05-A Gift From Earth Page 5

  Jesus Pietro's clothes dried slowly, in wrinkles. He sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his belly. Presently he opened his eyes, sighed, and frowned slightly.

  Jesus Pietro, this is a very strange house.

  Yes. Almost garishly colonist. (Overtones of disgust.)

  Jesus Pietro looked at the pink coral walls, the flat-sanded floor which curved up at the edge of the rug to join the walls. Not a bad effect if a woman were living here. But Harry Kane was a bachelor.

  How much would you say a house like this cost?

  Oh, about a thousand stars, not including furnishings. Furnishings would cost twice that. Rugs, ninety stars if you bought one and let it spread. Two housecleaners, mated, fifty stars.

  And how much to put a basement under such a house?

  Mist Demons, what an idea! Basements have to be dug by hand, by human beings! It'd cost twenty thousand stars easily. You could build a school for that. Who would ever think of digging a basement under an architectural coral house?

  Who indeed?

  Jesus Pietro stepped briskly to the door. "Major Jansen!"

  The sequel was likely to be messy. Jesus Pietro retired to the flying office while a team went in with an echo sounder. Yes, there was a large open space under the house. Major Chin wanted to find the entrance, but that might take all night, and the sounds might warn the colonists. Jesus Pietro sat firmly on his curiosity and ordered explosives.

  It was messy. The rebels had put together some ingenious devices from materials anyone would have considered harmless. Two men died before sleepy-gas grenades could be used.

  When all was quiet, Jesus Pietro followed the demolition teams into the basement.

  They found one of the unconscious rebels leaning on a dead-man switch. They traced the leads to a homemade bomb big enough to blow house and basement to bits. While they disconnected the bomb, Jesus Pietro studied the man, making a mental note to ask him if he'd chickened out. He'd found that they often did.

  Behind one wall was a car, a three-year-old four-seater model with a bad scrape on the ground-effect skirt. Jesus Pietro could see no way to get it out of the basement, and neither could anyone else. The house must have been formed over it. Of course, thought Jesus Pietro; they dug the basement then grew the house over it. He had his men cut away the wall so that the car could be removed later if it was thought worthwhile. They'd practically have to remove the house.

  There was a flight of steps with a trapdoor at the top. Jesus Pietro, examining the small bomb under the trapdoor, congratulated himself (pointedly, in Major Chin's hearing) on not allowing Major Chin to search for the entrance. He might have found it. Someone removed the bomb and opened the trapdoor. Above was the living room. An asymmetrical section of mutated grass rug had reluctantly tom away and come up with the door. When the door was lowered, it would grow back within twenty minutes.

  After the dead and unconscious had been filed away in patrol wagons, Jesus Pietro walked among them, comparing the faces with his final stack of photos. He was elated. With the exception of one man, he had collected Harry Kane and his entire guest list. The organ banks would be supplied for years. Not only would the crew have a full supply, which they always did anyway, but there would be spare parts for exceptional servants of the regime; i.e., for civil servants such as Jesus Pietro and his men. Even the colonists would benefit. It was not at all unusual for the Hospital to treat a sick but deserving colonist if the medical supplies were sufficient. The Hospital treated everyone they could. It reminded the colonists that the crew ruled in their name and had their interests at heart.

  And the Sons of Earth was dead. All but one man, and from his picture he wasn't old enough to be dangerous.

  Nonetheless Jesus Pietro had his picture tacked to the Hospital bulletin boards and sent a copy to the newscast station with the warning that he was wanted for questioning.

  It was not until dawn, when he was settling down to sleep, that he remembered who belonged to that face. Matthew Keller's nephew, six years older than when he'd pulled that cider trick.

  He looked just like his uncle.

  The rain stopped shortly before dawn, but Matt didn't know it. Sheltered from the rain by a cliff and by a thick clump of watershed trees, he slept on.

  The cliff was the Beta-Gamma cliff. He'd fetched up against it sometime last night, dizzy and bruised and wet and winded. He could have collapsed there or tried running parallel to the cliff. He had chosen to collapse. If Implementation found him, he'd never awaken, and he had known it as he went to sleep. He had been too exhausted to care.

  He woke about ten with a ferocious headache. Every separate muscle hurt from running and from sleeping on bare ground. His tongue felt like the entire Implementation police force had marched over it in sweat socks. He stayed on his back, looking up into the dark trees his ancestors had called pines, and tried to remember.

  So much to begin and end in one night.

  The people seemed to crowd around him. Hood, Laney, the four tall men, the kid who drank behind the bar, the laughing man who stole crew cars, Polly, Harry Kane, and a forest of anonymous elbows and shouting voices.

  All gone. The man whose scar he wore. The woman who'd left him flat. The genial mastermind-bartender. And Laney! How could he have lost Laney? They were gone. Over the next few years they might reappear in the form of eyes, lengths of artery and vein, grafts of hair-bearing scalp ....

  By now the police would be looking for Matt himself.

