Paradigm (9 page)

Chapter 7

“W
hat are they
doing?”

“I’m not sure. Waiting maybe.”

Sam shifted the box to his other hand and peered around the corner. The small square in front of the parking lot entrance had been all but empty the day before, but now there were three men in blue and gold uniforms hanging around the elevator entrance.

“Let me have a look.” Nathan pulled Sam back and peeked out. “They look like police to me. Oh, man…they’re
searching
people.”

“What!?” Sam yanked Nathan back and took another look at the uniformed men.

Nathan was right. They were patting down everyone who came past, whether they wanted to get into the parking lot or not.

“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “They can’t be Carolyn Bast’s men. The uniforms are too fancy.”

“Who?”

“Carolyn Bast.”

“And she would be…?”

Sam ducked back into the narrow alleyway and sighed.

“She runs a company of…I don’t know… mercenaries, I guess. She found the box and took it, probably for a client. And then this other guy…some kind of monk…stole it back. But they chased him and killed him. Well, fatally wounded him. He died in my arms and gave me the box.”

“And this all happened when?”

“Yesterday. After I left the antiques shop.”

“In the street?”

“Yeah.”

“So the cameras probably caught the whole thing.”

“That’s why I thought an expensive hotel would be better. Kind of hiding in plain sight.”

“But she found you.”

“Well, her hired assassin did.”

“But he didn’t do the job.”

“She…
she
didn’t do it, no.”

“Because…?”

“Because it was Alma.”

Nathan just stared at him.

“Alma is a hired killer?”

“Apparently.”

Sam peeked out again. The policemen were still there, chatting with each other and laughing. Their uniforms were very neatly pressed and far too ornate. Not functional at all. There was no way they were hired mercenaries.

“We have to get out of here.”

“D’ya think?”

“Okay, look…here’s the plan. You go out there and create a diversion and I’ll sneak out and take the stairs.”

“Why do I have to create the diversion?”

“Because I have the box and the box is what they want.”

“So give me the box.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because if this gets screwed up I want it to be my fault. Plus, you’re better at diversions than me.”

Nathan sighed and looked around the trash-cluttered alley, before walking over to a heavy green dumpster and lifting the lid. The reek of week-old cabbage and rotting fish surged out and across the alley.

“Gah!” gasped Sam. “Shut it! Shut it!”

“You’re the one that wants a diversion,” said Nathan, grinning.

Sam tried to hold his breath while Nathan dug around and finally produced a cardboard container a little larger than the Paradigm Device. He heaped some of the rotting vegetable matter into it and closed the lid.

“Right. Are you ready?”

Sam nodded.

Nathan ran on the spot for a few moments, then took a deep breath, charged around the corner and made for the elevator door.

“Stop!” yelled one of the policemen.

“What?”

“We have to search all containers. What’s in the box?”

“Nothing!” said Nathan, his eyes darting around.

“Well, let’s have a look then.”

“No!”

Sam smiled. Nobody could do crazy-eyes like Nathan. Sure enough, the second policeman was drawn in.

“Look, kid, you can’t go into the parking structure without showing us what’s in the box.”

“Why?”

“Because those are the rules.”

“They weren’t the rules yesterday.”

“Well they’re the rules today. Order of the mayor. Now show us the box and you can be on your way.”

Nathan looked from one to the other and started backing away from the elevator.

“That’s okay. I don’t need to go into the parking lot. I’ll go this way.”

Now the third policeman stepped over.

“Open the box and stop being stupid.”

“There’s nothing in it.”

“Look—”

Nathan glanced from one to the other, then spun around and ran. Predictably, all three policemen took off after him. Sam shook his head as he strolled over to the entrance to the stairs and started walking down. Based on his experience of both paramilitary forces, it looked like Carolyn Bast had snagged the cream of the crop. Apparently good pay beats out a fancy uniform.

The GTO was right where they’d left it, tucked away in a corner as far as possible from any other vehicle. Sam popped the trunk and stashed the box under Nathan’s household junk, then he unlocked the door, slid into the drivers seat and leaned back.

