Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta Read online

  There was a terrific sense of impact and a sound like a whumpf!—and then the landcar was through the debris. Shards and fragments of accumulated junk cascaded through the air behind the landcar. The mutants, outwitted and outmaneuvered, shouted their frustration and defiance, shaking fists and futilely hurling missiles after the landcar.

  Safely beyond the mutant encampment, Buck pulled the landcar to a halt. Its formerly smooth and handsome surface was now crumpled and covered with muck and fragments of debris, but its engine continued to run. Buck slumped in his seat, catching his breath and regaining his composure from the nearly fatal encounter with the mutant band.

  Theopolis took advantage of the momentary calm to plead once more with the spaceman. “You should go back,” the computer brain initiated his appeal, and Twiki emitted a series of clicks and one squeal while the computer brain’s voder spoke.

  “I can’t,” Buck snapped back before the machines could go on. “I’ve got to track down my family.”

  “You won’t find out anything,” Theopolis argued. The lights behind his plexiglass covering flashed dismally. “Give up and go back, Rogers. You barely escaped with your life. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

  “That wasn’t luck,” Buck cracked in reply, “it was skill, intellect, and pure animal magnetism.”

  “And a lot of luck,” Theopolis insisted.

  But the exchange was over. The computer had made his appeal, the spaceman had rejected it, and now Buck set the landcar to rolling forward once again, rolling cautiously but steadily through the rubble-littered streets of Anarchia, the dismal hell that once had been Chicago.

  In the distance Buck could hear the waves of Lake Michigan hissing and crashing against the shore. The Chicago River bridges had all fallen long ago, but Buck managed to find a sort of accidental bridge formed by the crash of the ancient IBM Building, which threw a dam of rubble across the river. The water had made its way through the cracks and submerged gaps in the debris, so pressure had never built up and swept away the dam, and Buck was able to pick his way across the runneled surface, the dark, oily waters of the poisoned river to either side of the landcar.

  “Oh, be careful, will you, Buck,” Theopolis pleaded.

  The drone Twiki squealed.

  “Yes, Twiki, of course Buck is a good driver,” Theopolis soothed. “I’m sure he won’t dump us into the river.”

  Again the drone gave its characteristic, high-pitched sound.

  “Yes,” Theopolis told the drone. “I’m sure that Buck understands that we’d sink. Why, if we were to rust away there beneath the water he’d lose the two best friends he has in the world. Now, just be calm and we’ll be on the other side in a few seconds.”

  The landcar rolled from the impromptu dam onto the ground on the other side of the Chicago River. Buck breathed a sigh of relief. “Theopolis,” he said, “do you really understand those clunks and squeals that Twiki makes, or is that all some sort of put-on for my benefit?”

  “Why, Buck!” the computer’s lights glowed indignantly. “How could you even accuse me of falsifying data in that fashion? It would blow half the capacitors in my monitor to do such a thing!”

  Buck drove through an open area that might once have been a grassy municipal park. He brought the landcar as close as he could to the remnants of an immense structure, then turned off its engine. “If I haven’t forgotten the layout of this burg in the past five centuries, this is City Hall. I’ve got some checking to do inside, and I don’t want to leave the landcar unguarded. Do you think you can handle the job, Theopolis? Twiki?”

  The drone made a terrified-sounding squeal and began to rock from side to side in its seat.

  “Now stop that!” Theopolis ordered.

  Twiki calmed down—a little.

  “Of course we can, Buck,” the computer said. “You go attend to your business, and we’ll be here in the landcar when you get back. We don’t get bored, you know—I can always fill the time by calculating the lunar ephemeris for arbitrarily selected periods a few billion years from now. You never know when that information is going to come in handy.”

  F I V E

  The once-imposing great doors of City Hall had long since fallen in on their hinges, leaving easy access to the main vestibule of the building. Here Buck found a larger-than-life, awesome pedestal marked with the name Richard Daley, and the feet of a statue still on the pedestal. Buck looked above the metal feet, visualizing as best he could the invisible man who stood smiling benevolently at long-dead voters.

  As he stood contemplating the ruined monument he became aware of a sound—the sound of breathing, suppressed, shallow, nearly inaudible. Nearly: but not quite.

  He cocked his head, zeroed in on the source of the sound, yanked a shard of fallen wainscotting away from its place and saw—an impromptu shelter holding two children in tattered rags. There were a boy and a girl. They stared up at Buck in abject terror, making no attempt to escape or to attack. They merely crouched, trembling, awaiting his reaction to them.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Buck said to the children.

  There was no response.

  “Can’t you talk?” Buck asked.

  “I can talk,” the girl said at length. She pointed to the boy. “He can’t talk. I can.”

  Buck looked at the boy crouching mutely beside the girl.

  “He your brother?” the spaceman asked.

  The girl pondered. “Maybe. Who are you?”

  “I’m from the Inner City,” Buck said.

  The statement brought an unexpected reaction. The girl’s eyes widened in terror. Without a word she bolted from her hiding place, dodged past Buck’s surprised arms and bolted across the vestibule.

  Buck took off in hot pursuit.

  The girl headed up a flight of broad marble stairs heavily choked with fallen debris.

  Buck lunged, caught her by one filthy, naked ankle. She struggled until it was clear that Buck had no intention of letting go and she had no chance of breaking his grip. Then the girl subsided into resigned passivity.

  “I said I won’t hurt you,” Buck told the girl again. “Why are you so afraid of the Inner City?”

  “I’m not afraid,” the girl exclaimed defiantly, “I’m not afraid of anything!”

  The silent boy emerged from his hiding place and timidly approached Buck and the girl. He was unarmed and apparently harmless. Buck decided to permit him to stand by while he interrogated the girl.

  “Do you live here?”

  “Yes,” the girl conceded. “This is our home.”

  Buck looked earnestly into the girl’s face. “Now this is very important. Please. Do you know where the Hall of Records is? A huge room full of files, birth certificates, things like that? You know, just mountains of paper.”

  “Oh yes. Sure, a big room full of papers. I’ll show you.”

  The two children led Buck up the flight of marble stairs, down a dark hallway choked with the dust and trash of five centuries. The spaceman jumped when a huge shadowy shape appeared, then ran silently across their path: a gigantic rat. The children took the event as a matter of course and continued to lead Buck along the hallway, through broken doors.

  They stopped where a cable ran through a hole in the ceiling. The girl first, then the boy, jumped from their feet, caught the cable and began to shimmy up it as confidently and easily as two monkeys climbing a liana-vine in some tropical jungle.

  Buck grasped the cable, preparatory to lifting himself after the children. “Are you sure this is the best way?” he called up to them. “How about the stairs?”

  “The stairs are sealed off,” the girl called back down to him. “This is the only way.”

  The cable brought them into another echoing, dusty chamber. Buck followed the children along another corridor, wondering momentarily if he was being led into an ambush. But at that moment there opened before him the prospect he had been seeking: one of the largest rooms he had ever beheld. It was nearly as large as th
e launching bay of the now defunct starship Draconia, as large as a starfighter hangar at the Inner City spaceport, as large as the old Vehicle Assembly Building at old Cape Canaveral, back during Buck’s first lifetime in the twentieth century.

  And it was filled with a five-hundred-year-old shambles.

  Uncountable metal filing cabinets stood about, lay on the floor, hung at precarious angles. Some were open, some rusted shut, some still obviously full, others with their contents strewn wildly across the dust-laden marble floor.

  Buck stumbled around the room, stunned by the experience. He stopped, lifted a crumbling document, tossed it aside and seized another, “My God,” he muttered, “it looks like . . . a holocaust.”

  “It was,” the girl agreed. “This is the heritage of the great holocaust.”

  “What happened?” Buck asked.

  “I don’t know,” the girl shook her head. Through the caked dust and straggly curls, she managed somehow to have the beauty of childhood’s innocence. “The holocaust was hundreds of years ago,” she went on. “We know that there was a terrible destruction and plague visited upon us—or our ancestors. But no one is old enough to remember what happened, and the tales we are told do not tell either.”

  Buck smiled grimly. “Some of us are too old to remember,” he said, more to himself than to the child. “Well”—he picked up another file, then cast it aside—“there’s nothing here newer than 1988. There’s nothing here that can help me.”

  Suddenly a mellow, yet oddly mechanical voice was heard. “I told you you’d find nothing.”

  The girl jumped, startled.

  Buck whirled and saw the robot Twiki with Dr. Theopolis suspended around his metallic neck. “What are you doing here?” Buck demanded. “I thought you were guarding the car.”

  “There’s no one out there, no danger, Buck. I decided that you might need my wise counsel in your researches, so I asked Twiki here to bring me in.”

  The robot squeaked—several short, annoyed-sounding squeaks.

  “Oh, all right,” Theopolis said. “Yes, it is kind of spooky out there and we both feel better being with Captain Rogers.”

  The young girl interrupted the exchange. “What is that thing?” she asked, pointing to Twiki and Theopolis, apparently mistaking them for a single device.

  “It’s a pain in the diode,” Buck said. He cast a last, despairing look at the scattered files of the hall, then turned and began to make his way back toward the ground floor and the street. In a few minutes he and the robot-team were climbing back into their groundcar. Buck turned and smiled at the two children. “I’d like to pay you for the help you gave me,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a quantity of Inner City scrip.

  “What’s that?” the girl asked.

  “Money.”

  “Never heard of it. What’s it for?”

  Buck shoved the scrip back in his pocket and pulled off his coat, aware that both children were trembling in the chilly air. “Here, try this,” he held the coat toward the girl.

  She tried it on, petted it, ducked her head and murmured, “Thank you,” to Buck. Her brother came up and rubbed his face on the cloth of the sleeve. The girl pulled off the coat and slipped it around her brother’s shoulders. It fit him like a circus tent. “There,” the girl said, “he needs it more, he’s colder than I am. And it fits him better, anyhow. Where are you going?” she asked Buck suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’m trying to find some information. I’d hoped to find it in the Hall of Records. But . . .” He shrugged helplessly.

  “Maybe Pandro can help you,” the girl said. “He was here yesterday.”

  “Who’s Pandro?”

  “Boss of the gypsies.”

  “Gypsies!” Buck exclaimed. “There are still gypsies?”

  “Oh, sure. They come through every so often. They’re camped pretty near here now.”

  Buck’s landcar approached the gypsy encampment through the gloom that seemed to hover perpetually in Anarchia, be it day or night, summer or winter. The encampment, to Buck’s first glimpse, resembled a bizarre parody of the traditional gypsy encampment. Campfires burned in a roughly circular clearing while colorfully dressed men and women circulated, chattering and visiting one another; pots of food hung, bubbling and smoking, over fires—that much was just as usual. The gypsy vehicles were drawn up around the clearing, but instead of the horse-drawn wagons of wood and canvas that Buck in his boyhood had associated with gypsies, these were a fleet of campers, motor homes, and recreational vehicles. They were dusty and rust-marred, battered, painted and repainted beyond any hope of ever determining their original shape and color. But as Buck approached he saw a gypsy arriving on a rusty, fenderless motorcycle—so somehow the gypsies managed to keep their power-packs replenished and their running gear functional, at least on one heavy, German-made motorcycle.

  Buck climbed from the landcar. He reached toward Twiki and lifted Dr. Theopolis from around the drone’s neck. “I may need some of that wise counsel you were peddling, Theopolis. Twiki, stay here. Stay out of trouble if you can. I’ll be back.” With a careful movement, Buck hung the computer brain around his own neck.

  Twiki squealed in angry protest but obeyed, remaining in the landcar as Buck walked into the gypsy encampment. He walked slowly up to a woman in almost traditional gypsy garb and offered a tentative greeting.

  “Howdy, howdyl” the woman responded. “What’s your handle?”

