Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (34 page)

“Inside?” whispered Tom.

I nodded and he led the way. The front door was closed but not locked. It opened to a big lobby about twenty feet square, spotlessly clean and containing nothing but half a dozen metal-frame chairs. As we paused I heard a clatter of footsteps on the aluminum floor, and a man carrying a couple of thick notebooks came hurrying in. Tom and I froze.

“Well, thank Heaven,” the new arrival said. “I didn’t know anyone was coming out. We’ve been so shorthanded this last week I’ve been on continuous double shifts.”

New York accent, California tan. He was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, and he was wearing an all-white uniform like a medical orderly. The first impression was of a clean-cut, clean-living lad who should have been carrying an apple for his teacher along with his notebooks. A closer look added something different. He had a spaced-out glassy stare in his eyes, a look that I had seen before only among the ranks of the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas.

“First visit?” he said.

Tom and I nodded. I hope I looked as casual and at ease as he did.

“Great. You’ll love it here. I’m Scott.”

“Rachel,” I said. As I took his outstretched hand the inside of my head made its own swirling list of mysteries: vanished professor—golliwog stamp roll—observatory—spaceship—biology experiment—strange attractor—religion—sanctuary—lunatic asylum.

What was I missing?

“I’ll tell Marcia you’re here.” Scott had shaken hands with Tom and was heading off along a passageway. “But let’s settle you in first, and then find something for you to do.”

We followed him to a long room with a dozen beds and a shower and toilet facility at the far end. “You’ll sleep in here,” Scott said. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

I sat down shakily on one of the beds. Hard as a rock. “Prison? Military barracks? Hospital? Tom, we were crazy to come here.”

“Don’t you want to find Lockyer?” Tom shook his head. “Not prison, not hospital. Boy Scouts, or the dorm in Vermont summer camp. Kids away from home for a big adventure, mummy and daddy miles away. But they’ve gone unisex.”

“What
is
this place?”

“I don’t know. Sounds like Marcia’s the kingpin, whoever she is. Or queenpin. Or camp counselor. Everyone defers to her, even Ray Sines.” He went across to the window and stood gazing out at it. “My imagination, or is it changing again?”

I followed his pointing finger. The third dome was now a mottled and virulent green. A flowing column of darker color seemed to be rising steadily through the paint on the dome. Before we could discuss what we were seeing Scott came hurrying back in.

“Right,” he said. “A quick look around, then introductions will have to wait until tonight. We’ll need uniforms.”

He led us to an array of tall lockers at the end of the room. While he watched—no thoughts of privacy here—Tom and I took off our outer garments and replaced them with aseptic-looking white uniforms identical to the one that Scott was wearing. Tom had a little trouble finding one that fitted him; the members of Ascend Forever were presumably an undernourished group.

When we were dressed to Scott’s satisfaction he took us to the entrance hall—and back outside the building. Tom gave me a quick glance. Why bother with sterile clothing if we were going to be outside? Answer: sterility was not the point; uniformity was.

We marched to one of the three domes and peered in through the transparent wall panels. I saw a sloping floor with a little fountain at the upper end, close to where we were standing. A trickle of water ran across the dome’s interior and vanished at the other side. The rest of the floor was covered with dusty-looking plants, growing halfheartedly in a light-colored soil. The plants looked tired, and slightly wilted. In the center of the floor stood the skeleton of a much smaller dome, with only half its walls paneled, and within that structure three human figures were bending over what looked like a computer console.

A telephone handset hung on the outside of the dome, and Scott reached for it. “New arrivals,” he said. “Any changes?”

The three figures inside straightened to stare out at us and waved a greeting. “Welcome aboard.” The voice on the phone was young, friendly, and enthusiastic. “Nothing special happening here. We’ve been trying to find out what’s wiping out the legumes, but we don’t have an answer. Oxygen and nitrogen down a little bit more—still decreasing.”

“Still trying changed illumination?”

“Just finished it. We’re putting in a bit less power from the ceiling lights, we’re making it longer wavelength. We won’t know how it works for a while.”

