Bikini Planet Page 6

  “Be silent.”

  “Or be forever silent.”

  Mandy put her hand to her mouth, looked at Norton, kissed her fingertips, blew him the kiss, then looked back at the empty screen.

  “Put this on,” said one of the three.

  Norton started to reach for his clothes, but one of the men handed him a mask similar to theirs. It was the face of an animal, although nothing he recognised; some kind of composite creature, but feathered like a bird.

  As he slipped the mask over his face, he was instantly blind. It wrapped itself around his head and the world became totally dark, absolutely silent. He tried to pull the mask off, but his arms were seized and he was dragged away, out into the deeper darkness of the unknown future!

  Wayne Norton didn’t know where he was. Again.

  He was naked again. Still naked.

  This time he was surrounded by the shadowy outlines of his three abductors, a bright light was aimed into his eyes, and he was tied to a chair. So chairs did still exist.

  “You are John Wayne?” asked one of them.

  “Yes,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “You don’t have to answer him,” said a different voice.

  “I know I don’t have to answer him,” said the first.

  “We have ways of making you talk,” said yet another voice, followed by a snort of laughter. “I said it, I said the line. We have ways of making you talk.” He said it again.

  “But I am talking,” said Norton. “Listen. This is my voice. I’m talking. What do you want to know?”

  “I thought you’d be taller,” said the second voice.

  “I’m sitting down,” said Norton.

  “You’re not the John Wayne,” said the first voice.

  Hundreds of years in the future, and they still watched John Wayne movies…?

  To give himself time to think, Norton gazed at the dark shapes of his interrogators. Although they had removed their masks, he still couldn’t make out their faces. He felt as if there was someone else behind him, and he managed to half-turn his head. The room was cramped, the ceiling very low, and it was too dark to see.

  It was difficult to judge how much time had passed since he’d been seized. More than an hour, probably. Less than three, certainly. He didn’t know where he was, but neither did he know where he had been. When he first awoke, he was indoors. He was still inside.

  He’d been led away on foot, then sat down for a while. Unable to see or hear, neither had he felt any movement. Had he been in a car? