Go back to Part Two.In the Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1995 by T.J.Hardman, Jr. HTML version of In The Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1996 by T.J.Hardman, Jr and TJH Internet SP. No part of this work may be reproduced, copied or distributed without the express handwritten permission of the author, with the exception of on-screen viewing.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. Some use may be made herein of real locations or institutions, but such use is entirely fictional in intent. Any use of tradenames or trademarks is completely accidental, and is not to be interpreted as any attempt to disparage or recommend.
All menuing systems described herein, especially motion-control menuing systems, where not already under patent or copyright protection, should be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr and are not to be duplicated in any manner whatsoever without direct contractual consent. Insofar as it is implied, all due credit is to be given to the pioneers of voice-recognition systems, particularly International Business Machines (IBM). All described original inventions and modifications to extant simple technologies, or combinations of advanced extant technologies into new systems are to be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr. and may not be marketed for profit without contractual arrangements.
Some of the predicted icon-based task-programming systems are conceptually similar to a display motif of a product of the University of New Mexico called 'khoros', although to my knowledge, their scientific dataprocessing and visualization system was developed completely independently of my own concepts.
Wilson's beltcom paged him to the infirmary. The nurses asked him to roll up a sleeve, and get ready to donate. The nurse took about fifteen vials of blood, totalling about a quarter- liter. Wilson was curious as to what this was all about, and the nurse simply said, "I don't know, I don't care, all I know is I get orders to take blood from you." She recited a short litany of acronyms and initials. Wilson understood none of it except for liver- and endocrine-screens. Baffled, he returned to camp, after drinking the obligatory glass of orange juice-plus-iron.
Finally the day came when Wilson was to start work. First, he supervised the placement of the RL-442. A heavy-lifter chopper, a truly immense thing, had been made available for the last week, and it had ferried several pieces of equipment to the worksite. Wilson got to ride in the chopper. It was a short ride, only about two miles, but if he'd driven the surfacer to the site, it might have taken him days, had he made it there at all. It was designed to operate on smooth graded subsurface, and the heavy equipment that had travelled from the machine yard to the site had reduced the road to little more than a hellacious quagmire. Everything that could easily move on its own was either on the site or on the way. A few of the huge pieces of heavy equipment had evidently been shipped piecemeal to the site, and assembled there by factory techs. The RL-442 was placed, amid the roaring of the heavy-lifter, at the end of a strip of new roadbed, which had the dull luster of polyresin matrix cement. Beside the road stood several trailers, which Wilson knew contained spools of superconductor cabling. A Border Defender crouched next to the trailers, and another was patrolling atop the crest of hill from which he and Harry had first surveyed the construction.
According to his flowgram, the first thing to do was to load the canisters of polyresin chemical mixes into the RL-442, and this he did, with the aid of a forklift operator. The forklift trundled across the skirting of the roadway, bearing the immense sealed canisters of assorted goops and nasty solvents that combined in the RL-442 to produce the final coats, and Wilson helped guide their insertion into the hoppers. There was also the matter of loading the mounting boxes for the plane stator coils (to be added later) which would be imbedded in the surface along with superconductor. Finally, it was all aboard, and Wilson clambered into the control cabin, flipped switches, and when all of his displays were green, he ordered the loading of a reel of superconductor. He uploaded his flowgram from his beltcom into the surfacer's memory, and production began.
After about three hours, Wilson found himself agreeing with the various persons who had advised him that this would be one of the most deadly dull jobs of his life. The surfacer crept forward at perhaps three feet per minute. It was, admittedly, surfacing two lanes wide, and also admittedly, when it rolled off of the surface it was laying, behind it glistened a slightly greenish, oddly translucent surface, which was spongy to the touch... and hot. As it cooled, the resiliency seemed to increase. The stink increased, too, everytime the wind shifted to bring to him the fumes from the area being surfaced. Whatever reaction was curing the polyresins was indeed a complex and nasty one, and the stench reminded him of a time when he had been a revolted witness to a high-speed collision between a truck hauling live pigs and one hauling turpentine.
After another three hours, he climbed down from the cockpit, and wandered over to the side of the road. He kept his beltcom on, of course. It wouldn't do to have the surfacer go rampaging off on a tangent at its top speed of perhaps a quarter-mile per hour... he drew a cup of coffee from his thermos, and simply watched the surfacer do its thing. He wandered back to the beginning of the swath of new polyresin, admiring the finish. Recalling something he'd been told, he decided to try a little experiment. He pulled out a pocketknife, opened the tiny sharp blade, and tried to cut into the road. The knife blade caught at the surface, which had a texture almost like sandpaper imbedded in a superball, but found no purchase. It was like trying to cut a whetstone. He suspected that he might dull the blade before he cut the surface. He picked up a bowling-ball sized chunk of granite that was sitting by the side of the road, and threw it down full-force. It bounced slightly, with a sort of ringing thud. He examined the surface, and couldn't really tell where he'd hit the surface, other than the smudge of dirt left behind by the rock.
He heard the sound of a big Caterpillar coming up behind him, and turned to make sure he wasn't in the way. It was Jenkins, dragging up a stakebed trailer full of more surfacer supplies. She made a gesture that he took to mean, "Where ya want it?" and he pointed towards a spot at the skirt of the roadbed about a hundred feet in front of the surfacer, which was roaring along smoothly. Jenkins began to pull the Cat about, and as she did, she beckoned him to hop aboard, and pulled to a halt to he could climb up. He grabbed a stanchion and levered himself up to the running board. "How's it going?" he yelled, scarcely audible above the howl of the turbine, and she gave him a thumbs up, kicked the throttle, and jerked the Cat into motion. Where the heavy Caterpillar's track crossed the recently laid surface, only dirt remained. The surface was that strong, that fast-setting. Wilson wondered how they'd get to the superconductor to replace any breaks that might occur. He turned to Jenkins, trying to talk to her, and she waggled a finger at him as he tried to speak, and took her hands from the controls long enough to open and close her hand like a mouth, pantimiming talking, and to point at her watch, and then pantomime eating. Wilson got the message. It was maybe a quarter to twelve. They'd do lunch.
He clung to the handbar with one hand, and with the other dragged his beltcom around to where he could see the display. The status bars showed that he'd have to reload about two o'clock or so, and so he entered a request for the forklift operator to show up then. By the time he was finished, they'd passed up the surfacer, and Jenkins killed the turbines and braked the Cat to a halt.
The canteen had packed them some decent lunches. They settled down to the business of eating without too much to say, other than some pretty simple pleasantries. Jenkins somehow didn't seem to Wilson to be the sort who engaged in a great deal of smalltalk, anyways. Wilson tore into the ham-and-cheeses as if they were the last sandwiches on earth, and Jenkins wolfed her own, somehow managing to combine a ruthless efficiency at dining with a sort of muscular femininity. Jenkins was no beauty, Wilson mused, but she did have her points. She filled her coveralls rather well, and there was something about her all-business attitude that made him wonder if she took to the lighter side of living with the same directness. He was still wondering when she looked up from her fruit-cup, catching him in reverie. She did have lovely wide-set blue eyes, the cerulean color of the Siamese cat's eyes, slanting slightly down and outward at the edges, and they were always a bit startling when they suddenly fixed upon one's own eyes. She licked the corner of her mouth rather daintily, set her fruit-cup down, tossed her head, and grinned. "Penny for your thoughts?" she asked, and flustered somewhat, Wilson returned to the here and now. "Probably not worth that much," he said.
"So how ya like the job so far?"