  Buck looked around helplessly, finally asked, “Uh . . . can you tell me where I can find Pandro?”

  “Over your shoulder. Come on,” the woman said.

  Buck gaped at her but she didn’t move. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder. All he could see was a half-demolished recreational vehicle.

  “Pandro,” Buck tried again. Maybe the woman mistook his meaning. “Pan-dro,” he repeated, “do you understand me?”

  “Wall to wall and treetop tall,” the woman said. “Don’t you have no ears?”

  Buck wondered what the woman meant, whether she understood him. She seemed to speak English. Her words were ordinary enough, and her sentences were gramatically correct. But they didn’t mean anything! He smiled, walked to the half-demolished cruiser. He pounded on the door and asked, “Pandro? You in there?”

  “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” a voice called back. The vehicle’s door opened. A man gazed out at Buck. The man was middle-aged, a grizzled-looking, stubble-faced, tough- and competent-looking man who had clearly done his share of rough living, survived it, and emerged battered but unbowed.

  Buck introduced himself.

  “It’s your nickel,” the grizzled man said.

  “Uh-huh.” Buck stood looking up at the other man. “Can I come in?”

  “You got the break,” the man said. “I’ll pour coffee on ya.” He gestured Buck into the vehicle, offered him a seat, poured him a cup of some vile greenish stuff that he claimed was coffee.

  Buck made a face at the vicious brew. Well, at least it was hot, whatever other shortcomings it might suffer from. Buck explained his mission, finished with a request. “Anything. Any clues, leads to my family. What happened to them? Do any of my descendants still survive?”

  “I don’t know nothing,” Pandro answered. “But I know a good buddy that might could help ya. Handle’s Aris. Very old dude, been breathin’ longer as anybody I know. And he’s got smarts he ain’t even used yet. Lives in Skipland.”

  “Great. Skipland, eh? How do I find him?”

  “I need some greenstamps,” Pandro stated.

  “Greenstamps?” Buck saw Pandro make a gesture. “Oh, sure. He reached into his pocket again, pulled out the same Inner City scrip that he’d previously offered to the girl at the Hall of Records. “How much?” he asked.

  “That ain’t greenstamps,” Pandro said. “Not in this lane.”

  “Then what’s greenstamps?” Buck asked.

  “Could be most anything. I can’t use
it, I’ll trade it off.” He pointed to Buck’s laser-gun. “Like that smokey stunner, f’rinstance.”

  “You mean my laser?”

  “Pository.”

  Before Buck could reply to the demand, Theopolis put in, “Giving him a weapon is forbidden, Captain Rogers.”

  At the sound of the strange voice, Pandro jumped, he stared wildly around, looking for the source of the words.

  “It’s all right,” Buck explained. “There’s no one else here. It was this box that I’m wearing. It talks.”

  Pandro bent and stared at Theopolis, almost hypnotized by the arrays of flashing lights within the plexiglass. “Come again?”

  “Theopolis,” Buck commanded, “say something. Pandro wants to hear you talk.”

  The computer remained silent.

  “Dr. Theopolis, I’m warning you,” Buck fumed. “Talk!”

  Nothing.

  “He’s being quiet just to make me mad,” Buck explained thinly. “I kept telling him to shut up, earlier. Now he’s sulking. Talk, Theo!”

  “Ah, you’re pulling my antenna,” Pandro laughed. “That thing don’t talk. But I like them lights, them’s real pretty. I know a chick who’d fancy that box for a decoration. So you give me it and I’ll Q.S.O. ya Aris’ 10-20.”

  “Does that mean you’ll tell me how to find him?” Buck asked.

  Pandro nodded, still staring at Theopolis’ lights. “Four ten.”

  “Okay,” Buck said. “It’s a deal.” He removed the computer’s strap from his neck and handed the plexiglass box to Pandro.

  “No,” Theopolis shrieked. “You can’t do that!”

  “Hey!” Pandro exclaimed, almost dropping the box. “It really talked!”