Joe Haldeman - The Coming

“What’s happening?” the chancellor asked. “Does this usually happen?”

“No, sir. I think it’s a drug interaction. Seventy-one Tikan is psychotropic, and if the offender has taken some other psychotropic drug… shit. There goes his pulse.” He chinned a microphone switch. “Dispatch, this is Rabin in 16-dash-304. We have a code nine here, need help fast. Heart stopped.” After a few seconds a female voice said they were on their way. Rabin had already begun cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

After a minute of rhythmic shoving on the man’s chest, alternating with breathing into his mouth, he asked Barrett, “Sir, can you do CPR?”

“Uh, no. I’m afraid not.” He made an ineffectual gesture with both hands. “I’ve been meaning to take the course…”

Another minute. “Find someone who can. I may need help.” It was hard work, and Rabin was out of shape. He’d heard of people having heart attacks themselves while administering CPR. He didn’t want to be part of an ironic newspaper story.

Barrett didn’t go straight out the door, but first stepped over both of them to take something off the desk. Then he went out into the corridor and started knocking on doors and shouting at people.

“Code nine” meant that a suspect needed immediate medical attention. Sometimes the rescue unit dragged their feet a bit, since suspects were usually guilty, and a dead suspect meant less work all around.

Rabin was starting to have chest pains, which he knew were psychosomatic, when a middle-aged black man kneeled down next to him. “Need help?” Rabin nodded and rolled away, gasping.

He leaned back against the desk and watched his replacement: slower, but pretty good, considering that he’d probably never done it on a live person before. Of course this person was only somewhat alive.

Not armed, at least not obviously. So why had he been ordered to dart him on sight? If he was dangerous, why risk sending the chancellor along to identify him?

Could the dart have been switched—did he inadvertently fire a killer dart rather than a talker? No, he’d loaded the weapon himself when the call came in.

The dart was on the floor. He leaned over slowly, still hyperventilated, and picked it up. The charge cartridge was green-blue-green, 71 Tikan. He got a plastic bag out of his utility kit and dropped the cartridge in and put it in his pocket.

Other evidence. He stood up slowly and checked the desk. A keyboard, but nothing up on the wall. No crystal or cube in the readers. A notepad and stylus. He pushed the “previous message” corner of the notepad and got a crude drawing of a naked woman and a neatly printed phone number.

He wrote the number down in his notebook. Ma’am, you’re being investigated in conjunction with a serious information crime. No, don’t bother getting dressed. I’ll just handcuff you to this bed here .

Chancellor Barrett stepped into the office. “Sir, what was it you took from the desk here?”

“Desk? Oh, nothing. Nothing… I was just checking the notepad there.”

“But I—”

“Nothing, Sergeant Rabin.”

“Yes, sir.” The old bastard, it must have been a cube or crystal from the reader. Whatever this guy was working on.

It put Rabin in an interesting situation. Under oath, or drugs, he would have to testify that he’d seen the chancellor take something from the desk. Did the chancellor realize that? Was the chancellor corrupt enough to threaten his job? His life?

“I was mistaken, sir. I thought I saw… it was a confusing moment.” The older man put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, wordlessly.

The rescue unit, two men and a woman, came crowding in. They relieved the black man, ripped open the suspect’s shirt, applied two inductor pads to his chest, and cranked his heart. He flopped around and coughed and retched. They had to repeat it twice before his heartbeat stabilized.

The woman stood up. “Should we take him to the cardiac ward or the secure ward?”

“Secure ward,” Rabin said. “Have them find out what drug he’s on. This was a 71 Tikan reaction.”

“Probably a DD,” she said. She made a gesture and her two helpers rolled the man onto a stretcher. They rushed him out the door.

The chancellor thanked the black man, Professor Pak, and ushered him out.

“Sir, if you don’t need me, I’d better follow the ambulance.”

“Of course, Sergeant. Thank you.”

On the way to where he’d double-parked, Rabin called dispatch and said he was ambulance-chasing, headed for the secure ward at North Florida. He had to shout to be heard over the ambulance’s shriek.

The sudden wail shattered his concentration. He watched the ambulance lift and sail down the street, followed by a squad car. What department was that building? Physics?

He capped the old-fashioned fountain pen and took a sip of his tea. He liked to work here, on the edge of the student food court, because nobody would sit down and say, hey, you writin’ a book? There were distractions, but usually if it was sirens, they were of the female variety.

He opened the memorybook and typed in a date. It had every Gainesville newspaper from the Civil War onward. He reread an article for the dozenth time and continued writing:

The first battle was really no more than a skirmish. Union forcesA raiding party of 42 cavalry rode into town, encountering no resistance. Under ordersThey posted guards on the streets entering G’ville, while the main body constructed a hasty fort of cotton bales on what is now University Avenue.

Mrs. Dickison, wife of the cavalry commander, happened to be visiting Gainesville. She knew that there was a cavalry group camped [a few] miles away, at Newnansville. She wrote a note explaining the situation, and sent it via her eight-year-old son, who slipped by the Yankee picket, pretending to be grazing his horse.

} A{ The small Confederate force, led by Captain ______ Chambers, attacked the next morning, but were unable to break through the cotton-bale fortifications. The Union soldiers, armed with repeating rifles, killed one man and [many] horses. Chambers retreated with his wounded to a camp outside the city, but the Yankees decided to quit while they were ahead, and that night returned to their main group at Waldo. They torched a syrup warehouse, but left behind nearly a million dollars’ [$85M in today’s money] worth of supplies and provisions.

It was a good month for oracles. The local one, Charles Dubois, wrestled with Scripture and calendar and proved that January 1 would be the two-thousandth anniversary of the Savior’s Resurrection. And thus the occasion for our resurrection, if we first cleansed ourselves. They had to install outdoor loudspeakers at his church in Archer, to provide for the overflow of believers sitting in the gravel parking lot or seeking shade in the old live oaks.

Johnny Kale asked his hundred million followers to pray for guidance; this thing is “a sign and a portent” whether it comes from heaven or merely an alien civilization.

The American archbishop Philip Stillwell followed the pope-in-waiting in reverence. The Coming was still only a two-word phrase whose provenance was the realm of science, not spirit. The Ayatollah Bismahin dismissed it as a blasphemous hoax.

The tabloids, electronic and paper, had a field day. The big ones arranged among themselves to rotate points of view, so that at any given time there would be headlines to suit those who believed in the Second Coming as well as those who believed the government was out to get us all.