"She"s got to be dead, or unconscious, or something!" Wooley snapped back. Another spasm shook them and the shaft lights stayed out. "Come on! We"ve got to get out of here or we"ll all die!"
With her deceptive strength she picked him up and raced up the stairs. At the top, she looked back, and there seemed to be tears in her eyes.
"Forgive me once more, dear Mavra," she whispered more to herself than to Renard, although he heard.
Then she was off across the bridge.
Both cars were packed with bodies, and they stopped and started several times and moved jerkily. Despite moments when they seemed stuck, doomed to die of asphyxiation, both made it to the surface.
Renard, though still in shock, realized it was now his show. "To the ship!" he yelled. Time for mourning later.
Aboard the Shuttle The shuttle had originally been designed for humans. The Bozog engineers had adapted it for the flight from the Well World to New Pompeii-and though there were now eleven humans and only three nonhumans aboard, they managed. The shuttle had been designed for up to thirty people, and the rear area still had its seats-with two to spare.
The Bozog and the Ghiskind remained with Renard on the bridge. The Agitar struggled to get ahold of himself. "Ghiskind, look in back and make sure everybody"s seated and strapped down," he snapped. The red specter drifted back, looked, came back, and its hollow-hooded head nodded.
"E-release," Renard muttered. "Now-oh, yeah. Hold tight!" He checked his own straps and reached over to a keyboard, punching the code in.
Nothing happened.
He cursed, then thought a bit, trying to figure out what he had done wrong. Suddenly, he had it.
"E-lift," he punched.
The ship broke free and rose at near maximum power.
"Code please," a pleasant, mechanical voice came at them over the ship"s radio, startling him. "Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship."
"The robot sentinels!" he cried. "We forgot about them!"
But Mavra hadn"t. She"d had him program the entire sequence.
"The Decline and Fall of Pompeii," came her recorded voice over the radio. It was, Renard thought with some relief, a truly appropriate t.i.tle.
Now the ship slowed, came almost to a standstill. Before him, the screens showed a meaningless series of figures and lots of circles, dots, and other shapes.
The shuttle began to move forward again.
He sighed and relaxed. "That"s that for now," he told the others. "She said it would be a day or two before we"d be in range of anybody, unless we run into someone coming our way first."
He walked back to the pa.s.senger compartment.
"G.o.dd.a.m.ned bushy horse"s tail!" one of the women swore. "Feels like you"re sitting on a rock, and it"s so long you sweep the floor with it!"
Another laughed. "I guess we got off lucky," she said cheerfully. "He hadn"t thought of the tails until he got the people in from the forest."
Renard was confused. Except for slight differences in coloration, and the occasional tail, they all looked alike.
"Who"s who?" he moaned.
One laughed. "I"m Wooley, Renard, so relax. This is Star-ah, Vistaru, that is. And these two over here are Nikki Zinder and her daughter, Mavra." She choked up, but recovered quickly.
He didn"t. "Nikki Zinder . . ." he mumbled. "Her daughter . . ."
The girl stared at him unbelievingly. "Are you really my father?" she asked.
He shook his head slowly. "No, somebody else was, somebody human. I have his memories, and his personality, but I"m something else now."
That seemed to satisfy her, and Nikki, who"d tensed at the question, visibly relaxed.
Renard looked at the others, anxious to change the subject. "What about them?" he asked, looking at the seven other girls.
Wooley undid her straps and walked to him. She was taller than he and her tail trailed like a bird"s plume.
"We"ve explained to them that they have all lost their memories for good," she whispered to him, "because of the machine. They"ll be okay."
That relieved him, and his body reminded him of a different need. "We"ve got at least a couple of days on this tub," he pointed out, "and very little to eat."
She shrugged. "We can hold out if we have to. Actually, there"s enough organic stuff in the padding and old packs. We can all have something, I think. You"re the one that will probably have the most problem."
He chuckled and looked at his pa.s.sengers. "Live on love, huh?" he cracked.
