Buck Rogers 1 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (10 page)

The disembodied voice of the Council rang out. “You make a good case, Dr. Huer.”

“But a dangerous one,” the computer Apol differed. “The Draconians are the most powerful force in all the civilized universe, and if they are insulted by our behaviour, we will be in dire peril.”

The disembodied voice replied loudly. “They can only be sympathetic to our need to find justice in the case of this man who has suffered at our hands, and who has offered the Draconians’ own charity as his only defense.”

“Nonetheless,” the computer Apol shrilled petulantly, “nonetheless, nonetheless, learned Counsellors, I wish to go on record, yes to go on record, as being opposed to this motion. Opposed, yes, opposed to this motion.” His lights blinked furiously until it appeared that he was in danger of blowing a circuit.

“Are there any others in opposition?” the great voice asked calmly. When no others joined Apol, the voice resumed. “Council moves to suspend Captain Rogers’ sentence until it, and the evidence upon which his conviction was based, have been reviewed.”

In the spectators’ room Dr. Huer turned to Wilma. She ran and hugged him in jubilation. “Thank you, Doctor. You were wonderful!”

Dr. Huer’s answering glance was sober. “I’m afraid that this action by the Council means nothing if you can’t locate Captain Rogers in time!”

“We’ll find him in time,” Wilma answered gravely, “we’ll find Buck!”

“I’d like to go with you, my dear. I’d like to help if I could, but—” He gestured as if to say,
the spirit is willing but the flesh is too old.
“But you must take a sizeable force,” he resumed. “You know that the sight of Inner City troops rouses the mutants and their rabble companions to a rage. You’ll need a strong party to stand off their attack.”

“I’ll have no trouble finding volunteers,” Wilma said. “For some reason, the members of the Intercept Squadron seem to regard Captain Rogers as some sort of folk hero. We’ll have to leave behind a crew to man duty stations, but every member of the squadron who can be spared, will almost certainly want to go.”

Huer smiled sadly, disappointed at having to pass up the adventure of rescuing Buck. “Try to keep him from becoming a martyr as well,” he said. “Good luck to you, Wilma. Good luck to you all.”

He reached for her hand before she spun around to leave, but as he did so Wilma impulsively leaned over and kissed the old man on the cheek. He raised his hand to the spot her lips had touched and gazed wistfully after her as she strode away.

Striding side-by-side down the windswept road, Buck and Twiki with Theopolis suspended from his neck had reached the remnants of a ruined city. This was the true heart of Anarchia: craters, rubble, bricks and girders and shards of glass lying higgledy-piggledy where they had tumbled in that last paroxysm of combat between the forces of old America and her enemies.

No vehicle moved in the cracked streets; instead, rank weeds had sprouted in every crevice and spread their sickly effluvium over the macadam. Vicious rats, skulking mongrel hounds, giant aggressive insects scuttled from shelter to hole. Some of the shadows contained vague, dark, ragged figures that might have been humans or the descendants of humans; their uncertain forms held a promise of horror indescribable, and the reality of their faces and bodies more than fulfilled the worst substance of that promise.

As Buck and the drone advanced warily from their wilderness into this living hell, the quad exclaimed in his wordlessly eloquent squeal and the computer hung around his neck flashed in horror. “Oh, my word,” Theopolis crooned, “oh, heavens preserve us! I knew that Anarchia would be bad, but this is worse than ever I’d even imagined.”

“Just keep moving,” Buck urged huskily.

Again Twiki made his squeaking noise. “What’s he saying?” Buck demanded of Theopolis.

“You don’t want to know,” the computer answered.

“Stop saying I don’t want to know. I
want
to know!”

“Very well, Buck, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Twiki says he thinks we’re being followed.”

Buck swung around to check on the little drone’s suspicions. A darkened, wrecked doorway stood nearby, leading into the hulk of what once had been a building of some size. In the murky dusk a group of horrific shadows seemed to duck into the doorway.

“Just your imagination,” Buck said to the drone. “Come on Twiki, let’s just keep moving ahead.”

The drone squeaked again.

“Twiki says he doesn’t believe you,” Theopolis interpreted.

“Tell him he’s a lot smarter than I thought,” Buck conceded. “But come on anyhow. There’s no point in playing target for some half-human bird of prey!”

