Authors: John Brunner
When, at thirty-three, he had abandoned his former career as a freelance R&D consultant and decided to train as an actuary, he had vaguely hoped that an insurance company, being concerned with the effects of human shortsightedness, might set up a special department to foster his project and pay for proper staff. That hadn't worked out. It had had to remain effectively a one-man show.
So he was a long, long way from his ultimate goal: nothing less than a world-simulation program.
But he was a patient man, and the shock of such catastrophes as the creation of the Mekong Desert had brought more and more people around to the conclusion he had reached long ago. Whether or not it could be done, it absolutely
must
be done.
Of course, he was in the same predicament as weather forecasters had been before computers, continually overwhelmed by fresh data that required slow, piecemeal processing. But he had already worked out many trial-and-error techniques for automatically updating his program, and in another twenty years…He enjoyed good health, and watched his diet carefully.
Besides, he wasn't after perfect accuracy. Something about as precise as weather forecasting would suit admirably. Just so long as it permitted men who were neither reckless nor cowardly to monitor human progress. (He often used the word in conversation. Many of his acquaintances regarded him as old-fashioned because of it)
"When someone next complains that the use of insecticides has resulted in an orchard-bred pest eating his magnolias, remind him that but for the improved diet made possible when the orchards were cleared of maggots he might not own a garden to plant magnolias in.
Verb. sap.
Yours, etc., T.M. Grey, Ph.D., M.Sc."
One thing you can tell right away about the owner of a Hailey.
He has a healthy respect for other people. A Hailey takes up no
more of the road than is necessary. The noise a Hailey makes is
only a gentle hum. And it leaves the air far cleaner than
gas-driven cars. Even if they are filter-tipped.
So the driver of a Hailey can get close enough to other people
to see their smiles and hear their murmurs of approval. What's
your car doing for interpersonal relations?
The shovel bit in, carried away another cubic foot or so of snow-and there wasn't anywhere to put it except on top of more snow.
Still, at least he hadn't hit a body when he plunged it in.
Pete Goddard ached. Or rather, what he could feel of himself ached. It had started in his soles when he'd been in the snow for half an hour. Then it had crept up to his ankles. Around the time the pain infected his calves he'd lost contact with his feet. He had to take it for granted they were still inside his boots.
Also his hands were tender and assured of blisters despite his gloves. It was down to twenty with a vicious wind; his eyes were sore and if the tears that leaked from them hadn't been salty he believed they would have frozen on his cheeks.
This was a foretaste of hell. Stark lights, harsh as curses, had been dragged up treacherous snow-mounds, coupled to emergency generators whose complaints at overload filled the air with a noise like grinding teeth. All the time there were shouts: "Here, quick!" And every shout meant another victim, most likely dead, but sometimes with a broken back, broken leg, broken pelvis. The avalanche had operated like a press. It had condensed the buildings closest to Mount Hawes into a state akin to fiberboard: human remains, structural timbers, cars, winter-sports gear, food, liquor, furniture, carpets, more human remains, had been squashed together until they could be crushed no further, and then the whole horrible disgusting mass had been forced downhill to transfer the shock to more distant locations.
Red among the snow here. He burrowed with his fingers for fear his shovel might hurt someone, and discovered a side of beef.
"Hey! Mister policeman!"
A kid's voice. For an instant he was haunted by the fear of standing on a buried child. But the call was from here on the surface, loud to overcome the drone of a helicopter. He glanced up. Facing him, balanced on a broken wall, a light-colored boy of eleven or twelve, wearing dark woolen pants and a parka and offering a tin cup that steamed like a geyser.
"Like some soup?"
Pete's stomach reminded him suddenly that he'd been on the point of eating when he left home. He dropped his shovel.
"Sure would," he agreed. This was no place for a kid-no telling what horrors he might see-but getting food down him was a good idea.
It was bound to be a long job. He took the cup and made to sip, but the soup was hotter even than it looked. The kid was carrying a big vacuum-jug behind him on a strap. Must be efficient.
"You found many dead people?" the boy inquired.
"A few," Pete muttered.
