“Jeez, he ain’t one of ‘em after all,” Rogers said, spitting tobacco juice. I heard it hit the floor somewhere.
“Good to see you, Jase,” Wyatt Proctor said, helping me sit up.
I tried to stay but felt dizzy and eased back down again.
“You’ll feel fine in a little while,” the doctor said.
“What happened to me?”
The doctor answered with a grim smile. “You were cut by a wolf. He pointed to a long thin gash on my left forearm. “You were lucky that this was the only mark you received. The wound was superficial and drew a tiny amount of blood. We cleaned and sterilized it immediately. Then we gave you a transfusion. In effect, we replaced all of your blood. Then…”
“Heck,” Wyatt finished with mock cheerfulness, “then we waited all night to see if you were a wolf or a poet.” His smile faltered as my gaze fell on Cowboy, still cradling his Uzi.
Cowboy reached out and gripped my shoulder. “I still have that book of yours with me,” he said quietly.
“I’ll get to sign it, yet.”
I sat up straight, as sudden, full remembrance came to me. “What about my son?”
The look that passed between Pettis and the doctor sank my heart.
“He’s…alive—” the doctor began.
“He got cut up pretty bad,” Pettis said. “They think they can save him. He hasn’t exactly been cooperative.” Pettis studied me closely. “You’re sure he’s your son?”
“Yes.” I turned to the doctor. “Can I see him?”
“Later, possibly. If he stabilizes, we may be able to try something along the lines of what we did to you, though on a massive scale. We’ve had partial success with it so far. We think we’re close to perfecting it. The fact that you’ve recovered is extremely encouraging—”
Even I noted the edge of hysteria in my voice. “You’ll be able to reverse it? To turn him back into my son?”
“I don’t want to raise your hopes, but, yes, possibly,” the doctor said.
My hopes soared. I felt suddenly strong.
Pettis said, “There’s more good news, Jase. The Lexington is going up tonight and—”
“Let me tell him,” Wyatt interrupted. He smiled at me. “We want you to go with us, if you can handle it. Seems you’re the only writer around, and we want you along as a historian, to put it all down for the record.”
Jimmy Rogers, who had been listening quietly all this time, spat another line of brown tobacco juice at the floor. “Hell, he deserves it. Without him, we wouldn’t have gotten our hands on ole Wyatt here and would have missed our chance at blowing the Moon into little bitty pieces.”
My jaw must have dropped five inches. “You’re going to blow up the Moon?”
Rogers smiled, his mustache lifting over teeth stained tobacco brown. “Hell, son, now we can clean up this whole mess. We had the shuttle and Big Dumb Booster to get us to the Moon; we had all the nukes we need. All we had to have was Doc Bates, or Mr. Proctor here, to tell us where to drop ‘em. We put the bombs in the right place, we blow the Moon to little pieces and get a pretty ring around the Earth like Saturn. The ole Earth here will hardly feel a thing. No more wolves get to Earth. No more full Moon to power the wolves already here. We get this transfusion thing going, fix up the wolves we can, wipe out the rest.” He spat tobacco juice and smiled. “End of problem.”
“So what do you say?” Cowboy asked. “If you trust the goddamn engineers that strapped the shuttle to that booster, there’s a lot you have to learn about the Lexington before tonight.”
The doctor added, “I’ll give you the okay to go.”
“Hell,” Jimmy Rogers said, his blue eyes twinkling, “it won’t be the safest trip in the world, and I can’t even promise it won’t be a little bumpy along the way.”
“Well?” Wyatt asked.
“When do we start?” I answered.
CHAPTER 24
Poetaster
There was a lot to learn. But I was disappointed with how pedestrian our training was. Basically, they told us how to strap ourselves into our seats, how to go to the bathroom, and how to eat. Everything else, including the donning of space suits if necessary, was left to Jimmy Rogers and a thin, thoughtful-looking man named Hartnet, whose thin mustache made Rogers’s look huge by comparison. Hartnet, it turned out, was the detonation man in charge of the nuclear weapons in the shuttle bay. He looked a little nervous about the whole business.
After our training session, we ate dinner in a huge hangar-like cafeteria with a long line of windows set in the side. Pettis drew me to a table where we could be alone. Through the windows I could see the Lexington, technicians swarming around it like hornets, jets of liquid oxygen puffing from the main tank of the huge booster. It looked cleaned and ready to go. Beyond it, another group of technicians worked on reinforcing the perimeter of the base, awaiting the coming of night.
“You know the one thing about all this that makes me mad?” Pettis asked me. “We have to make a night landing on return. We’re gonna blow up the wolves’ home planet and then land in the middle of them when we come back. I don’t think they’ll be too happy with us.” He smiled wryly. “Goddamn engineers.”
My gaze drifted out to the shuttle again, and Cowboy was silent, staring also.
“In my wildest dreams,” I said, “I never thought I’d ride one of those things. I certainly never thought I’d get to the Moon. That was one of the things I hoped for my son, that he would get a chance to go to the Moon. When I was growing up, I used to go out alone in the back field, lie down, and watch it come up. It seemed like it was close enough to pluck out of the sky, like a peach.”
“I used to like the Moon myself,” Cowboy said. “I remember in one of your poems, there was something about a tree—”
“‘The tree of night, hung white with fruit,’” I quoted.
“Well,” Cowboy nodded, looking out at the huge shuttle waiting for us outside, “we’re about to pluck the fruit from the night.”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Come with me,” said Cowboy.
~ * ~
Richie was strapped to a table in a small white room. He looked less like my son than he ever had. Nearly one whole side of his body was covered in roughly applied bandages; the right side of his face was a mass of scar tissue, dried blood and hurriedly applied dressings. A catheter tube swung lazily next to the table, ripped from an entrance point in his arm. He thrashed against his bindings, growling low in the back of his throat.
When he saw me his thrashings turned wild; his claws strained desperately to curl toward the straps to cut them, and his eyes glowed yellow-bright with hate. Now, suddenly, I was unsure if he was my son. He looked like any other of the mad creatures I had seen these past days—a raving, murderous animal with nothing but the extinction of the human race in its thoughts. There was none of the human glow I had seen once behind the lamp eyes; no remnant of the Richie who had saved my life and run off howling into the new world. There was only a lust to kill.
“They tried everything to sedate him,” Pettis said. “Nothing works on them. They barely got him in here and strapped down and got the bleeding stopped before he came awake. He came very close to cutting up one of the nurses.”