Joe Haldeman - Worlds Apart

Storm listened without comment for several minutes while Jeff explained how the vaccine worked, where it came from, and how he had been administering it through southern Florida. Storm kept the gun dangling loosely at his side.

“Supposing things are like you say,” he said slowly. “There’s something I don’t get. How come the spacers would go to that trouble? How come you go to all that trouble?”

“The Worlds need us back on our feet,” Jeff said. “They have a hard time getting along without the Earth.”

“No skin off you. You could just stay in a safe place and doctor people.”

“He couldn’t take the cold,” Tad said. “Had to get as far south as he could.”

He frowned and scratched his chin. “Still didn’t have to use the vaccine on anybody. Why you take the chance?”

“Loneliness,” Jeff said. “I might live another eighty years. I want company.”

Storm shook his head. “Well, hell.” He put the shot-gun-pistol away in his shirt pouch. “Guess I’ll believe you for the time being. I gotta keep it secret, though?”

“For as long as possible,” Jeff said. “When everybody starts getting gray hair, they’ll probably figure it out.”

The next day General left with a war party to head toward Ciudad Miami—the crater that used to be Miami—on a meat-gathering expedition. Jeff held sick call as usual, then sequestered himself in the University of the Media library.

Studying electronics didn’t present the practical problems he’d encountered years before, trying to learn some medicine. The university had a working database system; he didn’t have to rely on antique books. His main problem was an absolute lack of talent. He’d enrolled in a physics survey course his second year of college, but dropped it and transferred to chemistry before the first test.

Now he was doggedly worrying through the mysteries of resistors and capacitors, vaguely aware of how much work was ahead before he got to the quantum electronics he’d need to repair the transceiver. Not being able to make hard copies of the texts was frustrating. He did have a comprehensive wiring diagram for the transceiver, over a hundred pages of hieroglyphics, and whenever he learned a new symbol he would go through the booklet and circle everything that looked like it. He hoped that eventually he would develop some sort of gestalt understanding of the thing’s structure, but so far it was still a random assortment of gibberish.

Tad and Storm were no help, of course, and Newsman was a definite liability. He would come down to the carrel to watch Jeff work, muttering silly questions and non sequiturs. Jeff’s ruse was that he was working on understanding the medical machines at the hospital, so he had to make up a line of moderately convincing nonsense while he worked, which didn’t help his concentration.

Newsman always napped in the afternoon, though, which gave Jeff time to sneak down to the dish installation occasionally, and try to coordinate what he was learning with the actual devices there. Whole blocks of circuit boards were still intact, and he’d managed to match up nearly half of them with pages in the booklet. The smashed-up equipment that littered the floor no doubt had a lot that could be salvaged, and there was a closet full of spare parts. A competent electronics engineer could probably go in with a screwdriver and make some sort of working transmitter in an afternoon. Jeff hoped he’d be able to do it sometime before the turn of the century.

Jeff and Tad were in the library, Jeff studying circuits and Tad with Newsman, watching an old animalporn movie, when a runner came and said the two of them and Storm were supposed to come downtown right away. General was back and he needed some advice.

So Jeff painfully mounted a bicycle, cursing for the thousandth time the memory of old Holy Joe, who had decreed floaters blasphemous and sent them all pilotless out over the horizon. They stopped by at the jail/church and woke up Storm.

General was sitting on the steps of City Hall with Hotbox lying next to him, her head in his lap. As they approached, he disengaged her and stood up.

“Come on inside,” he said, smiling. “Someone you wanta meet.”

Standing alone in the foyer, feet hobbled, was Mary Sue, the eldest of the family Tad had left behind. Her face was bruised and swollen. “That’s him,” she said, pointing. “Healer. He’s the one keeps people from gettin’ the death.”

“Storm,” General said, “take him.”

Storm put his hand on Jeff’s arm. “Hold on,” he said. “Who is this slit?”

“She used to belong to him,” he said, nodding at Tad. “He gets it, too.”

“Met some people come down from Atlanta,” she said. “They don’ get the death there no more, said it was shots they got from the sky people, the spacers. He’s one of ‘em. We followed the way you two went. Nobody’s got the death anyplace you went, not since you give ‘em shots. Typhoid shots.”

“I’ve never been off the Earth,” Jeff said. “I’m not a spacer.”

“But you’re in with ‘em,” she said. “That medicine come down in a rocket. People seen it.”

“It’s true, isn’t it,” General said.

Jeff hesitated. “Substantially. But Tad doesn’t have anything to do with it. New New York sent me the medicine, and I’ve given it to thousands of people. No one here is going to get the death. You can live a normal life span if you want.”

“What’s normal?”

“Hundred twenty, more or less.”

General made a strained growling noise in his throat. “Kill him.”

Storm didn’t move. “Maybe we better—”

“You kill him. Right here.”

The priest pulled his shotgun-pistol out of his shirt pouch and pushed Jeff roughly to his knees. He held the gun to his head. “You want to pray to Christ and Charlie?” he said in a quavering voice.

Jeff’s eyes were squeezed shut, teeth clenched. “Fuck them both,” he said clearly.

“You—” General stepped forward to kick. Storm swung the pistol up and fired point-blank, ripping a large hole out of the center of General’s chest. He staggered backwards a couple of steps, slipped in his own blood, and fell heavily. Mary Sue was covered with gore but didn’t react.

Storm heard a noise and spun around. Hotbox was trying to open the door and cock a pistol simultaneously. He fired and she fell back down the stars in a shower of glass and blood.

“Get up, get up!” Storm put a hand under Jeff’s arm and hoisted him to his feet. “We gotta find guns for you two—go get Major. We get him, I think we’re okay, we’re in charge.”

“You don’t gotta,” Mary Sue said calmly. “He’s in back there, dressed out and smoked.”

“What he do?”

“Up in Islamorada. He told General most of the boys didn’ want Healer killed. So General killed him.”

“Was it true?” Jeff asked. “About the others?”

“Guess so. Most of ‘em run away.” She licked the blood on her lips. “Christ and Charlie. It just don’ make sense.”

People weren’t as paranoid about infection as they used to be, but we still spent a week in isolation, watching the cucumbers and tomatoes grow. It only took two days to synthesize the new antigen, since the scientists knew what they were looking for, and a small drone carrying the medicine got to the children before we left isolation.

We watched it on flatscreen. The magnification wasn’t quite enough to make out individual people, but we could see there were still some children at the compound. They had evidently opened part of the razor wire; one person went out and retrieved the medicine. I hoped they had the sense to use it.