Joe Haldeman - Worlds Apart

They came back and carried the cart across, but then the tide started rushing seaward, stranding them. The deserted mules, tethered on short reins, made a terrible racket for six hours. They risked two midnight runs to retrieve the animals, hoping there was no one watching, waiting to steal the cart.

They needn’t have worried then; they wouldn’t see another human being for months. December and January passed, and it stayed warm enough not to incapacitate Jeff.

They fell into a plodding routine: take apart the raft, saving the ropes and oars; go south until the next bridge out; have one stay with the cart while the other takes the mules back to retrieve the logs. Haul the logs south one by one; put the raft back together; cross; start over. Seven Mile Bridge, the longest span, was fortunately intact; so were all the other long ones.

That made them apprehensive. The short bridges hadn’t fallen down from neglect; they had been cut through or blown. Where draw spans were stuck, the machinery controlling them had been systematically destroyed.

Someone had spent a lot of time and effort to keep people from coming south. That they left the long bridges alone might mean they also used a combination of rafts and wheels, and wanted to keep their avenue north open.

The stores at Islamorada, about halfway down the Keys, had been emptied but not vandalized. One store had been boobytrapped, though. At the entrance they found a deep pit, the boards covering it evidently having been sawed partway through. A skeleton at the bottom of the pit had been picked quite clean. After that they were careful where they stepped. (They found the late interloper’s transportation on the Gulf side of the island: a rowboat sawed in two, oars taken.)

They discussed the possibility of holing up, waiting for whoever set the trap to come back. Better to ambush than be ambushed. But they ended up pushing on, doubly careful.

At Graham Key they came to their ninth bridge out, with the raft some forty kilometers back. It would have been quicker to build a new raft, but there were no large trees here, only saplings among burned-out stumps.

To minimize strain on themselves and the mules, they had been doing the long hauls in two stages. Jeff would move the logs to a halfway point while Tad guarded the wagon; then they’d switch. In this case, each stage would take about ten days. It took all night to desalinate enough water for Jeff and the mules to take with them. He left as soon as it was light enough to see the road.

Jeff never really expected the logs to still be there, but they always were. He always expected an ambush, but it never came. What happened, as before, was an undramatic ten days of manhandling good-sized waterlogged timbers and cajoling dumb mules.

After all the logs were safely at the twenty-kilometer mark, Jeff took the mules on back to the end of the island, looking forward to a few days of simply standing guard. He hailed Tad as soon as he could see the wagon, but there was no answer.

Maybe he was asleep. No need taking chances, though. He tied up the mules and cut through the sapling forest to the beach, to circle around. That wouldn’t do much good if someone had gotten Tad and was waiting for him.

They’d have the Uzi and a dozen other weapons; Jeff had just the scattergun and a pistol.

He sidled around the narrow beach and crept quietly back through the woods to the cart. They were waiting for him.

“Throw out your guns, oldie.” He hadn’t seen anybody, but there was cover enough to hide a couple of platoons. He heard a number of weapons being cocked.

“Better do it, Healer.” Tad’s voice. “If you try anything they’ll kill us. Must be twenty of them.”

Resigned, Jeff unloaded the scattergun and pistol and threw them into the clearing. He walked out slowly with his hands on the top of his head.

Tad came stumbling into the clearing, hands tied and feet hobbled. His face was a mass of bruises; some of his hair had been pulled out. “I’m sorry, Healer, they kept hurting me—”

“It’s all right.” They were coming out of the woods, in pairs, boys between twelve and eighteen, each with at least one gun. An older lad, tall with a trace of downy beard, carried the Uzi and had two pistols holstered on his belt. How much had Tad told them? Please God, Jeff thought, not about the vaccine.

“You the leader?” Jeff asked. He nodded, coming forward cautiously. He had an unreadable crooked smile and bright eyes. My God, Jeff thought, what if he’s got the death, they go insane a day or two before they lose motor control.

“Are you from Key West?”

“Naw. South America.” He laughed, a giggly falsetto. “Guy Tad says you’re not stupid. How can you be an oldie and not be stupid?”

“I’m not sure. Think it was medicine I was taking before the war.”

“Or you did something that pissed Charlie off. So he wouldn’t give you the death.”

“That could be it.”

“He says you heal. You a doctor?”

“No, I just learned some healing when I was younger. Then I found these medicines. Been headed south, trading healing for supplies. Most people have heard of me before I get to them.”

“We don’t hear much on the island. Keep to ourselves. We don’t trade, either.”

“They’re a commune,” Tad said. “Hundreds of ‘em.”

“We could join you, if you want us,” Jeff said.

“Oh, we got you.” He looked away. “Red Dog, you wanna check the tide? Yeah, we got you. Couple of people you wanna meet anyhow. Newsman and Elsie the Cow. Oldies.”

“A woman?” Jeff had only heard of male acromegalics surviving; he’d assumed there was some sex-linked factor in the immunity.

“Claims to be.” He giggled. “A real stiffener. If you can keep it up long enough to pork her, maybe she’ll have another oldie.”

“Half an hour to slack,” someone shouted from the water’s edge.

“Let’s get this shit rounded up,” the leader said.

“Wait,” Jeff said. “Are we going as prisoners? Or do we join your family?”

That crooked smile again. “I guess you’re prisoners till someone gets the death. We ask Charlie, maybe you’re prisoners, maybe you’re family. Maybe you’re dinner.” He threw his head back and laughed, for the first time opening his mouth wide. His teeth were chipped and filed to points.

For years I suppose I tacitly assumed that the Janus Project was a hoax, a make-work business the Coordinators cooked up for obvious morale purposes. You can’t have thousands of highly trained technical people just sitting around on their thumbs. Might as well let them design castles in the air: keep them happy and give the rest of the population something to dream about.

Much of the research and development for Janus would be directly applicable to rebuilding the Worlds, anyhow, and the more exotic aspects—the fantastic propulsion schema and so forth—might be handy in a century or so, when they actually could afford to build a starship. I went along with the gag. The strength-of-materials problems were fascinating, even if the overall picture was just a fantasy. Many scientists and engineers shared my attitude, my tacit complicity, because we could look at the numbers and see the reality they concealed. It’s true that a matter/ antimatter drive had been demonstrated many years before, accelerating a small payload to solar escape velocity in a matter of minutes. But that didn’t really prove Janus would work—no more than you could produce a flea the size of an elephant and expect it to jump over mountains (it would collapse under its own weight).

To begin with, the small m/a demonstration had actually been a simple reaction drive, a steam-powered rocket. They took a few hundred kilograms of water and bled a few grams of antimatter into it. It zoomed off very impressively. But for Janus to follow that design, it would have to fuel up with a small ocean.