Ben Bova - Exiled from Earth

Then Lou heard his own laughter. He couldn’t see Marcus, but he knew he was still there.

“You’ve lost, Marcus. You might as well admit it. There’ll be a government inspection team here in a matter of hours. Followed by troops, if you want to fight. It’s all over. You’ve lost.”

“I can still kill you! And the girl!”

Lou was laughing uncontrollably now. The drug, he knew in the back of his mind. But there was nothing he could do to stop himself. “Sure, kill me. Kill everybody. That’s going to help you a lot. An enormous lot.”

He laughed until he passed out again.

It was pleasant to be unconscious. Or am I dead? But the thought brought no fear. He was floating in darkness, without pain, without anxiety, just floating in soft warm darkness. Then, after a long, long while, the darkness began to turn a little gray. It brightened slowly, like a midnight reluctantly giving way to dawn.

Bonnie’s face appeared in the grayness. There were tears in her eyes, on her cheeks. “Oh, Lou …”

He wanted to say something, to touch her, to make her stop crying. But he couldn’t move. It was as if he had no body. Then her face faded away and the darkness returned.’

He heard other voices in the grayness, and once in a while the black turned gray again and he could see strange faces peering at him. He would try to talk, try to signal to them, but always the darkness closed in again.

Then, abruptly, he opened his eyes and everything was in sharp focus. He was lying in a hospital bed. The walls of his room were a pastel blue, the ceiling clean white. There were viewscreens and camera eyes in the ceiling. Lou found that he could turn his head. It hurt, but he could do it. There was a window at his left. He couldn’t see out of it at this angle, but sunshine was pouring in. A night table was next to his bed, a rolling tray crammed with plastic pill bottles and syringes and other medical whatnots. A door, closed. A single plastic sling chair standing beside it.

He tried sitting up, and the bed followed his motion with an almost inaudible hum from an electric motor. Leaning back in a half-sitting position, he suddenly felt woozy.

At least I’m not dead, Lou told himself.

His body felt stiff. Looking down, he saw that his hands and arms were wrapped in bandages. So was his chest; white plastic spray from windpipe to navel. His face felt raw. as if he’d shaved with an old-fashioned razor.

The door suddenly opened and a nurse appeared. “Good day,” she said with professional cheeriness.

“H … hello.” Lou’s voice was terribly hoarse; his throat felt rough.

She must be pushing forty, Lou thought. She still looks pretty good, though.

“How do you feel?” the nurse asked.

He considered the question for a moment. “Hungry.”

She smiled. “Good! That’s one condition that the automatic monitors can’t record yet.”

She was gone before Lou could say anything or ask any questions.

Within minutes a food tray slid out of the wall and swung over to the bed. It was clumsy, eating with bandaged hands. By the time Lou was finished, there was a knock on the door and it opened wide enough for Kori to stick his head through.

“Hi. They told me you were finally awake.”

Lou’s voice felt and sounded better. “Come on in. How are you? Where are we? What happened? Where’s Bonnie?”

Kori grinned and pulled the chair up next to the bed. As he sat on it, he answered. “Bonnie’s fine. She’s here in the hospital, too, getting treated for radiation dosage. There was a considerable amount of fallout from my little toy, you know I stayed inside a cave until the government troops arrived, but I got a touch of it, too.”

“Marcus and the others?”

“They gave up without much of a fight,” Kori said “A government inspection team ’coptered to the island in four hours and eleven minutes after the blast. Inside of another two hours they had a little army of government troops covering every square centimeter of the island.”

“And what happened to me?” Lou asked “I remember trying to hold them down at the dock. Then somebody shot me and I fell into the water. Then…”

Kori was trying not to laugh, without being very successful at it.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, forgive me, but you are. Do you know how they found you?”

Lou shook his head.

“You were lying flat on your back in one of the bedrooms of Marcus’ house. Stark naked. Sixty million splinters all over your face and body and arms and legs. And you were laughing. Laughing your head off.”

“Very funny,” Lou said “Marcus had me shot full of happy-juice, so I’d tell him where you were. So he could find you and kill you.”

“I know,” Kori said, still giggling “Forgive me. It just presents an odd picture.”

“Is Bonnie going to be all right?” Lou asked.

“Oh yes, certainly. She’ll be visiting you herself in a day or so.”

“And Marcus and his crew?”

Kori shrugged. “In jail, I suppose. The troops took them away.”

Lou felt himself relax against the supporting bed. “That takes care of everybody, I guess. Oh! What about Big George? Who’s taking care of him?”

Kori’s face suddenly went somber. “That that’s the one bad part of it, Lou. He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Somebody shot him,” Kori said, his voice low. “We don’t know who did it. It might have been Marcus’ guards or the government troops. Bonnie was right there, and she couldn’t tell who fired the shot.”

“Killed him? But why?”

Shaking his head, Kori answered, “We’ll never know. There was a little fighting when the troops landed. Maybe it was just a stray shot. Or perhaps someone got frightened at the sight of the gorilla. At least he didn’t suffer at all. One shot he died instantly.”

“Poor Georgy,” Lou said.

For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Lou asked, “Where are we, anyway?”

Ron’s face didn’t cheer up at all. “Back where we started In Messina It looks to me like we’re going to be shipped up to the satellite as soon as you and Bonnie are well enough to travel. To begin our exile.”

The doctors made Lou stay in bed for a week, while his torn skin healed and he got his strength back. He saw Bonnie and Kori almost every day. But most of the time he lay in bed, thinking. So much had happened in so short a time. Now he could think about it, look back on it and try to fit all the fragments together, to form a coherent picture of what had suddenly happened to him and his life.

Why? he thought bitterly. Why Big George? The main reason we tried to go against Marcus was to save George, and he was the only one that didn’t get through it all right. Lou thought of the bomb explosion and how it must have terrified the gorilla. The last few hours of his life must have been hell for such a peaceful, gentle animal. We didn’t do right by you, George, Lou said silently. I’m sorry.

Looking toward the future, Lou was just as bleak. They were going to exile him, of that he was sure. Kori was more optimistic, though.

“After all we’ve done for the government?” Kori said one afternoon, at Lou’s bedside. “Risking our lives to stop Bernard’s attempt at a coup? They won’t exile us, they’ll give us medals. You should get an award anyway, you’ve set a new international record for splinters.”

Lou grinned with the young physicist. But inwardly, he knew the government couldn’t let them go free. They would tell the world about the exile, and the government would never be allow that.

There was something different about Bonnie. She was up tight, holding back something that she didn’t want Lou to know.