Test of Fire (1982) Read online

Page 3


  "... SHOULD BE AT THE AIRLOCK IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES. MEDICAL TEAMS SHOULD BE AT THE AIRLOCK IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES."

  The crowd was laughing and talking and surging forward now. Lisa felt herself pushed closer to the metal hatch; not that anyone touched her, but the emotional energy of the crowd had a vital force to it.

  "Who the hell gave anyone permission to leave their jobs?" Kobol snarled, his voice rising. "We can't have people meandering around like this!"

  Catherine Demain laughed at him. "What are you going to do about it? They're excited about Douglas bringing back survivors, I guess."

  Lisa watched the crowd. Almost every one of the settlement's five hundred and some people seemed to have suddenly jammed into the cavern, filling up the big central aisle, spilling over into the narrower passages between stacks of crates.

  Even the children had come, to clamber over the lunar buggies that they were never allowed to touch.

  They were happy. They were excited. They kept a respectful distance from the medical volunteers and the trio of leaders next to the hatch, but they had come to see Douglas' return, to witness his rescue of a handful of people from Earth.

  They want to see that Earth isn't totally dead, Lisa realized. They've come to see survivors of the holocaust with their own eyes.

  The crowd surged forward again, kids standing on tiptoes atop buggies and forklifts, an expectant crackle of excitement running through the cavern.

  Lisa suddenly felt cold, shiveringly cold. She turned and saw the airlock indicator light had turned from red to amber.

  Everyone seemed to hold their breath. The big cavern went absolutely silent. The light finally flashed green and the massive metal door began to swing slowly open. Kobol stood as tense as a steel cable just before it snaps. Catherine Demain took an unconscious half-step toward the slowly opening hatch.

  "Help them," Lisa commanded. Two of the medical volunteers dropped the stretcher they were carrying and rushed to the hatch. They leaned their weight on it, swinging it fully open.

  The first man out was one of the pilots, grinning broadly as he stepped through, searching the crowd with his eyes until a tiny blonde woman raced through the people standing in front and threw herself into his arms. A murmur ran through the cavern.

  A younger man stepped out next. Lisa recognized him as one of the communications technicians.

  His coverall was stained with mud, his face was grimy. But he too had an enormous grin on his face, a smile of satisfaction, of relief, of accomplishment.

  The crowd watched, hushed, as the survivors from Earth came out one by one, most of them supported by members of Douglas' crew. The medical volunteers helped them onto stretchers and carried them toward the powerlift to the makeshift infirmary that had been prepared for them. The crowd melted back to make room for them.

  They were awed into silence as the survivors were carried past. The people from Earthside were mostly men. They seemed weak, they looked thin, as though starved. There were no obvious burns or wounds on their raggedly-clothed bodies.

  When the last of the survivors came out, Catherine Demain hurried after his stretcher. Lisa stood where she was. The crowd began to murmur again, to talk excitedly. The rest of the crew who had gone Earthside stepped through the airlock hatch, each of them wearing that same grin of victory. As each of them came into sight, the crowd cheered and applauded. The noise was growing, building, reverberating off the rock walls and ceiling. One by one, the men who had participated in the mission came out and were quickly surrounded by friends, family, lovers.

  And then, last of all, came Douglas Morgan. His smile was not as broad as the others'. There was less of joy and relief in it, more of irony and doubt.

  But only Lisa saw this. The others simply roared their approval once they saw him, rushed to him cheering wildly and raised Douglas to their shoulders.

  He looked genuinely surprised. Lisa saw that his eyes were tired, sleepless. His coverall was grimy and stained with what might have been blood along one sleeve.

  But the crowd noticed none of this. All they knew was that Douglas had led the expedition to Earth, had brought back living survivors of the holocaust, had proved that they were not totally cut off from their mother world, had shown that the Earth was not entirely dead.

  They paraded with him on their shoulders and cheered themselves hoarse. Their noise was absolutely head-splitting. But Lisa stayed where she was, her hands at her sides no matter how much she wanted to press them to her ears.

