Redshift Part 27

"That's not going to help you," Roxy says.

It's the first time she has spoken first.

Trevor thinks for a minute that she's taken to him, but her back is still turned, so there's no knowing. "It couldn't hurt." Hopeful, he chirps. "Spot me?"

There's a long silence, as if she's thinking about it. Then Trevor hears her snoring.

On Monday his hair starts to thin. It isn't falling out, it's just vanish-ing. By Friday he's bald.

He's not alone in this. Everyone else is bald, too. For the few people still out lurching around, hats have come back into fas.h.i.+on. The hats last for only a few hours, since everyone has for-gotten how to make them. He thinks about working out on the weights hut then thinks, Screw it.

He is so depressed that he orders pizza. Inexplicably, you can still get pizza delivered to your door, even though everything else has gone to h.e.l.l. After he pays he opens the box and sees that he can't recognize even one of the toppings. Shuddering, he offers it to Roxy.

She eats half of it before asking, "Want any?"

"No thanks. Hey, you have hair!"

"I've always had hair." She finishes the pizza.

He prays. It's hard to do when you don't know what you want and you can't see the face of the ent.i.ty you're talking to. Deep in the bas.e.m.e.nt, Roxy groans.

"Dammit," he yells, "if you're in love with me, why don't you just say so?"

He creeps down and looks in on her.Where she was tough and fit when he got her, Roxy has gotten a little stringy. It's as though her muscles have lengthened, like a runner's. He wonders at the change. Roxy is either sick with love, he decides, or sick with waiting. It would help to know.

Trevor picks love.

He coughs, and she raises herself on one elbow to look at him.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Gorilla troubles. You wouldn't understand."

Daylight is now twenty-four hours long, but to compensate, nighttime also takes twenty-four hours. Sunrises take so long that everyone loses interest. The telephone cuts out in the middle of a solicitation, someone trying to get Trevor to change his long-distance phone company even though the last phone company is defunct. There will be no e-mails from Jane.

He sometimes checks anyway.

During one cloudless day, the windows melt.

Trevor can barely breathe. He doesn't know where all the air has gone, but it isn't where he needs it. Near his mouth. He crawls to the bas.e.m.e.nt.

What's happening? He gasps. "Do you know what-what's happening?"

"Nope," Roxy says.

"The whole thing's gone to s.h.i.+t. What's happening to us?" Trevor is interrupted by horrible high-pitched screeching outside. Fire ants the size of sport utility vehicles are roaming the street, eating anything that isn't made of metal. Trevor unlocks the cage, / have a gorilla, thank G.o.d.

Roxy kills the entire hive in the time it takes him to make a milkshake. She returns to the cage and takes a nap. Later that night, in bed, he remembers that he forgot to lock the cage. He decides to screw it. He thinks, there's always the chance that she'll decide to come to me; when I least expect it she'll sneak upstairs . . .

Because things like disease and Armageddon happen to other people, never to us (for we are special), what really happens always comes as a surprise. A freak accident. A mistake!

Therefore Trevor wakes up one day with fear rising in his throat, the suffocating thought that this is his last day on earth.

He says, the way you do when you know it can't possibly be true, "This is my last day on earth." He's right.

He staggers to the front door and grapples it open. He looks outside and sees nothing.

No city. No streets. No newspaper on his front step. There is nothing to see except the dry wasteland that stretches in all directions. The dust at the end of the world? He doesn't know.

When you are special, even at the end of the world you carry on. It's What One Does. Business as usual. Carry on, and destiny won't notice you. Hold your breath and clamp your elbows to your sides. Small gestures. Nothing to attract attention. Wait, and the fates will pa.s.s you by Roxy joins him in the living room, where he's eating, for all he knows, the last frozen lasagna on the sere, blasted planet."Roxy, thank G.o.d!"

"I'm hungry."

"Can you save me?" he asks.

"Not at this point."

"Why?"

"You're too weak. You think too much."

"I think too much?" Staggered, he considers it from all sides. "What does that mean? What do I think too much about?"

"Everything."

"Does thinking make me weak?"

She polishes off the lasagna. "See?"