“No danger, though?”

“Not yet. No matter what, we’ll have another couple of weeks before we begin to worry. But it’s a pain to see it go this way. Three weeks ago we were pretty sure this one would make it.”

“Maybe it will.” Scott waved to the people inside. “We’ll keep trying, too. Now that I have some help maybe I’ll have time to run an independent analysis.”

He hung the handset back on its closed stand and pointed to the panel next to it. “This is all new,” he said. “And a real improvement. We have dual controls now, inside and outside. Temperature and humidity and lighting levels in the dome can be controlled from this panel here. When we started out, all the controls were inside and it was a real nuisance. If there was no crew we had to send someone through the airlock whenever we wanted to vary the interior environmental conditions.”

He started toward the middle of the complex. “Anyway, that’s Eight,” he said as we walked. “Not going too good now. Seven is a lot better.”

“What happened to One through Six?” asked Tom.

“They went to stable end-forms, but they weren’t ones that humans could live in. So we brought the crews back outside, closed down the operations, and reused the domes.”

He didn’t notice Tom’s raised eyebrows, and went on, “But Nine’s the interesting one! I’ll warn you now, though, you won’t see much of the inside of it from here. We’ve had to ship a TV camera to the interior, to supplement the audio descriptions, otherwise we’d be short of data. But we’ll take a look through the panels, anyway.”

We were closing on the strangest of the domes, and now I could see that its wall panels were neither painted nor made of opaque materials. They were coated on the inside. Scott went to a telephone set in the wall—in that respect this was identical to the other dome.

“Marcia?” he said. “New arrivals. How about clearing a patch, so we can take a look inside Nine?”

The coating of the wall panels was close in color to the way we had first seen it, an orange-red with a touch of brown. While we stood and watched, a circular cleared patch began to appear on the wall panel closest to us. Soon we could see a hand holding a plastic scraper.

“Tough coating,” said a woman’s voice. “A good deal tougher than yesterday.”

The clear patch was finished and about a foot across. In the middle of that patch a frowning black face suddenly appeared. It was that of a woman, with protruding eyes and black straight hair that stuck out wildly in all directions.

We hadn’t found Jason Lockyer; but we had found the inspiration for the caricature design of the golliwog stamp.

“New arrivals,” said Scott again. The tone of his voice was quite different from the way it had been at the other dome. Now he was respectful and subdued, almost fearful.

This time there was no cheery wave. The golliwog face stared hard at me and Tom. “What chapter?” said a gruff voice through the handset.

We had no choice.

“Philadelphia,” I said.

“Your names?”

“Rachel Banks and Tom Walton.”

The way to the car was around the dome and then dead ahead. We could be in it in thirty seconds and driving down the mountain. On the other hand, Scott was acclimatized to ten thousand feet and we were not. I couldn’t run more than fifty yards without stopping for breath, and overweight Tom was sure to be in worse shape....

While those thoughts were running through my head the face on the other side of the panel had disappeared. We stood there for about thirty seconds, while my instinct to run became stronger and stronger. I was all ready to shout at Tom to make a break for it when Marcia’s face appeared again at the panel. Already the wall was partly coated, and she had to use the scraper again to clear it.

“I’ve told all the chapters,” she said. “I have to approve any new members
in advance
of joining—and certainly in advance of being sent here. We must check on you two. And while that’s being done we can’t afford any risks. Building Two, Scott. You’re responsible for them.”

There was no doubt who was in charge. And I had waited too long. I half-turned, and found that Marcia had used her brief absence to call for reinforcements. Four men were on their way over to the dome, all young and tanned and fit-looking.

Tom looked to me for direction. I shook my head. Marcia’s check on us was going to show that we were not members of whatever group she led, we could be sure of that. But this was not the time or place to look for an escape. I suddenly realized something I should have been aware of minutes ago: the car keys were in my purse—and my purse was back at the lockers with the rest of my clothes. Thank God I hadn’t told Tom to run for it. I would have felt like the world’s prize idiot, sitting inside the car while our pursuers came closer and I explained to him that I had no way to start the engine.