It felt good. The slight gasoline odor that had made him ill when he’d first won the car now just smelt like home and even the broken spring in the seat back seemed somehow welcoming.

He replaced the cigar lighter, closed his eyes, and turned the key. The guttural roar echoed through the parking lot, almost masking the sound of running feet approaching from the left.

Nathan jumped in and slammed the door.

“Let’s go!”

Sam backed out and headed for the exit.

“Where’d you take them?”

“Up and down a few streets then into the hotel, up one elevator and down the stairs. I lost them in the kitchen.”

Sam smiled and turned the car onto the ramp. Daylight and the outlands were just ahead, and from there a short drive back to the old freeway and the Wilds. Then he stopped.

“What is it?” asked Nathan, his voice tense.

“They’re waiting for us.”

“No, I told you—I lost them.”

“There’ll be more than three policemen in the whole of Century City! I’ll go check.”

Nathan looked at him, his eyes narrowed.

“Sometimes I think you do this on purpose.”

“Do what?” said Sam, innocently. “I said I’d go. Wait here.”

He opened the car door and started to get out.

“Don’t be stupid. You’re driving. I’ll go.”

Nathan opened his door carefully and crept up the ramp, keeping his body low, then trotted back to the car and climbed in.

“Well?”

“You’re right. The barrier’s down just like before, but there are two old cop cars just beyond blocking the way out.”

“What kind of cars?”

“Police cars, I just said. Old fashioned ones. Black and white.”

Sam rolled his eyes, got out of the car and inched up the rise until he could see the cars, then he made his way back, climbed in and put the GTO in reverse.

“Crown Vics,” he said. “They don’t look in good shape. We should outrun ‘em easy.”

“Outrun? Sam, they’re blocking the way! What are you—”

“I saw this in a movie once,” said Sam, grinning. “You might want to hold on to something.”

Nathan opened his mouth to complain, but Sam had already revved the car to a high whine. He released the brake and the old GTO screeched off the mark, gathering speed as it climbed the ramp.

“Here we go!”

The wheels left the ground ten feet in front of the barrier and soared over the police cars as the officers stood in open-mouthed amazement. They were still staring as the old car hit the ground and screamed away up the street and into the outlands.

Sam glanced in the rear-view as they scrambled into their cars and took up the pursuit. He made a hard right and sped up a narrow lane and out onto one of the wider thoroughfares, narrowly avoiding four pedestrians and a skinny dog. The sound of sirens could be heard not far behind.

“Oh, jeeze!” Nathan looked back. “They’re catching up!”

“No they’re not.”

Sam took another turn, then another. He was staying in front, but not gaining much ground.

“I thought you said we were faster.”

“We are, but they know the streets better.”

He blinked and shook his head. Nathan looked anxious.

“D’you need one of your pills?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He wasn’t, of course. The all too familiar scratching at the back of his head had begun as soon as they cleared the garage and now he could hear the buzzy-whispering again. To make matters worse, every time they sped past one of the digivends there was a surge that made his head feel like it was going to explode. Sam gritted his teeth and took another corner, only to find his way blocked by another barricade of rusty Crown Vics. He slammed the GTO into reverse, then hit the brakes. The car skidded to a halt and did a one-eighty. He floored the gas and rocketed in the opposite direction.

“Whoa!” Nathan grabbed at the dash as they swung around another corner, the sirens wailing in the distance.

The streets had seemed fairly deserted when they’d arrived, but now it seemed like everyone and his brother was meandering around the place. Sam swerved to avoid yet another cluster of dazed digivend users only to have to mount the sidewalk at the next intersection when a bunch of kids ran into the road after a ball.

“We have to get off these streets,” he muttered.

“Try the hills. The streets’ll be narrower and I’ll bet the cops aren’t as familiar with them.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Look around. See any other cars? I bet they never have to chase anyone more than a few blocks.”

“Good point.”

Sam skidded into another u-turn and passed the police cars coming the other way. This created the usual confusion as they all screeched to a halt and tried to get the big cruisers to do a u-turn.