"I never saw anybody dead before. Now I've seen maybe a dozen."
His tone was matter-of-fact, but Pete was shocked. After a pause he said, "Uh-I guess your mom knows you're here?"
"Sure, that's her soup. When she heard about the accident she put on a big pan of it and told us all to wrap up warm and come and help."
Well, okay; you don't tell other people what's good and what's bad for their kids. And it was kind of a constructive action. Pete tried the soup again, found it had cooled quickly in the bitter wind, and swallowed greedily. It was delicious, with big chunks of vegetables in it and strong-scented herbs.
"I was interested to see the dead people," the kid said suddenly.
"My father was killed the other day."
Pete blinked at him.
"Not my real father. I called him that because he adopted me. And my two sisters. It was in the papers, and they even put his picture on TV."
"What does your mom use for this soup?" Pete said, thinking to change a ghoulish subject. "It's great."
"I'll tell her you said so. It's like yeast extract, and any vegetables around, and"-the boy gave a strangely adult shrug-"water, boiled up with marjoram and stuff…Finished?"
"Not quite."
"I only have this one cup, you see, so after it's been drunk from I have to clean it in the snow to kill the germs and go find someone else."
The boy's tone was virtuous. "Did
you
see my dad's picture on TV?"
"Ah…" Pete's mind raced. "Well, I don't get to watch it too much, you know. I'm pretty tied up with my job."
"Yeah, sure. Just thought you might have seen him." A hint of unhappiness tinged the words. "I miss him a lot…Finished now?"
Pete drained the mug and gave it back. "You tell your mom she makes great soup, okay?" he said, and clapped the boy's shoulder. At the back of his mind he was thinking about Jeannie; she being so much lighter than he, their kids ought to come out just about the same shade as this boy here. If only they were equally bright, equally healthy…
"Sure will," the boy said, and added, struck by a thought, "Say, you need anyone else up here? You're working pretty much on your own, aren't you?"
"Well, we have to spread out because there are so many places to dig," Pete said. He was never at ease talking to children, having had problems when he was a kid himself. His father hadn't died and made the papers, but simply vanished.
"Well, there's lots of us down by the ambulances."
"Us?"
"Sure. We're from the Trainite wat my dad used to run before he died. I'll send someone up to help you-Harry, maybe. He's big. What's your name, so he'll know who to come to?"
"Uh…I'm Pete. Pete Goddard."
"I'm Rick Jones. Okay, someone will be along in a minute!"
"Hey!"
But the kid had gone scrambling and leaping down the trenched mounds of snow. Pete reclaimed his shovel, alarmed. Only this morning at the wat he'd had to guard the occupants as they stood out in the cold while detectives searched for drugs. Having a Trainite partner him…
The hell with it. What mattered was to pull out any more poor bastards who might be buried under this load of white shit.
It was okay. Harry wasn't one of the people he'd met this morning.
He wasn't too much bigger than Pete, but he was fresher. He hardly said more than hello before he started shifting snow, and they concentrated on the job until they uncovered their first victim: dead, blue with cyanosis and cold. Stretcher-bearers came, and a young Air Force officer-they'd turned out the Academy, of course-took particulars of the ID in the man's pocket. He was local. Pete had given him a parking ticket once. One of the stretcher-bearers had a transistor radio, and while it was in earshot it said something about Towerhill being declared a disaster zone.
"First of many," Harry muttered.
"What?"
"I said first of many. You don't think this is the only avalanche they're going to cause with their stinking SST's, do you? The Swiss won't let them overfly the country between October and May-said they'd shoot them down first. So did the Austrians."
Pete handed Harry his shovel. "Let's dig," he sighed.
About ten minutes later it became clear what they'd got into at this spot: a whole collapsed room, if not a building. Uphill, a wall of rough stone had broken the worst impact of the avalanche, but it had shifted on its foundations and twisted into an irregular line of precariously poised fragments. Over that the roof-beams had folded, but not fallen, leaving a small vacant space in which-
"Christ!" Harry said. "Alive!"