"Kinda boring," he said, "I really only have to watch the damned thing do its stuff, so far. It won't get interesting until it breaks down, I guess."
"I should be so lucky, they have me jumping all over the place. Tow this here, hoist that there, make an earthramp here, pronto, dammit..." She didn't giggle, exactly, nor was it either a chuckle, but sort of a silent laugh that was, while not exactly audible, still nonetheless an expression of wry mirth.
"Hey, maybe we could trade jobs."
"Nah, I don't think so. I know how your kind of job is, it's either deadly dull or much too exciting by far. What are ya gonna do when the damned thing breaks down? Of course, you must know that whatever goes is going to be the hardest-to-reach part in the whole damned thing..."
"Uh, yah, you got that right. Says so right in the manual." She did laugh at that, a sort of mannish giggle. She favored him with another smart-aleck grin, and continued, "At least they're being honest. Have you read all of your supporting documents?"
"Hell, no! The whole manual is about twenty meg. Nope, I've just been studying the scheduled-maintenance parts and procedures, you know. Did you know that the damned thing splits right down the middle, otherwise, there's a part has to be replaced every two-hundred and fifty hours of operation, if it didn't break open like that, you'd have to remove four tons of stuff just to do scheduled maintenance. I just thank God that all you have to do when it breaks open is just pull a rod and replace it. The whole thing's like that, easily replaceable subassemblies."
"Sounds like this antique air-cooled Volkswagen my dad had. Pretty near anything you wanted to fix, you had to pull the whole engine out. Once you had the engine out, though, everything was right there."
"Heh. So hey, Jenkins? Um, excuse me for getting personal, but do you have a first name? Mine's Wilson, in case you forgot..."
Jenkins tilted her head, grinned at him again, and said: "Of course I have a first name... Corporal!"
Unfazed, Wilson continued, "OK, so hey, Corporal, how'd you get drafted into this chickenshit outfit?"
She got serious again. "Lessee... I'm in ROTC, and part of my specialization is perimeter emplacement, site development, and so on. Civil engineering at its lowest level. Also, I'm working towards a degree in teaching practical engineering. Believe it or not, I intend to devote my life to teaching highschool girls how to operate heavy equipment, do engineering math, that sort of thing. Someone's got to teach the teacher, and there's no teacher like experience. This stint is my summer service requirement."
"Wow. And you're pretty handy with a rifle, too. Thanks for the save, by the way, in case I forgot to tell you that night."
"All in a day's work, Mr. Civilian, sir." Jenkins was not the type to do the false-modesty thing, Wilson concluded. He forged ahead.
"Jenkins, you don't seem like the bloodthirsty type... (she looked up at him quizzically) What led you into soldiering?"
"I could return fire by asking you how you wound up here, but I watch the news, ya know... how I came to be a grunt... heh. Boy you sure do pick the easy questions. Okay, it's like, well - Okay, I was sort of a tomboy growing up, and then I discovered boys... and decided that I was going to be Miss Femininity. Then I discovered more about boys than I wanted to know... there aren't many gentlemen left, okay? and I saw how my femininity-act was getting me treated, what sort of ideas it was giving people... so I guess I went back to being a tomboy. I didn't go all of the way to being full-tilt butch, but somehow, I just picked up a lot of what used to be considered as "male attitude". Decided that I was going to learn a serious trade: civil engineering. My grades never were the best, and I barely got accepted for college. The only way I could get a good shot at civil engineering was through the Army. They had a shortage of female officer candidates in the civil engineering disciplines. I got in. You'd be surprised how few women wanted to have ample opportunities to slog through endless mud, on top a Caterpillar or no. As for bloodthirsty, well, if the price I have to pay to get the degree I want is to have to shoot a couple of criminals who're trying to shoot me, guess that's the way it has to come down." The hard-as-nails part of her was what was showing now, but she wouldn't look him in the eyes as she said that last part. She did look up at him when she was done speaking, defiantly, chin high, but she turned profile to him, and there was a hint of a sob that he would never be allowed to actually hear when she continued. "Those were the first people I've ever shot. I guess they deserved it."
Wilson reached out his hand towards her, afraid to actually touch her, but she reached out and took him by the hand in a grip that was nearly as strong as his own, and he said, "It was them or us. That's all it was. Glad you were there." She turned to meet his earnest gaze, and the tear she would not allow went away. She swallowed a tiny gulp of something painful, and smiled a small smile, and they were friends.
"Thanks," she said, and rose to her feet. Looking at her watch, she said, "Break's over. Back to work. Seeya!" Wilson watched her walk away, and decided that he was quite glad that she'd never gone "full-tilt butch". The surfacer had almost caught up to their position, and suddenly the wind shifted, and the acidic reek of the curatives reached him. Back to work indeed, thought Wilson Forbrush.
At dinner that night, there was an excellent meal of Louisiana swamp cooking. Wilson discovered that he loved catfish fritters with shrimp gumbo on the side. He was talking small with Steuben when Harry showed up, accompanied by Jenkins. "Hey, how'd it go?" he asked them, and Jenkins just shrugged, rolling her eyes in an "it's a living" sort of expression. Harry didn't say anything, just sat down and ate his gumbo. Once he was done, he turned to Wilson and said, "Well, buddy, looks like we aren't going to be tentmates any longer. They want the surfacing to go to 24 hours a day as of tomorrow, for as long as they can get the surfacer to last at that rate. Seems that we let the roadbed crew get too far ahead, and there's some flap about leaving the cured concrete exposed for more than a certain length of time. Something about getting a better bond with the final surface if it's not fully cured when the surface is applied. Anyway, you get set up down at the roadside, and I get moved into the Admin complex."
Wilson wasn't too pleased. He and Harry had been getting along rather famously, as Wilson was full of questions, and Harry was generally quite inclined to hold forth at great length on almost any subject imaginable. "Damn, I'll miss you."
Harry said, "Hey, you're not getting rid of me just yet! Seems that you've got several people semi-tied to your end of the operation, such as the forklift operator who loads the RL-442, and there's whoever lays out your supplies (which could be the forklift operator if he didn't have other things to do), and then there's whoever sets out the supplies for whoever brings them to you. There's three people. Probably there's more... and that's only for the one eight-hour shift where you're actually the operator."
"So what's going to be done about it?"
"Like I said, there's going to doubtless be some reshuffling of personnel. Probably Steuben, Jenkins, or one of the other Cat drivers will get detailed over to your end. I was just talking to Jenkins about it, and she says she's rated on forklifts as well as Cats. How about you, Steuben?"
"Guess I could learn," he responded.
"Hmmm. Damn. Wilson, I'd love to get you a telefactor, a larger version of the one you trained on, and in fact, I might be able to justify it later on - but for now, I guess you'll probably have to make do with Jenkins, unless someone more qualified turns up."
"Fine with me, sir," said Wilson, ignoring Jenkins, who was giving him a grin from the other side of Harry. "Um, who'll be operating the RL-442 when I'm off-shift?"
"Believe it or not, it'll mostly be running itself."
"But it can't run more than about four hours without a refill!"
Harry furrowed his brows. "And there's the rub, don'tcha know. This will sound ridiculous at first... but due to certain political considerations, for which read money, most of the personnel here has to be either entitlements-types, or Armed Forces ROTC-types. Between the thirty-odd sites where we're doing roads like this, we've got damned near the entirety of ROTC and the Reserves pulled in on this job, and that leaves us with entitlements-types. There are very few entitlements-types who have your motivation, Wilson, and almost none have your aptitudes. Frankly, you're sort of weird, a statistical outlier, if you will. Until we can get some telefactors out here, or another qualified operator who doesn't require seventy thousand a year plus unreasonable benefits, you're the only person who can do the job. I hope you can stand to have your sleep interrupted for an hour every four hours for a month or so."
