Screaming Science Fiction (24 page)

I ordered a Coke for myself, and—”Four vodkas and a small tomato juice,” Smiler told me! “An Anemic Mary—in one big glass.”

“Do you have a problem, buddy?” the words escaped me before I could check them.

“Are you kidding?” he said, frowning. But then he saw me ogling his huge drink and grinned. “Eh? The booze? Jesus, no! It’s like rocket fuel to me—keeps me aloft and propels me around and around—but doesn’t make me dizzy!” And then he was serious again. “A pity, really, ’cos there are times when I’d like to get blasted out of my mind.”

“What?” I stared hard at him, wondered what was going on in his head. “Smiler, I—”

“Peter,” he cut me short, “I’m not going to die—not just yet, anyway.”

For a moment I couldn’t take it in, couldn’t believe it. I was
that
delighted. I knew my bottom jaw must have fallen open, so closed it again. “They’ve come up with something?” I finally blurted it out. “Smiler, you’ve done it—you’ve beaten the Big ‘C’!”

But he wasn’t laughing or even smiling, just sitting there looking at me.

He had been all dark and lean and muscular, Smiler, but was now pale and puffy. Puffy cheeks, puffy bags under his eyes, pale and puffy double chins. And bald (all that shining, jet-black hair gone) and minus his eyebrows: the effect of one treatment or another. His natural teeth were gone, too: calcium deficiency brought on by low grav during too many missions in the space stations, probably aggravated by his complaint. In fact his eyes were really the only things I’d know him by: film-star blue eyes, which had somehow retained their old twinkle.

Though right now, as I’ve said, he wasn’t laughing or even smiling but just sitting there staring at me.

“Big ‘C,’ “ he finally answered me. “Beaten the Big ‘C’….”

And eventually the smile fell from my face, too. “But…isn’t that what you meant?”

“Listen,” he said, suddenly shifting to a higher gear, “I’m short of time. They’re checking me over every couple of hours now, because they’re expecting it to break loose…well, soon. And so they’ll not be too long coming for me, wanting to take me back into that good old ‘controlled environment,’ you know? So now I want to tell you about it—the way I see it, anyway.”

“Tell me about…?”

“About Luna II. Peter, it was Luna II. It wasn’t anything the people at Lakeport have done or the space medicine buffs from the Lake, it was just Luna II. There’s something in Luna II that changes things. That’s its nature: to change things. Sometimes the changes may be radical: it takes a sane man and makes him mad, or turns a peaceful race into a mindless gang of mass murderers, or changes a small planet into a chunk of shiny black slag that we’ve named Luna II. And sometimes it’s sleeping or inert, and then there’s no effect whatever.”

I tried to take all of this in but it was coming too thick and fast. “Eh? Something in Luna II? But don’t we already know about that? That it’s a source of peculiar emanations or whatever?”

“Something like that.” He shrugged helplessly, impatiently. “Maybe. I don’t know. But when I was up there I felt it, and now it’s starting to look like it felt me.”

“It felt you?” Now he really
wasn’t
making sense, had started to ramble.

“I don’t know”—he shrugged again—”but it could be the answer to Everything—it could
be
Everything! Maybe there are lots of Luna IIs scattered through the universe, and they all have the power to change things. Like they’re catalysts. They cause mutations—in space, in time. A couple of billion years ago the Earth felt it up there, felt its nearness, its effect. And it took this formless blob of mud hurtling through space and changed it, gave it life, brought microorganisms awake in the soup of its oceans. It’s been changing things ever since—and we’ve called
that
evolution! Do you see what I mean? It was The Beginning—and it might yet be The End.”

“Smiler, I—”

He caught my arm, gave me what I suspect was the most serious look he’d ever given anyone in his entire life, and said: “Don’t look at me like that, Peter.” And there was just a hint of accusation.

“Was I?”

“Yes, you were!” And then he relaxed and laughed, and just as suddenly became excited. “Man, when something like this happens, you’re bound to ask questions. So I’ve asked myself questions, and the things I’ve told you are the answers. Some of them, anyway. Hell, they may not even be right, but they’re my answers!”

“These are your thoughts, then? Not the boffins’?” This was one of his Brit words I used, from the old days. It meant “experts.”

“Mine,” he said, seeming proud of it, “but grown at least in part from what the boffins have told me.”