  He sat up, and every muscle screamed. He was naked. Implementation must have found his clothes in Laney's room. Could they match the clothes to him? And if they couldn't, they'd still wonder how a man came to be wandering stark naked in open countryside. On the pedwalks of Earth there were licensed nudists, and on Wunderland you didn't need a license; but on the Plateau there was no substitute for clothing.

  He couldn't turn himself in. By now he'd never prove he wasn't a rebel. He'd have to get clothes, somehow, and hope they weren't looking for him already.

  He surged to his feet, and it hit him again. Laney. Laney in the dark, Laney looking at him in the lamplit bed. Polly, the girl with the secret. Hood, first name Jayhawk. A wave of sickness caught him, and he doubled over, retching. He stopped the spasms by sheer willpower. His skull was a throbbing drum. He straightened and walked to the edge of the watershed forest.

  To right and left the watershed trees stretched along the base of the Beta-Gamma cliff. Beta Plateau above him, unreachable except by the bridge, which must be miles to the left. Before him, a wide meadow with a few grazing goats. Beyond that, houses. Houses in all directions, thickly clustered. His own was perhaps four miles away. He'd never reach it without being stopped.

  How about Harry's house? Laney had said there was a hiding place. And the ones who left before the raid .... some of them might have returned. They could help him. But would they?

  He'd have to try it. He might reach Harry's house, crawling through the grass. The luck of Matt Keller might hold that far. He'd never reach his own.

  His luck held: the strange luck that seemed to hide Matt Keller when he didn't want to be noticed. He reached the house two hours later. His knees and belly were green and itchy from the grass.

  The grounds about the house were solidly spread with wheel tracks. All of Implementation must have been in on the raid. Matt saw no guards, but he went carefully in case they were inside. Implementation guards or rebel guards, he could still be shot. Though a guard might hesitate to shoot him; he'd want to ask questions first. Like: "Where's your pants, buddy?"

  Nobody was inside. A dead or sleeping family of housecleaners lay against one wall, beneath their looted nest. Dead, probably, or drugged. Housecleaners hated, light; they did their work at night. The rug showed a gaping hole that reached down through indoor grass and architectural coral to a well-furnished hole in the ground. The living-room walls were spotted with explosion marks and mercy-bullet streaks. So was the basement, when Matt climb
ed down to look.

  The basement was empty of men and nearly empty of equipment. Scars showed where heavy machinery had stood, more scars where it had been torn loose or burned loose. There were doors, four of them, all crude looking and all burned open. One led to a kitchen; two opened on empty storerooms. One whole wall lay on its side, but the piece of equipment beyond was intact. The hole left by the fallen wall might have been big enough to remove it, but certainly the hole in the living-room floor was not.

  It was a car, a flying car of the type used by all crew families. Matt had never before seen one close up. There it was beyond the broken wall, with no possible way to get it out. What in blazes had Harry Kane wanted with a car that couldn't be flown?

  Perhaps this was what had brought on the raid. Cars were strictly denied to colonists. The military uses of a flying car are obvious. But why wasn't its theft noticed earlier? The car must have been here when the house was built.

  Dimly Matt remembered a story he'd heard last night. Something about a stolen car set to circle the Plateau until the fuel ran out. No doubt the car had fallen in the mist, watched by furious, impotent crew. But — suppose he'd heard only the official version? Suppose the fuel had not ran out; suppose the car had dipped into the mist, circled below the Plateau, and come up where Harry Kane could bury it in a hidden basement?

  Probably he'd never know.

  __________

  The showers were still running. Matt was shivering badly when he stepped in. The hot water thawed him instantly. He let the water pour heavily down on the back of his neck, washing the grass stains and dirt and old sweat from him as it ran in streams to his feet. Life was bearable. With all its horrors and all its failures, life was bearable where there were hot showers.

  He thought of something then, and metaphorically his ears pricked up.

  The raid had been so big. Implementation had grabbed everyone at the party. From the number of tracks, it was likely they had taken even those who had left early, putting them to sleep one-by-one and two-by-two as they turned toward home. They must have returned to the Hospital with close to two hundred prisoners.

  Some were innocent. Matt knew that. And Implementation was usually fair about convictions. Trials were always closed, and only the results were ever published, but Implementation usually preferred not to convict the innocent. Suspects had returned from the Hospital.

  But that wouldn't take long. The police could simply release everyone without a hearing aid, with notations to keep an eye on them in future. He who wore a hearing aid was guilty.

  But it would take time to reduce around a hundred convicted rebels to their component parts.

  The odds were that Laney, Hood, and Polly were still alive. Certainly they could not all be dead by this time.

  Matt stepped out of the shower and began looking for clothes. He found a closet which must have belonged to Harry Kane, for the shorts were too wide and the shirts were too short. He dressed anyway, pulling shirt and shorts into a million wrinkles with the belt. At a distance he'd pass.

  The clothes problem was as nothing, now. The problem he faced was much worse.

  He had no idea how long it took to take a man apart and store him away, though he could guess that it would take a long time to do it right. He didn't know whether Implementation, in the person of the dread Castro, would want to question the rebels first. But he did know that every minute he waited reduced the odds that each of the partygoers was still alive. Right now the odds were good.

  Matt Keller would go through life knowing that he had passed up his chance to save them.

