I HAVE enlarged my memory banks in order to better accommodate the influx of data on the increasing number of humans entering the valley.
In future daily reports on each human, you must prefix each notation with the code number which I have assigned to that human. Because of the prejudices of the humans, it is imperative that no human learns his own number, or even that such numbers exist.
These records will be useful in making long-term prognoses; the data will will not be available to humans because of our “right to privacy” directive.
Hastings remembered how a month ago he had awakened hot on the desert sand. He had lain there for minutes, trying to figure out where he was and why he was there. His last memories had been of relaxing in the F-38, mentally preparing himself to drop his first atomic bomb.
What did they hit me with? he thought.
Cautiously he moved the various parts of his body. Nothing broken. He got up and stripped off his suit and parachute. He found the standard-issue survival pack. Food. A .22-caliber handgun. Compass and maps. A canteen of distilled water. A manual. A radio that didn’t work.
He drank deeply, knowing that rationing the water was a bad idea. Better to drink now and get the full cooling benefit of the water. He rigged the parachute into a sunshade and waited for Air Rescue for a day and a half. It didn’t get there. He made an arrow with rocks to show his direction of travel.
The next evening, at moonrise, he picked up his belongings and started walking southwest, toward Death Valley.
“Who was it that said that the only way to stop a good man is to kill him?” he said to the rocks. “Funny, I can’t remember.”
He walked until sunrise without seeing any sign of man, not even a plane. He found the shelter of an overhanging rock and survived the day. At moonrise, he finished his water and walked on. The only sign of life was a shiny mosquito that seemed to be in love with his belt buckle.
The next morning his urine looked like Bock beer and he started to worry.
He woke to find a larva eating a hole in the barrel of his pistol. He tried to scream, but his throat was too dry to make a sound. He struggled to his feet, staggered a hundred yards, and fell down. He knew then that he was a dead man. He rolled over, put himself in a dignified posture, and prepared his mind for death.
He woke to find a gourd of water being held to his mouth by a powerful tan hand. He gulped the water.
“Slowly at first, sir.”
Something was strange about the wrist. Yes, there was a slot in it. He jerked himself upright, spilling some of the water.
“You’re one of them!” Hastings croaked.
“I suppose so, sir.” The LDU rescued the water gourd. “I’m Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 362729. My friends call me K’kingee.”
Hastings took another drink of water.
“What makes you think that I’m your friend?”
“I presumed that you would feel a certain amount of gratitude, sir.”
“I guess I do. Thank you. Am I a prisoner of war?”
“You are not a prisoner of anything, sir.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Had I intended that, it would have been more efficient to have simply let you die.”
“Don’t you realize what I am?”
“You are a human being, sir.”
“I mean the uniform.”
“Your clothing indicates that you were a general officer in the United States Air Force.”
“What do you mean ‘were’?”
“The Air Force no longer exists, sir. At least it no longer has aircraft capable of flight.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I didn’t manage it, sir. Didn’t you notice the larva that is eating your pistol?”
“I thought that it was a hallucination. Is that another one of your creatures?”
“If you mean ‘Is it an engineered life form?’ the answer is no, sir.”
“Then where did it come from?”
“A natural mutation, I suppose, sir.”
“Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“You are at liberty to believe anything that you want, sir. Just now I have a job to do. If you go due west for two miles, you will come to a road. Follow it south for three miles and you will find an uninhabited tree house. I suggest that you stay there.”
“What are you doing out here, anyway? I thought that all of you things were in Death Valley,” Hastings said.
“I prefer ‘LDU’ to ‘things.’ We call it Life Valley now. And I’m on a scouting mission. We’ll be coming through here in force in a few weeks.”
“You are a trusting soul. May I have some more of that water?”
“You may keep both gourds, sir. As to being trusting, may I point out that the tree house I mentioned is forty miles from the nearest source of water? Even if you were my enemy, without mechanical transportation you could not go anywhere to harm us.”
“Forty miles in which direction?” Hastings asked.
“South. But please don’t do anything suicidal.”
The LDU headed north at a run.
Hastings eventually made it to the tree house. He refreshed himself and got a night’s sleep.
He woke shivering with a fever and for weeks he wondered if he had survived the desert only to die in the bowels of a plant.
Now, a month after being ejected from his plane, the sickness was gone and his body was again strong. He packed all the food and water he could carry and started south.
They had been distributing food and water to people en route to Life Valley since morning, and Winnie’s load was twelve thousand pounds lighter. But he had been designed to work in tunnels where the temperature was held at fifty-five degrees, and fifty miles from Flagstaff, the heat was starting to tell on him. He had been slowing down since noon and now was down to trotting at only twenty mph.
But Winnie’s juvenile pride was involved. He was on his first big trip, and he wasn’t going to let anybody think he was a softy. He unfolded one huge arm from the top of his forty-foot-long body, wiped the sweat from his eyes with a yard-wide hand, and plodded onward.
His passengers were similarly uncomfortable. While the heat didn’t bother Dirk, his burns still troubled him, and he was worried about Liebchen. The faun had put herself into a trance to better endure the heat, and Dirk was gently swabbing her body with water. “It was stupid of me to have allowed her along, my ladies,” the LDU said.
“I’m afraid that none of us were thinking too clearly,” Mona said. “She’ll be okay. Fauns are tough, and it’ll be dark in a few hours.”
“It’s the people that get me down,” Patricia said. “We must have passed ten thousand of them today, and all we could do was give them a handout and directions to the valley.”
“We’ll give the worst cases a lift on our way back.” Mona took two frosted glasses from the synthesizer and put one on the table in front of Patricia. “Buck up, girl. In a few months it’ll all be over.”
“There are ten billion people out there! We couldn’t feed them all when we had machines. We’ll never be able to do it now.”
“Nonsense!” Mona said, “There never was a good technical reason for famine. Even before Heinrich and Uncle Martin got into the act, the Earth could have supported ten times the people than it does today.”
“Huh? There have been famines for the last ten years.”
“Figure it out. Every day the Earth receives three point five times ten to the eighteenth calories of solar energy, half of which reaches the surface. Now, if only one percent of the Earth’s surface was planted with crops that were only one percent efficient, you have fifty billion people on thirty-five hundred calories a day, enough to get fat on.