Sam turned up the first alley he saw and headed toward the hills that surrounded the outlands. A few more evasive maneuvers found them speeding up a twisting hillside road, surrounded by dusty trees and tangled manzanita.

“Hear that?” said Nathan.

“What?”

“Nothing. No sirens. I think we’ve lost them.”

He was right about the sirens, but Sam wasn’t taking any chances. He turned onto even smaller side-roads and doubled back a few times before he felt confident enough to slow down. Finally, the last dirt road opened into a clearing and he stopped the car. The whispering in his head had gone but he felt exhausted, as if he’d been pushing the car instead of driving it.

He got out and walked around, stretching his long legs and breathing deeply. The air near the city was more acrid than the stuff he was used to in the Wilds, but even that seemed sweet now that they were finally on the road again.

“Whoa! What is that?!”

Chapter 8

T
he problem with Nathan’s
reactions to things was that he tended to use the same vocabulary whether it was something good or something that was about to kill them and grind them up to make its bread. Sam spun around, his heart suddenly racing, but it was just a building.

Well, not
just
a building. A really spectacular one, or the remains of it. Sam walked toward it, his eyes wide. He’d seen pictures in old books, but had never imagined that any still existed.

“It’s an observatory,” he said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

“A what?”

“An observatory. They used them to look at the stars. At least, that’s what I’ve read.”

Silence.

“Wait.” Nathan was suddenly at his elbow. “So they really do exist? Stars, I mean.”

“I guess so.”

Sam stared at the building. It was long and curved gently from one end to the other. A great pillared entrance portico was in the center, with the remains of statues and carved words in a language he didn’t recognize. But it was the structure on the right-hand side of the building that was really stunning. It was round for a start. People didn’t build round buildings any more—too much trouble when squares and rectangles were so easy.

And then there was the roof.

It was a dome. Or half of it was, the other half had fallen in, but the clean line along the central edge made it look as if there had always been some sort of gap between the two halves. Sam smiled.

“There would have been a telescope,” he explained. “A huge one. It would have poked out through the gap between the sides of the dome. And the dome would move… I mean, it would rotate, so they could point the telescope at whichever part of the sky they wanted to look at.”

Without saying a word, they both walked toward the building.

The observatory was surrounded by clusters of old eucalyptus trees and the occasional clump of stubborn grass. Some rusted metal posts to which signs had probably once been attached poked from the hard ground near the remains of a gravel path, though the signs themselves were long gone. But no one had taken the stone. Why not the stone?

They stepped through the porticoed entrance and into a massive room, open to the sky. Time and weather had taken its toll on the great space, but it was clear that it had once been faced in the same white stone as the outside, cold and beautiful in equal measure. Now, however, it was green with moss and algae and smelled damp—which seemed strange in such an arid landscape.

“How many people lived here?” asked Nathan.

“No one. People just worked here.”

“So most of the time the building was empty?”

Sam nodded and led the way out of the entrance hall, through a plain doorway and into the domed observatory itself.

“Okay,” said Nathan. “But why isn’t anyone living here now? It seems a lot nicer of a place than most of those shacks down—”

“One more step and I’ll blow both o’ your thieving heads clean off!!”

“Oh.”

Standing on the opposite side of the observatory, on a railed walkway that circled the base of the dome above their heads, was the oldest man Sam had ever seen. His face was sunken and taut, like a skull with the skin stretched thinly across it, and his bald head was like parchment, dull and cracked. The rest of his body was skinny and frail, his clothes seeming to hang from his shoulders as if he were nothing more than a wire frame, an outline of the man he had once been. The most noticeable thing about him, though, was the really big gun he was pointing right at them and the rock steady grip with which he held it.

“We’re not stealing,” said Sam. “Just looking.”

“Well, you can’t look, neither. Now git!”

Sam sighed and turned to go, then turned back.

“I was wondering…”

“I’m gonna count to ten, then you’re both gonna be—”

“I just want to know if you still have the telescope.”

“What?”

