Earthbound

5

We spread through the building, flipping light switches on and off. Suddenly, I heard a sustained musical note.

“What’s that?”

“A-440,” Namir said. “Like a tuning fork.” We followed the sound to the Women’s Lounge area, where a small cube had been left on.

“Same guy,” Alba said. The one we called Spy—it couldn’t be the same one literally; we’d left him twenty-five light-years away. Just a standard “human” interface for the Others.

He looked out of the cube, unblinking, for another minute or so. Then the tuning-fork sound ended, and he spoke:

“We have decided to give you power again, for one week, to see what happens.” The screen went blank.

“One week,” Paul said. “What do we do first?”

“Let’s see if the cars work,” Alba said. “One of those panel trucks, or a little bus.”

I followed her out to the lot, carrying my superfluous pistol. Card came out, too. The morning was pleasant, still cool, about nine o’clock.

She got into the first car and punched in N-A-S-A on the dash keyboard.

“Shit.” Faint numerals appeared on the windshield, OOH OOM. “They probably all drained out.”

We tried two others and got the same. Card found the recharging station and unreeled a cable out to a small bus. He plugged it into the rear.

“All right!” Alba called out from the driver’s seat. She hopped down. “Is there another cable?”

“Two more. Maybe do that panel truck?” She looked at me and rubbed her chin. “Do you know how to drive?”

“Umm… it’s been a while.” I had a license back in 2070, but moved to Mars in ’72. “Sixty-some years. I suppose cars are a lot different.”

“But you can,” she said to Card.

He shrugged. “I have a car, but I live in LA. Haven’t touched a steering wheel in years.”

“You may be about to.” She pointed to a stolid-looking blocky sedan. “Might as well charge that one up, too. We may want to look official.”

He went off to do that. “How long do they take to charge up?”

“An hour, maybe a couple of hours. Depends on the range, mainly. And whether they’re hooked up to free energy. You probably want to take the sedan to get the most miles.”

“Couldn’t fit Snowbird in there.”

“Well, the panel truck, then.” She pointed back at the building.

Paul was at the door. “Carmen,” he called, “we have a problem.”

“Only one,” Alba said. “How nice.”

I went to him. “Snowbird’s hurt. Another stray round hit her.”

“How bad?”

“Who can say? She didn’t even tell anybody about it; Dustin saw the hole.”

We walked back to the snack area, where the Martian was standing in a corner. That was normal; she even slept standing up.

“It’s a small thing, Carmen,” she said. “Just a small bullet, which didn’t hit any vital organs.”

“Let me see.” She turned around and showed me, a small black dot high on her back, about where a human shoulder would be. There was a little pink froth of blood.

“I can feel exactly where it is,” she said. “It’s not doing any harm.”

Paul was standing behind me. “Are there any doctors for Martians at that Russian place?”

“There are members of the blue family. They’re something like doctors.”

“We have to get you there anyhow, for food. This just makes it a little higher priority.”

“It’s too far,” she said.

“Not anymore,” he said. “I’m a pilot. We just have to dig up an airplane somewhere.”

“That would be a figure of speech?” Snowbird said. “They don’t bury airplanes?”

“Right… Damn, I threw away my cell. Do you still have yours?”

“Think I can find it.” I went into the next room, where we’d changed into NASA work clothes. My cell was in the corner where I’d tossed it, the power light a barely visible dull red. I plugged it into the wall and it went bright red, then yellow, then green. I took it in to Paul.

He punched a few numbers and shook his head. “Nothing’s up and working yet, I suppose. Do you speak any Russian?”

“No, nyet.”

“I do,” Snowbird said. “So does Namir. We used it sometimes on the starship.”

I recalled that Namir’s father had come from Russia. He’d gone back for some Olympics and brought home a souvenir balalaika, which was why our mysterious spy had such an odd instrument aboard a starship.

I took the phone from Namir and was looking at it, trying to decide what to do next, when it suddenly rang, the anonymous-caller tone. I punched the answer button, and a young woman’s face appeared.

“Carmen Dula?” she said. “You look just like your picture!”

“Um… most people do.”

“Sorry.” She covered her eyes with a hand and winced. “I am Wednesday Parkman, calling from the office of the president. At Camp David, Maryland.”

“Okay. What does the president want?”

“Well, I don’t know, really. I was told to call your number and Paul Collins’s until one of you answered. But you answered right away. So let me try to find the president?”

“Sure, and Paul’s here, too.”

“Hold on!” Her face left, and we saw the ceiling for a moment, and then a slow pan of Monet’s lilies, with a cello playing softly.

“I don’t guess she’s had this job for too long,” I said.

“How the hell did they get up to Camp David without power?” Paul said.

“You couldn’t walk there in a day,” I said.

The lilies dissolved, replaced by an important-looking man I recognized just as he said his name. “Dr. Dula, I’m Morris Chambers. We met briefly at the White House.”

“It seems like a long time ago.”

