Chloroplasm

by Dee Carter, Denis Hughes

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

In A.D. 2043 the world seemed doomed to suffer the impact of total war on a hitherto undreamed-of scale. The horrors of titanic bombardment and the searing ravages of electronic ray assault were slowly simmering up to a point when the Controllers themselves could not turn back. But it was only a handful of men and women, living and working in the underground dumps of destructive force, who fully appreciated the danger. They feared for their fellow beings; but when the war itself was due to start the blow came, not from a mortal enemy but from a far more terrible foe...

Release date: October 27, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 119

Sample

“Six months, John! that’s all I give it! I tell you that if things go the way we think they will it’s goodbye to civilisation! And you know it!” Forbes glared at his companion challengingly, defying him to argue the point. He moved restlessly, hands thrust deep in his pockets, a restless man with a restless brain. And Cassel knew that what he had just said was only too true.

“I’m not denying it,” he grunted. “We both know the world is sitting on the edge of a volcano. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Or is there?”

Forbes stopped his pacing and gestured briefly, that odd, helpless little gesture that Cassel knew so well.

“No,” said Forbes; “there’s nothing we can do. I’m quite aware of that. But it simply makes it worse to my mind. This being so helpless. You know what I mean!” He was pacing again, dark shaggy head pushed forward, shoulders a little hunched as if he bore the entire weight of the world’s multiple troubles on his own back.

John Cassel watched him. Their friendship was long and close; Cassel didn’t want to strain it, hated the idea of it rupturing. In Forbes’ present mood there was a danger.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Cassel said slowly. “Being cooped up down here, a couple of hundred feet underground, doesn’t help either.” He grinned suddenly and felt for a cigarette. “But even that might have certain advantages if what we fear actually happens.”

Forbes halted in the middle of the comfortably furnished room. He nodded slowly. “At least we’re immune from possible radio-activity,” he admitted. “If not from any of the other delightful results of full scale war. Delights! Ha! My God, John, it makes me shudder when I think of what will happen to the people. The ordinary people, the dull, stupid masses who do as they’re told no matter what it costs them. They don’t understand, I tell you! They’ll never understand until it’s too damned late; and then they’ll be finished, their world falling apart around them!”

Cassel nodded. “While we and the others like us live on in our little bolt holes and nurse the very core of world destruction.” His voice was suddenly bitter. “Why did we ever take on this thing in the first place?”

Forbes laughed. “I know why you took it on!” he said. “You wanted Mandy and she was in it already. That’s why you dedicated your life, John; and you can’t deny it!”

Cassel screwed his face up defensively. He couldn’t deny it; Forbes was right. But the irony of it was that even so he was no closer to Mandy now. Further off in fact. Oh, she was tied as he was, all right, her life given over to the guardianship of these underground generator piles—death dumps, as Forbes had named them—but Cassel himself had been drafted to Number Four, while Mandy was irrevocably stationed in Number Three, twenty miles away. Twenty miles.… It might as well have been twenty thousand.

Cassel suppressed an angry retort. “Too true,” he admitted. “But how was I to know they’d put me in charge of Number Four? There was no choice; and you know as well as I do that once you’re in this thing you can’t get out—or make your own terms, damn it!”

Forbes smiled grimly. “And you told them with such conviction that your only interest was guarding the station!” he murmured with cutting sarcasm. “What fools men are for the sake of a woman! But never mind that, John. It doesn’t meet the present situation at all. Once these flaming half-wits who control the world’s destiny give the word, all hell is going to break loose. They’ll take the bombs we look after; call on us for bigger and better destructive force; turn on the generative directional impulses that spring from our little dungeons and blast each other to smithereens! And I don’t need to labour the fact that once they start—as they certainly will before long—we can count it the end of our human culture on this earth.”

“Couldn’t we refuse to co-operate? Tell them we don’t have the stuff?” Cassel knew it was a hopeless suggestion.

Forbes laughed unpleasantly. “My dear chap,” he said, “imagine what the result would be! We should merely be seized and put to death as traitors to the cause of the coming war against aggression! And it wouldn’t do any good because we aren’t indispensable by any means. We’re the key men here, I grant you; just as Mandy and others like her are vital to the running of the other stations. But anyone can come and collect these frightful weapons we nurse so carefully.”

Cassel said, “You’re right, of course; you usually are. But it doesn’t make me any more amenable to the horror that’s bound to come up there on the surface.”

“It won’t affect us—directly, I mean. We shan’t be killed when they start. None of the advantages of modern war can reach us down here! And if we ever put our noses above the ground when it’s all over and civilisation is blown to rags we shall still be immune from the after-effects. No lingering death from radio-activity or the wasting due to the new cosmographoid particle radiation. Isn’t that wonderful to think about? I’ll say it is! No, John, personally and physically we don’t have a lot to worry about when it does start. But afterwards … well, I suppose what’s left of the human race—if it’s sane—will gracefully degenerate into a new cave-man period. More likely, though, there’ll be nothing edible and what survivors there are will soon perish.” Forbes grinned wickedly, warming to his subject. “You see what I mean? Guess what it means to us personally!”

Cassel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t have to guess,” he said. “I know! Just a handful of us, eh? Immune from the perils of destructive war. They might stop it before it goes too far, of course.”

“They won’t! The ideologies with the greatest sway in the world are dead set on cutting one another’s throats. It doesn’t matter to them what it costs! They can’t see further than their noses and the politicians don’t appreciate the terrible danger. Even if they do they think they’re bound to win and so avoid disaster! Lord, but it makes me sick to think about!”

“Nothing we can do.”

