The Long Sleep

XXIII

The sky looked like the bottom of a spittoon. Ugly gray-brown masses of roiling vapors and darker, heavier clouds like clots of mucous scudded down the throat of the world. He could see no blue sky at all. Not a single bird graced the heavens; and no sun shone. It was, he thought, the vault of hell.

He did not faint.

He simply sat and stared, too numbed to feel the full emotional jolt of it.

The land was also gray and dead. It contained no trees. No grass or flowers. The only growing things were towering fungoid forms that reached from the ground like the rotting fingers of dead giants who were determined to push out of their graves. The earth was all dressed in rags of fungus and moss that resembled — though this was a much more virulent form of it — that wriggling monstrosity which he had encountered in the storm drains during his escape from the dungeon. Soupy brown fog drifted between these towers of fungus, like an intelligent entity seeking something unspeakable. There was no other movement than the fog. No animals scampered through the vegetation; no breeze stirred a leaf, for there was neither breeze nor leaf. There were no cities, no houses, no people. Just these endless vistas of death…

He had known that he must come out here. He had known there was something he must see, something into which he must plunge in the manner of a child leaping blindly into a pool in order to sink or swim. The scene was too devastating, the truth behind it too horrible for him to absorb it a piece at a time; absorbing one bit, he would have backed quickly away from the rest of the knowledge, a reluctant Adam with a rotten apple. He'd needed to face it all at once or not at all. And now, weeping softly, he saw it, and he remembered…

This was the pitiful world which man had inherited when the planet's ecological systems began to break down in the late 1990s and on into the Twenty-first Century. In those Last Days, the government had constructed the inverted pyramid deep beneath the flatlands of Utah, a last bastion of mankind where more than two thousand top administrators and scientists searched frantically for some way to perpetuate the species. While hundreds of millions died from a complex chain of ecological disasters, those deep inside the Utah pyramid, Joel among them, had worked in conjunction with NASA to launch the seeds of mankind toward the stars.

They had not been trying to save mankind precisely as an old biology text would have defined the species. They were willing to alter the outward appearance to preserve the inner essence. In a hundred deep-space, faster-than-light drone probes, NASA had never discovered a planet enough like Earth to permit comfortable human colonization. Therefore, it had been necessary for them to create genetic alternatives to man and to put these quasi-human creatures on the interstellar ships which had been readied to take Earth's new children from their dying home.

The aquamen, he thought. They hadn't been entirely a part of Galing's stage setting. They had once been real — still were real, out there on some distant world. The aquaman was a strain of human being that was engineered for survival on a marine planet.

When this work was done, when the staff of the Utah installation had seen their creations shot into space, they next studied and perfected the science of cryogenics. They had built sixteen life suspensions pods — only sixteen, because their supply of certain delicate and crucial instruments was limited — into which volunteers, drawn from a pool of six hundred, were placed for a thousand-year sleep. It was hoped that when they woke they would find themselves in a world where ecological balance had been restored through the tedious but effective processes of Nature.

However, fifty years later, all but one of the pods were damaged in the riots when rational society within the pyramid dissolved. Ten centuries later, Joel woke alone.

It wasn't the Twenty-third Century, as Harttle had said. They were just trying to break him in easy. It was much later than that. Instead, the date must be three thousand and something, A.D.

When he had come awake after ten centuries of sleep, Joel did not find paradise. The air beyond the fortress was still quite poisonous. The water was an acid that had to be refined before it could be used even for bathing. He had been shocked to find no one alive at all. Not even his wife, Alicia Corley, was alive to share the awful future with him. Her pod had been ruined in the riots, of which he found few but detailed records.

He was the last man on Earth.

For several weeks, he remained alone, brooding, contemplating suicide or a return to the pod. But he was basically a man of action, and eventually he acted. He switched on the hermetically sealed nucleotide vats, activated the computers controlling them, and he built one dozen androids.

His thoughts drifted back to the present, his eyes to the fungus beyond the tank. He looked down at Allison. She was still sleeping, though she murmured quietly and stirred a bit. He smiled and touched her dark hair.

Originally, he had intended to treat these artificial companions as men had treated them since they'd been first successfully manufactured in 1993: as tools, as slaves, but never as equals. He wanted to hypno-educate them, assign them to various projects, then return to his pod, checking up on them for a week or two each century. Because androids were, in effect, immortal, they could pass ten thousand years searching for some way to roll back the ecological disaster.

One hitch developed in this plan, although it had not seemed like a hitch at first. He discovered, through various laboratory tests, that his own tissues had reached stasis as a result of the thousand-year sleep. They had ceased to die or renew themselves. No activity took place within them; they lay beneath the microscope like photographs, not like real cells. His tissues were reproducing only when he was injured in some way and matter had to be replaced. He was now immortal himself. He did not need to return to the pod. He was elated. However, over the months that he worked side by side with the vat-formed men and women, he began to think of them as more than animals or slaves. He felt that they were equals — and soon he fell in love with the one who looked a bit like Alicia: he fell in love with Allison, a vat-born woman.

She whispered in her sleep now.

He rested one hand on her face and watched as she took steady, deep breaths.

Falling in love with an android was in the nature of a cardinal sin: a womb-born must never have sexual relations with a vat-born. Never in human history had there been such a universally held, fiercely evangelized, and rigidly obeyed rule against miscegenation. He loathed himself for loving her. He tried to overcome his prejudice, couldn't, and decided that anti-android propaganda must have been fed to him during hypno-training sessions during his early days in the pyramid. This loathing was too strong to be naturally bred. And nothing short of a point-for-point opposing, pro-android propaganda tape could cure him. Yet, without knowing what that original propaganda had been, he was unable to establish a curative program. Androids were a off-shoot of the search for viable space travelers. They were tools. Slaves. They were even pets. But they were never lovers. They were inhuman, unhuman, not fit objects for desire.

Unable to treat his own illness, he had decided to assign the android team various research tasks and return to his pod even though he no longer required it. He hoped that another hundred years of sleep would erase either his love or his prejudice. However, he woke a century later with both: he loved her, and he loathed himself for wanting her…

And then?

As he watched the fungoid towers which seemed to have moved a bit on the plain before him, he strained to recall the rest of it… Next had come Disorientation Therapy, a drastic form of psychiatry popular in the decade before the worst of the ecological changes. He knew it was his best chance. He and the androids had stripped the pyramid of every clue to its real purpose, stored these records in hidden vaults, and structured a Disorientation Therapy Puzzle from the entire installation. As he saw it: he would be given a temporary chemical amnesia, would be placed in his pod and, when revived, would find himself in a maze of deception and illusion: fake streets, the dungeon, the house… And in this weird play, Allison would be his only touchstone to reality as he struggled to solve the problem and reorient himself. With any luck he would come to need her and care for her so much, in his disorientation, that his guilt and prejudice would be easily defeated.

It had worked. He had slept with her and he wanted to sleep with her again. He had even thought of having a family by her, if that were possible. And he felt no guilt. He was cured.

Then why did he feel that something was terribly, dangerously wrong?

He looked at Allison. She was mumbling continuously now, smiling in her sleep, slowly coming out of the drug.

Where was the danger he sensed, if indeed there were any?

Not Allison.

Something else…

“Joel! Joel Amslow!”

He recoiled as Henry Galing's authoritative voice boomed out of the radio receiver in the center of the tank's main control panel.

“Joel! Please answer me.”

He flicked a switch permitting two-way conversation, and he said “I'm here.”

“You're all right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where you are?” Galing asked. He no longer sounded sinister. He was worried.

“Outside the Utah fortress,” Joel said.

“You understand the illusions?”

“Too well.”

“This wasn't in the program,” Galing said worriedly. You weren't supposed to act like this.” He paused to get a grip on himself. “You are safe, you said?”

“Sure.”

“You better come inside.”

“The therapy was a success,” Joel said. He caressed Allison's face again.

“Oh?” Galing said cautiously.

Joel sighed and leaned back in the safety harness. He was so weary. The dead world, the rotting sky, the barren land that fell away in every direction — all this made him feel old and worn out. It was this weariness, he now thought, that made him feel there was yet another danger; his nerves were frayed, playing tricks on him. He gazed fondly at the woman on the seat beside him. “Very successful therapy,” he told Galing. “I don't feel the way I used to… You people may be vat-born, formed as complete adults… But you've each got a distinct personality. You're as human as I am. I mean it. I no longer have to be alone.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Galing said. “But that's only half of it. Apparently, you don't know anything about what the Overmaster did to you.”

“What?”

“The Overmaster's relentless,” Galing said. “It won't give up and go away. We came damned close to being destroyed, the pyramid breached and ruined—”

“Overmaster? I'm not tracking very—”

The earth rumbled beneath the tank, trembled gently at first and then more violently, lifted up, tilted, slammed down again, and nearly overturned the elephantine vehicle.

“Joel? Is something wrong out there?”

The earth rose again. Fell again. Harder this time.

“Joel?”

“Something—”

Again the movement came, as if a bomb had exploded underneath the tank.

Joel looked up, startled, as he was thrown forward and then jerked back by his safety harness. He saw the towering fungoid forms. Very near. Too damned near. They'd moved in on him… Now, they rose above the tank like the many fingers of an alien hand, reaching down to crush him.