"Jesus!" breathed Wilson. "Um, when does this start?"
"Get a good night's sleep tonight, Mr. Forbrush, this may be your last chance for a straight eight in quite awhile. Um, oh, your tent has already been moved."
Harry began stuffing his face with catfish fritters, and wouldn't say anything else.
Wilson moped through another plate of catfish fritters, and then decided, to hell with it. He just got up without a word, throwing his cafeteria tray on the pile as he passed. Outside, he headed for the roadbed. He was just reaching the gate of the main compound when he heard feet behind him.
It was just Jenkins. He shook off his gathering anger, and waited for her.
"Raw deal, pardner," she started, and he cut her off.
"Goddamnit, you just saw the story of my life right back there. Every damned time I think I'm in the gravy, something has to come along and screw it all up. I had decent job in Idaho, took me years of running around to get it, and I had to scratch and claw just to hold my position, and by God I held it. I got up early, worked any and all hours on crazy half-rusted farm junk, just to get out of having to register for a OneCard and pay back-taxes. I wind up in the Welfare slammer, a very nice slammer, but jail nonetheless, and when I do get out, I think I'm in the gravy! Good food, interesting work, decent people, and I start getting used to it, and then here's my luck again. And my buddy Harry drops this load on me and then just says, 'Sorry!' and I can't get another word out of him. Shit, that's what it is, it's turning to shit."
"Hey, you'll be getting a lot more sleep than I ever did when I was in Basic, I can tell you that much!"
"Aw, sorry, Jenkins, it's just that, well, I figure this is just the start of a trend. Like, Harry lays the news on me and then won't say nothing else. Of course I can live on four hours of sleep at a time... hell, once I was homeless, and generally got kicked awake four or five times a night. Lived one whole Texas winter that way, in sleep-deprivation hell... But the point is, I guess I was just getting too used to thinking this was all going to be a grand adventure, and blue skies forever. But it's not. It's going to be hard work, and more hard work. And it just got a little harder, and I expect it's going to get harder all of the time."
He couldn't really see Jenkins' face, but her stride seemed to soften somewhat. They walked on in silence for a few minutes, navigating by a combination of the harsh glare coming from the roadbed construction and the reflection from the overcast. Finally, Jenkins spoke up. "I guess that's the whole definition of responsibility. You see everything turning to shit around you and you, and you just keep going. You know that it's never going to get any easier, and you keep going. And besides, even though you think you know that it's only going to get harder and worse, really, you never know. It could get better... and another thing you never know for sure... no matter how things are, things can always change. Be responsible, Wilson... somewhere in that unknown future, there's a possibility that you will wind up in the gravy, and stay there. I think, though, you'll never see it if you take small excuses to run away."
"Damn, Jenkins, you're pretty good at reading people, aren't you? But you're right, I guess I should look at this temporary adversity as an opportunity to show some guts, build some character maybe."
They came to the edge of the roadbed. Wilson bent and touched the new surface of the road, and it was still warm. He could see Jenkins giving him a sort of quizzical look to see if he really got the message. "I don't know if I'll be any good at building character," he said, "but I will sure try to do a good job building this road." She looked at him for a second more, and then turned to walk across the road. He could see a small camp compound a ways down the road, and even as he watched, a caterpillar set down a pallet with a MILSPEC tent on it. Jenkins pointed to it, in case he hadn't seen it, and said she was heading back to the main camp. "Gotta get my beauty rest, ya know," she told him. She squeezed his hand by way of saying goodnight.
"Take care going back by yourself," he told her. She grinned at him again.
"Hell, there's a Border Defender right over there, there's probably a few nightscopes on us right now, and besides," she grinned at him, suddenly popping off a very nice sidekick which stopped an inch from his face, "I'm an Army girl, and a genuine badass." She continued grinning at him over her shoulder as she began to retrace her way towards camp. Wilson watched her until she disappeared in the jumble of glare and darkness and then shook his head, and turned to find his own way home.
Wilson began to worry that he might actually like the girl.
When the morning came, he woke early, before his beltcom woke him. He tried to doze again, but the incessant sounds of the earthmovers revving a mere three kilometers away prevented a return to sleep. This was going to be a drag, he decided. Well, as he had told Jenkins the night before, it wasn't as if he'd never gone short on sleep before. He drew on his coveralls, and stepped from the tent, scratching himself absently, and wandered over to the shower tent. There was soap, and towels were handy, and the water was, if not actually hot, warm enough for this early summer day. He dried himself, and went looking for coffee. He found a mess tent by following his nose. He didn't recognize anyone, and so merely mumbled morning politenesses to everyone he encountered, not that anyone was doing much besides staring at their beltcoms and chowing down breakfast.
The food was not up to the standards of the main camp, but was hot and filling anyways. He ate his fill, and wandered back up the roadbed to the RL-442 and cranked it up. The displays indicated that he would need refilling at about ten o'clock, and so he requested a forklift operator for that time. The status board was starting to go from green to yellow when a forklift appeared in the distance. As it approached, it became clear that Jenkins was the operator.
"Howdy!" he hailed, when she was close enough. "How'd you swing this?"
"Seems I was the only person with all of the certificates who wasn't full-time dedicated out there with them," she said, indicating the earthmovers down the roadbed. "So what to do?"
Wilson disengaged the forward drive of the surfacer, and swung across to the large Lull forklift. It had gripping handlers instead of the regular forks, which was required for handling the refill containers. He directed Jenkins to head for the stakebed with the refills on it. "Ya know", he said, I'm almost beginning to think you actually want to hang out with me or something, Jenkins."
"Eh, you're not too bad compared to a lot of these people out here. Haven't tried to put the moves on me yet, anyways. That makes you a good sport in my book. Um, should I just carry these one at a time, or drag the whole stakebed up?"
"Um, better drag the whole thing even with the surfacer. It's got holding tanks that the refills drain into, otherwise you'd have a stinking mess everytime you tried to change tanks. Um, that's also why you want to minimize travel between the stakebed and the surfacer. I don't know how strong the refill tanks are, but if you dropped one of them and it burst, you can't imagine the mess and the smell. Pretty bad, I imagine, the manual says there's a special mode for cleaning up spills, and from what I read, it's not something I want to try right now."
"Right," said Jenkins. "Now hop off and secure that tow boom to the hitch."
"Right," said Wilson.
It turned out that the stakebed held exactly six loads of surface. At a rate of four hours between refills, it meant that Jenkins needed to haul one load a day. The supplies were stored in a pit at the machine yard, and the round trip with Lull dragging the stakebed took about three hours. Wilson pondered this, and sent mail to the person responsible for supplies (he didn't know if this was a meat person or a cybernetic "agent") requesting that future shipments be drop-shipped to the roadside. This should free Jenkins up for any other tasks which might need doing. Much as he liked her, he didn't want to be, well, stuck with her. The thought of familiarity possibly causing her to become contemptuous of him somehow rankled. Later, he felt his beltcom ping, and found that his request had been approved. Wonderful, he thought. The next shipment, due in two months, would be neatly spaced along the road.
At dinner, where he moped through his meal (all of the military personnel had been called to a meeting, and he didn't have a chance to chat with Jenkins, as he'd hoped), his beltcom summoned him to a meeting of the civilian staff, to be held at eight o'clock, the time he had decided that he would be going to bed. He supervised a refill of the surfacer at 7:30, and headed across the wasteland between the roadbed and the main compound. Nobody used the muddy bog that was the remnants of the road from the main compound if it could be avoided. Only vehicles with tracks or all-wheel drive and large tires could use the sloppy mess to get around.
He was passing a thicket of the green-hell scrub that took over any uncultivated land in these parts when he heard a machine voice. It was a Border Defender, calling him to identify himself. He couldn't tell if it was the one he'd encountered before. How could you tell? No way to know in this light... When he'd presented his OneCard, it thanked him. He turned to go, but it said, "Will you answer a question for me, Mr. Forbrush?"
"Sure," said Wilson, not quite sure what would have happened had he refused.
"Mr. Forbrush, do you have an opinion regarding this project?"
"I think it's an idea whose time has come."
"Do ideas have times that come? I do not have any record of this."
"Oh," said Wilson, beginning to understand why almost everyone with whom he'd discussed the Border Defenders seemed to hold them in mixed esteem. "Um, it's a turn of phrase."
"Can phrases turn? If they can turn, how do they do this? If phrases can turn, in which planes do they rotate? Do they move in relation to the temporal dimension? Does a phrase turn through time until it is an idea? An idea can be a phrase if it is a cliche. Is the statement 'an idea whose time has come' a cliche?"
Egads, thought Wilson, That is truly bizarre. But it seems to have come to a correct conclusion... that's not related to anything. He said, "It is a cliche. The statement, 'a turn of phrase' is also sort of a cliche, actually, it's.. - um - okay, it's a 'colloquialism'."
"It is a casual, conversational, informal idiomatic, vernacular statement?"
"I guess it is."
"What do you mean that the roads are 'an idea whose time has come?'"
Wilson thought. "Okay," he said, "We need roads."
"There are about a million miles of roads. Are roads ideas?" The Border Defender's voice was steady, even, uninflected, dead in fact. It sounded like a well-educated zombie, with fine diction and no interest... but it was somehow insistent for all of that.
"Roads were ideas before they were actually made. All made things were ideas before they were physically made."
"If the roads are an idea and they are being made now, is this the meaning of the statement 'an idea whose time has come'?
"Sort of. What I meant was, these roads are something that has to be done now, these roads, this way, at this time."
"How are these roads different from other roads?" It didn't give him time to answer, but continued, "I see that the design specification of these roads have many differences from the design specification of the existing roads. They start and end at different coordinates, they travel along different paths, they use different materials, they have different contractors, they..."
"Stop! Please," Wilson added. "Listen. These roads will be built to replace existing roads which are falling apart. Our civilization depends on these roads. If the roads fall apart, civilization as it exists will fall apart. We don't want that to happen. Look, I have to go to a meeting... mind if I leave?"
"Go to your meeting Mr. Forbrush. Thank you for answering these questions. Good night," it said to Wilson's hurrying back.
God, that's weird, though Wilson, shaking off a shivering. Steuben's right, it sort of did give me the creeps. What the hell is going on in its mind? And what the hell is a machine doing asking me my opinion? Why mine? Hell, maybe it asks everybody... but it seemed confused by almost everything I said to it. I thought that they were all connected. It did seem to pause for a second while comparing road plans... damn, could it have been sending out a request for a mainframe compare of all road plans? Yeesh. But it couldn't have been real-time connected, or it wouldn't have asked me all of those stupid questions about common phrases it has to have heard a million times. Guess it must have standing orders from Sphinx to ask opinions or something... or maybe it hasn't got standing orders on that subject, and has low priority status for requests to the main consciousness. Maybe it's actually trying to figure something out on its own. Hell, maybe it's getting all existential standing guard over a jillion dollars-worth of superconductor out here in a crossroads town miles from the Sprawl. Wilson smiled to himself at the idea of a weapons-system experiencing angst. He sobered, though, when he considered that something of the sort might actually be occurring. What if it decides that life is not worth living or something, and blows us all away? He shivered again, this time for real, and recalled Steuben's words, "Think of all of the power they've got, and nobody even knows if they're sane," and he just hoped to God that they did, as Jenkins asserted, follow orders. Whatever those might be.
In the canteen, the projection screen was standing against the wall, and people were sitting around, muttering to each other. Wilson hadn't seen this pitch of murmur in the entire time he'd been here; ordinarily there were pockets of boisterousness scattered amongst islands or conversational calm. He saw Jenkins Steuben, and Harry sitting in their usual place, and he worked his way over to them, and asked, "What's going on?"
"I dunno," Steuben said, and Harry just scowled. Wilson had never seen Harry scowl... but Harry was either a practiced scowler, or things were worse than he thought, in whatever area, he didn't know. He nudged Jenkins, who shrugged. The screen lit, and showed a nearly subliminal test-pattern, as was common in auditorium showings of major news events. Wilson realized, belatedly, that he had paid absolutely no attention to the news since he'd been tossed into the Welfare slammer, and damned little attention for years before that.
Finally, the test-pattern swirled, and Mr. Richards face appeared. He tapped his throat mike, glanced beyond the video pickup, and returned his gaze to the "audience".
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thought I would call you all together for this conference to give you a progress report.
"As you should know, there are thirty-seven Roads Projects operating in full swing. Various areas have reported some shortfalls, but as a rule, everything is going according to schedule, or operating within acceptable variances. Those of you at the pilot site atop the old Florida Interstate Four are to be congratulated today, as your successful demonstration of fifty-five fully-functional kilometers of line-driver highway has assured us of increased funding from the various states involved in this venture. Various state legislatures in special session have dispensed funding to the Federal Reserve specifically for this project. The so-called "Rocky Mountain Empire" has contributed sufficient prepayment to cover the Interstate Seventy project from Kansas to Salt Lake City, and most of the other areas have allocated similar funds, some as prepayment, some as allocations from future taxbases. The Pueblo-El Paso Consortium has dedicated massive amounts of material to the project, in return for consideration for zero-interest Federal loans in their effort to link El Paso to Denver along the old I-25 corridor. Texas has dedicated a full twenty percent of their refining capacity to DuPont's proprietary chemical processes, trading industrial capacity and raw petrochemicals for the credit that they have needed so badly after the introduction of centralized fusion power. The GeneTech and Organonanotech Axes in the MidAtlantic states have contributed several tons of self-metaengineering adaptive polymeric organonanotech. Most of the have-not states are located between states that have revenue surpluses, and regional coalitions have worked out ways to spread both the wealth and the debt.
"What I'm saying is, we have full funding."
Harry's scowl nearly left his face.
"Also, I might add that decreased tension between America and the HindAsian Hegemony have allowed us to reallocate quite a bit of the finances and industrial capacity that had been dedicated to the Armed Forces, and thus we'll be able to intensify our production effort here in this project."
Harry's scowl deepened.
"In short, fellows, we have the green light, and we have it greener than we had ever thought. That is all, and for now, goodnight."
The screen blanked. Steuben remarked, "And they made us all come up here for that? Jeeeze, what a waste of time."
Harry muttered, "Well, there's good points and then there's bad points."
"So what's so bad about increased funding? And why so glum all the time, anyway, Harry?" Jenkins was doing the serious look, but not the hard-as-nails thing tonight.
"Well, okay, look. Wilson, you'll probably get your telefactor sooner than you thought, everybody will probably get more equipment... Steuben, you'll have a chance to get that training you want when the equipment gets here, and Jenkins might get undetailed from this project and get to go back to school... but still..."
"C'mon, out with it, Harry!"
"I don't like the idea of detensioning with the HindAsians. They're too goddamned subtle for our diplomats to deal with properly. Remember World War Three? The goddamned Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo kept bringing everyone to the negotiating table, and stepping up offensives everytime anyone came to bargain. Bargaining was just a ploy, and when people didn't come to the bargaining table, they heated up the action as hot as they could get it. At first Russia wouldn't let anyone arm the Bosnian Muslims, and then they got into their own little suppressive war with Chechnya, and then the Azerbaijani and the Armenians and then the Turkmeni all went nuts, and next thing you know, Iran got the bomb from the Chechnya reactor-fuel repositories combined with Pakistani know-how and North Korean nukes, and who knew that Turkey had the bomb? Or the Greeks? The Balkans won't be starting any more world wars for a few centuries... But what I mean is that the HindAsians do the same thing as the Serbs did -- but they're a lot more subtle. The HindAsians have quite a bit of nuclear capability, though most of it's not explosives, and not much of that would be deliverable by missile... but they have biochem tech equal to or surpassing our own, they have the highest population pressure on Earth, and if you've ever noticed that "Calcutta" was synonymous with hell-on- Earth fifty years ago, well, let's just say it hasn't gotten any better -- if there's a formative crucible of hominid evolution these days, it's HindAsia. I've heard direct translations of some of their political broadcasts, and they have a word that combines Hitler's "lebensraum" or breathing-space with the inherent Hindu idea that the Hindu are the chosen people... and it's only ever used in the highest imperative tenses these days. It's only been the threat of assured destruction of their foodfactories that has kept them from running riot over the rest of Asia, and then only because we had assured them that we had enough automated armor to actually stop their proposed human wave."
Jenkins said, "Yah, that was a scary idea, thinking that they actually had enough people so that we could nuke a perimiter around them, and they could spare enough people to walk into the perimeter, die, and pile up thick enough for another human wave to walk over the dead using their bodies as a radiation shield. And we couldn't just saturation-nuke them because enough radiation to kill all of them would make the rest of the world pretty unlivable..."
"Well," said Harry, "they've somehow convinced our politicians that they'll stay put for a few more years... but I've been having this horrible thought, came to me one night and wouldn't go away... what happens when the periodic readjustment of the Monsoons occurs, and algal blooms that their food-factories scoop out of the sea can't quite make ends meet anymore? I mean, there's no way that they could do the human wave thing and make it to this hemisphere, but if they exploded out into China and the old Muslim Russias, what the hell would the Chinese and the White Russians do?"
Steuben spoke. "I've seen simulations of that in strategy classes. I'm not at liberty to discuss that sort of thing, but I can say this... we don't want that to happen. Lots of ways it could go, none of them pretty."
"Damned right."
"But Harry," said Wilson, "look at the good side of things. At least for now, we have the green light for our project, and it'll be a sweeter deal for all of us here."
"Yup," Harry nodded, "That is sure what it looks like. Let's go draw a beer from rations."
Most of the other people in the bar got beers too. The discussion got fairly lively, and then faded away around midnight. Wilson headed back to the roadbed, dreading another encounter with the Border Defender, but no mad machine voice called to him from the night. Wilson was quite relieved. As he had approached the place where he'd spoken with the thing, he had tensed, trying to prepare little statements of demurral, since he couldn't imagine how a conversation would go in his present tipsy state. He hadn't really been all that thrilled to speak to one while sober. The sentinel never put in an appearance, so he simply resolved to have a ready litany for avoiding conversations with the machine.
His four-in-the-morning refill operation came all too early. He wobbled forth, with the intimations of morning's hangover starting to show themselves. The graveyard-shift forklift operator worked wordlessly, and when Wilson was done, immediately wheeled away, headed back to the leading edge of roadbed replacement. Wilson directed the surfacer to continue operations, and then staggered back to bed.
His fitful sleep was troubled by dreams of faceless hordes of small brown men, clambering across the bodies of their fallen. A desert lay behind them, and whatever they encountered, they ate, down to and beyond the roots. In this vision, the small brown men carried weapons. Some had rifles, some had pistols, and some had merely small knives or simple pointed sticks... when they fell, their possessions were stripped from them, and passed to the rear, to be gathered by new arrivals. They stretched in droves far beyond the horizon, a wall of man-forms clambering over the bodies of their dead. Wilson's frightened spirit climbed into the sky as the faces of these emaciated, wiry men reached his vantage, and then his point of view swooped across the throng. Behind the men came the women, picking the bodies of the dead, and finding nothing. They were half of them visibly pregnant, and behind them, in their own separate throng came the children, gaunt, weary, too tired to scream, searching for something to eat, vainly hoping that the men and their women had left something behind. There was nothing for them to eat except the rats which fed upon the bloating corpses upon which the children clambered. The children whipped the rats to death with sticks from which they'd eaten all of the bark, and fought over the remains of the rats. Toward the rear of the vast multitude, small children gnawed the decaying fingers of their aging parents, and one small child suckled eagerly moaning at the pus of decay oozing from a death-swollen breast. At the rearward edge, where the human desert ended and the natural desert began, within the angry winds of the desolation, children, strong, wiry children without kwashiorkor bellies stalked each other. Wilson's dreamspirit saw a skinny baby, howling with the agonies of self-digestion, ripped into shreds to feed small monsters; toes, fingers and guts disappeared into the jaws of small-toothed predators.
When Wilson's beltcom bleeped a wakeup call, Wilson woke in relief, to a dreary drizzly day. He could not recall his vision, but its aura remained, and for the rest of the morning, he worked haunted by that miasma, compounded by the throbbing headache of the sleep-deprived hung-over. Too much caffeine atop rejected scrambled eggs did nothing to ease the pounding, and when he saw a huge Lull forklift lifting the palletted tents, carrying them to a site closer to the leading edge of the roadbed, his dismay was paralyzing. He could do nothing but sit brooding in the control cabin, listening to tiny melodies in the howl of the turbines, with the rhythm provided by the tapping and thumping of the various chemical injector ports. The surfacer dragged along tediously, as it would for several years.
His dismay decreased, however, when he saw a load of collapsed tents being hauled down from the main camp, followed by a procession of heavy equipment. After the lunchtime refueling, loaded by an unfamiliar forklifter, he left the surfacer running unattended (except by beltcom, of course) and climbed the hill between the roadbed and the main camp, carrying his lunch. The main camp was being struck. Of course, the brick buildings, the converted warehouses or school or whatever it had originally been, would doubtless be retained as they were as a central command post. For one thing, there were probably a few midframe computers installed there, and those were rather delicate machines, which wouldn't take well to being forklifted through quagmires, or being jolted along rocky roadbeds in stakebed trailers. The canteen was half disassembled, and the cookstaff was bustling about stowing their wares and tools. A sentinel stood by in case of need, but Wilson didn't think that there'd be any problems from wolfgangs anytime soon.
He surveyed the scene for a few minutes, watching the bustle as a relief from the tedium of his own soporific task. The walk from the hill had cleared his head, and his lunch became rather more appealing. In fact, he was suddenly ravenous. The lunch disappeared quickly, and he headed back down to the surfacer, where there was small electric golf-cart waiting. In it was a goon sweltering in a suit, and a man in casual attire. The casual fellow turned out to be the doctor from the Welfare Prison.
"Mr. Forbrush, how do you do, I'm Doctor Austin," said the doctor, and Wilson waved his hand, saying, "I remember you." The goon evidently needed no introduction. None was made. He just gave Wilson the disinterested evil eye of his profession.
