[Buck Rogers 01] - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Read online

  On the other side of the glass, Buck Rogers calmly submitted to the guards who flanked and escorted himself and Twiki—the quad with Dr. Theopolis hung around his neck—from the room.

  It was barely a matter of an hour before two lonely forms plodded down the road from the Inner City to the barren and seething land of Anarchia. One was Buck Rogers; the other, Twiki with Dr. Theopolis hung from his neck.

  They stopped in the middle of the road, for there was no traffic here to prevent their doing it, and stood, gazing back at the great glowing dome of the Inner City.

  “I never thought I’d say this,” Buck muttered, “but that place is starting to look good to me!”

  The little quad made one of his infrequent little squawks of distress. Dr. Theopolis, hanging from the drone’s metal neck, glowed softly as he spoke. “I wouldn’t start feeling sorry for myself yet, Twiki. This is nothing compared to what lies ahead of us.”

  “Maybe we ought to stay right here until it gets light,” Buck suggested.

  “Oh, I’m afraid we’d freeze to death,” Dr. Theopolis said. “That is, you would freeze to death, Buck. But in fact, it wouldn’t be any too good for Twiki’s mechanical fittings or for my own more environmentally sensitive circuits. It’ll be way below zero here long before sunrise starts it to warming up again.”

  Buck shrugged, and he and Twiki turned away from the Inner City and began their slow walk along the windblown road.

  “Well,” Theopolis philosophized, “I guess we just have to move on, then.”

  “I’m sorry,” Buck said. “I did what I believe was right, and for my own sake I’d do it again if I had to. But I’m sorry that I had to take you fellows down with me.”

  “No one forced me into your camp,” Theopolis replied. “I did what I did because I believed in you, Buck. And I still do—and I’d do it again if I had to, as well!”

  Buck thanked the computer.

  The drone Twiki made an odd squeaking sound.

  “What’d he say?” Buck asked Theopolis.

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

  And they kept walking, kept walking, up the windswept road, away from the brilliant domed city, and towards the vague and distant outline of ruin and desolation.

  FIVE

  Back in the Inner City, in the office of Dr. Huer, to be specific, the old scientist was sitting, disconsolately contemplating the recently completed trial and its tragic verdict. He looked up in surprise as Wilma Deering hurriedly entered and cried out to him, “Doctor, I need your help—desperately!”

  “What is it?” Huer asked, startled.

  “It’s Buck Rogers.” Wilma was nearly in tears. “We must get him back, Dr. Huer, we must!”

  “Back? My dear,” the old man said, “you can’t be serious. You know what the life expectancy is outside the Inner City?”

  “It’s the life expectancy of the Inner City itself that I’m concerned with saving, Dr. Huer. That, and the entire planet Earth!”

  Huer’s eyebrows flew ceilingward in alarm. “What are you saying, child?”

  “I realize now how foolish I was in pressing for the Council to pass judgment on Captain Rogers. We had the perfect test of his guilt or innocence in our hands, and we failed to apply it!”

  Dr. Huer shook his head in puzzlement. “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  Wilma interrupted the old man. “Buck Rogers claims that the Draconians helped him. He could provide us with the perfect opportunity, the perfect excuse, to go aboard their ship and check out his story.”

  “While using the same expedition to do a little looking around for—other things. That is very good, child.”

  “Exactly,” Wilma agreed. “It’s a good plan, I have to say that even though I invented it myself.”

  “Well,” old Huer said drily, “you chose a fine time to think of it. I doubt that Captain Rogers feels in a very friendly or cooperative mood as far as the Inner City is concerned. That is, if he’s even alive.”

  “Never mind,” Wilma cried. “I know he’s alive, somehow. Just help me to convince the Council to suspend their sentence while they review my new findings.”

  Huer rubbed his chin with a pale, blue-veined hand. “I’ll try, Wilma, that’s all that I can promise you. I’ll try.”

  * * *

  In the Council Chamber of the Computer Council of the Inner City, membership had been brought back to a full twelve by the elevation of a replacement for the banished Dr. Theopolis. The Counsellors were again assembled, the lights dimmed, and this time it was not Buck Rogers but Dr. Huer who held the floor of the meeting.

  “It is in the city’s and planet’s best interests,” Dr. Huer was saying. “As things stand now, we have nothing further to lose, for all will be lost anyway.”

  “But the very fabric of our society,” the computer Apol said, “is threatened when a ruling of the Council is reversed, or even suspended. The word of the council must be final and absolute.”

  “No,” Huer differed. “This case transcends all rules and precedents of the Council. If the Council has erred in its judgment, the danger of letting the error stand is far greater than that of admitting fallibility and correcting the error. If by some horrible error of judgment the Draconians are admitted to Earth, and they come to us not as friends but as traitors and enemies in our very midst—then will all be lost! Then we would suffer an absolute defeat. Therefore we must seize this opportunity to verify the honesty of their stated intentions.”

  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 s
he 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 o
r 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.