America 2040 - Golden World Part 10

Paul Warden was thinking the same thing. He gave orders. Sage Bryson had moved her camera crew to within ten yards of the excavation and was seated high on the saddle of an extended boom, shootingdown into the excavation.

"Sage, move back about five yards," Warden ordered, and when Sage did not comply immediately, he yelled, "That's an order, Ms. Bryson!" The boom rolled slowly backward. The coned snout of the beast was very distinct on the screens now.

"You move back, too," Max told Grace. "I'll join you as soon as I get a sample of the substance on the wall of the basin."

The admiral was obviously in communication with Mopro on their private frequency, because the big robot rolled up to stand at the edge of the excavation. The admiral was positioning the noose around the opening of the tunnel.

"Everyone stand by!" Max yelled.

Mopro's fingers opened at the tips, exposing his deadly, rapid-fire guns. His chest plate became an outlet for a laser cannon. The admiral was half-crouched, tense, ready.

"Here it comes," Max said.

Grace cried out as the beast below put on a surge of incredible speed, and on the screen, she saw its powerful maw begin to open.

It all seemed to happen at once. The backside of the pipeline crawler shot up out of the tunnel and the cargo crawler flew backward as Max and Grace abandoned their equipment and ran. Paul Warden and his men crouched, weapons ready. The admiral and the powerful head and neck of the beast seemed to shoot up from the excavation at the same time. The small antelope was catapulted about twenty feet, and the admiral, using all the more-than-human power of his legs, flew through the air, with the gaping maw of the beast within inches of his body.

Mopro caught the powerful, tubular neck with the full blast of a stun gun, and with a hissing bellow the head of the beast reached its greatest extension, the teeth snapping shut with a crash to miss the admiral by a margin so fine that Grace's heart was in her mouth. Then the dead-white flesh of the powerful neck was squeezed by the flexisteel collar, and even as he landed lightly on his feet, the admiral was operating the winches, snapping the high-tensile cable into tautness.

The convulsions of the beast shook the ground, causing the edges of the excavation to begin to cave in.

The cables sang with tension.

"We've got him!" Paul Warden yelled.

Suddenly the beast was still. Only the head and neck were visible. The flexisteel collar had closed tightly just behind the fold in the neck.

"Shall I bring him out?" the admiral asked.

For a moment Paul Warden didn't answer. He was awed by the sheer malevolence of the thing, and he, like the others, was getting the smell of it, the sickening stench of rotting flesh. Evil, tiny, red eyes darted back and forth. The exposed neck, dead-flesh white, pulsed. The mouth opened, exposing the huge, back-tilted front teeth and the broad, flat, crushing back teeth. A hiss, which was mixed with a nauseous gurgle, made Grace back up a few more steps. "Bring him out," Warden ordered.

The admiral shortened two of the cables, let the other two out as the winch motors whined and began to smoke with the resistance being put up by the beast. And then the ground seemed to explode upward from the excavation and the twenty-foot length of the monster was yanked from the tunnel.

It looked like a huge grub. The tubular body writhed, and Grace saw immediately how the thing moved itself along its runnels. The midportion of the body seemed to lengthen and contract. When underground, the thing would, by that movement, push the head forward as the midbody lengthened. The sc.r.a.ping sound was created as the beast slid over rock. Then the midbody would contract and sc.r.a.pe, as the rear portion was drawn forward. There was not a great deal of flexibility in the body, however, for the creature's struggles moved the rear end of the body only in a small arc.

"Capture cage!" yelled Paul Warden. The four men of his squad put away their weapons and ran to offload the cage, made of the strongest metals ever alloyed, big enough for two elephants in tandem.

The creature closed its mouth. The hissing roar ceased. The red eyes seemed to calm. The admiral was standing ten feet away from the creature's suspended head when it turned its neck and clipped one of the high tensile cables in two as if it had been made of string and, with lightning swiftness, faster than the fastest strike of the quickest Earth snake, lashed the powerful neck to catch the admiral just as he reacted and began to leap backward. The teeth closed on the admiral's thighs, the mouth covering his legs from knee to groin, and as Grace Monroe screamed a belated warning, she heard the crunch of metals and plastics followed by the clatter of Mopro's automatic weapons.

