Cavor climbed alongside Dallas aboard one of the electric cars that was already loaded with a whole pallet of cryoprecipitate. A large label on the container indicated that the contents were AS-1 RED BLOOD CELLS. FROZEN. AB Rh POSITIVE. TO BE STORED AT -65 °C OR COLDER. EXPIRING TWENTY YEARS FROM DRAW. COLLECTION DATE JULY 20, 2069. Briefly, Dallas wondered how it was that the collection date could already be marked.
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Look, what does it matter? We’ve got what we came for, haven’t we? If we don’t get some fresh blood in our veins soon we’ll be dead, and it’ll make no difference whether this machine has a pulse or not.’
‘But the possibility makes you uncomfortable, right, Dallas?’
‘What does one more bad feeling matter? Look, let’s just get out of here, shall we? My own quantum state is of rather more concern to me right now than that of the Descartes computer. Another time, another place, I might be fascinated by the idea of an information process taking the opportunity to give itself a kind of genetic expression. If that’s what’s happened. I’m not at all sure.’
The electric car carrying them jerked into forward motion. They didn’t bother to close the lid. Within a few seconds they were out of the vault and speeding through the labyrinth in the first of the many cars now loaded with blood.
‘Anyway, it’s hardly our affair,’ said Dallas, as much for his own benefit as Cavor’s. ‘Something bootstraps its own evolution, let Terotechnology and the First National people sort it out. They’ll be here soon enough. They’ll know what’s happened here. The Descartes computer is linked to others back on Earth. Right now, there’s a bank employee who’s looking at a computer, unable to believe what it’s telling him — that someone just broke into the most important bank in the solar system and stole the stuff of life. Four tons of it.’
‘We’ve done it then.’ Cavor closed his eyes and let out a weary sigh of satisfaction.
‘Yes,’ Dallas said, almost grudgingly. ‘We’ve done it.’
‘Thank God.’
‘God had nothing to do with it. But I’m beginning to wonder if we weren’t expected.’
‘I didn’t see any welcoming committee.’
‘It’s not just blood that can be tested.’
‘Now you’re talking in riddles.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am. But that’s where meaning often lies.’
5
I
Nineteen hours later, Dallas went up to the flight deck, to find Gates staring out of the window of the orbiting Mariner. It was the first chance they’d had to talk since leaving Descartes. For a moment he said nothing, enjoying the strange silence of Moon orbit. Finally he asked, ‘How do you feel?’
‘I’m okay,’ shrugged Gates, as if there was no reason to be concerned about him. ‘Matter of fact, I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time. Like I’ll live forever. It’s probably psychosomatic, the effect of a complete infusion, I guess, and not just the couple of units I lent Ronica.’ He paused, searching Dallas’s reddened face — one of the effects of his exposure to the radiation of the containment room — for some clue as to the other man’s well-being. But there was no indication of anything other than the sense of anticlimax that prevailed throughout the ship. ‘How about you?’
‘Cav and I have each had a complete infusion,’ said Dallas. ‘Neither of us is vomiting anymore. White-cell count seems to have stabilized, although Ronica says it’s still a little early to tell if we’ll need another infusion.’
‘We’re not short of blood.’
Dallas smiled his assent. ‘All in all, I’m feeling better than I could have expected.’ He nodded as if he was only just realizing this himself. ‘At one stage, it looked like a military hospital down on mid-deck. About three or four infusions happening all at once.’
‘Ronica’s been busy, all right.’
‘She did herself last of all,’ observed Dallas. ‘But she reckons Lenina’s going to make it.’
Gates nodded, already well aware of this. He reached for Dallas’s hand and took a firm hold if it.
‘We’re all going to make it,’ he said. ‘Mariner’s in good shape.’
Dallas held Gates’s watery gaze for a minute before glancing out of the window again. ‘Where exactly are we?’
‘We’re coming up on the dark side of the Moon,’ said Gates. ‘Fifty thousand feet, four thousand miles an hour. We’ll be invisible for the next twelve hours, just in case anyone decided to try and look for us. The dark side’s about the last place they’ll think of looking now. More likely they’ll believe we’re well on our way back to Earth. We’re set to autopilot. Soon as we come around the near side we’ll increase altitude and then head home.’
Dallas nodded, although he wondered exactly where home was now. He could hardly live in the city again. That’s where they would have to go to sell the blood to Kaplan, but after that...?
Gates seemed to sense Dallas’s dilemma.
‘Where will you go?’ he asked. ‘When we get back?’
‘Nothing’s decided. But Ronica and I have talked about going to Australia. Things are still pretty good there, I believe. Plenty of open space. Not much disease. What about you? The man with a Clean Bill of Health. Where will you go?’
‘With Lenina.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll find somewhere.’
‘Why don’t you come with us?’
‘Maybe everyone should?’
‘I’ve no problem with that.’
‘Kind of a new colony? For crooks and criminals?’
‘That’s the way Australia got started.’
‘A man with a Clean Bill of Health.’ Gates repeated the phrase as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘I guess it’s only just sinking in. I’ve lived with the threat of P2 all my life. There hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about dying. For the first time ever I’m able to consider my future and I can’t think what I’m going to do with it.’
‘That’s the great thing about having a future. You don’t always have to think about it. You can let the future take care of itself.’
‘Maybe I should at that. For a while anyway.’ Gates stretched and yawned and glanced over his shoulder at the open mid-deck hatch. ‘Seems kind of quiet down there.’
‘Everyone’s asleep.’
‘I could sleep for a couple of decades,’ confessed Gates. ‘But a couple of hours will do.’ He unbuckled himself from his seat and floated up to the ceiling. ‘How about you? Coming?’
A sudden darkness enveloped them as they crossed onto the dark side of the Moon.
‘I’m too tired to sleep,’ said Dallas. ‘I think I’ll just sit here for a while and wait for the Sun to come up. I’m in a contemplative sort of mood.’
‘Well, don’t get lonesome,’ said Gates, steering himself toward the open hatch. ‘And don’t touch the flight controls. I’ve had enough emergencies for one lifetime.’
‘I won’t, Daddy.’
‘Good boy.’ Gates disappeared down the hatch, headfirst, leaving Dallas alone in the pilot’s seat.
He stared out of the window at the desolate scene that lay fifty thousand feet below the Mariner. With no atmosphere or sunlight, it could as easily have been fifty miles. So many craters. The Moon looked like a giant honeycomb. The navigation computer busied itself giving them all names: Hertzsprung, Korolev, Doppler, Icarus, Daedalus, Schliemann, Mendeleyev. Each crater seemed to have its own patron and its own story to telclass="underline" a Danish astronomer and inventor of spectral-stellar charts; the guiding genius of Russia’s first space program; the discoverer of the way in which the observed frequency of light and sound waves is affected by the relative motion of the source and the detector; the mythical son of Daedalus, who flew so close to the Sun that the wax of his wings melted and he fell into the sea and was drowned; Daedalus himself, the legendary inventor of ancient times and creator of the Cretan Labyrinth; the German archaeologist and looter of Troy’s ancient treasures; the inventor of the periodic table of elements according to their relative atomic masses. It was odd the way nearly all of these names seemed significant to him.