  But, he reminded himself, it wasn't really a chance. He had no way to reach Alpha Plateau without being shot. He'd have to cross two guarded bridges.

  The noonday sun shone through clean air on a clean, ordered world ... in contrast to the gutted coral shell behind him. Matt hesitated on the doorstep, then resolutely turned back to the jagged hole in Harry Kane's living room. He must know that it was impossible. The basement was the heart of the rebel stronghold — a heart which had failed. If Implementation had overlooked a single weapon ...

  There were no weapons in the car, but he found an interesting assortment of scars. Ripped upholstery showed bolts attached to the exposed metal walls, but the bolts had been cut or torn out. Matt found six places which must have been gun mounts. A bin in back might have held makeshift hand grenades. Or sandwiches; Matt couldn't tell. Implementation had taken anything that might have been a weapon, but they didn't seem to have harmed the car. Presumably they would come back and dig it out someday if they thought it worth the effort.

  He got in and looked at the dashboard, but it didn't tell him anything. He'd never seen a car dashboard. There had been a cover over it, padlocked, but the padlock lay broken on the floor and the cover was loose. Harry's padlock? Or the original owner's?

  He sat in the unfamiliar vehicle, unwilling to leave because leaving would mean giving up. When he noticed a button labeled "Start", he pushed it. He never heard the purr of the motor starting.

  The blast made him spasm like a galvanized frog. It came all in one burst, like the sound of a gunshot as heard by a fly sitting in the barrel. Harry must have set something to blow up the house! But no, he was still alive. And there was daylight pouring in on him.

  Daylight.

  Four feet of earth had disappeared from above him. A wall of the house was in his field of vision. It leaned. Harry Kane must have been a genius with shaped charge explosives. Or known one. Come to that, Matt could have done the job for him. The mining worms didn't do all his work.

  Daylight. And the motor was running. He could hear an almost soundless hum now that his ears had recovered from the blast. If he flew the car straight up ...

  He'd have had to cross two guarded bridges to reach Alpha Plateau. Now he could fly there — if he could learn to fly before the car killed him.

  Or, he could go home. He wouldn't be noticed, despite his ill-fitting clothes. Colonists tended to mind their own business, leaving it to the crew and Implementation to maintain order. He'd change clothes, burn these, and who would know or ask where he'd been over the weekend?

  Matt sighed and examined the dashboard again. He couldn't quit now. Later, maybe, when he crashed the car, or when they stopped him in the air. Not now. The blast that had freed his path was an omen one he couldn't ignore.

  Let's see. Four levers set at zero. Fans: 1-2, 1-3, 2-4, 3-4. Why would those little levers be set to control the fans in pairs? He pulled one toward him. Nothing.

  A small bar with three notches: "Neutral. Ground. Air." Set on Neutral. He moved it to "Ground". Nothing. If he'd had the "Ground Altitude" set for the number of inches he wanted, the fans would have started. But he didn't know that. He tried "Air".

  The car tried to flop over on its back.

  He was in the air before he had it quite figured out. In desperation he pulled all the fan throttles full out and tried to keep the car from rolling over by pushing each one in a little at a time. The ground dwindled until the sheep of Beta Plateau were white flecks and the houses of Gamma were tiny squares. Finally the car began to settle down.

  Not that he could relax for a moment.

  Fans numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 were left front, right front, left rear, right rear. Dropping lever 1-2 dropped the front of the car; 3-4, the back; 1-3, the left side; 2-4, the right side. He had the car upright, and he began to think he had the knack of it.

  But how to go forward?

  There were Altitude and Rotation dials, but they didn't do anything. He didn't dare touch the switch with the complicated three-syllable word on it. But ... suppose he tilted the car forward? Depress the 1-2 throttle.

  He did, just a little. The car rotated slowly forward. Then faster! He pulled the lever out hard. The rotation slowed and stopped when the Plateau stood before his face like a vertical wall. Before the wall could strike him in the face, he got the car righted, waited until his nerves stopped jumping, then ... tried it aga
in.

  This time he pushed the 1-2 lever in a little, waited three seconds, pulled it out hard. It worked, after a fashion. The car began to move forward with its nose dipped.

  Luckily he was facing Alpha Plateau. Otherwise he would have had to fly backwards, and that would have made him conspicuous. He didn't know how to turn around.

  He was going pretty fast. He went even faster when he found a knob labeled "Slats". The car also started to drop. Matt remembered the venetian-blind arrangements under the four fans. He left the slats where they were, leveled the car's altitude. It must have been right because the car kept moving forward.

  It was hardly wobbling at all.

  And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known.

  The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed flashes of blue within the steep channel it had carved for itself. Cliff and river terminated at the void edge to the left, and the murmur of the river's fall came through the cockpit plastic. To the right was a land of endless jagged, tilted plains, softening and blurring in the blue distance.

  Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn't know just what it looked like, but he was sure he'd recognize the huge hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They wouldn't bother him. He hadn't decided how close he would get to the Hospital before landing; even crew might not be permitted within a certain distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he was a crew.

  It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and be was flying the car as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-year-old crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt.