Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta Page 6

  She awakened with a jolt.

  The car had halted, its engine had ceased to purr. Wilma could hear Buck open the landcar’s door and climb out. She waited a few seconds and followed him.

  As she emerged from the landcar she stood awestruck, staring at the sight above.

  The night was unusually clear for the Earth of the twenty-fifth century. The moon was full and its red glow illuminated all of the landscape around the car. Towering above Wilma was the most astonishing sight she had ever beheld: four great faces stared stonily straight ahead. Each was as tall as a fast, single-seater rocket ship. They looked as natural as if they were living creatures just emerging from the Earth, their skins painted in almost healthy tones by the ruddy glare of the full moon. They had been carved from the rock—and Wilma suppressed a gasp. It seemed to her that the stunning faces were alive, that the rock they grew from was somehow living rock.

  As soon as she had regained her composure she looked around.

  There he was! Buck Rogers was advancing across the open ground toward the great carven faces. Wilma dodged behind boulders and shrubbery each time Buck stopped to survey the ground. He climbed up the final steep approach to the statues.

  Wilma gasped as she saw Buck disappear into the rock!

  Could he have obtained some scientific device that made it possible for a man to walk through rock? Wilma ran the last few yards to the point where Buck had disappeared. No, he hadn’t penetrated the solid rock. There was a cave here!

  Inside, Buck Rogers shone a pocket illuminator, splashing its luminescence around the walls of the cavern, picking out his path along the floor. There seemed to be no bear, no mutant bear, or any other hostile creature in the cavern. He advanced cautiously, flashing his light ahead of him.

  In the distance he thought he spotted a tiny flickering point of light. He doused his pocket illuminator, crouched low, and crept silently toward the point of light.

  Slowly the flickering point of light grew, became a flickering campfire. A single figure sat beside the flame, wrapped in a long white robe.

  From her own position, farther toward the mouth of the cave, Wilma watched Buck approach the white-robed stranger.

  She saw the sitting figure raise its eyes, its meditation interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor. Although Buck was still well out of the range of the campfire’s light, the white-robed figure spoke to him: “I sense the presence of a human. Show yourself.”

  Buck stepped forward, into the glow of the campfire. For a moment Wilma wondered why the cave didn’t fill with fumes from the fire, then decided that there must be some second opening through which air flowed. She heard the spaceman identify himself, then say, “I am looking for a man named Aris.”

  “For what purpose do you seek out Aris?” the other asked.

  “I need help. I’m looking for my family. Not my personal family—my descendants. It’s not an easy thing to explain. But I don’t wish you any harm. Honestly.”

  “Sit,” the white-robed figure said. “I am Aris.”

  Buck lowered himself to a cross-legged position beside Aris’ campfire. “I bring you a present from the Inner City,” he said, reaching inside his civilian garment and extracting a small parcel. “It’s a pair of—in my day, we’d have called them long johns. But supermodern ones. They store solar power. Just put ’em out in the sunlight and they save it up, keep you cozy on a chilly night here in the cave.” Buck laughed nervously.

  “Are you here to give me underwear, Captain Rogers?” Aris asked.

  Buck shook his head. “Er, not really. I just wanted to, ah, make friends. Kind of dumb of me, wasn’t it?” He put away the underpants.

  “I am 137 years old, Captain Rogers,” Aris said. “I don’t expect to strike up many more friendships in the time left to me.”

  “Gotcha!” Buck nodded vigorously. “And how old do you think I am, Mr. Aris?”

  The old man looked at him. “I’d say, thirty-five or so.”

  “A little more than that. I’m exactly 537 years old.”

  The old man looked at Buck silently for a long time. Finally he said, “Pardon my skepticism, but I doubt that that’s so.”

  “Yeah,” Buck said. “Well, I haven’t exactly lived for 537 years. I was born 537 years ago. But, ah, I was frozen. You know, those cryogenic things. But by accident. I was sent on a mission in space. Back in 1987. Something went wrong with my ship, I still don’t understand exactly what happened. But I was in suspended animation for five hundred years. I was only supposed to be gone five years. But while I was out there”—he gestured—“the world that I knew ended. I don’t know what really happened. Something about a holocaust. Dictators . . . bombs . . . nuclear pollution. All over, poof! Wham!