With Buck in the lead, they slipped down a side street, found their way into a shadowed opening not unlike the one from which they had been menaced. On the street they had deserted, a group of shapes emerged from the building-hulk. There were five of them, and for all their indistinction they could all be identified as human—after a fashion.

They hobbled and scuttered down the street after Buck and Twiki and Theopolis, muttering and mumbling horrifying parodies of human speech as they went.

Theopolis somehow sensed their presence. “My God!” he cried.

“Shhh!” Buck warned. Then, in a whispered undertone, “What do you mean, your God? Who made you anyhow, somebody down at the canning works?”

“This is no time to discuss theology,” Theopolis whispered back to Buck. “Oh, my God, this situation is hopeless, absolutely hopeless. Oh, why didn’t we stay out in the countryside where all that was going to happen to us was that we’d freeze to death!”

“We’ll be all right,” Buck insisted. “Don’t throw in the sponge now, Theopolis.”

“What sponge? Oh, you always use those strange expressions, Rogers. But I do have a little cheering news, I think.”

“I could sure use some,” Buck sighed. “What is it, computer old pal?”

“It isn’t you that they’re after. Those mutants, I mean.”

“What?” Buck asked, astonished.

“Well, I suppose they could make
some
use of you.” Theopolis murmured something softly to his drone and Twiki raised a metallic arm and prodded Buck appraisingly in the side. The quad squeaked something to the computer. “Yes,” Theopolis continued, “I agree with Twiki. You’re still young enough to be tender, Buck. A trifle too muscular to make really choice merchandise, but at least you’re not all old and stringy like Dr. Huer would be. He’d never be worth a plugged nickel on the black market. But you’d draw a fair price, yes.” He flashed his lights for a while.

“You mean they’re cannibals, eh?”

“Only as a sideline, Buck. As I was saying, they’re not
really
interested in you, although if they had occasion to bash your skull in with a rock they wouldn’t want to let you go to waste, that’s all. But they’re much more interested in Twiki. And—I blush to say this—myself.” At the expression about blushing, Theopolis’ lights glowed an embarrassed crimson.

“They want you?” Buck stared at the little quad and the computer around his neck. “For what? Advice?”

“Now don’t be flippant!” the computer answered petulantly. “The fact is, many of my circuits contain precious metals. Gold, iridium, platinum. To me they’re precious because I do my thinking with them. But to
them
,” and he emphasized the word with a scornful tone, “they’re just precious metals that they can sell, or barter for food or tools.”

Buck nodded and said, “Ah, hah!”

“As for Twiki,” Dr. Theopolis went on, “I hate to tell you the purposes they would have for him. Poor creature. You know, quads don’t have anywhere near the grade of computer-brain that we Counsellors have. They’re designed to be docile little servants, and they’re very good at that, but that doesn’t mean that they’re just
things
.”

Twiki squealed.

“No, of course you’re not just a thing,” Theopolis said soothingly. “You have a mind and you have your feelings, Twiki, as I was just explaining to Buck here. Everyone knows that, Twiki.”

The quad squealed again, a more mollified sound than his previous complaining tone.

“And if those mutants should ever get hold of poor Twiki,” Theopolis rambled on. Suddenly he stopped. He’d become so engrossed in his own monolog and in the quad’s reactions to it that he had failed to notice when Buck disappeared.

Theopolis murmured frantically to Twiki. The drone scuttered out of their protective doorway, into the middle of the street, twisting and scanning the street, using his mechanical joints to direct his optical sensing devices one way and then another, until he located Buck at last.

Twiki. gave a squeal of relief. Buck was only a moderate distance away from them, standing before a half-demolished building and staring at the lettering carved into its concrete.

“How do you like that,” Theopolis grumbled, “I confide our predicament to the man-from-the-past, and instead of trying to help us escape he drops us like a hot rock.”

Twiki squealed indignantly in agreement.

“Well, you’re absolutely right, my dear drone,” Theopolis resumed. “He got us into this, not we him. And he’ll just have to devise a way of getting us out of it.”

With Dr. Theopolis still hanging around his neck, Twiki scuttered across the shattered pavement after Buck. From behind the astronaut, the computer and the drone could see the lettering on the building that Buck was staring at.

