Buck Rogers 1 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (5 page)

“Delta Vector, Supervisor.” A momentary pause. “You don’t hear from me very often. My scanners monitor the low-frequency direct-commo bands.”

“Yes, yes, Delta Vector. I’m sure you’re picking up Pirate and Marauder chatter. No reason for alarm. Probably Van Allen belt echoes from that attack on our freighters last night. Those signals will be bouncing around the spectrum for a week at least.”

“Yes, sir. I mean—no, sir! This isn’t an echo. It’s a voice, a strong voice. And it’s singing.”

“Singing? Delta Vector, did you say
singing?
Stay on the line, Delta.” He switched lines. “Operational Control, this is supervisor control on the floor. I want a direct feed-line from Delta Vector.”

And into his monitor minispeaker there came the static-distorted tones of a man’s voice singing. “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home . . .” The voice dropped the old song, switched over to businesslike, almost urgent tones. “Hey, you guys, wake up and fly right! What’s goin’ on there? I’m on final reentry countdown and I can’t read anything from you. If I don’t get some landing instructions from you, I’m going to put a big black hole right in the middle of beautiful downtown Burbank. Or Peoria. Or to tell the God’s honest truth, I don’t have the slightest idea of where the hell I’m heading!”

A look of puzzlement crossed the supervisor’s face. “Practically a foreign language. Can it be some kind of joke?”

But the supervisor’s thoughts weren’t left to run their course. Another voice broke in, even more urgently, on the line. “Alert! Alert! Alien space craft invading defense belt, vector four one zero. Repeat, alien space craft . . .”

The supervisor leaped into action. “My God!” he exclaimed, “it’s heading directly for the defense shield!” Into his transmitter he almost shouted, “Get me intercept. Intercept squadron on the line-quickly! Top red-emergency!”

At Intercept Squadron headquarters the commanding officer picked up her handset. Colonel Wilma Deering was herself a beautiful woman, fully aware of her own features and the power they gave her in human dealings, but when she was on duty there was no consideration of glamour or romance. Her job was far too important for her to permit any dalliance to distract her from its performance.

“Colonel Deering here. Yes. I read. What are the coordinates? Right!” She hung her commo unit away, pressed the control stud under a glaringly flashing light. A raucous klaxon sent up its grating, grinding hoots. “Alert intercept!” Wilma commanded via loudspeaker. “Retard defense shield counterforce one hundred miles. Hold fire until we verify target identification!”

And from launching pads where sleek interceptor craft were held in flight-ready preparedness twenty-four hours a day, engines roared into shrieking, urgent life and gleaming, powerful fighting craft screamed away from earth, ready to engage any enemy that appeared.

“Alert intercept aircraft,” Colonel Deering’s voice came. “Stand by for readout on position of enemy craft!”

The War Room supervisor’s voice came metallically over the transmitter to Wilma’s earphone. “Very odd, Colonel.”

“What’s odd?” she snapped.

“Target seems to be moving unusually slowly for any known type of spacecraft. And its flight path is strange, too—erratic.”

A technician’s voice broke in on the line. “Target, thirty seconds from electronic destruct field.”

Wilma Deering peered through her window. She was no deskbound commander, but flew every mission with her squadron, fought in every engagement and shared every risk that she asked her subordinates to run. “I have the target in visual sight, now,” she was saying. “My God! What
is
that thing?”

As astonished as their commander, the members of the Intercept Squadron streaked past Buck’s antiquated spaceship, banking smoothly for another pass at the intruder.

“All right,” Buck Rogers exclaimed, unaware of the purpose of the craft that had scrambled to meet him. “Hey, really nice to see some friendly space-jockeys up to meet me!” His eyes widened, then narrowed again. “Wait a minute.” He gazed in amazement at these sleek, yet brutally powerful space fighters as they roared around his primitive ship like turbohydroplanes circling a wallowing rowboat. “Who are you guys?” Buck asked weakly. “Hell,
what
are ya?”

The voice that returned through his headset was that of Wilma Deering. “Attention alien spacecraft. Do you read me?”

“You bet I read you! And watch who you’re calling alien! You don’t look so goddamned familiar yourself. Who are
you
?”

The female voice was sharp. “You will restrict your responses to yes and no. You are in grave danger.”

“From who?” Buck demanded. “You?”

“You are traversing a narrow corridor into our inner cities.”

“Inner what? Look, lady—”

“Colonel Deering, please. Commander, Intercept Squadron. Now please be quiet. If you deviate from my orders by so much as a thousand yards you will be burned into vapor. Do you understand that?”

“Vapor! Yeah, I got that. What do I do?”

“Do you have manual override capabilities?”

“You bet!”

“Then follow me very closely.”

“I’ll be right on your tail. Just show me the way, lady!” He punched the manual override button, putting his ship’s computer into standby mode and taking control of the ship himself.
Just like an old-time jet jockey,
he thought to himself, and then—
well, we really blew it this time. That’s gotta be the Russkies . . . that commander of theirs sounds like one tough chick!

Through his speakers came the hard voice. “You’re doing fine so far.”

“Das vidanya,” Buck replied bitterly.

“I beg your pardon?” the woman’s voice sounded puzzled.

“Just being friendly.”

“I didn’t understand those last words. But let me assure you, whoever you are, pilot, that violating our planetary air space is not an act of friendship. It’s an act of war!”

Buck shook his head and concentrated on following the sleek interceptor down to land. “Wait’ll the guys at the Cape hear this one,” he mumbled to himself. “Buck Rogers sets down right in the middle of Red Square. No question about it, they’ll torture me for everything I know.”

Minutes later he found himself seated inside a streamlined monorail car as it streaked along its track. It was surrounded by a city of incredible beauty, graceful towers and glistening spires thrusting upward nearly to touch the metallic and glassite dome that covered the entire metropolis.