  “When I got back, got unfrozen, my world was wrecked. There’s no connection between this world, today, and the world I knew.”

  “And yet there were survivors,” Aris countered. “A new civilization has begun, as you have seen.”

  “Yes,” Buck agreed. “That’s the point. Maybe some of those survivors are related to me. Even just one. If I could find anybody that I was connected with, you see, somehow I wouldn’t feel quite so . . . alone in this world.”

  Aris nodded. “And what if there are none?”

  “Even so. Even to know for sure that all of them—my family, my friends—were completely wiped out. Even that would be better than not knowing.” He paused. “At least, I think it would.”

  “I know of a man named Rogers,” Aris said slowly. “I knew his father, Rogers, and his grandfather, Rogers. But, since I am not nearly as old as you are”—a strange smile flickered across the old man’s visage—“I cannot say that these Rogers are related to you.”

  “Of course,” Buck conceded. “I guess I’ve been chasing shadows.” He rubbed his face with his hands, gathered his thoughts for a few seconds. “Aris, is this the end, then? There’s no one who can help me, is that right? So I click my glass slippers together and find happiness right in my own backyard.”

  Old Aris looked puzzled. “Are you all right? Your speech seems to be becoming muddled.”

  “Never mind,” Buck said. “I think I’d better just beat it out of here. Sorry I bothered you, Aris. Go back to sniffing your campfire smoke or whatever you do to pass the time around here.”

  He rose to his feet and started to make his way back to the entrance of the cave.

  Wilma Deering, seeing Buck headed for her hiding place, scrambled out of the cave ahead of him. She scurried away from the cave mouth and began to run toward the landcar. Suddenly a group of figures rose, as if from the Earth itself, surrounding Wilma. They were dressed as shepherds, and even had the unmistakable odor of sheep to them, but something looked not quite right about them. Something almost inhuman, alien.

  Wilma tried to sprint past them, to the landcar, but two massive figures loomed before her. She tried to dodge around them, felt herself seized, started to scream to Buck—half a cry for aid, half a warning to save himself—but before she had got out a single sound she felt the momentarily stunning paralysis of a laser-pistol set to immobilize without killing.

  She slumped into the arms of the massive shepherd—or pseudo shepherd—nearest her, unconscious and limp.

  As Buck headed away from Aris’ campfire, the old man called after him. “There is one other place you might try, my friend.”

  “Forget it,” Buck gritted bitterly. “Thanks anyhow.”

  He strode away from the campfire, slowed his pace, halted, turned back. “Where?” he asked.

  “I have heard of a great temple,” Aris told him, “a house of God where they have kept records of families and of tribes over a span of hundreds of years. It is located by a great white seabed where the sand tastes strangely of salt. Some of our people go there to bring away the dried salt. But rarely, for this place is thousands of miles from here, in the direction of the sunset.”

  Buck shook his head, trying to unravel the meaning of th
e old man’s directions. Finally he said, “Salt Lake City?”

  “I know not by what name the place is called, Buck Rogers.”

  “But it must be,” Buck muttered, half to Aris and half to himself. “The old Mormon Temple. They were always doing work on genealogy. They even had it computerized, way back in the twentieth century. If they’re still in business—Aris, you’re a genius!”

  He sprinted from the cave and started down the hill toward his landcar. He approached the car, halted. Suddenly his burst of euphoria dissipated. Something was wrong. He couldn’t tell what it was, but—and then he could. There was evidence of strangers, of shepherds.

  There were footprints near his car, and on a grassy patch he could even see their flock grazing. Beyond the meadow he could see the bushes thickening and even a stand of thick-growing trees that stretched into the foothills and low mountains nearby.

  But—not a soul was visible!