Something moved feebly in darkness. White darkness. The snow had burst in through a window, fanned out on the floor.
"Ah-yah-ahh!" The treble cry of a child.
"Look out, you fucking idiot!" Pete roared as Harry made to drop his shovel and dive straight in under the arching timbers. He grabbed his arm.
"What? That's a kid! Get your hands off-I-"
"Look, look,
look
!" And Pete pointed to the huge trembling overhang of snow that had broken against the stone wall like a frozen wave. Because of their digging it loured above the space in which the child-children, he realized, hearing a second cry discord with the first-in which the children were trapped.
"Ah…Yeah." Harry regained his self-possession and blinked down into the dark hollow. A bed, overset. A lot of snow. "See what you mean. We could bring that whole pile down on us. Got a flashlight?"
"Loaned it to someone. Go get another. And lots of help. See, that beam?" Pete didn't dare so much as touch it. Now it was exposed, the single crucial roof-strut that had spared the children looked like a match, and on the slanted broken roof that it supported lay God knew how many tons of snow and rock.
"Sure! Be back right away!" Turning to run.
"Hang on, kids," Pete called into the cold dark. "We'll get you out soon's we can."
One of the half-seen shapes moved. Stood up. Shedding snow.
Moving snow.
Trying to climb to the light!
"Oh, my God! Harry, HARRY! BE QUICK!"
Crying. And the crying drowned by the noise of weight leaning on a fractured beam.
The
beam, the one that held back the incredible mass of snow. He saw it spray tiny white flakes, like dust, that danced in the glow of the distant emergency lights.
Christ…Jeannie, Jeannie, it could be a kid of ours down there-I don't mean
could
, not at fifty bucks a day, but I mean it's a kid, and we could have kids, and…
But those thoughts were spin-off, and had nothing to do with him moving. Shovel dropped. The beam yielding. Turning so his shoulders came under it, his numb hands felt for it. The weight, the incredible intolerable unthinkable weight. He looked down and saw his boots had been driven in over ankles in the packed snow.
At least, though, he could still hear the crying.
"Did it go okay, Peg?" Mel Torrance called as she wended her way through the maze of desks, glass partitions, file cabinets. The paper was losing money. Most papers were losing money. Even Mel had only a cubbyhole for an office, whose door stood permanently open except when he was taking his pills. He was embarrassed about that for some reason.
Ridiculous. Who do you know who doesn't have to take pills of some kind nowadays? Which reminds me, I'm past due for mine.
"Oh, fine," Peg muttered. She'd been out to cover a sewer explosion. Someone had poured something he shouldn't have down the drain, and it had reacted with something else. Big deal. It happened all the time. Today nobody had even been killed.
"Did Rod get any good pictures?"
"Said he'd have some for you in about two hours."
"He didn't get Polaroids? Shit, of course not-the pol count is up today, isn't it?" Mel sighed. Days you couldn't get Polaroids were starting to outnumber those when you could; it was something in the air that affected the emulsion. "Well, a couple of hours should be okay…Message for you, by the way. It's on your desk."
"Later."
But the note said she should contact the city morgue, so she put the call in while rolling paper into her typewriter with her other hand, and after five wrong numbers-about par for the course-the phone said,
"Stanway."
"Peg Mankiewicz."
"Oh, yes." Stanway's voice dropped a trifle. "Look, we finally had the definitive lab report on your friend Jones."
"Christ! You mean they've been on at him all this time?" Peg heard her voice ragged. Couldn't they even leave his corpse alone? Weren't they content with hurling insults at his memory? "This self-appointed prophet of a better world who turned out to be just another acid-head."
Quote/unquote.
"Well, it's a slow process looking for these very tiny traces of a drug," Stanway said, missing the point. "Paper chromatography work.
Long-column separation, even, sometimes."
"All right, what did they find?"
"A hallucinogen in his system. Not LSD or psilocybin or any of the regular ones, but something with a similar molecular structure. I don't really understand the report myself-I'm an anatomist, not a biochemist.
But I thought you'd like to know right away."
Like! No, it was the thing in all the world she least wanted to hear.