Armageddon, Inc Page 3

  Before he left, Ramsey confronted Norm. "Do either Foat or Rees owe you anything?" he asked.

  Norm's eyes flickered. He was tempted, but the platoon of soldiers kept

  him honest. "Nope. Each paid a week in advance, so technically I owe them."

  "Keep it," Ramsey said. "Keep the two hundred I just paid you. Forget

  you know anything about this. If anyone mentions Mill Rees, or Dennis Foat,

  or Dr. Frederic Ramsey, just tell him he has them confused with someone else."

  "Right," Norm said fervently.

  Ramsey saw to the loading of the Dennis Foat's body into the ambulance

  beside that of Mill Rees. Then he climbed into one of the trucks, and the

  little convoy headed back to the Inland. Just over the border, General Bargh

  was waiting with an entourage of his own.

  He presented Ramsey with a map. "I've marked the route to Fronville," he said. "Can you leave now?"

  "No," Ramsey said. "I'll have to rest first. How far is it?"

  "Best part of a day's drive. Quicker by air, but there's no airfield

  nearby. Do you want a copter?"

  "I want the most inconspicuous arrival possible. Give me a car and a

  driver, and I'll start early tomorrow morning. In the meantime, there are

  things we should talk about. Rees's body for example."

  They talked. "You may find the town full of mutants," the general said.

  "If you do, we want them. All of them."

  "Genetics doesn't work like that," Ramsey protested. "It doesn't

  suddenly produce a whole population of mutants."

  "How does it work?" the general wanted to know.

  Ransey reflected. "Mill Rees may be unique. If his mother, or father

  was a mutant, he might have a mutant sibling or two. But that's it."

  "No mutant cousins?" the disappointed general demanded.

  "Give up the thought of abducting an entire community of mutants," Ramsey said irritably. "Give up the thought of abducting even one mutant and giving the war a new dimension before the Easts think of it. Mutants aren't abductable. How could you abduct someone who can stop a motor with his mind?

  Even if I find a mutant or two, they may want nothing to do with your war."

  "Find them," the general said. "I'll take care of it from there."

  Ramsey went to bed early and slept badly, as usual, and early the next

  morning he left for Fronville.

  ******

  Ramsey had once read an eyewitness report that described the Outland in

  the same awed terms that normally were lavished on Tibet or Patagonia. The Outland communities the author had visited had been composed of widely scattered, tidily-built houses, each almost literally a small farm producing all the food its family required. Government services were provided by volunteers. There had been no shops, no shopping centers--if a citizen needed something he couldn't make himself, he would arrange a trade with another citizen who could make it. Such communities had seemed unimaginably weird to the author.

  "Weirdness aside, what could there possibly be about that environment

  that would produce a mutant?" Ramsey asked himself, coming abruptly out of a semi-doze in the rear seat of his car.

  Was it possible that a citizen of the twenty-first century trying

  to live under nineteenth century conditions would experience considerable

  stress?

  Ramsey kept trying to put everything out of his mind so he could sleep,

  but the dead mutant so perplexed him that his badly-needed nap turned into a nightmare. At noon they stopped to sample the lavish basket of food the

  military had provided them with. At four o'clock, Ramsey's driver woke him

  from his non-sleep and announced, "We must be getting close."

  "What do you think of the Outland?" Ramsey asked him.

  "There's a lot of it, isn't there?" the driver said politely. "Doesn't

  seem to amount to much, though. Farms, mostly."

  They turned off at the merest suggestion of an intersection. The driver

  was following a low-level aerial map based on photos General Bargh had ordered taken as soon as he heard of Fronville. The road seemed to be well cared for, but it was narrow and had a dirt surface. They topped a hill, and a town lay spread out in the valley below them on both sides of a river.

  Ramsey ordered the driver to stop while he studied it. Its extent

  startled him. The eyewitness report he had read was immediately contradicted by an astonishing number of mills or factories. There were no chimneys; the factories seemed to be powered by mill races on either side of the river.

  Each had its own railway siding. At least that much was consistent with a

  nineteenth century agrarian society. There were no wires, no satellite disks

  on houses, no telephone relay towers.

  But there were no chimneys on the houses, either, and this was a region

  where the winters would be cold. He saw no church steeple, which didn't

  necessarily mean there was no church, just that their church, if they had one, didn't have a steeple.

  Then he saw the junk yard, acres of junker automobiles--and he hadn't

  seen an automobile on the road since he started except when he'd caught a

  glimpse of a motorway used by Inlanders. Beyond the junk yard was an

  extensive railway marshaling yard, and that also was astonishing. Closer to

  him were acres of what looked like sheds or barns, straight lines of them

  lined up close together like buildings standing at military attention with

  railway sidings threaded among them. He turned his gaze to the town again,

  studied its residential area, and decided there was far too little of it to

  house a population operating all those factories. He shook his head dazedly.

  No doubt it would all become understandable when he'd had a closer look at it.

  Farms with large barns were scattered about the valley. Horses and

  cattle grazed in hedge-enclosed fields near the village. There were tall,

  freshly built straw stacks, neatly thatched. A flock of sheep grazed on the

  steep hillside. To Ramsey, who'd had little experience of rural scenes, it

  was altogether lovely.

  He told the driver to proceed slowly, and they moved down into the valley at walking speed. They were perhaps three hundred meters from the house that marked the beginning of the town's residences when their motor stopped.

  Ramsey turned questioningly to the driver, found him studying his instrument panel in consternation. He tried to start the motor repeatedly, got no response.

  "Do you have fuel?" Ramsey asked.

  "Plenty," the driver said shortly.

  He tried again, unsuccessfully.

  "This is close enough, anyway," Ramsey said. "I don't want you driving

  right into the town. There's enough room here for us to push the car off

  the road, and there's a tree to shade it. I'll walk the rest of the way.

  While I'm gone, see if you can find out what's wrong with the motor."

  The two of them--with the driver doing most of the work--managed to push the car off the road and under the tree. Ramsey, mopping his face, caught a flutter of movement in the hedge that lined the nearby field. He started toward it. With a giggle, a small boy burst from it and ran off.

  Thoughtfully Ramsey watched him go. "Try the car again," he suggested

  to the driver.

  It started immediately.

  "Make yourself comfortable," he told the driver. "And don't worry about

  the car. I don't think that will happen again."

  At least he had the answer to one of his questions. It figured that a

  young mutant could stop a car's motor from five meters if an adult could

  stop a plane's ro
cket engine at five thousand meters, and Ramsey had all the

  proof he needed that mutant traits extended beyond Mill Rees's generation.

  Perhaps that child was his son. In any case, Ramsey was about to encounter

  the potentially explosive situation he had dreaded, and there was no way he

  could avoid poking his finger into it.

  He walked slowly, warily, but in his weakened condition that was the way

  he always walked.

  To the left, the land fell away in a slope, and he turned aside and

  looked down on the sheds he had seen from the ridge. They were packed with discards of various kinds--glass, plastics, paper, cloth, scrap metal, even

  old automobile tires. They contained, in fact, all of the effluvia of a high

  civilization, carefully sorted. The startled Ramsey wondered if there were

  some government department he had never heard of that was shipping Inland discards to the Outland and what the Outland proposed to do with them.

  He walked on and approached the town. Each of the wood-framed houses

  stood on what any Inlander would have considered an excessively large plot of land. As he expected, the town's business district was minimal. Most of

  the buildings there also were framed of wood with a scattering of brick

  buildings among them. There was a blacksmith shop. The market was a large, empty hall where people could gather periodically to exchange things they produced themselves. There was no bank, no post office, which did not

  surprise him. There was no doctor or dentist's office, which did. There was

  something like a small general store that had one customer. Clerk and

  customer were the first people Ramsey had seen. The most impressive building, of brick, seemed to be an office building. It bore a sign, "Fronville

  Cooperative Association."

  But the village was full of activity even though none of it was visible.

  Over everything hung a perpetual humming noise that he could not identify. At close intervals a whining scream announced that somewhere among the industrial complex a sawmill was at work.

  At the end of the business district, the dwellings resumed. An elderly

  man who sat sunning himself on a porch was watching Ramsey's halting progress curiously. Ramsey turned and walked toward him. "Could you tell me where I can find Melna Rees?"

  "She'll be at the woolen mill," the old man said. He pointed out the

  building he meant. Ramsey thanked him and turned in that direction.

  The millrace brought him to another stop. There were no mill wheels.

  The ponderous, romantic, inefficient contraptions that made nineteenth century mills so picturesque were nowhere in evidence. Instead, there were water inlets that made him ponder whether the villagers had somehow managed to build turbines that would operate from that lazy-flowing current. The hum grew in volume as he crossed the millrace on a small, wooden bridge and approached the building. A middle-aged man saw Ramsey at once when he entered it and came to ask him what he wanted.

  "Melna Rees," Ramsey said.

  "Please wait here," the man said. He pointed at a chair, and Ramsey

  seated himself. It was a wood chair, crude-looking but surprisingly

  comfortable. He relaxed and closed his eyes. The hum had an hypnotic effect, and he urgently felt the need for sleep. He shook himself awake. His most severe task was still ahead of him.

  A hand touched his arm. The woman who stood before him was dressed

  plainly in some kind of dark blue smock, but she had a simple kind of beauty

  that Ramsey found appealing. She looked to be about twenty. She gestured and led him into a room that served as the establishment's office. The cries and hubbub of playing children could be heard next door. Evidently there was a nursery for the children of working mothers.

  Melna Rees fixed a penetrating gaze on him. "You've come about Mill,

  haven't you?"

  Ramsey faced her uncertainly. "I'm Doctor Frederic Ramsey. I came to

  tell you what happened to him."

  "Mill was my brother. I'm so sorry you were put to so much trouble. We

  already know about him. He is dead, isn't he?"

  "Yes--"

  "Mill's twin brother, Will, tried to make mind-contact with him last

  night. He knew immediately that Mill was dead. So you have had your long

  trip for nothing."

  Ramsey had a sinking feeling that he had lost control of his mission

  before it began. "Perhaps not," he said. "There remains the question of what should be done with Mill's body. A young friend of mine was killed with him, and we considered burying them together. Or, if you prefer, we can return Mill's body to you so he can be buried here--we thought you might want him in a family plot with his ancestors."

  "A young friend of yours was killed with him?"

  "Yes--"

  "How sad. It is obvious that your own health is poor, and yet you made

  this long trip to find us. Would you mind telling me what happened to Mill?"

  "If you really want to know. It wasn't pleasant."

  "Death back there--" She dismissed civilization with a gesture.

  "--often isn't. But wait. You need rest and refreshment. There are others who will want to know, also. If you don't mind a short walk, we can go to my

  house."

  She spoke to the man Ramsey had met earlier. Then she led Ramsey to a

  door, held it open for him, and--the moment they were outside--looked around in puzzlement. "How did you get here?"

  "In a car," Ramsey said.

  "Where is it?"

  "I left it and my driver a short distance from the village. A small boy

  stopped the motor."

  "That naughty child!" she exclaimed. "At it again. I must speak with

  his father. Did he do any damage?"

  "Oh, no. He just stopped the motor--and kept it stopped until I

  chanced to see him. Then he ran off, and the motor started at once."

  "I'm glad. I do apologize. A child like that can be a problem. He is

  like a young bird learning to fly--he wants to fly everywhere, all the time."

  Ramsey was still puzzling over the row of mills. "How do you run your

  machinery?" he asked.

  "With electricity, of course."

  "I haven't seen any power plant," Ramsey protested.

  "Every mill has its own hydro plant," she said. "Of course there's a

  large one for the town, also."

  "Hydro plant? You mean--electrical power plant? But I have seen no

  wires."

  "Wires?" she exclaimed. "Don't you Inlanders have broadcast power?"

  They crossed a different bridge, also of wood, over the mill race, and

  Ramsey came to a stunned halt. An enormous building that had looked like a

  factory set back from the river was actually a warehouse. Every conceivable

  form of scrap metal had been stacked in and around it.

  "I saw collections like this on my way into town," he said. "Where do

  all these discards come from?"

  "Wherever we can find them available," Melna Rees said. "We are

  scavangers, you see. We have to be. Otherwise, we would have no raw

  materials to work with."

  "Those junk cars I saw--"

  "Another source of scrap metal. And other things. It is the discards of

  you Inlanders that keep our economy going."

  Ramsey reflected that somewhere among this welter of mill buildings there must be smelters and metal processing facilities. Clearly there was much more to the town of Fronville than met the eye.

  Melna Rees's house was nondescript--a simple frame building, simply