“Doesn’t it. The president is drawing together a committee to deal with the current”—he made a helpless gesture—“situation, and he’d like you to come here as soon as possible.”

“Washington,” Paul said, “or Camp David?”

“Washington is chaos,” he said. “Once you’re in the air, we’ll give you a code word that will allow you to land at Camp David.”

“Okay. So what do we get into the air with? We’re still on the Armstrong Space Force Base.”

“Let me check.” He got up from the desk, and we had another minute of Monet and strings. He appeared again.

“You were rated for multi-engine commercial a half century ago. Airplanes are simpler now, but there’s no GPS.” Of course not, no satellites.

“If there are charts and a compass, I can sort it out. It would have computers, even without GPS?”

He looked away from the phone and then nodded. “Navigation computers, yes. There is a subsonic twelve-passenger NASA plane waiting for you on Runway 4, South terminal. That’s the only secure terminal, they say, so go directly there. Security there wants your license-plate number.”

Alba was leaning in the door. “Government plate, 21D272,” she said. “It’s a little blue bus.” Paul repeated it.

“What will this committee be doing?” I asked. “What can they do in one week?”

“The key phrase is ‘maximum survival.’ We estimate that there are still about 300 million people alive in America after yesterday. We would like to have… a maximum still alive a year from now. Having learned how to live without technology.”

“It won’t be 300 million,” Paul said. “It won’t even be 100 million.”

The bureaucrat’s face didn’t change. “You understand what we’re facing. It will be a disaster of biblical scope no matter what we do. We do want to maximize the number who survive, but we also want to preserve a semblance of the American way of life.”

Paul nodded. “That will be interesting. I’ll call you next from the airplane.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me. “Cheeseburgers and idiotic television? I wonder what the American way of life is nowadays.”

“If they really want maximum survival,” Namir said, “they’re aiming for a totally protective welfare state that’s also a police state. Which identifies the ones chosen to survive, and lets the rest go find some way to die. Or is there some humane alternative?”

“We have plenty of time to talk about it en route. We’ll be in the air most of the day.”

“Slow plane?” Alba said.

Namir nodded slowly. “We’ll be going by way of Russia, of course. They’d never allow us to take Snowbird there if we went to Camp David first.”

“Of course. Over the Pole,” I said. Hoping the Others don’t decide to turn off the power prematurely.

We loaded the bus in a hurry, deciding to hold on to all the food and weapons. We could use up the perishables on the way to Camp David, and the rest might come in handy next week.

Alba did the driving; she knew the way, and nobody else but Card had driven during this century. Leaving the place, we passed a sight I could have lived without, a trio of buzzards tearing up the body on the sidewalk. Paul winced at the sight but didn’t say anything.

The guards at the airfield gate knew Alba, of course, and waved us through. There were a couple of dozen planes parked around, but she followed a line painted on the tarmac that led to Runway 4, where a woman was standing by a small passenger plane.

One problem was immediately manifest: you got into the plane by climbing a narrow set of stairs that led to a narrow door—not wide enough for a Martian. Fortunately, the baggage compartment was pressurized, and the bay was a couple of meters wide. The ramp going up to it was a conveyor belt; she gave a thumping Martian laugh as she rolled up.

Paul was talking to the woman while this was going on. She was a flight controller who also flew, but she’d never piloted one this big, and she’d never flown without GPS. Paul hadn’t either, in a real-life situation, but in Space Force training he’d flown everything from gliders to spaceships. By the seat of his pants, as they say.

They went up into the cockpit and checked out the emergency navigation system, which could work by compass headings and a VR cube that showed what the ground looked like from any altitude over any place on Earth. Goggles that could see through clouds.

It only took a few minutes to load up our provisions and weaponry. “Well,” Alba said, “I guess I’ll be leaving you now.”

“Not if you don’t want to,” Paul said, looking down the aisle of the plane. “This is an alien planet to us; you and Card are our native guides. You know modern weapons, and the riot gun doesn’t work for anyone else.”

Everybody murmured or nodded assent, even me. Though I didn’t care for the way he carefully didn’t look at her when he knew I was watching.

Well, we’ve always given each other that freedom. But neither of us had exercised it in some years. Not to mention light-years.

The plane started taxiing, and there was some discussion over the radio when Paul turned left. For some reason, they thought we were going east. We took off headed for the North Pole.

In retrospect, I suppose they had the ability and authority to shoot us down. I’m glad I didn’t think of that until later.

The ride was pretty bumpy and loud until we got to cruising altitude. Then it was just a mild vibration, with the noise from the wind and engine canceled out.

Alba came up the aisle and sat next to me, offering to share a packet of nuts and dried fruit.

“This may seem funny,” she said, “but I’m not quite clear on what you and Paul actually did. I mean, I was never good at history. That was like forty years before I was born.”

Fair enough. What did I know about 2014, forty years before I was born? Had they started building the space elevator yet? I’d have to look it up.