By the time contact was made two and a half days out, they had all practiced what was to be said-and what was not to be said-and their courses of action.
"This is the Com police," a stern male voice came over the radio. "Identify yourself by number and destination."
Renard sighed. "This is a refugee ship from New Pompeii, a planetoid formerly owned by New Harmony," he replied. "I am not a pilot and there is not one aboard."
That seemed to disturb the police a bit. There was some anxious checking against police computer files.
"Stand by, we will match you and board," the police ship stated.
"It"s in your hands," he responded. "However, first I think I better warn you about a few things."
He proceeded to tell them of Antor Trelig"s party, of Obie, the Well World, everything. The only details omitted concerned how to reach the Well World.
The police didn"t believe, of course, but they recorded the information anyway; then they matched the ships, locked, and two armored cops boarded.
One look at the pa.s.sengers and they had less reason to doubt.
Com police were an odd group: the wild ones, the undomesticated, the lovers of freedom and the restless. They were carefully recruited in midlife, usually after having been caught red-handed at something nasty.
In exchange for voluntarily undergoing some loyalty conditioning, they were paroled-to police the rest, to protect the Com and the frontier from others just like them.
They generally knew a hot potato when they grabbed it. The taped conversations were coded, sealed, and sent directly to the eleven-member Council Presidium, which made decisions when the full Council could not be summoned-or when it shouldn"t be.
Three Council members were out to the ship in less than fourteen additional hours. They were Com, all right, yet each maintained his own strong character. One, a woman apparently approaching middle age, had an especially regal bearing.
"Some twenty-two years ago," Councillor Alaina said, "before I had this last rejuve, I hired Mavra Chang to attend Antor Trelig"s little party as my agent. I never heard from her again, of course-but, since New Pompeii disappeared, taking dear Antor with it, I was satisfied." She looked around at the odd little group of human women and aliens. "And now I see she succeeded after all."
They all had tears in their eyes, and even the Bozog quivered a bit. Only the Ghiskind, as usual, was impa.s.sive.
"When I heard the police report, I didn"t believe it-but here you all are, even Nikki Zinder!" She turned to Vistaru. "And you-an unexpected pleasure, Star Tonge. One of your sons is an invaluable Chief Counselor."
"The kids," Wooley murmured to herself. "It"d be interesting to see the kids again."
"And now we must decide what is to be done," Councillor Alaina continued. "We owe you all a great deal."
Renard slapped himself. "The sponge cure!" he blurted.
The refugees looked startled, and he nodded. "Obie-the computer-gave it to Mavra. She recorded it in the ship"s log."
Alaina nodded to a Com policeman. "Get it," she ordered. "Secure it." She looked preoccupied, as if watching new vistas unfold. "If that cure holds up," she continued, "it"ll break the back of the syndicate. The changes will be revolutionary."
"It"ll work," the Agitar a.s.sured her. "Mavra said it would."
A grim expression marred the Councilor"s normally impa.s.sive features. "Mavra Chang. Yes. So sad. You"re sure we can"t go back for her?"
"Studies show most power has failed," a policeman put in. "The plasma shield itself is weakening. If anybody"s still there, they"re dead now for sure."
She nodded. "I thought as much. But her name shall live on in our histories. She shall be celebrated among the greats. We will not forget her."
"None of us will," Renard replied sincerely.
They sat about half a light-hour off New Pompeii. On the screens the planetoid showed clearly as a small ball.
"Everyone thinks that you need the weapons locker to destroy a planet," Alaina noted. "But you don"t. That takes a vote of all the Council, and we can"t put this to the Council until we"ve substantially laundered it. No use informing the universe that such a thing as Obie is possible. Somebody else would surely build one."
All agreed.
Four ships showed on the screens, Com police cruisers towing huge objects with tractor beams.
"What are they?" Wooley asked, fascinated.