  Buck sprinted to his car. He bent to see if anyone was hiding inside it, waiting to ambush him. Instead they came from the opposite side of the car, diving across its low, curved roof, swinging hamlike fists at Buck from either side. He bounded aside, let the two false shepherds pound their fists onto each other. Before they could recover their equilibrium and return to the attack, Buck was on them, pounding his fists against their jaws, driving one solid punch after another into their torsos. If there was any way that one tough man could take two, Buck would have succeeded. But instead a third figure emerged from hiding and aimed a laser-pistol point-blank at the daring spaceman.

  The new arrival squeezed the trigger on his weapon and Buck Rogers dropped to the ground—but not as a result of the bolt of force that the weapon spewed at him. Some subtle warning, some sixth sense that separates the extraordinary man from the ordinary had warned him of peril from a new direction.

  The bolt singed the billowing robe of one of the shepherds Buck had been fighting. Rogers hit the ground, spun, and launched himself through the air straight at his newest assailant. Buck’s muscular shoulder caught the newcomer squarely in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him with a single powerful whoosh.

  Buck whirled again, saw that the man was doubled over in pain but still clutched his hand-weapon. Meanwhile the other two would-be assassins had drawn lasers of their own.

  Buck set a zigzag course away from the band of assailants, headed for the scrubby bushes nearby, then dodged left and right with the same speedy agility that had made him a football star on the Space Academy’s varsity eleven five-hundred-odd years before. Half-expecting to be brought down at any moment by a laser-bolt, he heaved a sigh of relief as he made it into the thick woods at the edge of the meadow.

  He plunged into the trees, dodging left and right so that thick trunks stood between himself and the pursuing pseudo shepherds at all times. After a while he leaped for an overhanging limb, swung himself onto it and scooted sideways to the trunk of the tree. He placed one foot in a crotch of the trunk, pulled himself into it, raised his body to a higher limb and stood, crouching against the main trunk of the tree, watching the helpless pursuit that went on below.

  Finally he saw the false shepherds headed back in the direction from which they had come.

  They disappeared. In a few minutes he heard their voices raised in loud disagreement, then the slamming of doors and the purr of a landcar engine. Buck remained in his tree until he was sure they were gone, then descended to the ground and began to calculate. He had escaped from his assailants and he had a good clue—at least, one that could raise his hopes—to getting some information on his family.

  But he had lost his groundcar, and he was stranded here in what had been South Dakota. He had to make his way back to Chicago. Could he survive the journey?

  There was only one way to find out!

  S E V E N

  The shimmering dome of the Inner City seemed to waver and dance before his eyes, to fade into insubstantiality and then to come back to sharp, glowing existence. The walls that surrounded the city itself, nestled securely beneath the dome, loomed seemingly higher than mountains, insuperable barriers that no expenditure of effort could cross.

  The man who stumbled and drove himself mercilessly across the last few hundred yards was ragged, bearded, sun-baked, emaciated. But even his fatigue-bleared eyes remained fixed on his objective. He fell forward, catching himself with sun-browned, sinewy hands on the towering wall, and with his last remaining strength of muscle pounded on the unyielding surface, demanding entry into the city.

  At the same time he shouted hoarsely for the city guards to come and admit him into the dome.

  A panel opened and a team of Inner City guardsmen strode into the afternoon sunlight, smart and precise in their military-cut regulation garb. They took the ragged figure by its elbows and brought it into the city, as much carrying as guiding it along the way.

  Half delirious with fatigue and exposure, Buck Rogers found himself in a light-cell, a futuristic holding location where the guardsmen had placed him. There were no walls as such around him, no bars such as had been used to hold prisoners in the days of his youth. Instead, barriers of pure radiation, coruscating light, and tingling electromagnetic force held him as securely as would have brick walls or iron bars.

  He sat morosely contemplating his situation.

  After an unmeasured time had elapsed the light-wall drew back to reveal an opening the size and shape of a doorway, save for its shimmering, glittering edges.

  In the lucent oval of the opening there stood a diminutive figure, bald-headed, pink-skinned, gimlet-eyed, wearing a white laboratory smock and a pair of glinting, old-fashioned spectacles. Buck knew that Dr. Huer was virtually the only man who still affected glass disks and metal earpieces in this age when permanently implanted mini-lenses could give any man or woman lifelong perfect vision, provided only that nature had provided them with a functioning retina and optic nerve.