"Uh, Mr. Forbrush, the reason I'm here today is to ask you if you'd mind doing a few more tests for us. We got some samples of blood from you a few weeks ago, and there are some areas that require a bit more testing, no hospitalization or anything, just more tests." The doctor's face was not exactly open and cheerful, but he didn't appear to be the devious type that Wilson tended to associate with government medical personnel.
"Well, I guess so. Um, nothing serious is it, doc?"
"Well, probably not, but that's what the tests are for. Among other things, we'd like to be sure that the vaccines we gave you are working correctly, and that you're not having any, well, hidden reactions."
"Well, since you put it that way, I guess I should come in. Hey, couldn't you have just asked the nurse to get more blood from me and use those samples?"
"Well, Mr. Forbrush, yes and no. Some of the tests we want to make are fairly involved, and require more equipment than we'd like to move up to this site, merely so you won't miss a day of work. Part of the testing requires that there be the absolute minimum of time between the taking of samples and their analysis, and some of the tests require that samples be taken continuously. You'll be hooked up to a catheter, and there will be continuous small withdrawals."
"Eeek," said Wilson. "Supposing I said no?"
The goon, who had been heretofore utterly uninterested if not oblivious, suddenly was more alert. It only showed in his eyes, but Wilson knew about goons. They could shoot you without changing expressions, and without moving much. The goon did nothing, but his eyes stopped their lazy roving of the horizon, and fixed on a spot in the air about halfway between the doctor and Wilson. The doctor said, "Well, you're presently under contract to the Welfare department, and we could always de-assign you, and pull you back to confinement, and we'd probably have to test you thoroughly to make sure you hadn't picked anything up out here in the hinterlands... I think you get the picture."
"I guess I do," said Wilson. "When do you want me?"
They came for him two days later. Harry was drafted to cover Wilson's shift, as he was so far the only other multi-qualified on-site person who could operate the surfacer without voiding the warrantee. He grumbled a bit when Wilson told him that the doctors would be snatching him off to some hospital, grousing about Govenment interference from one agency messing up other agencies, wondering who the hell was ultimately in charge. Wilson groused too, saying, "You just watch, I bet it's going to be another pincushion party."
"Huh?" Harry didn't catch the slang.
"A pincushion is something you fill up with needles, Harry. Heheh," Wilson chuckled nervously. "I never did like needles, I guess that's why I never wound up as a doper when I was tramping."
Harry gave him an odd look, and asked, "What did you do, sign up for one of those experimental programs at the Welfare slammer?"
Wilson nodded, and Harry asked him, "What did they give you? You seem to be okay..."
"I dunno, experimental vaccine, they said. Why? And what do you mean about 'I seem to be okay'?"
Harry shook his head, and said, "Some of the people they try the vaccines out on don't turn out to be okay. Some of them seemed to go through, well, changes. One guy, well, his head started growing. He was in another guy's training classes, remedial something or another... but the guy said the other guy's head started growing. The one guy, the one they'd tried something on, he'd been sort of slow, borderline retarded, I guess, and then his head started growing. Reportedly, he got up to normal intelligence, and then his learning rate shot up off of the charts, and then, according to my colleague, he went totally nuts. Flipped out, bonkers, I dunno. Sort of got paranoid, and then stopped communicating, after awhile all he ever said about anything was that he had headaches or something... Eventually, he just disappeared."
"Jesus!" said Wilson. "That's not usual, is it?"
"Oh, man..." Harry regarded Wilson with a very compassionate expression, and then continued: "Some folks just get bad reactions to the vaccines, or whatever they are, just get sick and die. I hear some die in convulsions, some seem okay and then they get weird cancers, I've even heard really weird rumors from some of the inmates I was training. Um, damn. I had no idea."
"Just stop staring at me like I was the newly-risen dead, okay, Harry? You're worrying me. I feel fine! They gave me these shots for like a week, and then tested me, and they said that I was fine, and that I could be released from sickbay back into the general population. Sort of pissed me off, in sickbay they had com. I was catching up on all of the latest hit singles on MTV."
Harry tried to shut down his expression of mingled pity and slight revulsion. "No headaches, no..? um." Harry broke off in mid-thought, mouth closing with an almost audible snap. He shook his head as if there was maybe something nasty and insectile buzzing around in his brain. "Damn. Hey, Wilson."
"Yah, now what?"
"A lot of the people on these various Roads sites are from the Welfare system, one way or another, okay, Wilson? I really can't say anything more, but - keep your ears open, and don't tell anyone that you were an experimental subject in Welfare stir."
Wilson was driven into Hagerstown, Maryland, and there he stayed for maybe half an hour, while he was separated from the various other passengers in the van, slowly moved from the general population into a more restricted area, and his escorts slowly changed from smiling airline-sales types into spooky attaches. The man who flew with him from the Hagerstown airfield in a fast military courier copter had all of the earmarks of a Federal spook. He didn't have the large build and the bulging muscles of a standard goon, but the eyes were the same, set wide apart in an incredibly average face on an unremarkably flawless body in workaday attire. He could probably eat a stack of goons for breakfast. This was one of the seldom-seen and unremarked ones. Most people could go through an entire lifetime without seeing a spook, or perhaps it was better to say that most people could go through an entire lifetime without knowing they'd seen one. Or maybe several. The guy was so ordinary that you could forget his face even as you looked at it. Wilson idly wondered if this was the result of some weird inverse cosmetic surgery designed to make a person unnoticable, or if maybe there was a special team that scoured the country's colleges looking for people who couldn't get noticed... He wondered in a fit of whimsy, what sort of people could find such folks? He supposed they had to have some way of finding each other to mate, and chuckled at the thought. The spook's eyes flickered back at him, and then shifted to the view from the pilot's window. He appeared to be muttering to himself, and listening to unseen voices. Paranoia of the job must be getting to him, thought Wilson, then he realized that this spook's mental health was probably rigorously attended to by the best in the business. He was probably loaded with implants.
They crossed a major freeway, probably Interstate Ninety-Five. Wilson noted that there was a major rebuild in progress here, with four of the seven northbound lanes blocked off. Greenish-black surface trailed behind two tandem-operated surfacers, and ahead of them clouds of dust momentarily cleared to let him see the heavy earthmovers carting rubble to the rolling crushers, which straddled the trenches dug by the telefactor concrete saws and trenchers which they passed over a moment later. A greenbelt broke the cubistic clutter of the Sprawl, and Wilson saw therein encircled a compound of the low, flat buildings that characterized military bases. The spook muttered again, and Wilson tried to read his lips, but his lip-reading wasn't very good from this angle, and besides, it all seemed to be gibberish anyways. The copter banked into a pattern above a field. The spook wasn't flying it, or was he? Wilson knew that some people were fully wired for direct control of certain telefactors, making them essentially cyborgs, though the grafting of man to machine was mostly virtual, telecommunications or telefactor control devices instead of prosthetic superlimbs. The copter could be coming in on a traffic-control beam, alternatively. Wilson looked in vain for traces of subcutaneous wiring on the back of the spook's head, but there wasn't much sense in wiring up an agent who could be recognized by such external giveaways. He suspected that the wiring was probably biowire, organic conductor matrixed with traces of silicon and rare earths. If it was there, it wouldn't even show up on X-rays, but the right kind of magnetic-resonance imaging would probably reveal this agent's head to be full of all sort of funny little strands, lumps and wires.
