The Season of Passage Read online

  'I order you to open the seal, Friend,' Lauren said firmly.

  The charade could end here, she thought. After a moment's hesitation, however, the circular door slid aside. Friend might have been suspicious, but he couldn't know what she had planned.

  [Yes, Lauren.]

  Lauren remembered floating towards the computer's main console. Then there was a void. She must have blacked out. Fortunately her head bumped the ceiling and she woke up. Unfortunately, she had lost the dynamite; it had slipped out of her shorts. The plastic bag had drifted under a chair; it was close to spilling its contents for Friend's inspection. Hastily she retrieved the dynamite and

  swam back to the main body of the Hawk's computer. Speed was essential. The Antabolene had her yawning like crazy.

  Lauren stooped under the main console, shielding her activities from the cameras with her body, removed the putty-like dynamite, and worked it into a grille. She favored using a simple fuse rather than an electronic detonator because the latter would require that she trail a wire from the control room down to the lower levels and Friend could cut the wire by closing the seal on it. She'd light the fuse and dash for the Nova's airlock. It was a risky plan. The explosion would probably rupture the Hawk's hull. If she was trapped in the control room - if Friend locked her in - she would be exposed to the vacuum of space.

  [Lauren, what are you doing?]

  She didn't answer. She worked faster.

  [Lauren, why are you looking there for Martian samples?]

  'Huh?' she began to perspire.

  [Why are you looking there for Martian samples?]

  'Why do you ask?' Lauren squeezed a lump of plastic around a fuse and whipped out her lighter. The door that led to the living room was still open.

  [Lauren, there are no Martian samples in that spot.]

  'Oh,' she muttered. A wave of dizziness hit her as she tried to light the lighter. Taking a deep breath, she steadied her hand and touched the flame to the fuse. Then she whirled and launched herself toward the exit.

  It slammed shut in her face.

  'Open the seal, Friend!' she shouted.

  [Lauren, there are explosives attached to a portion of my hardware.]

  'Goddamn you, I order you to open this door!' She

  looked back at the fuse. It was still burning. The door stayed shut. Friend didn't say anything. 'I'll die if you don't open it!'

  Friend didn't open it. He must have thought she was bluffing.

  Yeah, Daniel, Friend knows everything mankind has learned in the last five thousand years. He knows every game that's ever been invented. He's a master at poker.

  Lauren retreated to the dynamite and snapped the fuse in half. Yawning loudly, she wondered how much longer she could stay awake. It was only intense danger that kept her conscious. That, and a new plan. She floated toward the emergency suit locker. Bill had used a suit from this very locker the second time they had landed on Mars, when the lower hull had cracked and opened to the Martian atmosphere. The suits inside the locker were not individually tailored to fit the crew, like the ones hanging in the basement, but Lauren wasn't feeling picky.

  It was an old question: could computers really think? Lauren believed she finally received an answer to it when she opened the locker.

  It was yes.

  Friend turned off the lights.

  'Gimme a break,' she muttered, flipping on her lighter. She slipped into a pressure suit. The helmet sealed over her head with a soft hiss. A green light glowed softly on the right arm of her suit, indicating she was safe inside her own little bubble of atmosphere. Turning on the suit's headlamp, she groped back to the fuse.

  [Lauren, if you ignite that dynamite you will be killed.]

  Mars had even put fear in the machine.

  'You think so, huh?' she said.

  [Lauren, the shock wave would definitely kill you.]

  She crouched under the console and secured a fresh fuse

  with another lump of the plastic dynamite. 'I'll take my chances, Friend.'

  [Gary would not approve of this action.]

  'The hell with him.'

  Lauren lit the fuse and sprang toward the furthest chair from the computer console. Once in the seat she quickly buckled herself in and turned the back of the chair to the dynamite.

  [Lori, I'm sure if we talked this over we could arrive at an agreement that would be mutually beneficial.]

  She laughed. 'What did you call me?'

  [Lauren, we should talk this over.]

  'Shut up. You're scrap metal.' Lauren pulled her knees up against her chest and huddled into a tight ball.

  The dynamite exploded.