“Not a thing, my friend! Except stand by and watch and weep for our fellow beings, secure in the knowledge that if they all perish we and others of our calling will be saved! Ironic, isn’t it? We devote our lives to guarding and creating the agencies of untold misery, protecting the bombs, tending the generators of destruction, serving the very things that will annihilate humanity. The only suffering we shall have to face is the suffering of our conscience, something we can never justify, but which it’s too late to assuage now.”

Cassel dragged hard on his cigarette. His face, much younger than Forbes’, drawn into lines of resentment at his own futility and the bitter prospects that faced him. There was not even the saving grace of having Mandy to share whatever the future might hold. Station Number Three and Station Number Four were virtually different worlds, their inhabitants segregated for good and all from, the world above, with only the tenuous contact of radio and video between them, a contact that was unsatisfying and strangely unreal. And Cassel knew that he and Mandy had drifted far apart in their separate little existences. Even on the video her smile lacked essential warmth, and her calls were now restricted to routine checks between the two underground destruction dumps. It never struck Cassel that the dark-haired girl might be shying from closer contact because she knew that they must inevitably be separated forever. Once a person, man or woman, took on the job they did there was no turning back. It was part of the system that the remainder of their lives must be spent in the same subterranean labyrinth where untold devastation was stored and tended. The men who directed the affairs of the human race called it progress; achievement; protection of peace; loyalty to mankind’s precarious existence; service to the all-important state. They called it a number of other high-sounding phrases, duping the world, gradually taking it with them to the very brink of cataclysmal war, a war which, as Forbes had said in so many words, would be the end. No wonder there were times when men such as Cassel and Forbes grew bitter as their keener minds groped and found the essential weakness in the infallibility of the dominant world controllers.

But they were helpless to avert the peril they foresaw, and must stand by and watch. That was the system; that was their life. They themselves were mere cyphers in the vast and somewhat incomprehensible scheme of things which made up human existence in the year of grace 2043. And if there were times when revolt seemed the logical step to take they were just as helpless, for the ruthless hold which the dreaded controllers, the politicians, the power maniacs and the smaller but no-less dangerous fanatics had on the peoples of the earth was unbreakable. Only swift and instant death would face a man like Cassel should he decide to leave the post into which he had been directed after volunteering for service in one or other of the subterranean stations. There was nothing to prevent him from stepping into the lift and rising hundreds of feet to the surface. Nothing but the knowledge that the moment he stepped out at the top concealed relays would notify his masters that he was leaving. A button pressed miles away and an unseen weapon would be touched off, a small but incredibly powerful projectile would be loosed and find its mark in his heart before he had covered a mile. There was no other deterrent; but likewise there was no other result but death. A few, a very few, had imagined themselves clever enough to escape. None had survived more than fifteen minutes after leaving the exit shaft. And the visiscreens below had seen and watched and told their dismal story. Yet often enough Cassel—and Forbes as well for that matter—toyed with the notion of leaving. It never got further than speculation because they realised the impossibility of success. And now in Cassel’s mind there was a dim hope that if world chaos did result from the crass stupidity of war, escape at least might be less impossible.

The days dragged on; days into weeks; weeks into months. Still the human race hovered on the edge of disaster, slowly but surely thrust closer and closer to senseless ruination by the men in whose careless hands the issue of war or peace was entrusted.

And Cassel and Forbes, together with their twenty-four assistants in Station Number Four, worked on as usual, tending the dangerous things in their care, constantly checking humidity and temperature, adjusting the artificial gravitational forces which were necessary to maintain equilibrium in the bombs themselves, working on the impulse generators so that stored energy would always be on tap to meet demands in the event of hostilities breaking out.

They were warned, too, that possibly those demands might come at any moment. It did nothing to lull their fears for the future, and many were the earnest conversations they held between themselves and the other three stations. Number Three was a bare twenty miles away, buried far beneath the white chalk of the Sussex Downs; Number One and Two were under the great arid deserts of Australia, half the world away. Each station had the same complement of men or women, twenty-six, so that one hundred and four persons were engaged in nursing the so-far unused potential of appalling destruction.

For many hours during his off-duty periods Cassel stared at the viewer screens as he roamed the surface of the earth with the eyes of the video scanner. Cut off from sharing the life and everyday existence of the people above, looking at their activities in this vicarious fashion was more than a form of relaxation. It became, for Cassel anyway, one of life’s necessities.

The great cities throbbed with vitality, their people scurrying like so many ants about their business. And when he scanned them more closely so that their features were plain he saw that little sign of the coming disaster was revealed. They laughed and talked and planned, yet were doomed by the greed of their controllers, unknowingly and ignorant of what was to come. Gone were the days when the people themselves had any say in government or the ordering of world events. Now they were numbers, without personality or identity. And as such were condemned to obliteration in the name of victory.

Only men like Cassel and Forbes in Station Four, or women like Mandy Lecrane at Station Three, had an inkling of how things were to shape themselves. Their intelligence was unhampered by extraneous considerations such as faced the surface dwellers of the city and countryside; theirs was a dedicated existence, though most of them would certainly have turned their backs on it had they been able to. And it was small consolation to know that when once the terrors of full scale war were unleashed on the people only they and their fellow guardians below the ground would be safe from the awful ravages of radiation injury once the bombs began to fall and the impact of the generative impulses were loosed on rival territories. Below ground, they were fully protected by the special anti-radiation screening of the stations; and if they should happen to be subjected directly to the fatal radiations on the surface that, too, was taken care of. Special treatment had been given them when they volunteered for service. They were immune from that peril, though Cassel, when he tried to think about the future objectively, wondered if it would not be better to be as vulnerable as everyone else.

Later on he was to change his mind on that score. But that was before the coming of the Terror.…

Forbes came on duty one morning to find the whole place on the a. . .