Paul Warden watched in astonishment as high-velocity, metal-jacketed rounds chipped small fragments off the lead-white skin of the slug. Mopro was giving the creature eight barrels of automatic fire, and the bullets sang off the thing as if striking solid stone, causing a bit of excitement as people dived for cover, with whining ricochets zinging off into the distance.

Before Warden could react past drawing his laser, Mopro was falling into a kneeling squat and the joints of his knees were opening, and two armor-piercing, high-caliber rounds blew the slug apart in the middle in a roar of explosive sound.

The back portion of the separated slug jerked and writhed. The front part was stunned for a moment, falling to thud onto the ground, the admiral still in its jaws. Mopro rolled rapidly, and the searing beam of a laser began to smoke and cut the stonelike skin just behind the creature's head. As the band was severed from the body, the jaws relaxed and the admiral dragged himself out, a puzzled look on his handsome face, his legs totally useless. He drew himself away from the gaping mouth by digging his fingers into the dirt, halted at a distance of five feet, and turned to look in wonderment at the dead beast.

Mopro spun his treads, sped to the admiral's side, and bent ponderously to pick him up on his thick, powerful arms.

"My G.o.d," Max breathed.

Grace recovered from her shock and ran toward Mopro and the admiral.

"I'm sorry, Grace," the admiral said, smiling at her from Mopro's arms.

"Damage report, quickly," Grace snapped. The admiral looked at her, a smile on his face. His reply wa.s.slow in coming. "No... damage, Grace," he said. His voice was weak.

"Your electrical system, Admiral. Check it, please." "I... no... fine," the admiral said. "Max!" Grace shouted. "My toolbox!" Max, seeing the seriousness of her face, went toward the crawler at a dead run.

"Put him down, Mopro," Grace said gently to the big robot. Mopro laid the admiral tenderly at her feet.

She knelt quickly and began to tear at the admiral's shredded trousers, unable to remove them over the mangled legs. Max was back with her kit. She grabbed power shears and began to talk at the same instant. "Max, use the laser scapel. Vertical incision just below his left ear, one-eighth-inch depth, three inches long."

Max went to work. Grace cut away the obscuring trousers and used the power shears to tear and rip at the tough material of the torn skin.

Paul and Stoner stood at a respectful distance. "If that had been a man," Stoner said, "he'd be dead."

"I'm through the skin," Max said. "There's an RD 33 atomic power pack exposed."

"Good," Grace said, still ripping and cutting, into circuitry now, pulling out and tossing aside tiny a.s.semblies of microchips. "We're all shorted out down here, draining all the power away. Splice in an RD 33. There are several in the kit."

Max looked inside the neatly arranged kit, stabbed for a power pack and tool, and began to work, his big, blunt fingers surprisingly quick.

"Can he die, or something?" Paul Warden asked.

"We can lose him," Grace replied, still working frantically. "The redundant power packs are in his legs.

The ma.s.sive short circuits are draining all power from his brain."

"Ready to splice," Max said.

"Nuclear bond for good contact," Grace said, and Max plunged into the kit for a tiny bonder. There was a sharp spark of power and then another, and the admiral said, "Very good work, Chief Rosen. Thank you."

"Can you help me now, Admiral?" Grace asked.

"Certainly, Grace," the admiral said calmly. "I have power restored to my brain."

It had been very, very close. A few seconds longer and all that was the admiral-that unexplainable, unexpected personality that made him what he was-would have been gone. Now the race was to save all the data that had been so laboriously stored in the memory chambers built into his chest.

"So far no data has been lost, Grace," the admiral said. "If Chief Rosen would lift my head so that I can see... My sensors are dead below the waist."

Rosen propped up the admirals head and shoulders. "I would say, Grace," the admiral said, "that the drain is at the main junction in the left hip joint. "

Grace used the power shears relentlessly. "You're not being very neat, Grace," the admiral said.

"Look who's being a critic," she snapped. "I wasn't the one who thrust a pair of perfectly good legs into that d.a.m.ned thing's mouth."

She exposed the metallic bone of the hip joint, probed, and yelled, "Ouch," as sparks flew and she jerked her hand back. Then she ripped out a ma.s.s of wiring and tiny electronic objects. "How's that?"