  It was as if she had been slapped by a speeding truck. The shock wave crushed the wind from her lungs. A burst of bright fire was followed by a loud roar as the explosion was quickly sucked into space on the wave of escaping air. The hull had cracked. Debris socked her from a dozen angles. The noise was deafening. Her chair spun in dizzy circles. As quickly as it had come, however, the storm passed, leaving in its wake the eerie silence that was only found in deep space.

  Her pounding heart filled the universe. She sat in pitch black. Faint stars shone through that portion of the hull that had once been Friend's brain. Yet Friend - that half of him in the Nova proper - had been cured, at the expense of a lobotomy. Lauren turned on her radio and spoke to him. He began to ramble on about how his basic programming had been overridden by a transposition of concepts alien to his intrinsic priorities... Already he sounded like his old self. But she had to be sure, or at least as sure as she could be.

  'Friend,' she interrupted. 'What's my name?'

  [Lauren.]

  'Have you ever called me Lori before?'

  [Yes, Lauren. Minutes ago, when you were resting in your hibernaculum, I called you Lori.]

  'Why?'

  [Because my basic programming had been overridden by a transposition of alien concepts...]

  'Stop. I believe you. Is Gary still asleep?'

  [Yes, Lauren.]

  'Could you kill him for me using his hibernaculum?' she asked.

  [No, Lauren. My basic programs forbid such an action.]

  'What if I tell you Gary is trying to kill me?'

  [You may tell me that.]

  'Gary is trying to kill me. Now can you kill him for me?'

  [My basic programs forbid such an action.]

  'But don't you have to protect me?'

  [Yes, Lauren. It is one of my prime functions. It is also one of my prime functions to protect Gary.]

  'Who's more important?' she asked, not really expecting an answer.

  [Gary is more important as far as the mission is concerned.]

  'What if I told you Gary is a Martian?'

  [You may tell me that.]

  'Gary is a Martian. He's no longer Gary. He just looks like Gary. He's dangerous. Manipulate the flow of blood through his hibernaculum in such a way that it kills him. That is a direct order, Friend. Do it now.'

  [I cannot, Lauren.]

  'Why not?'

  [Your remarks are not logical. You have not given me reason enough to override my basic programs.}

  'I told you, Gary is not Gary. He's a fucking Martian!'

  [There are no fucking Martians, Lauren.]

  It was useless arguing with a machine, even when he was on your side. She considered having Friend rouse Mark, but that would take hours, and Mark would be the last one in the solar system capable of killing Gary.

  'Friend, do you still have control of the Hawk's systems?'

  [No, Lauren.]

  She had foreseen the possibility before she had set off the dynamite. It meant she was locked out of the Nova. She would have to crawl out the hole into space and make her way to the Nova's exterior airlock. She ordered Friend to prepare for her unorthodox entry and undid her seat belts.

  The rip created by the blast was wide and Lauren had no trouble making her way into the starry night. Immediately she began to drift, though, and
had to grab for her very life. A false step now and she would join the family of asteroids. In the dark she searched for handles, but in designing the Hawk's nose, the engineers had been concerned with other qualities besides EVA anchors. However, as she rounded the ship's top point, raw sunlight burst before her over the hull and she was able to find protrusions to grab hold of. She turned her back on the harsh light and pulled herself toward the Nova. Mars shone to her port side, approximately four times as large as the Moon as seen from Earth, and a hundred times more visible than she would have preferred. For a moment Lauren suffered from the illusion that they were actually returning to the red planet, and not racing away from it at thousands of miles an hour. It was not a pleasant illusion.

  Approaching the Nova, Lauren noted where the antenna dish had been sheared off. What a fool she had been to think the pinpoint collision was an accident! Torn metal drifted near where the antenna had attached, standing at

  odd angles in the windless cosmos, casting hard shadows on the ship's silver hull. Repair was out of the question, but she was one fool that was learning fast.