"It doesn't make sense!"

She licks the lasagna wrapper. "My point," Roxy says.

Bemused, he looks at her. The open cage. The hook latch on the cellar door. "Why didn't you escape?" She stayed because she loves me. She does!

"This place was as good as any other."

"Don't you love me? "

He dies before she has to answer.

Roxy packs up food and water from the kitchen, a couple of steak knives, a plastic bucket, a blanket, and a string of pearls. She sets off toward the horizon, in no particular direction.

Whatever else happens, in this new world, the gorilla always survives Bob Vardeman has done it all in science fiction and out of it- he's also written westerns, fantasies, and just about anything else you can think of, including original Star Trek novelizations and, most recently, h.e.l.l Heart (Vor #5). He's particularly adept at melding himself into series books, but when he turns to something purely of his own invention, watch out.

"Feedback" is a weird one-it's about s.e.x (which means that you've already stopped reading this headnote and started in on the tale that follows) but it's also about much more.

Feedback.

Robert E. Vardeman.

Visions of half-eaten junk food danced in Greer's head. He closed his eyes tightly and concentrated on only a few of the murky, indistinct fried tofu chips shaped into faux pork rinds.

Too many extraneous images intruded. As he focused the best he could on the ever-s.h.i.+fting, tormentingly shouted words and mind-searing images, a migraine headache started, far back in the vast reaches of his mind and spreading until it was a dark web sticking like glue to his every thought, dragging down every synapse.

These tofu chips are s.h.i.+t! blasted into his mind, causing Greer to reel. His thin-fingered hand clung to the desk as new waves of pain built in intensity. He sensed the tsunami approaching and tried to break off and get out of the man's mind."Don't," came the cold words. "Don't you dare. We have to find out why the test group doesn't approve of Tofu Tasties."

Greer's watery eyes blinked open. Tears welled and ran down his cheeks. He did not wipe them away. The pain surged now and threatened to tear away his sanity.

'It's because they taste like c.r.a.p," he grated out. Did you receive that, or are you trying to weasel out of work again?"

'That's what he's thinking." Greer swallowed hard and finally wiped away the tears with a crisp linen handkerchief taken from his coat pocket. This always happened when he delved too deeply into a non-telepath's squalid, unfocused mind.

Why couldn't I get a telepath for a d.a.m.ned taste test? They wouldn't torture me like this with so much unmanageable fury. They focus themselves, he screamed mentally. The echoes of his own thoughts rebounded from distant unknown corners in his own mind and produced even more pain.

Are you all right, Greer? came a faint, distant thought as soothing as the other was grating.

Controlled, soft, like a cool drink on a sweltering day.

"Kathee," he gasped out, not sure if he sent it telepathically or spoke aloud. Greer cursed under his breath when he heard Lawrence Macmil-lan snort in disgust. The head of research marketing considered any telepathic contact other than with his precious test human "resource elements" to be a waste of valuable a.s.sets. Find those markets. Get them to buy. Dig into the consumers' deepest hidden thoughts and find out what they really think so they can be coerced into buying Tofu Tasties s.h.i.+t chips.

"You are on company time," Macmillan said coldly. "No personal communication."

"My head hurts," Greer said.

Greer?

He took a deep, calming breath, but the migraine refused to fade. He absorbed not only the vile taste of fried-in-pork-grease tofu but also the pent-up anger of the test subject. The man felt intense guilt because he was being paid to sample a product he hated. He wanted to speak out negatively but felt it would be a betrayal of taking money to try what he was told was a fine, tasty, healthful new comfort food. It was worse for Greer because he worked so hard to insinuate himself into the man's mind and had finally found what he thought of as a mental resonance. He meshed with the nontelepathy through extreme effort and then paid the price for it by absorbing the undisciplined output.

It was like struggling furiously to get a funnel into his mouth and then choking when a fifty-five-gallon drum was emptied into it. He hated the feeling; he hated commoners; he hated Macmillan most of all for forcing him to do this. Still, this was a better gig than most telepaths got, no matter how awful it might be.