They set down outside a nondescript building amid a clutter of other equally nondescript buildings, and the spook hustled Wilson from the chopper as the ducted-fan vehicle's turbines spooled down from flight speeds. Wilson and the spook met some military-in-mufti types who exchanged some sort of jargon with the spook. He answered them in similar weird jargon, perhaps ten syllables of weird mouthnoise. Wilson rather doubted that he could make half of the sounds they were using. All of them suddenly burst out into very human laughter, and Wilson, feeling himself to be the butt of some obscure alien joke, blushed, embarassed. The others noticed this, waved their fingers in complex patterns, and each made what sounded like a short explosive giggle. "Ta!" said the spook, and he whirled and ran back to the chopper, which was already revving back up to speed.
The two spooks who had received him at the facility welcomed him, as they hurried him down the hall, to Fort Detrich, Maryland. Wilson had thought that the place (which had gained a rather ill reputation during the swine-flu scare of the late 1970's) to have been long decomissioned, and he said as much to the two spooks.
"Do you believe everything you see on the news?" one laughed. "Actually, the best way I can explain this to you, not that you need to know, and so I could be lying to you, and I bet you'd believe it! Heh, okay, if you have all of this perfectly good equipment lying around, what would you do if the public decided that it didn't like the uses to which it's purportedly put? You can - A, destroy it all. B, you can mothball it and hope it doesn't depreciate too badly. C, you can go ahead and keep on doing whatever you were doing and (teehee!) say you're not! Or D, you can turn it over to peaceful research, or even better, certify that there are no proactive military researches going on, and state categorically that you're using it for highly dangerous purely defensive researches, or F, you can turn it over to Centers for Disease Control, run it under their funding, and still do whatever you want to do, or G, all, some or none of the above. Take your pick, Mr. Forbrush, but whatever you think, I bet you're wrong."
"Um, what happened to E?" asked Wilson.
The two spooks exchanged a glance and grinned. They had the best teeth Wilson had ever seen. "Classified," they said in unison.
By this time Wilson had come to the conclusion that spooks were seriously weird. Possibly too weird for words. Giggling spooks cheerfully enumerating all of the possible ways that they could explain their circumvention of the electorate's political will, and then saying that none of it happened, while escorting him through the evidence to the contrary? Way too weird for him. He decided that he was going to ignore the antics of his escorts, who were playing some bizarre game of keepaway with him. His escorts evidently decided that they were having a grand time of making him notice. One held a small cross up to the corner of his eye, giggled, and when Wilson looked his way, the spook tossed the cross behind Wilson's head to the other spook. Wilson looked at the other spook just in time to see him assume an expression of extremely silly utter innocence as he tossed it to the other spook. Wilson rightly decided that to attempt to follow this activity was a sure path to madness and idiocy, and so ignored the spooks. After awhile, they stopped, not because Wilson was no fun, but because the third spook, the one Wilson had never noticed, snatched it out of its trajectory behind his neck. Wilson had no idea what the hell this was all about, but the spooks shut up, assumed serious expressions, and marched him silently (with only Wilson's feet making any noise whatseover) through a maze of drab unremarkable halls past unmarked doorways to a door like any other. "Voila! Here ya go!" said the third spook, pushing Wilson in the door.
Wilson, still wondering what the heck that had been all about, turned away from the silently slammed door. Remarkable that any door moving fast enough to make such a whoosh of air could so silently click shut. He faced the lab.
"Pay no attention to the kittens, Mr. Forbrush, they're pretty harmless as of yet." It was the pale thin doctor from Welfare.
"Kittens?" said Wilson, not understanding fully.
The doctor grinned. It was not a pleasant smile, but it was almost a cheerful one. "Kittens. Surely you understand the word? The young of the species Felis Domesticus? All bounce and no danger yet to a mouse? They'll catch one, and they'll play with one, but they'll never kill one, not intentionally. The instincts aren't developed yet. Cats kill with very specialized teeth, designed to penetrate and sever the spine of rodents at the base of the skull. Until the instinct develops, they can't kill, they just sort of bat their catches about."
"What the hell do cats have to do with anything?"
"The spooks. Feline neurotransmitters. They're Mods."
"Modified people?" Wilson was aghast. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Just keeping up with the Joneses, Mr. Forbrush. Where do you think spooks come from? Think of this as an analogue to the steroids that produce goons... but this is permanent, genetically encoded. Don't worry, they're volunteers, and they have excellent insurance packages to cover their survivors, as if they had any. Orphans."
"I don't understand, still."
"I really hope you don't, Mr. Forbrush. Suffice it to say, this word to the wise is: 'Silence is Golden.' I love my work, but all too often, I experience setbacks. Staff." He didn't raise his voice on the last word, but people in labcoats appeared as from vacuum. The pale thin doctor wrote upon a beltcom, then detached a PROMtab from the back, and clipped it to Wilson's shirt. The adhesive would hold for several hours. "Mr. Forbrush, please follow these kind people, they will take good care of you. Please answer all of their questions as best you can, and please don't resist testing. Your health may depend on how much you cooperate." The doctor smiled again, and while the smile was not reassuring, Wilson felt that the grimace conveyed honesty.
Hooked to several tubes, Wilson sweated coldly on a stainless-steel operating table. The tubes led into outlets in the mirrored obseravtion wall, and he had no idea what was happening beyond that wall, other than the occasional flash of light from some display on equipment on the far side of the semimirror glass. Nurses occasionally entered the room (besides the two stationed there for immediate action, should it be required) and these generally attached some sort of remote-control dispenser to his IV-drip, close to his arm. Sensors adorned his brow, arms and chest, and there was an extremely annoying catheter which seemed to end somewhere around his adrenal glands. His penis was throbbing like it had been stepped on. He positively hated the catheter. If he ever met a stockholder in the company that made them, he was going to kick some ass.
After hours of very slight, but extremely odd changes in sensation and perception, suddenly everything returned to normal, with a final slurping of blood from the main IV drain at his elbow. Wilson could almost feel himself losing a pint. Shortly thereafter, a nurse wearing the bolted-on smile of her profession came in and unplugged him. When the catheter came out, he thanked her (and God), and the professional smile became a more human one, for just a moment, and then her composure returned.
"You're welcome, sir," she said. It was the first time someone had addressed him so in years. He returned her smile with his own best, and she colored slightly as she efficiently wound her tubes about her hands and left, beckoning him to follow. Two other nurses, one bearing stacks of printout as well as the ubiquitous medical version of the beltcom, led him to a well-furnished antechamber. It appeared, from the collection of actual books, as well as the large full-wall projection system, that this was the doctor's office. Patiently, he waited.
Two doctors entered, mere minutes later. One was the pale thin one, and he was accompanied by the small brown man. They seated themselves, and pretended to study their beltcoms. Wilson felt sure that they had been a part of every single test that had occured, but doctors being doctors, it was necessary that he wait while they again reviewed his case.
Wilson broke the silence. "Feel like telling me why I'm here?"
The doctors studiously ignored him. There were two more chairs in the room, and soon, the door opened again, and admitted the two spooks who had been having such a fun time escorting Wilson in from the landing zone. The doctor pointed, and they sat. They moved exactly out of step, as might a crowd of co-eds, but as they sat in the indicated chairs, their movements were simultaneous, and somewhat blurred due to their speed. Wilson recalled the doctor's earlier statement about cats, and kittens, and as he looked at the intense blankness of the spooks' eyes, he was reminded of a time when, crawling beneath a house examining drainpipes, he'd come across the neighborhood alley stray, a loving friendly ginger tomkitten, perhaps nine months old. Head down, ears erect, the kitten had assumed the deathly still stance of the surprised cat, not sure whether this was friend or foe, challenge or playmate, eyes softly glowing at maximum dilation. The agents were giving him the exact same look, their faces drawn in a curious non-expression of total focus. "Relax," said the doctor, and both blinked, eased their postures, and began examining and adjusting their breakaway neckties. Wilson was sure that had they been so equipped, they'd have soon become entranced with each other's slightly twitching tails, and begun batting away. Kittens indeed. Suddenly, the vision collapsed, and they were two identically unremarkably-average post-collegiate fellows, casually grooming themselves in an uncertain social situation.