"Antimatter, my dear," Alaina replied. "It"s all over the place, you know. Always has been. Calculate the ma.s.s of the object you want to destroy, grab some antimatter of equal ma.s.s, bring the two together, and they cancel each other out. Took a century even to create a tractor beam that wouldn"t react with the stuff. The police craft will follow a trajectory that will have the antimatter asteroids strike New Pompeii at the same time. Should be quite a flash, and that will be that."
They watched as the ships moved by, curved, swung the asteroids around and let them fly.
And then scrammed like h.e.l.l.
While they waited for the missiles to reach their target, Alaina discussed other things.
"Makes you wonder," she said, looking at Renard, the Bozog, and the Ghiskind. "If you three can exist, how many others might? Maybe just over the next solar system, so to speak. Perhaps within our lifetime two of our cultures will meet. How I"d love to see that!"
"If you"d been on the Well World you"d have your fill of alien races pretty quickly," Vistaru responded.
She shrugged. "I"ve always wondered. Perhaps such a clash will be the ultimate problem. Perhaps the other beings will be antimatter? That That would be frustrating!" She laughed, then changed tone. would be frustrating!" She laughed, then changed tone.
"Have you thought about your own futures?" she asked them.
"We-the Bozog, the Ghiskind, and I-can return to the Well World," Renard replied. "We"ve told you that. Just get us to a Markovian world. That"s what we have to do, of course. There"s no place for us in this part of the universe."
She nodded, and turned to the others. "What about you, Tonges?"
Wooley smiled. "Nikki Zinder has never had a chance to be a real person, live a real life. Her daughter even less so-and the others, well, they can learn to be people. It will be interesting to see how the family"s come along. And, well, Star and I really did love each other, you know. It"ll be fun being together again after all those long years."
"And we owe Mavra something," Vistaru put in. "Both of us keep thinking, if only we had stayed a little longer, if only we"d made sure that Vash"s children all got out. If only we hadn"t left them. She had such a horrible life-maybe we can help these other women, instead of letting them wind up in a hole, like Mavra. I think we owe that much to her, to them, and to ourselves."
Alaina nodded. "I think I can understand. Bodies like those can be wonderful, or the biggest curse you can have. And I"ll help. Mavra"s fee was agreed to, recorded, and never paid. I think you could do a pretty good job with a million, couldn"t you?"
Wooley"s eyes went wide. "A million? million?" She laughed suddenly. "Wow! We"ll buy our own frontier world!" She looked at Vistaru. "You know, it"s crazy, isn"t it? We had lives once, then second lives on the Well, then third lives back here, fourth back on the Well, now fifth-I wonder if that means we"re going to keep living forever? We can always return to the Well again in the future."
Vistaru laughed. "Yeah, but take it easy. You aren"t my husband any more. You"re superwoman now."
"I started out a woman," the other pointed out. "Not much of one, I admit. Maybe it"s time for Wu Julee to find out what it"s really like."
Vistaru nodded. "It can really be wonderful," she said softly.
"Look!" Renard yelled. "The asteroids are about there!"
As he spoke four smaller dots converged on the large ball. A tremendous flash of energy blurred their vision momentarily, then there was nothing.
Scans revealed no trace of New Pompeii, not the slightest speck of dust.
Alaina sighed. "That"s it, then. Let"s get out of here."
The ship throbbed to life and started moving. There were tears in Renard"s eyes and all were silent.
"Good-bye, Mavra. Forgive us."
And even the Yugash"s hood bowed.
An Unnamed Star in M-51
She stood and stretched all four legs in the darkness. She was used to working in the dark, and her nose quickly found some edible fruit and some stale bread. It would do, and the fruit provided needed water. She"d gone through the last of the preserved foodstuffs the day before.
She wondered why she was still alive. She wondered why she persisted in postponing the end.
The lights came on. That, in itself, was no surprise. She"d been expecting it any time now, ever since she"d experienced the familiar blackout and that long dropping feeling a few hours before.