It was simply an old street marker, designed to let people know the name of the thoroughfare that ran in front of the building. It said,
State Street.

Twiki moved around in front of Buck and looked up at the man. From around the drone’s neck, the computer-brain spoke. “I don’t mean to impugn your strategy, Buck . . . but standing in the middle of the street is hardly wise under the circumstances, do you think?”

As if he hadn’t heard a syllable of the computer’s words, Buck strode distractedly around the corner of the building to look at it and the cross-street from another angle. Curiously, Twiki and Dr. Theopolis followed.

More to himself than to the others, Buck mumbled, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”

The lettering on this side of the old concrete cornerstone said,
Michigan Avenue.

Buck swung around, faced the others and commanded, “Come on!”

To the astonishment of Twiki and Theopolis, Buck Rogers sprang away at a dead run. The five-hundred-year layoff had not softened his tendons or cut into his wind. He set a fast but steady pace that the little quad was hard-pressed to match, even with the power and speed of his mechanical undercarriage to give him the advantage.

“Saints preserve us,” Theopolis exclaimed, “he’s found a way out of Anarchia!”

Buck pounded up one street and down another, obviously on familiar territory. If the truth be known, he was indeed on familiar territory. Although he had not set foot on these streets for half a millennium, he knew them as thoroughly as a blind man knows the inside of his own house. He could have made his way through this maze of thoroughfares blindfolded without missing a stride—and that was for the best, for it was a blackly overcast night, and whatever level of artificial illumination the city once had boasted, had long since disappeared, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves at night, by torchlight, campfire, or simple darkness.

Finally Buck pushed his way through the shrubbery of an ancient, overgrown archway. He patted his flight-suit, now growing dirty and tattered from his excursion through the ruined city, and pulled an old lighter from one flap-sealed pocket. He flicked it, and despite its age it lit, having been hermetically sealed and perfectly preserved during its five-hundred-year tumble through space in its owner’s pocket.

Buck held the lighter before him, illuminating the base of an ancient statue, broken off centuries before at the ankles and serving now as merely a trellis for some rank and noisome ivy.

RICHARD DALEY,
the pedestal of the ancient statue had carved upon it,
1902-1976.
Buck nodded in recollection of the man who had ruled the city in Buck’s own boyhood days, over five hundred years ago.
The little mayor everybody liked.
There was some question about that, Buck recalled. Not everyone would have agreed to the final line.

He scrambled around through the undergrowth near the pedestal. After a while he found what he was looking for, completely hidden beneath a thick growth of ivy and hardy bushes. It was the statue of Mayor Daley, missing its feet. Of course, Buck nodded to himself, they were still up on the pedestal. Somebody had smashed in the face of the statue, Buck noted. Apparently, someone who disagreed with the line about everybody liking the old mayor.

Buck nodded and muttered something to himself. He snapped off the flame of his lighter and restored it to his pocket, then set off again at a run, Twiki following him faithfully, Theopolis bouncing from his harness around the neck of the little quad.

The pace of Buck’s progress and the darkness of the city made it hard for the drone and the computer-brain to follow him. At one point they lost Buck completely, then, as Twiki stood, rotating his body and his optical sensors in hope of picking up the man again, Theopolis exclaimed, “There he is! That way, Twiki! Don’t let us get lost again!”

Twiki squeaked and looked around once again. He and Theopolis could see sinister forms gathering behind them in the gloom, most of them huddling in doorways, clinging close to the walls of ruined buildings at the edges of the street, a few of the bolder ones standing in a group in the middle of the street, their number growing with every passing second as the drone and the computer seemed almost visibly to tremble with fear.

Twiki squealed frantically and Theopolis replied, his usually soothing voice somewhat higher and less steady than before. “I know, Twiki,” Theopolis said. “I see them, too! Let’s just keep going on after Buck. He knows what he’s doing. He’s our leader, and I’m sure he has a very good plan to get us out of this scrape.”

Again the drone squealed in fright.

“Don’t think thoughts like that,” Theopolis scolded. “It runs down your batteries. There, now don’t get panicky, I’m sure we can find Buck. Look, I’m sure he just went around that corner. Let’s follow him.”