“The telescope. There used to be a telescope here and—”

“I know there used to be a telescope! Question is, how’d you know? You ain’t never seen one. You ain’t never even seen a star.”

“Have you?”

“No.” There was a note of disappointment in his voice. “But I seen a satellite once! And once I saw the moon real clear, craters and all!”

Nathan leaned closer to Sam. “What on earth is he talking about?”

“Were you an astronomer?” asked Sam, ignoring his friend.

“Hell, no. Before my time. But my Daddy was. Just about broke his heart. What’s your name, son?”

“Sam Cooper. This is Nathan Berlin.”

“Huh. You wait there. I’m coming down.”

The old man scuttled over a few feet to a small gap in the railing where there was a rusty platform attached to some chain and a couple of ancient-looking pulleys. Sam couldn’t help flinching as he stepped onto the device, but it seemed to hold his weight without any difficulty. The old man yanked on a lever and waited. Nothing happened. He pulled it back and yanked again. A slow grinding, then nothing.

“Goddamn machine! Never works!”

He banged the lever back and forth.

“Don’t do that!” yelled Nathan.

“Can you use the stairs?” asked Sam.

“’Course I can’t use the goddamn stairs! Think I’d have gone to the all-fired trouble of building this useless, festering rig if I coulda used the blasted stairs!?” He banged the lever back and forth again.

“Stop it!” shouted Nathan, as if he were feeling every metallic blow. “Let me take a look.”

“What?”

“He’s pretty good with machines,” said Sam in what he hoped was an encouraging tone.

The old man looked over at them, then nodded.

“Not like I can do much from up here.”

“You could still shoot us.”

“Sam!”

“Well, there is that,” chuckled the old man. “But I ain’t feeling quite so inclined as I was earlier.”

Nathan glared at Sam before making his way to the base of the roughly-built elevator. He knelt down and peered into the box at its base.

“When’d you build this thing?”

“Fifty-some years ago. Worked fine then.”

“You should have built a housing.”

“A what?” asked Sam.

“A cover. For the…for this. It’s full of crud. It looks like the only problem is your switch isn’t making the connection.”

“Huh. Thought so.”

“Well, if you thought so, why didn’t you—”

“’Cause I can’t bend down that low! Fifty-some years ago I was a might more spry!”

“Well why didn’t you make a housing back then?”

Nathan stood up, sighed and looked around.

“There’s some tools on that bench over there,” said the old man, gesturing toward a long stone platform covered in an array of implements of various sizes.

Nathan walked over, his eyes suddenly like saucers. Sam had always been amazed at what his friend could do with a few pieces of bent wire and an old screwdriver, but here was a bench with almost every tool he could have imagined. For a moment he just stood and stared, then slowly reached out and touched them, as if half expecting it to be a dream.

“You gonna get me down, or what?”

Nathan snapped back, grabbed a couple of things off the bench and returned to the box. Moments later there was a crack! then a hum and the rusty elevator descended slowly to the floor.

The old man stepped off, set his gun to one side and looked Nathan up and down.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said, as if he’d just discovered something with two heads. “If that ain’t the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in thirty years.”

“It was nothing,” said Nathan. “The switch couldn’t make the connection, is all. I just cleaned it out a bit.”

“Where are you from?”

“Nowhere,” said Nathan, glancing nervously at Sam. “Around. Not here.”

“Well, I coulda told you that. Mind you, I don’t suppose I see the cream of the crop. Most of the ones come here just after whatever they can sell.”

“I think that probably is the cream of the crop,” said Sam, smiling.

The old man stared at him for a moment, then slowly started to laugh. Even that was like a machine that hadn’t had enough maintenance: it began with a kind of wheeze that extended into a whistle that was eventually joined by gurgling guffaws. All of which might have led the casual observer to believe that he was having some kind of fit, if it hadn’t been for the crinkled eyes and the upturned corners of the wizened mouth.

“I think you could be right!” he gasped, finally. “Come on, young ‘uns, I reckon you could do with some food.”