"Separate the leads to that area, and we've got it," the admiral said.

She closed off and insulated the bare leads.

"Very good," the admiral said. "Now, Grace, would you please cover me? I feel quite exposed."

"What have we got here, a modest robot?" Max asked.

The look that came over the admiral's face caused Max to clear his throat in embarra.s.sment. Robots were not supposed to have feelings, but, by G.o.d, this one did. He patted the admiral amiably on the shoulder.

The admiral was transported back to the ship on a litter carried by Max and Stoner. A small crowd had gathered near the main hatch. As Max and Stoner lifted the admiral down from the crawler, Tina Sells rushed out. She seized the admirals hand.

"Oh, Admiral," Tina cried, "I told you to be careful. Are you hurt badly?"

"It isn't all that bad," the admiral said with a stiff upper lip. Grace, walking beside him, almost giggled when he actually bit his lower lip, as if to keep from crying out in pain. He had superb sensors to a.s.sess damage, but he could not feel pain.

"I'll stay with you," Tina said. "I'll help you get well."

Grace's urge to giggle left her. There was a sincerity in the teenage girl's voice that alerted her. When Tina turned her face toward her the girl's eyes were wet. "Grace, is-is-"

"He's fine," Grace said. "The damage is in nonvital parts. We'll install a set of new legs, and he'll be like new." But she was thinking,Good Lord, we have a modest robot who seems to be developing human emotions and a girl in love with him .

NINE.

Max Rosen was beginning to believe that he was destined never to have a moment alone with the woman he loved. Since the admiral was an important part of the colony's defenses, Grace worked night and day to repair the damage. When she was not in her lab working on and with the admiral, she was in some other lab a.s.sisting in the tests and biopsies of the giant slug. With the admiral out of action, Mopro was attached to Paul Warden's team, and working together, they killed three more of the underground beasts within five miles of Hamilton. There would be no further attempts to capture one of the things-they were far too powerful, far too deadly. But after three fairly quick kills-with the beasts lured to the surface not by sacrificing one of the pretty little antelopes but by having the pipeline crawler invade the beasts burrows-all further attempts were fruitless.

Random checks with listening devices showed a surprisingly dense underground population, and the densest concentration of the slugs was in the hidden valley of the dead city.

"Maybe the d.a.m.ned things ate everybody," Stoner grouched, unhappy because he was not free to go roaming in search of minerals.

The information that poured out of the ship's labs regarding the slugs was intimidating and astounding: For the first time humans had encountered a life form not based on the complex, oxygen-burning carbon molecules. The rocklike skin of the slugs was just that, rock. Its compound was based on silicon dioxide, the basic ingredient of common sand, which was elasticized by a binding enzyme that had the chemists shaking their heads. An a.n.a.lysis of stomach content-if the interior of the slug could be called a stomach, being mainly a rock-hard tube that exuded acids so virulent that an entire new chemistry could be founded on them-showed that the slugs drew sustenance from the very rocks of the planet.

"The d.a.m.ned thingsare miners," Stoner said. "They crush rock with those ma.s.sive back teeth, using the forward, pointed teeth much as we would use a pickax."

That was how the underground beasts were named, "miners," for the name began with Stoner and spread to the scientists in the labs and then to others.

Stoner was vitally interested when the a.n.a.lysis of stomach contents revealed minute amounts of iron, zinc, copper, and, in the last miner to be killed, a slightly radioactive acid soup, which indicated the presence of uranium somewhere down there along the beast's burrow.

It was Grace Monroe who uncovered the last secret about the miners. She had the admiral up on his feet on a pair of slightly improved legs, ready to join Mopro and Paul Warden in their hunt for more miners.

"Grace," the admiral commented, "it would be very helpful if we had at least one more of the pipeline crawlers."

She'd been so busy that she'd forgotten all about the sample that Max, sitting in the crawler, had taken from the wall of the tunnel. She sent the admiral to the site of the latest stakeout, where he retrieved the sealed tube containing the sample. When Grace opened it in the lab, the stench was overwhelming, and it took her only a few minutes to know why. She called Duncan Rodrick and Max to her lab.

