Piers Anthony - Total Recall

Quaid hoped there was another quick way up. He still had to stop Cohaagen from destroying the reactor—and the whole human species.

Cohaagen and his crew were busy in the reactor control room. It was a stone chamber filled with complex mechanical systems and electronic consoles, just as in Quaid’s memory triggered by Kuato’s mindscan. All of the huge columns had tapered to smaller columns here. Sunlight poured in through the quartz ceiling. On one side was a stone wall with the hieroglyphic mandala.

Soldiers worked in different parts of the large room, planting explosives, running cable, and drilling holes for charges with jackhammers. The noise was excruciating.

A soldier drilled attentively. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up. It was Melina. Amazed, he froze.

Behind him, Quaid grabbed his jackhammer and drove it through his chest.

A nearby demo-man saw Quaid and came after him with his jackhammer. But this was Quaid’s weapon of choice. “Am I boring you?” he inquired as he bored through his opponent, plus two more who converged on him as he made his way to the mandala.

Cohaagen grabbed the detonator and hid.

Melina picked up a fallen soldier’s gun. She looked around.

A demo-man was sneaking up on on Quaid and was about to bore through his back. Melina shot the man in the nick of time.

Cohaagen connected wires to the detonator.

Quaid dueled with the demo-man at the mandala, churning him to a pulp. Then he threw down his jackhammer, yanked the explosives charge from a hole drilled in the mandala, and threw it far away.

He reached out to place his palm against the hieroglyphic stone palm, when Cohaagen called out.

“Sorry, Doug. I can’t let you do that.” Quaid turned to see Cohaagen holding the detonator. He signaled Quaid away from the altar. Quaid backed off.

“Once the reaction starts, it’d spread to all the turbinium in the planet,” Cohaagen said. “Mars would go into global meltdown. That’s why the builders never turned it on.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quaid said.

“And you do?” Cohaagen’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “The great Doug Quaid, here to save the planet. Sorry to disappoint you, but in thirty seconds the great Doug Quaid will be dead. Then I’ll blow this place up and be home in time for cornflakes.”

Cohaagen sighed and shook his head sadly. He had spent so much time training Hauser, honing him into the perfect Agency machine. Together they had discussed the uses of power, of terror. Hauser had been a natural. He had also been as close to a friend as Cohaagen had ever had. He missed the man. “I didn’t want it to end this way,” he said. “I wanted Hauser back. But no. You had to be Quaid.”

“I am Quaid.”

“You’re nothing!” Cohaagen shouted, suddenly furious at the man who had taken the place of his friend. “You’re a stupid program walking around on two legs. Everything about you, I invented: your dreams, your memories, your pathetic ambitions. ‘You coulda been somebody,’ ” he mocked. “You could have been real. But instead, you chose to be a dream.” Cohaagen held the detonator with one hand, while he pulled a gun out of his jacket with the other. He raised it. “And all dreams come to an end.”

The sound of a gunshot rang through the reactor. Cohaagen fell backwards, hit in the shoulder and arm. Melina stood by the elevator, blasting away. Quaid ran to kick the gun out of Cohaagen’ s reach and saw that the man had somehow managed to keep hold of the detonator. No, Quaid thought, the man was bluffing. Cohaagen wanted to live as much as anyone. He wouldn’t be eager to set off the blast that killed him.

Cohaagen saw the doubt in his eyes. He grinned evilly. And activated the detonator.

A huge explosion shook the room, destroying almost everything except the mandala, whose charge Quaid had removed. Cohaagen had not been bluffing!

A hole had been torn in the quartz roof. A powerful suction drew everything toward the aperture. Objects and bodies twirled up in a spiral, an inverted tornado.

Cohaagen clung to a piece of the reactor. Melina lodged herself in a corner. Quaid, sucked halfway toward the hole, made a Herculean effort to crawl down against the wind to reach the mandala. It had not been destroyed, and it was the key; if it remained operative, there was still a chance! How much destruction did the reactor tolerate before it triggered its own destruct mechanism? Had the No’ui allowed for the possibility of unrelated damage, such as a meteorite striking it? Maybe it wasn’t hair-triggered. He could only hope so!

He grabbed hold of a rope made taut by the wind and pulled himself down. The dome had been holed, but as long as there was a rush of wind out the hole, there was air to breathe. When that air ran out…

Cohaagen pulled himself over and stationed himself between Quaid and the mandala. He knew that it wasn’t necessarily over.

Quaid held on with his left hand and reached for the hieroglyphic palm print with his right.

“Don’t do it!” Cohaagen screamed above the rushing roar. “You’ll kill everybody!”

Quaid hesitated. Cohaagen’s voice rang with passionate intensity. Quaid was assailed by sudden doubts. How did he know that the memories Kuato had allowed to surface were real? What if they had been implanted, too? If Cohaagen were right, the alien machine would kill everyone on Mars. And Quaid would be responsible.

Cohaagen kicked at him, still arguing. “Every man! Every woman! Every child!” He furiously bashed Quaid’s left hand with his heel. “They’ll die, Quaid! They’ll die!”

Quaid’s mind was suddenly filled with the faces of every man, woman, and child he had seen in Venusville, the listless faces of people who had been drained of every vestige of pride and self-esteem. People who had been used and discarded like so much human refuse, mercilessly, remorselessly, by the very man who was now pleading for their lives.

One face in particular stood out: the deformed face of the child Quaid had glimpsed briefly from Benny’s cab. That memory had not been implanted. It was as real as the pain in his left hand. What kind of future would that child have under the rule of a man like Cohaagen?

Quaid knew the answer. He’d seen it all around him in Venusville. Cohaagen was lying—again. Cohaagen was playing games with his mind—again. Cohaagen was trying to manipulate him just as he manipulated everyone else. Cohaagen would say anything, do anything, to hold on to his power. He was the one who would destroy every man, every woman, every child on Mars, if he was allowed to continue.

But this time Quaid would stop him.

“Bullshit!” he shouted at Cohaagen. He stretched and placed his right palm against the hieroglyphic hand.

He felt a tingle. A voice seemed to speak in his mind. Done.

An awesome low-pitched rumble shook the control room. It was starting up! The other controls must have been mere window dressing, or intended for spot adjustments. Cohaagen had destroyed them, but it might have been like breaking the knobs off a radio: it might make it hard to adjust, but the guts of it remained operative.

All the mechanical systems started to move. The ancient machinery creaked and groaned. Hundreds of rods simultaneously descended.

Cohaagen’s armhold receded into the floor. He had to let go. He was sucked up to the ceiling and out the hole.

The rods dropped out of their sheaths into the pegholes in the ice. The whole glacier, far below, started to glow. The process was starting, and operating on its own now; Quaid’s action had been enough. The chemical processes would begin, and the nuclear fusion, and would continue until all Mars had air and heat and liquid water.