  When Lauren reached the Nova's airlock her fatigue caused by the growing strength of the Antabolene in her bloodstream came within an inch of overwhelming her. It was all she could do to drag herself inside the airlock and hit the right button. But as the atmosphere tore against her pressure, she did doze, even though she knew it could be her death to do so. But perhaps it was that fear that brought the dream, for it was hideous. The cosmonaut's gouged eyes floated in a sea of red lava, searching for her on a molten shore. Only now they were beautiful blue eyes, like Jennifer's. They were searching for her to show her what was left of her sister's body. Ashes, Lori, burnt ashes. And it's your fault.

  Lauren awoke with a scream in her throat.

  She ordered Friend to open the airlock door, and drifted into the axis of the Nova. She floated weightless at the center of the ship, yet weightlessness didn't keep her from shaking. When she came to the ladder that led to the rim, where the hibernaculums were, she told herself that Gary was already dead, that he had been murdered on the frozen Martian plateau. Very good, my love. Drink all you want. There's lots. She began to weep, contemplating what was to come.

  'Is he still asleep, Friend?' she asked.

  [Yes, Lauren.]

  Lauren climbed toward the hub. The invisible threads of gravity returned along with the weight of the final confrontation. Time passed slowly, yet all too soon she stood next to his body. It was only a body, she told herself, a helpless vehicle possessed by a hateful spirit of ancient origin. Yet she did not believe it. He was still Gary to her:

  the boyish face that would never grow up; the curly dark hair she always wanted to run her fingers through; the strong muscles that were always ready to wrestle with her. He appeared so frail to her right then, fast asleep with half of his left arm missing. Gary had made no cowardly decision to live forever. He had trusted in her wisdom. Maybe she was wrong, after all. She had been wrong so many times already. Maybe he wasn't a Martian ...

  No!

  She couldn't listen to the arguments, especially her own. If she had not argued with Jim in the first place, there might have been a few more of them returning home. Gary was dead. She was only giving sustenance to a mirage to think otherwise. But now there was a gruesome decision to be made. How was she supposed to do it? She was no Van Helsing and she had nothing to make into a wooden stake. Yet did the exorcism need to be so messy? When the flesh was destroyed, surely the possession vanished. Legends-they were only stories. Plus she'd never read a vampire story that praised a laser bolt above a wooden stake, yet Ivan and Jessica could have testified to the advantages of high-tech hardware.

  Lauren's fatigue made it difficult to think clearly. But the limits of the flesh, she kept saying to herself. The limits of the flesh. The physical laws of the universe didn't have to all be tossed out just because there were vampires running around on the fourth planet. If she killed him, she killed him. He would be dead, totally dead. It didn't matter how she did it. There was no way she was sticking something sharp through his chest. The government would lock her in a tiny room for the rest of her life if they saw that she had desecrated Gary's body.

  Finally convinced she knew what she was doing, Lauren crossed to her medical cabinet. There she climbed out of

  her pressure suit and stood scantily clad before the rows of drugs. There were so many ways to kill a man She needed something simple, something she might be able to explain away as a hibernaculum failure. She picked up a bottle of potassium. A high dose of potassium would overload the heart by backing up the kidneys and toxifying the blood. Simple. Neat. Perfect.

  Lauren reached for a syringe and stabbed the needle through the cork at the top of the bottle. She drew off ten cc's, two hundred milli-equivalents, enough to kill a dozen men. She would tell NASA it had been a very nasty hibernaculum failure. She also grabbed a scalpel and put it in her pocket. If Gary tried to get up, she would slit his throat wide open and to hell with what NASA thought.

  Lauren crossed back to Gary's hibernaculum. There she leaned over the clear lid and deactivated the artificial kidney mechanism. She couldn't have the potassium filtered out of his system as quickly as she put it in.

  She was having a hard time. Her hands trembled. Her vision blurred. She took hold of the tubes that circulated his blood. She stared at his blood. It looked so red, so human. She took her syringe and thrust the needle into the tube leading into his vein and began to pump the potassium into his system: one cc, two cc's, three cc's.

  [Lauren, are you awake?]

  T know, Friend,' she said.

  [Lauren, Gary's heart is under...]

  'I know,' she repeated, hysteria entering her voice.

  Eight cc's. Nine cc's. Ten cc's.

  The syringe was empty.