Guards stood alertly at the front and rear of the monorail car. The only passengers between the watchful guardians were Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering. The car’s windows were darkened, but he could peer through them and see the golden, glittering city outside.

“What is it?” Buck exclaimed. “This sure isn’t the Moscow they told us about back in Chi Town!”

“This is the Inner City, of course,” Wilma answered coldly.

“Inner City okay, but not just of course,” Buck commented. “I’ve never seen anything like this. What kind of place is it?”

“Come away from the window, please,” Wilma said. Although her words were couched as a request, their tone made it clear that she spoke a command. She pointed peremptorily to a button beneath the clear panel and Buck obediently pressed it. The window went dark.

“Look,” he said, returning to his seat beside Wilma. “I think I deserve some kind of explanation. Where are we, really? I don’t even know what planet I’m on!”

“What you undoubtedly deserve is a firing squad,” Wilma answered sharply. “But we don’t have those anymore. We have a better fate awaiting you after your interrogation is completed.”

“And I thought Princess Ardala was all a nightmare,” Buck muttered bitterly.

“Princess Ardala!” Wilma jerked at the name. “I’m sure you’d like me to believe that she sent you. Well, it may interest you to know that whoever really did send you here planted a bomb on your ship. It was to be triggered by the earth’s atmosphere entering your ship when you opened the hatch after you landed.”

“A bomb?”

“Had we not moved your ship directly into a decontamination chamber to remove alien microbes, we would not have discovered the charge. And you, pilot, would be dead!”

Buck took a minute to assimilate this latest blockbuster. Not only was he no nearer to an understanding of what was taking place around him—each new revelation only seemed to move him farther away from one! He shook his head and stared introspectively into the darkened window-panel. “If this is all a nightmare . . . then I can only say that it’s a beaut!”

T H R E E

A sterile room, gleaming white from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall. Light glared down from every direction. The room was furnished with the most spartan of implements. Two hard chairs. One small table. A single panel barely distinguishable from the sterile glaring walls that surrounded it.

And one living occupant.

William Rogers, Captain, United States Air Force.

Buck sat in one of the two chairs, gazing morosely at the white panel, wondering, wondering who or what might come through it—and when!

He stood up, moved away from his chair, strode nervously around the room chewing his lower lip, smacking the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. Finally he went to the white panel and tried to press it open. It did not respond.

Instead, an even more inconspicuous panel slid aside, at the opposite end of the room, and a man passed through it to stand staring at Buck from the rear. The newcomer was built along the delicate lines of a person who has lived long and grown far from the fleshly existence of youth or even middle age. His hair was a gray that was heavily salted with white. His features were thin, ascetic, almost spiritual in appearance. Yet a keenness of intellect so marked his features that no one would ever have mistaken him for less than the genius he was!

“Doctor Huer is my name,” the newcomer announced. “I am very pleased to meet you, Captain Rogers.”

Buck spun on one heel, faced the other in readiness to make any move necessary. “What in hell is going on here? Where am I and what are you doing to me?”

“We’re studying you,” Huer announced as calmly and matter-of-factly as if he were an adult answering the simple question of a small child.

Buck swung around, glaring at the walls and the ceiling of the sterile chamber.

“It’s all electronic and quite painless,” the old man told him. His voice was thin, his tone a strange combination of gentleness and abrasiveness, as if he had seen all that the world had to show, and had reached a point of tolerance toward human foibles, yielding only occasionally to impatience with the foolishness of the mortal beings.

“So far,” Huer continued, “we’re quite as astonished as you are, Captain, by what has happened. Your testing has provided the most phenomenal data!”

“All right, get to it,” Buck snapped impatiently. “What’s happened to me? If I’m dead, I obviously didn’t make it to heaven. So just what planet is this?”

“What planet?” Huer laughed. “Why, Earth, of course! You returned yesterday morning, just as your mission required and on almost the precise landing area originally programmed into your ship’s computer.”

Buck shook his head despairingly. “Doctor, I may have been through a lot but there’s no way you’re going to tell me that city out there is anything like Chicago.”

“No, it isn’t,” Huer conceded. “There’s nothing like Chicago left on Earth. At least, nothing like the Chicago you knew in the twentieth century.”

Buck stared speechlessly at the doctor.

“Captain,” Huer resumed, “we’re trying to find a way to ease you into what’s happened.”

Buck Rogers leaped from his chair and stood glaring at the tall scientist. “I was raised back in the 1960s, Doc. So don’t be afraid to shock me. I know what culture shock is! Just let me have the facts, man! Tell me the plain truth and you can spare us both a lot of time and trouble beating around the bush!”

“I’m afraid that even I am not permitted to tell you everything,” Huer replied. “For your own good, Captain, it’s been decided that the shock would be too great—despite what you’ve just told me. Your 1960s were a difficult period, were they? I confess that my specialty is not ancient history.”

“Never mind that. You say its been decided I can’t handle the truth, hey? Well,
who
decided that? I have a right to—”

“Please!” the tall, lean scientist broke in. “I am but a humble man of science. Allow me to bring in my administrator, Dr. Theopolis.”

“Aw, look, Doc,” Buck complained in annoyance.

Huer crossed the wall to the semiconcealed white panel. It opened silently at his approach and he spoke to someone outside the sterile chamber. “Would you please bring Dr. Theopolis in here?”

From the opened panel there emerged the most astonishing creature that Buck Rogers had ever laid eyes on. In his own time there had been stories of intelligent robots, more or less manlike machines built with elaborate control circuitry capable of duplicating—or at least simulating—human thought. The famous ones—Adam Link, Helen O’Loy, R. Daneel Olivaw, Mr. Atom, Jay Score—had won their place in the hearts of lovers of extravagant literature.