“So what
has
happened?” I asked him, feeling a little exasperated now. “What’s going down, Smiler?”

“Not so much going down,” he shook his head, “as coming out.”

“Coming out?” I waited, not sure whether to smile or frown, not knowing what to do or say.

“Of me.”

And still I waited. It was like a guessing game where I was supposed to come up with some sort of conclusion based on what he’d told me. But I didn’t have any conclusions.

Finally he shrugged yet again, snorted, shook his head, and said: “But you do know about cancer, right? About the Big ‘C’? Well, when I went up to Luna II, it changed my cancer. Oh, I still have it, but it’s not the same any more. It’s a separate thing existing in me, but no longer truly a part of me. It’s in various cavities and tracts, all connected up by threads, living in me like a rat in a system of burrows. Or better, like a hermit crab in a pirated shell. But you know what happens when a hermit crab outgrows its shell? It moves out, finds itself a bigger home. So…this thing in me has tried to vacate—has experimented with the idea, anyway….”

He shuddered, his whole body trembling like jelly.

“Experimented?” It was all I could find to say.

He gulped, nodded, controlled himself. And he sank what was left of his drink before going on. “In the night, a couple of nights ago, it started to eject—from both ends at once—from just about everywhere. Anus, throat, nostrils, you name it. I almost choked to death before they got to me. But by then it had already given up, retreated,
retracted
itself. And I could breathe again. It was like it…like it hadn’t wanted to kill me.”

I was numb, dumb, couldn’t say anything. The way Smiler told it, it was almost as if he’d credited his cancer with intelligence! But then a white movement caught my eye, and I saw with some relief that it was the boys from the ambulance coming for him. He saw them, too, and clutched my arm. And suddenly fear had made his eyes round in his round face. “Peter….” he said. “Peter….”

“It’s OK,” I grabbed his fist grabbing me. “It’s all right. They have to know what they’re doing. You said it yourself, remember? You’re not going to die.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But will it be worth living?”

And then they came and took him to the ambulance. And for a long time I wondered about that last thing he’d said. But of course in the end it turned out he was right….

The car door slammed and the telephone rang at one and the same time, causing me to start. I looked out through the control shack’s dusty window and saw Big “C” receding from the car. Apparently everything was OK. And when the telephone rang again I picked it up.

“OK, Peter,” Smiler’s voice seemed likewise relieved, “you can come on in now.”

But as well as relieved I was also afraid. Now of all times—when it was inevitable—I was afraid. Afraid for the future the world might never have if I didn’t go in, and for the future I certainly wouldn’t have if I did. Until at last common sense prevailed: what the heck, I had no future anyway!

“Something wrong, old friend?” Smiler’s voice was soft. “Hey, don’t let it get to you. It will be just like the last time you visited me, remember?” His words were careful, innocent yet contrived. And they held a code.

I said “Sure,” put the phone down, left the shack and went to the car. If he was ready for it then so was I. It was ominous out there, in Big “C”’s gloom; getting into the car was like entering the vacant lair of some weird, alien animal. The thing was no longer there, but I knew it had been there. It didn’t smell, but I could smell and taste it anyway. You would think so, the way I avoided breathing.

And so my throat was dry and my chest was tight as I turned the lights on to drive. To drive through Big “C,” to the core which was Ben ‘Smiler’ Williams. And driving I thought:

I’m traveling down a hollow tentacle, proceeding along a pseudopod, venturing in an alien vein. And it can put a
stop to me, kill me any time it wants to. By suffocation, strangulation, or simply by laying itself down on me and crushing me. But it won’t because it needs Smiler, needs to appease him, and he has asked to see me.

As he’d said on the telephone, “Just like the last time.” Except we both knew it wouldn’t be like the last time. Not at all….

The last time:

That had been fifteen months ago when we’d agreed on the boundaries. But to continue at that point would be to leave out what happened in between. And I needed to fill it in, if only to fix my mind on something and so occupy my time for the rest of the journey. It isn’t good for your nerves, to drive down a midmorning road in near darkness, through a tunnel of living, frothing, cancerous flesh.