  Almost as an afterthought, a pair of wildly laughing men grabbed her and hoisted her up onto their shoulders, then fought their way through the circling, howling, triumphant mob to march side-by-side with their pair holding Douglas aloft. He looked at her and grinned boyishly, almost guiltily. He shouted some words at her but Lisa could not hear them over the ceaseless animal roar of the mob.

  Douglas laughed and shrugged his broad shoulders.

  Lisa knew, in an utterly unmistakable flash of insight, that her husband could lead these people wherever he chose to take them. They worshipped him. And she knew with equal certainty that he would throw it all away, that he did not want to be their leader, that he thought it all an absurd cosmic joke.

  Then she looked back over her shoulder at Kobol, standing alone now back by the open airlock hatch, his face twisted with anger and envy, halfway between weeping and murder.

  * * *

  Dr. Robert Lord sat staring at the open refrigerator.

  There were only four lumps of what had once beer food in it, but now they were green, slimy, shapeless blobs that dripped between the rungs of the refrigerator shelves. The stench made his stomach heave. The emergency power generator had run out of fuel four days earlier, and the food had quickly rotted.

  Fungus, Lord thought. At least the simple life forms are still working.

  His stomach pangs were so insistent that his hand started to reach out for the festering mess.

  "No!" he said aloud. The sound startled him. He pulled his hand away; then grabbed the edge of the refrigerator door and slammed it shut. Slowly, weak with hunger and the fever that was sapping his strength, he made his way out of the observatory's basement kitchen, up the spiral iron stairs that clanged as hollow as his stomach, and entered the big dome.

  The telescope stood patiently, a massive monument to a dead civilization. With each step across the cement floor Lord's boots echoed eerily through the vast, sepulchral dome. He had always thought of the astronomical observatory as a sacred place. Now it was truly a tomb. He was the only one left alive in it. Two days after the sky had burned, a wild, frenzied mob from the town had sacked the observatory, killing everyone they could find in their madness and hatred for scientists.

  "It's their fault!" the mob screamed as they attacked the handful of men and women in the observatory.

  Lord had fled to the film vault and locked himself in without waiting to see if any of the others could reach its safety after him. The vault was almost soundproof, but some of the tortured shrieks of his colleagues and students seeped through, burning themselves into his mind. He waited two days before he dared to come out, weak from hunger, filthy from his own excrement.

  They were all dead. The pert little Robertson girl had made it almost to the door of the vault before they found her, stripped her, and raped her to death.

  Lord knew he should have buried them, but he did not have the strength. Now, as he tottered across the observatory's main dome, smudged here and there by fires that the mob had started, there was no one to talk to, to confess to, except himself.

  "It was a solar disturbance," he said to the empty, silent dome. His voice quavered and echoed in the accusing shadows. "Maybe a mild nova. My paper on the fluctuations of the intrinsic solar magnetic field . . . it'll never be published now. There's nobody left to read it."

  He sank to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and cried until he collapsed exhausted on the cold cement floor.


  For weeks he had patiently sat at the observatory's solar-powered radio, calling to other astronomical observatories around the world. When none answered, he swept the frequency dial from one end to another, searching for sounds of life.

  He heard voices. There were people out there.

  But the tales they told made his blood freeze.

  Cities blasted into radioactive pits. Disease ravaging the countryside. Maddened bands of looters prowling the land, worse than animals, killing for the insane joy of it, raping and torturing and enslaving anyone they found.

  Lord shuddered, remembering their voices, pleading, angry, bitter, sick, frightened. He still heard them sometimes, and not always in his dreams.

  One woman, a psychology professor at Utah State, actually engaged him in a pleasant conversation over several days, reporting clinically on the devastation of Salt Lake City, the enormous levels of radiation that blanketed the state thanks to the heavy megatonnage that had been targeted for the mobile missile sites along the Nevada border. The wrath of the Lord, she had called it, not knowing his name.

  On her last day she told him with mounting excitement in her voice as she watched a group of young men nosing around the wrecked campus.

  Her excitement turned to disgust as they set buildings on fire and finally broke into the room she was in. She left the radio on as the marauders kicked down her door and poured into the room.

  Lord could still her screams whenever he tried to sleep.

  Her screams awoke him.

  He was lying on the cold cement floor of the observatory, exhausted and stiff. And starving. He could not tell how much of his weakness was due to the fever that raged through him, how much the fever was due to his hunger. Every muscle in his frail body ached hideously. It was dark now inside the dome. Night had fallen.

  Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself to his feet and tottered outside to the balcony ringing the observatory dome. In the shadows of night, the forest was as dark and mysteriously alive as ever.

  The warm breeze rustled the leafy boughs the way it always did. Insects buzzed and chirped. Frogs sang their peeping song.

  "It's only the men who have disappeared," Lord whispered to himself. "Life goes on without us."

  He wondered idly, almost calmly, if he were the last man alive on Earth. Why wonder? he asked himself. Why prolong it? The world will be better, safer, without us. With eyes that glittered of fever and the beginnings of madness he stared down from the parapet ringing the balcony into the inky darkness that fell away to the forest floor a hundred feet below.

  "Life goes on without us," he repeated, and cast his head up for one last glimpse of the stars.

  The stars!

  Lord gaped at the sight. He had hoped for a glimpse of them, but the clouds had broken at last, after weeks of virtually uninterrupted overcast, and the stars were blazing at him in all their old glory, ordered in the same eternal patterns across the sky. Ursa Major, Polaris, the long graceful sweep of Cygnus, Altair, Vega—they were all there, beckoning to him. Lord almost fainted at the splendor of it.

  The Moon rode high in the sky, a slim crescent with a strange unwinking star set just on the dark side of its terminator.

  "It can't be . . ." he muttered to himself. But even as he said it, he stumbled through the shadows to one of the low-powered binoculars set into steel swivel stands along the balustrade. They had been put in place for visitors, a sop to keep them from pestering the staff to look through the big telescope. They were ideal for gazing at the Moon.

  Hands trembling, Lord focused the binoculars on that point of light. It resolved itself into several rings of lights: the surface domes of the lunar colony.

  "They're alive up there," he whispered to himself, almost afraid that if he said it too loudly the lights would wink out. "Of course . . . they live underground all the time. The flare wouldn't have affected them, only their instruments on the surface."

  He stood erect and stared naked-eyed at the Moon. "They're alive!" he shouted. The lights did not disappear.

  Babbling with nearly hysterical laughter, Lord staggered to the stone stairs that led down to the observatory's parking lot. A dozen cars were there, surely at least one of them would have enough fuel in its tank to take him as far as . . . where?

  He stopped halfway down the winding stairs, panting and trembling on wobbly legs. Where?

  Most of the cities were radioactive rubble. Barbarian gangs roamed the countryside. But somewhere there must be a scientific outpost that still survives. With a radio powerful enough to reach the lunar colony.

  "Greenbelt, Maryland!" Lord exclaimed. "The NASA Goddard Center. They're far enough away from Washington to have escaped the blast. Radiation may have been heavy, but most of it should have dissipated by now"

  Nodding eagerly, he resumed his descent of the stairs. "Greenbelt," he muttered over and over again, convincing himself that it was true. "I can call them from Greenbelt. They'll have rocket shuttles up there. They'll come to pick up survivors.

  I'll call them from Greenbelt."

  Chapter 4

  Once they were alone in their one-room quarters, Lisa turned to her husband and said, "So now you're a hero."

  Douglas almost laughed. The wild joy of his reception at the airlock had been completely unexpected.

  For more than two weeks he had shouldered the responsibilities of the leader of an expedition into hell. He had seen more of death than any man wanted to see, had forced himself to accept it, to deal with it. He had even steeled himself to killing a few of the wild marauders who had attacked his men almost as soon as their shuttle had touched down on the long airstrip in Florida.