"Don't worry," said the small brown doctor, his quiet accent immediately placing him as an HindAsian, "You won't wind up like them. Really, all we gave you was a very good vaccine."
"Actually, Mr. Forbrush, the vaccine is working exceptionally well. Dr. 'C' here has done his usual superlative work. If you ever get sick, it will come as a great surprise to me. If you ever get sick from anything. Ever." Dr. "C" looked at the other doctor as if he wished to admonish him for talking too directly to the point.
Wilson didn't quite comprehend. "What are you telling me?"
Dr. "C" spoke, the lilt of his soft HindAsian voice most hypnotic in the rise and fall of odd inflection. "Mr. Forbrush, you were an unusually healthy man, considering your background and living conditions. I have seen such men many times in the past, especially in my own country where the conditions are not so conducive to health as they are here in America. In clear fact, there are a great many persons in HindAsia who should have long since been dead. Please take for example, the holy men of the sacred Ganges river, which serves as an open sewer for most of the Hindi subcontinent... but those who bathe daily in the waters do not succumb to infections from the waters. Indeed, many there are whose lives have extended beyond the expected human span of years.
"We examined most closely the waters of the sacred Ganges, and we found nothing that was so unusual. It was most revealing, however, when we examined the interactions of the microbial life at the level of interaction with the naturally occuring flora and fauna which infest the sudoriferous glands of the human being, these being the pheromone-emitting glands which broadcast our primate identity. We discovered that there were certain microbial forms which would replace the naturally occuring human symbiotes, and these infestations seemed to be no more harmful than the ordinary kind. However, these replacement organisms detoxified the human pheromones, which are basically aromatic or mercaptanal esters of semi-metabolized sexual hormones. The detoxification products generally seemed to act as very high-quality antibiotics, produced by microbes at the micro-level where possibly-harmful organisms are most affected by environmental saturation with these chemicals. Not incidentally, some of these byproducts are as efficient as viricides as they are as antibiotics.
"There are also many kinds of microbes from the sacred Ganges which also take up residence in the intestines, and in the respiratory tract. For many years, we have bred these organisms, and have experimented with genetic modification to determine which factors can be modified towards greater success as anti-thanatic symbiotes."
Both of the doctors sat, apparently complacently, and regarded him silently.
Wilson sat dumbfounded. Anti-thanatic? From the greek, thanatos, meaning death? He found his voice. "Once again, I must ask, what exactly are you telling me?"
The pale thin doctor spoke. "Mr. Forbrush, what we're telling you is that we think that you may have a very healthy life. A very long life. Very long."
Wilson mulled this over for an entire minute. He finally asked, "Exactly how long?"
Dr. "C" spoke again. "We do not know. One must for the most part tend to disbelieve the claims of the holy men whose livelihoods depend upon their extravagant allegations regarding their longevity. Perhaps you will have an extra ten to fifteen years. Perhaps you will tomorrow be hit by a meteor. Who can say? We are not omniscient. But I do know this: Besides whatever immunity or longevity which may have been imparted to you as a result of our experimentation, we have certainly inoculated you with every single vaccine known to science, including things not known to science, but known only to the militaries of both this country, and to my own researches, which were conducted when I was head of the HindAsian biological research establishment."
Wilson blurted, "You're Dr. Chandrasek... Chandra... - uh, you're him! The defector! The reason for the escalation five years ago!"
"It is true that I became disaffected with the policies and outlook of the ruling party in my own country. My own researches were being directed in a manner and into a direction which I could not in good conscience condone. But please do not call me a defector, for I have loved my country so much that I could not bear to any longer deliver into the hands of madmen weapons of unprecedented potential for mass destruction. Surely other nations would see that we were progressing more rapidly than they, and would destroy all of us rather than allow such madmen to achieve true technical superiority, particularly in the field of mutagenic contagion. I can only hope that I was successful in fully destroying my notes, or a problem may yet remain. Some of my subordinates were quite ambitious, and full brilliant."
"But be that as it may," said the pale thin doctor, "There's the matter of you. Wilson Forbrush. We had to try this experiment on someone. Believe it or not, we received a report regarding the conversation between you and your friend Harry... and he's right, you know. The Welfare people have heard about some of our less- than-successful experiments, and have inklings of the possible results of our quite-successful ones... The viral techniques we use to edit genetic structures are very difficult to use, and the viruses used do not long survive outside of very carefully controlled conditions, by design. But the popular mind, fed by too many Frankenstein-type movies, associates our techniques with biological warfare, and the thought of a gene-modifier virus loosed upon society as a plague is a sort of negative cultural icon... and the thought of virally-enhanced persons at large in the populace is inevitably associated with the thought of some sort of superman takeover. If they ever knew that our "kittens" here existed, and were produced artificially, if they could get at them, they'd tear them apart... they'd try at least."
The "kittens" held out their hands, elbows bent, as if signalling someone to stop. They rotated their wrists until their palms faced themselves, and flexed, and tendons stood out from elbow to fingertip, and as their fingers splayed, Wilson realized that their longish nails were nearly a quarter of an inch thick, and probably as sturdy as the nails of any great cat. The kittens had no fangs, but they did have minds and voices and one of them spoke.
"Mr. Forbrush, all of us Mods here are at great risk from the slightest breath to the outside. Despite our enhancements, we live in terror, for there are things that will kill us, just as we could kill you. Fire, decapitation, accelerations of more than four meters per second per second, or a nine-millimeter round through the brain will surely kill us, though we also share your immune-enhancing symbiotes. As a race, though, we're probably not very viable, any more than a goon remains a goon when they stop doing anabolic steroids and synaptic enhancers. We may be able to reproduce, but a great percentage of our children would almost certainly be monsters. But rest assured... until we, and I include you, can gain acceptance in general society, I don't think it would be wise to advertise our differences to those around us. We might be very annoyingly playful, but for now we're not harmful. We won't hurt you... unless you jeopardize us, ourselves, our friends, those like us whom we love. We could even love you, Mr. Forbrush, and defend you as our own, if you will keep your silence and thereby defend us from those who can't understand, even as you must defend yourself through your silence. Think of it as a responsibility, Mr. Forbrush. What do you say?"
Again, Wilson flashed back to that under-house encounter with a loving ginger alley-tomkitten... and he flashed to the instant when the kitten, a mere foot away, could have either run, remained, or sprung at his eyes. The Mod Kitten was in a similar poise... Wilson accepted his own odd condition, and the doctors, and even the Mods. After all, as the Kitten said, they were all Mods now, and the rank and file would tear them apart, harmful or not. The Kittens, or spooks, or whatever you wanted to call them, were probably doing (or capable of doing) quite a bit in the way of seeking out and dealing with infiltrators. He'd seen that they had a rather developed subculture, which certainly made it easier for them to function in secret, and to root out infiltrators and traitors... maybe. He had reservations on that score which he'd not even think at this moment.
"Okay," he said, "I'll play ball. Mum's the word. When can I go back to my job?"
The Mod Kittens relaxed, and the doctors beamed in a reserved doctorly way, and then they summoned their best bedside manner to give him the particulars of his cover diagnosis as the Kittens unfluffed and bounced out of the office, playing hackeysack even as they silently slammed the door behind them.