We were escorted, very politely, to the second and smaller of the two white buildings. I noticed for the first time that it had no windows.

“This is just part of the standard procedure,” said Scott. He was embarrassed. “I know everything will be all right. I’ll check as soon as I can with the group leader in Philadelphia, and then I’ll come and let you out. Help yourself to any food you want from the refrigerator.”

The door was thick and made of braced aluminum. It closed behind us. And locked.

We were standing in a room with three beds, a kitchen, and one other door. Tom went across to it.

“Locked,” he said after a moment. “But padlocked on
this
side. Where do you think it leads?”

“Not outside, that’s for sure. Probably upstairs. It wouldn’t help, though—there are no windows there, either.” I went across to the refrigerator and found a carton of milk. I had savage heartburn and what I would have really liked was a Mylanta tablet, but they were also in my purse. I was proving to be quite a klutz of a detective.

Tom was still over at the door. “It’s wood, not aluminum. And nowhere near as strong as the one that leads outside.”

“Good. Can you break the damned thing open?”

“Break it!” He stared at me in horror. “Rachel, this is someone’s private property.”

“It sure as hell is. Tom, I know you were brought up to regard personal property as sacred. But we’re in a fix. That bloody golliwog woman is all ready to serve us on the halfshell, and I don’t give a shit about property. Break it.” I was drinking from the carton—most unhygienic, but I was past caring. “Whatever they plan to do with us, I doubt if adding a broken door to the list of crimes will make much difference. Have fun. Smash away.”

“Well, if you really think we have to.” Tom was still hesitating. “All right, I’ll do it. With luck I won’t need to do any actual smashing.”

He wandered over to the kitchen area of the room and found a blunt knife. The door’s padlock was held in position by four wood screws. It took him only three or four minutes to remove all of them. He swung the door open and we found we were looking at the foot of a tightly spiraling staircase.

“We can’t get out this way,” I said. “But there’s nothing better to do. Let’s take a look.”

He went up the stairs in front of me, clutching the central support pole. On the second floor we came to another door, this one unlocked.

Tom opened it. We were looking at a carbon copy of the room below, but with one important difference. At the table in the kitchen area sat a man with a loaf of bread and a lump of cheese—Edam, by the look of it—in front of him. Next to those stood a bottle of red wine, and the man facing us had a full glass in his hand and was sniffing at it thoughtfully. When the door opened he looked up in surprise.

I think I was more surprised than he was, though of course I had no right to be. I knew him from his picture. We were looking at Jason Lockyer.

* * *

The introductions and explanation of who we were and how we got there took a few minutes.

“And it seems we’re all stuck here,” I said.

“Well, there are worse places,” said Lockyer. We had set a couple more chairs around the table and were all sitting there. “I ought to apologize, because of course this is all my fault. When I look back I can see I started the whole damned thing.”

He was a small, neatly built man with a good-humored face and the faint residual of a Boston accent. The fact that he was locked up, with no idea what was likely to happen to him next, did nothing to ruin his appetite. His only complaint was the quality of the wine. (“California ‘burgundy,’” he said. “It shouldn’t be allowed to use the name. It’s no excuse to say wine like this is cheap. It ought to be
free
.”)

“Three years ago,” he went on, “I was invited to give a talk to the local chapter of Ascend Forever in Baltimore. I had no idea what to say to them, until one of my best students—Marcia Seretto—who was also a member of the society, mentioned the society’s interest in establishing stand-alone colonies out in space. That would imply a completely stable, totally recycling environment. After that it was obvious what I had to talk about.

“Most people know that one fully recycling environment, driven only by energy from the sun, already exists. That’s the biosphere of the planet Earth. What I pointed out—and what got Marcia so excited that she almost had a fit—was the existence today of other biospheres. They were small, and they only supported life at the microbe level, but they were—and are—genuine miniature ecospheres, relying on nothing but solar energy to keep them going. The first ones were made by Clair Folsome in Hawaii in 1967, and they’re still going.”