  An alert began to scream. A red light flashed off and on beside his hibernaculum. It pulsed in the cold dark of the room like a bleeding artery. Lauren stared at the monitors above Gary's sleeping form. The green wave that recorded the rhythm of his heartbeat jumped. Gary's body jumped with it.

  [Lauren, there is an emergency situation...]

  'Shut up!' Lauren cried. She bowed her head. 'There's nothing I can do,' she whispered.

  Suddenly the noise of the alert stopped. Lauren looked up. The green wave had gone flat. The other lines followed quickly. Gary lay perfectly still. He was not breathing. He was dead. Nothing was going to use him anymore.

  ' Tell me that I'm the most handsome astronaut in the solar system.'

  Jim, Bill, Jessie, Gary, and Jennifer - the blood of all of them was on her hands, one way or the other. She dropped the empty syringe on the floor and limped into the adjacent room, to her hibernaculum. She crawled inside it and attached the tubes to her shunt. She closed the lid. She told Friend to put her under immediately. Then she tried to relax and let the Antabolene take effect. But the sleep she had held off with such difficulty was long in coming. Finally, however, in the end, she began to drift off.

  Then a second red alert jerked her awake.

  Lauren opened her eyes and looked at her monitors.

  The emergency was in Mark's hibernaculum!

  'Friend?' she said with great effort. 'What's happening?'

  There was no answer.

  'Friend?'

  Nothing. Lauren tried to get up but she was too weak. She fell back down. Before she did, however, she thought she detected motion at the edge of her vision. But that was impossible. Surely...

  She studied Mark's monitor more closely. The flow of his blood into the cleansing filters was weakening. And something was interfering with his breathing. Carbon dioxide was accumulating in his blood. He wasn't getting

  enough air. Again Lauren tried to sit up. This time the top of her head banged the lid of the hibernaculum. She tried raising her arms and pushing the glass open, but her muscles wouldn't respond. She fell back again. Helpless, she watched Mark's vital signs plumm
et. He was having severe spasms in his diaphragm. It was as if he were being smothered. And he was losing blood somehow.

  Blood! It's the only thing the dead live for.

  'Friend!' Lauren cried. Her voice barely rose above a whisper. The computer didn't answer. Friend's ears had been boxed, and in an awful instant, Lauren knew by who -by what. Still Mark's monitor held her attention. The fatal pattern was the same as a few minutes before. The green waves jumped and danced. Then they slowed down, and finally went flat. The red alert ceased. The ship was silent again.

  Mark Kawati was dead.

  The legends - only stories, she thought. But ignore them at your own risk. She should have found herself some wood.

  ' Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place the point over the heart, and the hammer in your right. Strike in God's name, so that all may be well with the dead that we love, and that the un-Dead pass away.'

  Gary had read her the passage.

  Gary.

  The Vampire had risen.

  Gathering the last of her failing strength Lauren threw herself at the lid of the hibernaculum. It was no good. She fell back helpless, straining her eyes toward the dark doorway through which would walk the most terrifying of mankind's nightmares.

  She heard a sickening thud.

  A body had been dropped to the floor.

  Then he was before her, standing in the shadows. He wore only baggy shorts. His skin was abnormally white. He grinned with a mouth full of bloodstained teeth.

  'Hello, Doc,' Gary said.

  Lauren screamed.

  He walked toward her.

  THIRTY-THREE

  His manner was arrogant, the cockiness of the already damned, who had nothing to lose. He paused above her hibernaculum, admiring her body with a ferocious grin, and then thrust back the lid. The smell that assailed her nose was like that of the pit. He reached down and touched her bare thigh. Her abdomen cramped involuntarily, as if it were suddenly filled with dry ice. His hand was hard, very cold.

  Don't touch me!

  'But you're dead,' Lauren cried weakly. 'I killed you.'

  His grin widened, the way Ivan's had when they said something that amused him. 'Exactly,' he said. He let go of her leg and opened the porthole above her bed, the one through which she had first gazed upon Mars. Red light bathed his face, magnifying the faint lines of hatred and despair in his expression. A drop of Mark's blood fell from his teeth and splashed her naked leg. The blood was warm.