  Dr. Huer advanced into the light-cell. The pseudo doorway drew shut behind him.

  Diminutive as he was, Huer stood over the form of Buck who slumped despondently on the floor of his cell.

  “I have only one thing to ask you, Buck,” the old scientist said in mild, low tones. Then, his voice rising surprisingly to a near shout, “What the hell is going on?”

  Startled from his somnolence, Buck struggled to answer. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything,” he said. “I just wanted to find some trace of my family. Sorry I lost a landcar, you can take it out of my salary. Come to think of it, Doc, what does a rock-jock in the Inner City defense squadron get paid anyhow? I’ve been around this place for a while now, and I always seem to have enough petty cash to get by on, but when does the eagle really fly?”

  “Eagle fly? What are you talking about?” Huer asked.

  “I mean—oh, never mind. I was just asking when payday comes around. I guess I’ll really have to pay for that landcar I lost.”

  “The landcar isn’t the only thing you lost,” Huer voiced firmly.

  “It isn’t?” Buck echoed.

  “No, it certainly isn’t,” Dr. Huer supplied.

  “Oh, let me think,” Buck rubbed his temples. After a few seconds the expression on his haggard face altered. “Oh, yeah—I do remember now.”

  “I’m glad you do.”

  “Yeah, Doc. I’m really sorry. Those computer brains must really be expensive. I’m sorry that I traded it away—I guess it’ll take me a while to pay that off. But I’ll make a start this very first payday.”

  Huer shook his head despairingly. “I’m not talking about any piece of machinery, Captain Rogers. Are you not aware that Colonel Deering has also failed to return?”

  “Colonel Deering? You mean Wilma? Wilma’s missing?” Buck pushed himself up on his elbows, struggled to his feet despite the weakness that almost brought him crashing again to the floor. This was the first real animation Buck had shown since Huer’s arrival in his cell. “But what does Wilma have to do with it?” Rogers asked.

&
nbsp; “I’m afraid she’s been captured, Buck. She’s very likely in the hands of enemies—if she’s still alive at all.”

  “Doc! This is terrible! We have to do something about this.” Buck was weaving back and forth, as he forced his weary body to stay upright. “We have to get her back!

  “But—Doc, Wilma Deering wasn’t with me. I went out of the city—I know it was against orders. I was trying to find some evidence of my family. But I was all alone.”

  “Yes, Buck, we know that. But what you seem not to know is that Colonel Deering cares about you very deeply. She was very worried over your mysterious conduct, and she followed you to find out where you were going—and why.

  “Now, listen to me,” Huer’s eyes bored into Buck’s, even through the old scientist’s thick-lensed spectacles. “You’ve got to help me figure this out, Buck. And we can worry about the other matters later. Buck, based on your own travels, have you any idea where Wilma might have become lost—or injured—or captured?”

  Buck took his bead in his hands and tugged at his hair as if to pull an answer through his skull. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got it! It must have been those shepherds. Or—phony shepherds.”

  “What shepherds, Buck? There are no shepherds anywhere near the Inner City.”

  “I know that, Doc. This was at the old Mount Rushmore Memorial. Way back, even before my day, some sculptor carved the faces of four former presidents of the United States into the side of a mountain out in South Dakota. I found out that there was a man living near there. An old, old man named Aris, who might be able to help me with the information I was after.

  “I took a landcar and drove there to find Aris. I did, too—living in a cave right under the memorial. When I got back to my landcar there were some strange-looking shepherds hanging around, and—”

  Dr. Huer interrupted his narration. “What do you mean by ‘strange-looking,’ Buck? They were human, weren’t they?”

  Buck frowned, recalling the faces he had seen briefly in his battle with the pseudo sheepherders. “They were human,” he said, “but they looked somehow—unearthly. I’m pretty sure they must have been—Draconians! I didn’t think of it at the moment, everything was happening so fast, Doc—but I’m sure, now, that they were definitely Draconians!”