Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

When they felt sure she had gone beyond the limit, they made their way topside. The superstructure had folded down. Men with headphones manned electronic gear. They were aboard a Russian trawler.

A crewman must have shot them with knockout needles, for the next they knew guards were marching them along a swaying corridor. They wore pajamas, the costume of Russians traveling by train. A sign read Posadit’ v Sibiri. They were in the last car of a long train diminishing toward Siberia.

“Stoi!” They stopped stoically, and the soldier and the matron guarding them shoved them into a compartment. The soldier lit up a filter-tip Laika; at the matron’s glare he backed out into the corridor.

The matron sniffled and wiped her eyes as the last onion dome of Moscow slid from sight. Liza quickly lifted the Heroine Mother medal from the woman’s breast and hid it under the seat. At Kuibyshev the matron missed it and went into hysterics. The OBS news agency had interviewed her when she received it and all Soviet media had given her a big play. She frisked her charges roughly and got some satisfaction, but not her medal. They waited their chance. The train swung across the Muyun-Kum sands of Kazakhstan. She dug the medal out from under the seat and dug the pin into the matron.

The matron’s yelp brought the soldier back in but the matron’s leap brought the two together in a mutual knockout. Meanwhile, Ben jerked the emergency cord. The handle came off in his hand but air and steel spoke success.

The abrupt stop telescoped the train’s lines of perspective, analoging the matrioshka, the gaily painted wooden doll nesting a series of successively smaller dolls. Luckily, they were in the last and so largest car; with everyone else out or in shock, they alone having braced themselves, the six convicts climbed out, careful not to squash tiny engine and tinier engineer, into the middle of nowhere.

The sand was cold where they stopped to rest. They tested the sand all around. Everywhere fiery: yet here one spot of coldness. They scooped the sand away, uncovering a mammoth block of fossil ice. Quickly before it melted they rubbed off grit to lick the ice, then froze at what they saw. A huge amber egg lay inside the ice. The ice melted quickly into the thirsty sand. They hadn’t thought of food for a long time; while they wondered how to crack the leathery shell without a stone hand ax, it chipped open from within.

“Leapin’ lizards! A dragon!”

“No, a pterodactyl.”

A giant pterodactyl. They backed away, but it kept pace by growing. Sudden release from the pressure of cumulative time accelerated the creature’s life processes; it reached full growth in minutes. The scales hardened, the wing membrane dried stiff, the long tail section grew rigid.

They were the first beings in its ken; imprinting filled it with dangerous affection for them. Its teeth were long and sharp. But once they saw its forty-foot wingspread they set about harnessing it. It was stupid but the speeding-up made it a quick study. In an hour they broke it to makeshift bridle and saddles, its wings raised a sandstorm, and they were airborne, heading east across Siberia.

Almost at once they pipped on a radarscope and had to evade one SAM 2 (1 SAM 2:4, Ben made it); after that they flew low. Once, at the tingle of a radar beam, Carol drew a stick of spearmint gum from her cleavage and dropped the foil wrapping as wriggly chaff. At the easternmost tip of Siberia they met fog and climbed above it to get their bearings. Through an eyelet in the fog they saw Bering Strait and the lazy colon of the Diomedes: the Russian island and the American.

With freedom in sight, they felt their mount failing rapidly. Dying of old age, it could no longer buck the east wind; they tried forcing it higher to ride a westerly jet stream, but it hadn’t the strength in its wings. It barely held trim to glide down the wind that swept them back, across Mongolia and into China. With a last surge, it landed them safely by the side of a road, then expired with an apologetic hiss.

In death as in life its processes quickened: its beloved burdens dismounted just as the flesh rotted off its bones. The erstwhile riders in the sky gazed dry-eyed at the dry bones: their pet had served them loyally and long, but when you’ve seen one pterodactyl you’ve seen them all. They walked away along the road and came to a Tung Feng auto on the shoulder with a flat and no spare.

Sue tried acupuncture but all that happened was Ben complained of heartburn and chest pains. A repair truck wheezed up, the mechanic and the chauffeur stared, the truck backed out of sight again, and shortly two columns of Red Guards trotted up to find the foreign devils playing ping-pong with invisible tables, paddles, and balls.

These in turn found themselves in a hospital for observation and in Ben’s case for American restaurant syndrome. An intern stuck a red-lacquered depressor in Ben’s mouth.

“Mouth say tongue.”

“Ah.”

The intern blew the smoke of his Ming Hua cigarette out of his eyes and peered into Ben. “Must be poisonous weeds. Wrong thoughts. Read chapter four of the Chairman’s works and you’ll feel better left away. And exercise. Lots of outdoor exercise.”

They were helping repair a section of the Great Wall of China their captors called the Mongol Patch. On either side of the Great Wall one vastness was all they could see. They eyed each other wanly.

“How’d we get here? Time warp?”

“Great leap forward.”

Their overseer, with red eyebrows and yellow turban, came near, a long rope in his hand. “Wang yang pu loo!” They bent to their task. Melon plants blossomed in winter along the Great Wall; the soil was rich with corpses. Lifting bricks and mortaring them became harder. The edges of vision grew shadowy, blurred. A Liza-shaped hole appeared in the dream.

Liza, come back.

The hole filled with Liza once more.

What happened, Liza?

Bad trip, this whole thing. I can’t take any more.

Liza flickered out and in.

Just what we need, hysteria.

Part of the pattern. She’s been sabotaging us all along.

It’s not my doing. It’s the baby’s.

(Warm nourishing darkness. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.)

So! Baby makes seven!

Why didn’t you tell us?

I put it out of my mind because I did an awful thing: I didn’t let them know I’d been taking LSD.

Let who know?

The gynecologist and the parents. If it were really my own I wouldn’t feel half so guilty.

Make sense.

Don’t you see? She’s a host-mother.

You dug. A childless couple paid me to carry their child. The woman’s unable to bear. The husband fertilized one of her eggs and the gynecologist planted it in my womb.

How long have you been . . . with child?

Eight months. Why?

There’s our interference. Brainwaves begin—or at least register on detectors—around the eighth week. Your baby’s had time to learn brainwave alphabet and grammar.

And it’s not just any baby, way it’s been kicking up. LSD residue in Liza’s blood and tissues may have mutated the chromosomes in the germ cells. We don’t know what kind of genetic monster’s among us.

Heehaw, heehaw.

The baby!

Right on, daddy-o.

If you understand what’s going on, you know you’re in this with us. If we die, you die.

Heehaw, heehaw.

Let me. Listen, kid. You’re not blocked the way the rest of us are. Can you get sensory cues from outside?

Come again? Oh, I dig. Yeah, I hear a buzzing.

That’s the thalamus-shocker. You can cut that buzzer off.

Yeah? How?

Get a fix on it and beam your brainwaves at it. That might start a thermal runaway and knock out the circuit. If that doesn’t free us to wake, it still might set off sprinklers and fire alarm and bring help. Try?