He thought, I'm hurting, Kathee, hut I can make it through. Meet after work?

Don't know, too many arrested today. I still have to interrogate witnesses. Sergeant Fates might make me work overtime.

Greer sniffed, wiped again at his eyes, and then tried to relax using some of those silly mantras Kathee recommended. It was h.e.l.l being a telepath, or even a half one like he was. What must it be like for Kathee, able to receive and send? She had to worry about everyone near ho could pick up her telepathic transmissions, especially if she became angry.

All he had to worry about was receiving. He was sensitive enough to pry into nontelepathicminds through great effort but could shut out the dull roar from those commoners if he got far enough away from their thronging crowds. It helped even more if he got drunk or distracted himself.

When would Macmillan get trained subjects?

Greer moaned again and pressed his hands to his temples. He knew that would never happen. Most people thought telepaths were something imaginary like Sasquatch and the yeti, no matter how the tabloids tried to cover the story.

"Greer!"

"Yes, sir."

"He verbally said he liked the snack all the way up the liability scale to a nine out of ten, but you claim he was thinking that Tofu Tasties were less than, uh, palatable?"

"s.h.i.+t, sir, he said they were s.h.i.+t."

"Mr. Nakamuri will not be happy. This makes it unanimous on all test subjects this week."

"Can I go? I don't feel very well." Greer could not care less what their district manager thought of the survey results.

"I am sure you will feel much better the instant you are out of the office," Macmillan said with a nasty twist in his voice.

"Whatever you say, sir," Greer said. The lacy webs of migraine now thickened and burned, as if a rope net had been set on fire in his head.

But Macmillan was right about one thing. Once he got away from the commoners, he would feel better.

I think she was in earlier, the man behind the bar thought.

Greer looked around but did not see Kathee. The usual crowd had drifted in, the ones too bored or too damaged by their work to tolerate the outside world much longer. He settled on the high stool and ordered his usual.

Hey, Greer, called Erickson. Greer thought of him as "numb nuts" after he realized Erickson was his opposite, a transmitter and not a receiver. If there was a more worthless talent, Greer could not think of it. At least nontelepaths hired him to spy on each other. What did Erickson do? Implant thoughts? No amount of mental coercion could make anyone like Tofu Tasties.

"What do you want?" Greer asked in an unfriendly tone. His mind raced over all kinds of lewd possibilities for Erickson and reveled in knowing the man could not pick up a single one. I'm going to a screamer. Want to come? "What the h.e.l.l is a screamer?" Something special, something you'll really like.

Pictures leaked around what little control Erickson had in transmission, enticing Greer in spite of himself. He preferred solitary pleasures but Erickson was excited, and broadcast emotions along with the flood of kinky images. Greer knew he ought to keep his distance, but it had been a hard day, Kathy wasn't here, and he was perversely intrigued by what he received in Erickson's thoughts.

All telepaths were freaks to be exploited, but valuable ones to the police and corporations and to the government. Greer did not want to think what some of his colleagues were made to do for the black ops groups. The genetic tinkering had come from that segment of the government, and to a large extent had remained the province of the spook, the spy, the saboteur . . . the a.s.sa.s.sin.His head began throbbing again. He needed some R&R. Why wasn't Kathee here? She was plain looking, but she was a two-way. When they made love, Greer had no words for it.

Feedback. Ecstasy. His pa.s.sion fed hers and he picked up hers until they could not stand it anymore.

What difference did looks make when they could rock the heavens with their f.u.c.king?

"I want to wait a while longer for Kathee," Greer said.

"She was in earlier, had to go back to work," Erickson said aloud. "Besides, you might not want a nice girl like Kathee seeing this."

"A screamer?" Greer was intrigued, but had to fight his own better judgment. Nothing Erickson had anything to do with could be good. The man was a loser.

Then Greer reeled as a flood of new, more intense images. .h.i.t him.

Erickson was so excited he could not control himself.

"You can stay here, but I want to get there for my special. . . show." "You're part of it?"

Greer blurted in astonishment. "They tie you up and-?"

Shut up! came Erickson's frantic thought. I don't want everyone to know. You 're a friend.