A month after I’d seen Smiler on the beach, Big “C” broke out. Except that’s not exactly how it was. I mean, it wasn’t how you’d expect. What happened was this:

Back in 2002 when we went through a sticky patch with the USSR and there were several (as yet
still
unsolved) sabotage attempts on some of our missile and space research sites, a number of mobile ICBM and MIRV networks were quickly commissioned and established across the entire USA. Most of these had been quietly decommissioned or mothballed only a year or two later, but not the one covering the Okeechobee region of Florida. That one still existed, with its principal base or railhead at La Belle and arms reaching out as far as Fort Myers in the west, Fort Drum north of the Lake, and Canal Point right on the Lake’s eastern shore. Though still maintained in operational order as a deterrent, the rail network now carried ninety per cent of hardware for the Space Center while its military functions were kept strictly low profile. Or they had been, until that night in late August 2024.

Smiler had a night nurse, but the first thing Big “C” did when he emerged was to kill him. That’s what we later figured, anyway. The second thing that he did was derail a MIRV bogie on its way through Lakeport. I can’t supply details; I only know he did it.

Normally this wouldn’t matter much: seventy-five percent of the runs were dummies anyway. But this one was the real thing, one of the two or three times a year when the warheads were in position. And it looked like something had got broken in the derailment, because all of the alarms were going off at once!

The place was evacuated. Lakeport, Venus, Clewiston—all the towns around Lake Okeechobee—the whole shoot. Even the Okeechobee Space Center itself, though not in its entirety; a skeleton crew stayed on there; likewise at the La Belle silos. A decon team was made ready to go in and tidy things up…except that didn’t happen. For through all of this activity, Smiler (or rather, Big “C”) had somehow contrived to be forgotten and left behind. And what
did
happen was that Smiler got on the telephone to Okeechobee and told them to hold off. No one was to move. Nothing was to happen.

“You’d better listen and listen good,” he’d said. “Big ‘C’ has six MIRVs, each one with eight bombs aboard. And he’s got five of them lined up on Washington, London, Tokyo, Berlin and Moscow, though not necessarily in that order. That’s forty nukes for five of the world’s greatest capitals and major cities within radii of two hundred miles. That’s a holocaust, a nuclear winter, the New Dark Age. As for the sixth MIRV: that one’s airborne right now! But it won’t hurt because he hasn’t programmed detonation instructions. It’s just a sign to let you all know that he’s not kidding and can do what he says he can do.”

The MIRV split up north of Jacksonville; bombs came down harmlessly in the sea off Wilmington, Cape Fear, Georgetown, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Cape Canaveral and Palm Beach. After that…while no one was quite sure just exactly who Big ‘C’ was, certainly they all knew he had them by the short and curlies.

Of course, that was when the “news” broke about Smiler’s cancer, the fact that it was different. And the cancer experts from the Lakeport Center, and the space medics, too, arrived at the same conclusion: that somehow alien “radiations” or emanations had changed Smiler’s cancer into Big “C.” The Lakeport doctors and scientists had intended that when it vacated Smiler they’d kill it, but now Big “C” was threatening to kill us, indeed the world. It was then that I remembered how Smiler had credited the thing with intelligence, and now it appeared he’d been right.

So…maybe the problem could have been cleared up right there and then. But at what cost? Big “C” had demonstrated that he knew his way around our weaponry, so if he was going to die why not take us with him? Nevertheless, it’s a fact that there were some itchy fingers among the military brass right about that time.

Naturally, we had to let Moscow, London and all the other target areas in on it, and their reaction was about what was expected:

“For God’s sake—placate the thing! Do as it tells you—
whatever
it tells you!” And the Sovs said: “If you let anything come out of Florida heading for Moscow, comrades, that’s war!”

And then, of course, there was Smiler himself. Big “C” had Smiler in there—a hero, and one of the greatest of all time. So the hotheads cooled down pretty quickly, and for some little time there was a lot of hard, cold, calculated thinking going on as the odds were weighed. But always it came out in Big “C”’s favor. Oh, Smiler and his offspring were only a small percentage of life on Earth, right enough, and we could stand their loss…but what if we attacked and this monstrous growth actually
did
press the button before we nailed him? Could he, for instance, monitor incoming hardware from space? No, for he was at Lakeport and the radar and satellite monitoring equipment was at La Belle. So maybe we could get him in a preemptive strike! A lot of fingernails were chewed. But: