“We figured you were worth it.”
“But why such a long tunnel, Heiny?”
“Logistics, Uncle Martin. For one thing, I needed someplace to put five million cubic feet of dirt. For another thing, there was the problem of feeding ten thousand LDUs. They only eat a fluid that your tree houses produce. There’s a community of eighty-five full-sized tree houses a mile from here, and I was able to grow food synthesizers in their roots, even though plant engineering is hardly my forte.”
“Only eighty-five trees?” asked Guibedo, doing some quick mental calculations. “They could produce enough food?”
“Well, I’m afraid I had to shut down the rest of their services, Uncle Martin. I was up there a couple days ago, and everybody was gone. But the trees will revert to their original state once the tunnel is filled in. The people will return.”
“Well, I hope so,” Guibedo said. “I guess you got to do things like that in an emergency. Why didn’t you tell me you made guys like Dirk, here, Heiny?”
“You’ve just answered your own question, you damned old iconoclast.” Copernick laughed. “You spend a half hour with my LDUs and they’ve got proper names! In a day you’d have them demanding private rooms, time and a half for overtime, and a grievance committee!”
“Maybe not such a bad idea, Heiny. You’d make a fortune hiring these guys out as a construction team. You didn’t have any trouble digging that tunnel, did you?”
“Oh, there was some sort of a security problem once when I was gone, but the LDUs took care of it,” Heinrich called over his shoulder as he walked toward the van.
“See!” Guibedo said. “They’d make a good work gang.”
“I thought about it, but there are the building people and the labor unions to contend with. And look at all the trouble your publicity got you into. Still, lack of money is slowing us down,” Heinrich said, getting into the driver’s seat.
“You know, Heiny, when I was in jail, I got to thinking about catalytic extraction and refining. We could make a tree that could extract heavy metals from the soil…”
The two were lost in technicalities as they drove away.
Three platoons of LDUs left the tunnel-filling and went about special tasks.
One platoon began cutting rectangular slabs of stone, polishing them smooth, and carving names and dates.
Another dug rectangular holes, pleasantly arranged, on a hilltop.
The third platoon exhumed the bodies of eighty-five families who had presented such a security problem, who had been so unamenable to reason.
When the work had been completed and ritual prayers had been said, Dirk thought to his brothers, It’s comforting to know that the proper ceremonies have been completed.
Yes, replied Blade. It’s important that we learn to do everything properly.
Chapter Five
JUNE 5, 2001
ONE OF the surprising things about commanding large forces is that eager, dedicated subordinates are often more trouble than slovenly ones. You must be ever on your guard. The slightest hint can be taken literally and blown all out of proportion.
The problem is as old as the chain of command. A general drops a hint; a colonel makes a suggestion; a major writes a memo; a captain gives an order; a lieutenant barks a command; and… a corporal pulls a trigger. It happened at Corregidor—the Japanese command never intended for the death march to occur. It happened at Mai Lai—when a town was wiped out. And it happened all too often in the course of the Symbiotic Revolution.
“So what’s the verdict, Doc?” General Hastings asked.
“You’ve got to stop smoking, George,” Dr. Cranford said.
“Is that all?”
“Of course not. You really must start keeping regular hours. And cut your work week down to sixty hours. And get out a little more. Learn to relax.”
“Look, Cranford, work is about all I have left.”
“George, the tragedy that took your family happened a year ago. You can’t—”
“Cut it.”
“But a man can’t mourn forever—”
“I take it that I’m healthy,” Hastings said.
“Yes, but you don’t deserve to be. There’s nothing wrong with you now that a little rest and exercise won’t cure.”
“You’ve been telling me that every checkup for the last ten years.”
“Well, why do you bother coming to me if you don’t take my advice? I tell you, working yourself into the ground all the time is going to catch up with you. It’ll shorten your life, George,” Dr. Cranford said.
“It hasn’t yet. Now are you going to sign my flying status papers or not?”
“I don’t have much choice. Air Force regulations are so damned specific about it. I don’t know why you bother—your flight pay is less as a general than it was as a lieutenant-colonel. But your reflexes are perfect. Your eyesight is twenty-twenty. Your blood pressure and electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram and every other damned thing are annoyingly perfect. But George, your life style is going to catch up with you.”
“Just sign the paper. Doc, you’re even more crotchety than usual. Something bugging you?” Hastings asked.
“Nothing except that I’m about to give up my practice and take up faith healing. That seems to be where my gifts lie.”
“Somebody didn’t have the courtesy to die when you told him to?”
“A whole bunch of somebodies. Half of the damned Senate has walked into this office with every organ in their flabby bodies rotting away!
“You know that this is the best-equipped facility in the country. And you know that I wouldn’t tell a man he was going to die unless I ran him through every test known to man, plus a few I thought up myself. And then not until he had six days to live and no hope. It’s just not something that a doctor likes to do. Besides the fact that many of them are my friends, it’s embarrassing to have to admit that my profession is of no damn use to them!”
“People have been getting well?” Hastings said.
“Scads of the bastards! It’s driving me to drink and damned nearly to profanity!”
“So this has been happening to everybody?”
“No. You’ve got to be in Congress to get a special dispensation from whatever God or devil is doing this to me. And seniority seems to help.”
“You’re serious about this?”
“Hell yes, I’m serious! One week I tell a senator to put his affairs in order, and the next week he comes in with his heart beating and his liver working and he’s alive in front of God and everybody!”
“Do you have any theories about it?”
“I thought at first that it was something that we were doing here by accident. Turned the place upside down for months. Checked out every batch of every drug that I’d given any one of them. Nothing. Then I found out that two other doctors at different clinics were doing the same damned thing. The only thing that it correlates with is you’ve got to be a congressman.”
“Well, have you checked out that angle?”
“Of course! The three of us have checked out every item in the Capitol cafeteria. The kind of floor wax they use. The postage stamps. The pencils. Anything that they would all have in common. Hell, I even sent a roll of their toliet paper to the lab. Nothing!
“I figure that God doesn’t want congressmen and hell’s full up!” Cranford said.
“Maybe I can give you a hand finding out what’s behind this.”
“You? Now, I appreciate the offer, but what use is a spook going to be on a medical research program?”