Forever Free

The penlight showed orderly boxes of documents and a wall of old law books, from Earth, mostly in English. There was another wall, behind a locked iron gate, with hundreds of wine bottles, some of them with labels as old as forty MF years.

I gave the lock a tug and it clicked open. I pulled us each out three bottles at random. The sheriff protested that he didn’t drink wine. I told him I didn’t shoot anymore, but I’d carried his damned ammunition.

There was a triple sonic boom, pretty loud even at our depth, and then a protracted sound like sheets being torn. I ran upstairs as soon as it quit.

Winded by the unaccustomed exercise, I held it down to a dogtrot going through the dead building and out the door.

Standing in the middle of Main Street, I could see the three golden needles of the ships on the horizon. Marygay was barely understandable through a roar of static from secondary radiation. “Landing went okay,” she said. “Some stuff came loose and crashed around.”

“How soon can you disembark?” I shouted.

“You don’t have to shout! Maybe an hour. Don’t you come too close before that.”

We spent the time loading the ambulance with ninety parkas from the police wardrobe–better too warm than too cold–and I chose a few cases of food from a grocery down the street.

There would be plenty to eat for the next several years–unless everybody else suddenly showed up, naked and hungry. And pissed off. If one kind of magic is possible, or two, counting the antimatter–then what kind of magic might happen tomorrow?

The sheriff seemed to have been thinking along those lines himself. When we finished loading up the clothing and food and a few extra bottles of wine–one for each ten people didn’t seem adequate–he said, “We have to talk to Antres 906.”

“About what?”

“This. I never could understand Tauran humor. But it would be just like them to demonstrate a new scientific principle with a huge practical joke.”

“Sure. Killing off a whole planet.”

“We don’t know that they’re dead. Until we have a body, it’s still a `missing persons’ case.” I couldn’t tell whether he was being ironic, playing cop. Maybe exposure to the big-city police station had done something to him.

In one of the vehicle’s many latched drawers, labeled only by number, we found a radiation counter. It didn’t need a power source in daylight. I pointed it toward the ships, and the needle gave a little quiver, well below the red sector labeled LEAVE AREA.

“So? Let’s go on in.”

“Inverse-square law,” I said. “We’d probably get fried if we got within half a klick.” I was guessing, of course; I didn’t know anything about secondary radiation.

I thumbed the radio. “Marygay, have you asked the ship how long it will be until you can disembark?”

“Just a second.” I could hear a vague mumble mixed with the static. “It says fifty-eight minutes.”

“Okay. We’ll meet you there about then.” I nodded to Charlie and the sheriff. “Might as well get started, and keep an eye on the counter.”

Going back was a lot easier than coming in had been. We wallowed across a ditch and then drove along the level mud that paralleled the broken-up road. We did wait for fifteen minutes at about the two-kilometer mark, watching the needle quiver less and less.

What to do with 90, or 150, people? Food was not a problem, and shelter was just a matter of breaking and entering. Water was a problem, though.

The sheriff suggested the university. It had dormitories, and a river ran through the middle of it. There might even be a way to jury-rig electricity, I thought; I remembered seeing a field full of solar collectors just off campus, and wondering what they were for–teaching, research, or maybe a backup power supply.

Our ambulance had just crawled onto the landing field when the unloading ramp on Marygay’s ship rolled down. People wobbled down it carefully, tentatively, in groups of five, which was the capacity of the elevator down from the SA pods and control room.

When she came down in the last group, I let out a held breath and realized how tense I’d been, ever since we’d admitted the possibility that they could have been marooned up there. I went halfway up the ramp and took her in my arms.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *