.”

“The Board can be in error. Weren’t you trying to second-guess us?”

“In a way. I’ve read my profile, of course. It looked like a test.”

“It was. And you were doing quite well, until yesterday.” She opened a drawer and took out a piece of paper. “This is a request from Coordinator Berrigan’s office, that you be transferred to the Janus start-up program. Did you have anything to do with this?”

O’Hara closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “On the contrary. One of my husbands suggested it several months ago. I refused because I thought the Board would interpret it as manipulation. I mentioned it to Dr. Berrigan, who is a friend, and she agreed.”

“That the Board would react negatively?”

“That’s right. I was going to wait until after this year’s evaluations, and then write up a detailed request.”

“To be transferred to Janus.”

O’Hara shook her head slightly. “Just for a position more appropriate to my talents. I expected that the Janus Project would be filled up by then.” She leaned forward and looked at the piece of paper. “Was this request made by my husband?”

“Not directly; the program that selected you was written by someone else. But both your husbands were consulted as a matter of course.” She sat back and folded her arms over her chest. “Please understand that I personally don’t disbelieve you. But only two other people were chosen from the Policy track, for a project employing over seven hundred. Given the…unique assets that you possess, it wouldn’t be difficult to arrange things so that the program would have to choose you as one of the three.”