He picked up the gun and led the way across the huge space to a small door that led to another room and then on to a long narrow chamber that Sam guessed must have once housed the controls for the dome and telescope. Now the benches that had once held state-of-the-art monitors and tracking equipment were laden with home-made shelves groaning under the weight of canned food, machine parts, candles, oil, powdered milk, dried fruit and vegetables, endless crates of bottled water and more than a few of what appeared to be whisky.

“Wow.”

“As you can see, we had some time to prepare.”

“We? You mean you aren’t alone?”

Sam glanced around nervously. He really didn’t want any more surprises today.

“Wasn’t. Wasn’t alone. Am now. You boys like bacon?”

“Bacon?” said Nathan. “What, like real bacon? From an      actual pig?”

The old man chuckled again, pulled out an old black frying pan from under the bench, heated it up on a two-ring stovetop and dropped six pieces of bacon into it.

Sam closed his eyes and let everything about the bacon envelop him. The snap and sizzle as the fat began to render under the heat and the slow, incremental release of the wonderful smoky aroma as it slowly filled the room.

“Been a while?”

“Yes,” said Nathan. “We’ve been getting by mostly on long-eared rabbit things. I’ve a feeling they’re not rabbits, though.”

“Oh, they’re rabbits,” said the old man. “Well, mostly, anyhow.”

He slid the bacon onto three slices of bread, folded each in half and handed one to Sam and another to Nathan.

“Bon appetite. And you can call me Drake. Always best to know who’s making yer food.”

Sam grinned and bit into the sandwich. It was fantastic. Greasy in all the right ways, crisp and meaty…and above all it was bacon. Real, honest-to-god bacon.

“Where did you get it?” asked Nathan, his mouth full.

“Got some cryogenic freezers in the basement. Daddy and the others took it into their heads to freeze themselves when they died and get woken up when things was better.”

“It didn’t work?”

“Oh, it worked fine until the generator broke. Then they just kind of dribbled out across the floor.”

“Eeww!” Nathan stopped eating for a second, but the moment soon passed.

“We fixed the genny, then Lucy, she was my wife, y’see, she said they’d be real good for food storage. Nigh on indefinite, y’see.”

“So long as the generator doesn’t break down again,” said Sam.

“There is that. But there’s just me now, so I don’t reckon she has to keep going too much longer.”

“How many of you were there at the beginning?”

“The beginning? I can’t say to that. I was born after the Second Collapse and there were seventeen then. Eighteen with me. Most had been astronomers, technicians, that kind of thing. This place was easily defended, y’see. So they came here. And they kept looking.”

“For what? For stars?”

“No. For signs. For…I guess they were hoping that it was reversible. But the blue sky never did come back.”

“So the sky really was blue?”

“That’s what they told me. Now what’s your story? Seems to me you already believed in stars.”

“My dad was a scientist.”

“Really? What was his name?”

“Um…Brooks. Elkanah Brooks.”

“Brooks?” Drake cocked his head on one side, considering the name, but came up empty. “Nope. Can’t say as I recall a Brooks.”

“We lived in San Francisco City.”

Sam wasn’t sure if it was the bacon, the observatory, or the old man, but he hadn’t felt so relaxed in company for a long time. And he’d said his father’s name. Usually he just sidestepped such questions, or made something up, but there was something about Drake that made him feel it was okay.

“I hear it’s a pretty place.”

“I guess. I don’t really remember much—I was five when we left.”

“To the Wilds, eh?” said Drake. “Tough life for a kid.”

Sam shrugged.

“So…I’m guessing you boys’d like to see the telescope. Follow me.”

Drake squeezed past them and led the way to another small door, behind which was a staircase that disappeared into the darkness beneath the observatory dome. He slowly made his way down, clinging to the old metal banister with one hand and feeling his way along the wall with the other. Sam and Nathan hesitated for a moment then clattered down the worn stone steps after him.

Once at the bottom, Drake gasped to catch his breath before reaching up and turning a switch. For a second nothing happened, but then strips of fluorescent lights flickered and sprang to life, illuminating what turned out to be a cavernous round room, a gloomy echo of the observatory above.