"Whew, what stinks?" Max asked in his blunt way-Then he saw that Grace had been crying. "What's the matter, honey?" he asked, and the tenderness in his voice caused Rodrick to smile to himself.

"You're smelling the decay of animal fat," Grace answered.

"Knowing what it is doesn't make it smell any better," Max said.

"Human fat," Grace added quietly, and had to wipe her eyes quickly. Max sobered and reached for her hand. Rodrick cleared his throat.

"Crudely rendered," Grace said. "Remnants of hair, small bone chips, blood, but mainly congealed fat."

"They don't eat-?" Max paused. He felt a little queasy.

"Apparently not," Grace said. "I estimated the amount of the... fat in that basin." She had to swallow hard. "It's almost all there, about all you'd expect to be able to render from a... woman of Lynn's size."

"I don't understand," Max said. "We had a.s.sumed they needed flesh for nourishment."

Grace turned to face Rodrick. "I've written a report on this creature's brain. It's a complex organ. The ratio between brain and body size is comparable to that of the dolphins of Earth."

"Are you saying that miners might have a relatively high level of intelligence?" Rodrick asked.

Grace shrugged. "Any conclusions would be premature, but Stoner has been doing charts of the tunnels.

Their complexity is impressive. They never come near to or cross any other tunnel. How can the miner dig a tunnel that runs absolutely straight and level for, in one case Stoner has found, ten miles? And I'm sure you've noticed that since we've killed four of them, they can no longer be lured to the surface. In fact, not one miner has been heard within ten miles of Hamilton since the last one was killed."

"You're thinking that they have some way to communicate a warning?" Rodrick asked.

Grace shrugged again. "I don't think we should continue a policy of extermination until we've done further study."

Rodrick nodded thoughtfully. "Since we can spot their traps so easily, I think we can get the teams back to work." He paused, considering. "All right. We won't go after them if they don't come after us. We'll keep our defenses up, and if they leave us alone, we'll leave them alone. "

Following the b.l.o.o.d.y mutiny on board theKarl Marx , the experienced personnel pulled long duty hours until others were trained to replace those who had died. Theresita Pulaski, with her marshal's stars back on her uniform, was in command, although she insisted that she be called comrade marshal rather than captain. She was out of her depth when it came to operational technicalities of a complicated mechanism like theKarl Marx , and she designated young Ilya Salkov to be her second in command and to be at her side constantly.

When a smooth routine had been established, the overworked survivors were able to relax a bit. It was then, in a new spirit of freedom, that the discussion groups began to form. The main topic was the destination of the ship. There were adventurers who wanted to pick a star at random and lightstep to it.

With the huge supply of the metal rhenium aboard, theKarl Marx had the ability to lightstep through time and s.p.a.ce at least a dozen times- all they had to do was bombard a small amount of the metal with antimatter molecules to propel themselves instantly across mind-boggling distances. Surely, the adventurous ones insisted, a dozen planets would yield at least one that conformed to the narrow range of living conditions necessary for man.

Most of those aboard, however, were conservative and resistant to change. They distrusted any departure from the plan that had been pounded out mainly by the dead Premier Yuri Kolchak: In theevent that the three probes sent out by the Soviet Union did not find a suitable solar system, the expedition would proceed to the one planet known to have free water and an oxygen atmosphere. To Yuri Kolchak and his advisers and spies, who had infiltrated the American work crews and learned the information, the obvious solution was to simply take the planet of the 61 Cygni system away from the Americans.

"That would mean that we have not left war behind us," said the bearlike Anton Emin.

There were others who were sick of war and blood, and they spoke up vociferously. Killing, they said, should not become a part of the new civilization among the stars.

But as the long months pa.s.sed and the feeling of s.p.a.ce seeped into the consciousness of those aboard the ship, they began to appreciate the enormous distances involved, and the thought of roaming for a long, long time through those vast, hostile stretches of nothingness became a gnawing dread.

"Perhaps we wouldn't have to fight," Anton Emin said. "Perhaps we could work with the Americans."

"For how long?" asked Denis Ivanov. Denis was a physician who came from a proud heritage. His ancestors had been among the original Bolsheviks who first went to battle against the czar's oppression.