  Then came the long return back to the Moon, with the sick and starving survivors they had picked up. And the memories of the others they had been forced to leave behind, too weak to make the trip, too old to be useful once they got back home, too sick to be saved by the lunar settlement's limited medical staff.

  Douglas felt he had aged ten years in less than a month. His nostrils still smelled the stench of decaying corpses; the smell seemed to cling to his clothing, his skin.

  And then the outburst of welcome, the hero's return, the tumultuous enthusiasm of his friends and colleagues, carrying him on their shoulders, praising him, laughing, cheering, blessing him.

  For what? Douglas had wondered. For adding two dozen casualties to their already-strained facilities? Or for giving them Kope that they might return to Mother Earth some day?

  Now Lisa faced him, lithe and deadly in her severe black jumpsuit, her expression unreadable.

  He had never understood her, he realized. He loved her, but he could not for the life of him fathom her moods. Or maybe, said a mocking voice within him, maybe you love not her, not the real Lisa Ducharme Morgan, but your own idea of what she should be. That would be just like you, Douglas: in love with the theory and trying to force reality to fit your flight of fancy.

  "How does it feel?" Lisa asked. "Being a hero, I mean. Having men hoist you up on their shoulders."

  All the excitement of the reception drained out of him. He replied defensively, "But they put you up on their shoulders, too."

  Her dark eyes glittered coldly. "Yes, didn't they? But they didn't kiss my hand. They didn't fall to their knees and worship me as their savior."

  "Nobody did that."

  "Not quite," she said, turning toward the desk unit, putting her back to him. "Almost, but not quite."

  Their room was a duplicate of all the other living quarters in the underground settlement.

  Spartan utility, nothing more.

  Lisa pulled out the chair, looked down at it for an uncertain moment, then let it go and sat instead on the edge of the bed. Her back was ramrod straight, her hands clenched with tension. Douglas stood just inside the door, knowing that if he went to sit beside her she would move away from him.

  "We have a lot to talk about," he said.

  "I don't feel like talking."

  "Sooner
or later . . ."

  She looked up at him. "What would you have done if Fred hadn't died out there? Would you have killed him?"

  Douglas searched his mind for an answer.

  "Well?"

  "There's been enough of death," he said, seeing the blood-soaked remains of the towns around Cape Canaveral. The radiation level had quickly tapered off, but the towns had self-destructed in orgies of terror and greed. There was no place to dig in Florida, no place to hide from the fallout.

  But even in the blast-hardened blockhouses of the space center human beings had clawed each other to death over scraps of food or a safer corner to huddle in.

  "Is your honor satisfied?" Lisa asked scornfully.

  "He's dead, and so is the baby."

  "What does honor have to do with it?" he snapped. "When did you become interested in honor? Did you do it in this bed, right here? Or over in his quarters?"

  A bitter smile turned the corners of her lips.

  "What makes you think we did it in either place? Or that we did it only once. It's only in melodramas that a single copulation gets the maiden pregnant."

  He snorted with disgust. "Maiden. Who else have you been doing it with?"

  "Before I met you or since?"

  He took an involuntary step toward her, his fists clenched.

  "Would you like me to evaluate them for you? On a scale of one to ten, you come pretty close to zero, you know."

  He swung without realizing it and only at the last instant did he open his hand. The slap rang through the tiny room, knocking Lisa over backward across the narrow bed, halfway over its far side.

  She pulled herself up slowly, the side of her face burning with the red imprint of his fingers.

  "Thank you," she said slowly. "That's precisely what I expected from you."

  He turned and stamped out of the room.

  For hours Douglas strode the underground corridors, walking blindly through the rough-hewn tunnels that laced the various parts of the settlement together. Past the long, pipe-fed vats of the hydroponics farms he strode, looking neither right nor left, seeing nothing and no one except his wife's shocked face with the imprint of his angry hand on it.

 

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