A black cloud of flies swarmed out. Inside the lift were dozens of clean-picked skeletons and three fresher bodies, busy with insect life. Spacesuits have a provision for vomiting, an emergency aspirator, and several of them were put to use. O’Hara was surprised the sight didn’t make her sick, and decided that was because it was too Grand Guignol—so revolting she couldn’t really accept its reality. But she didn’t look twice.
“Somebody help me clear this out. But keep watching.”
O’Hara scanned the edge of the jungle intently for a few minutes, but there was no motion. “Ahmed…this was one of the most civilized places on Earth, when I was here. How could they revert to savagery so quickly?”
“Oh, I don’t think you can say they’ve reverted. Not in the sense that they’ve forgotten civilization. I think what we see here is partly a game—they are children, after all—and partly an attempt at social organization.” In normal times, Ahmed taught anthropology. “Before the war, most of them got some tribal lore at home and studied precolonial history in school. The popular folk heroes dated back to tribal times, and so did a lot of mass entertainment. They’re just acting out a pattern that’s reassuringly familiar.”
“Living in the jungle, hunting wild game?” O’Hara said.
“I don’t know. More likely, they’re living in the city and stalking supermarkets. There’s probably not much game around here, and it takes years to become a good hunter. It would be fascinating to study them.”
A sudden thought chilled O’Hara. “What if they have guns?”
“I was thinking about that. Private ownership of fire-arms was strictly forbidden in the Pan-African Union; I think even the police were only armed with tanglers.”
“We’re lucky it’s not America.”
“We are…they’re acting out their own tribal rituals over there.”
O’Hara suddenly tensed. “Did you see that?”
“No,” Ahmed said.
“I did,” Goodman said. “The big one’s still in there. We oughta start a fire.”
“Better check with Berrigan,” O’Hara said.
“Go ahead,” she said over their intercom. “But use Ten’s weapon, or Jackson’s. Goodman and O’Hara should save fuel.”
“He was over by that big tree with the pink flowers,” Goodman said.
“All right,” Ten said, and fired a burst into a thicket about fifty meters to the left of the tree. “We just want to scare them away.” He let the thicket smolder for a minute and then gave it a sustained blast. It burst into bright flame and the flame began to spread.
“I wonder,” Marianne said. “When I was here we visited a game preserve about a hundred kilometers south. The man who showed us around did have a gun, an air rifle that shot tranquilizer darts. I guess something that could pierce a rhino’s hide would punch through a space-suit pretty easily.”
“And if it could put a rhino to sleep, it’d probably kill a human being,” Ten said. “But there can’t be too many of those guns.”
“Besides,” Jackson put in, “if they had anything like a rifle we’d sure know about it by now.”
“Or they mighta gone to get it,” Goodman said. “How far can one of those things shoot, I wonder.”
“Probably farther than we can,” Jackson said.
“Why don’t you stop making each other nervous,” Berrigan suggested. “We’re going up now.” The doors squealed shut and the lift rose smoothly, up a hundred meters to the control-room hatch.
Nobody talked while they eavesdropped on Berrigan and the other two engineers, muttering numbers and arcane jargon. Over the buzz of the feeding flies they could hear clicks and whirs from inside the gleaming machine.
“Seems to check out,” Berrigan said finally. “Marianne, Jimmy, you go mess up the op center. Then meet the others at the cryogenics area. I’m going to stay here, just in case.”
They started down the crumbling sidewalk as fast as the suits allowed. Goodman switched to a private channel. “I don’t like that much. She can take off without us.”
“She wouldn’t. She just wants to make sure the children don’t come aboard.”
“They ain’t gonna come aboard. They had two years to go inside there and they didn’t.” Berrigan had had to break an inspection seal to get into the control room.
“It might have been taboo, with all the dead people in the lift. Everything’s different now.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“Let’s just get this job done as quickly as possible.” They passed by a long black window and mounted marble steps that were slick with green growth. The sliding doors of the entrance were frozen shut, the shatterproof glass crazed from a hundred impacts. A sustained blast melted one of the doors and set off a yammering alarm.
Inside, there was another hindrance. It was a once-comfortable reception foyer, now gone to dust and mil-dew. There were prominent signs directing you to various places, but they were all in German and Swahili. Two years before, O’Hara had been rushed through the building on a tour, but she couldn’t remember which direction they’d gone.
“Maybe we should call Ahmed,” O’Hara said.
“Nah… we couldn’t pronounce that Swahili, or spell it. Let’s just you go one way and I go the other, and we burn anything that looks important.”
“We ought to go together. We don’t want to get trapped if the building catches on fire.”
“Okay, that makes sense. This way?”
“Good as any.” They went down a corridor marked ZEITUNGSWESEN BEREICH. They encountered another stuck door, and Goodman kicked it open.
“Well, I’ll be God damned. Would you look at that.”
O’Hara’s glove slapped against her helmet as she instinctively tried to cover her mouth. Instead of screaming, she squeaked.
They were in an observation area over a large room full of muted sunshine. There were forty or fifty consoles in neat rows, and forty or fifty bodies slumped over the consoles or sprawled on the floor. They wore identical white uniforms, stained, and their faces and hands were mummified, shrunken around bone, skin dark gray with a white dusting of mold.
“What the hell happened to them, I wonder.”
O’Hara leaned against a rail for support. “They-they’ve been sealed in here since they died. And they must all have died at the same time. Probably poison gas in the air conditioning. Or radiation, like a neutron bomb. I wonder who did it.”
“Well, it must be the place we’re looking for. Let’s burn it up.”
“Sort of hate to.”
“Yeah.” They clumped down the stairs together. “Break the window first,” Goodman said. There was a bay window of polarized plastic, overlooking the landing strip and launch pads. He melted a hole in it and the Sun glared through.
“Careful,” O’Hara warned. “We don’t want to be standing too close to those consoles when the picture tubes blow out.”
“Don’t think they’re cubes. Look like flatscreens to me.” But he aimed carefully and sent a squirt of flame all the way across the room, enveloping the two farthest consoles. He was right; the screens just melted down. The bodies burned passively at first, and then their limbs started to stir.
“Christ that’s ugly. Let’s get this shit over with.” He fanned the flame in a sustained roar over half the room, and O’Hara added hers to the inferno. They backed up the stairs together, spraying fire. The tile floor caught, burning bright orange with greasy black smoke.
Something pinged against O’Hara’s tanks, and she saw a shiny needle spin off into the fire. She whirled around. “Jimmy!”
It all happened in less than a second. At the top of the stairs were four boys, tall boys in their teens, naked except for body paint. Three of them held spears, and one had a large rifle with a wooden stock. He was working the bolt of it.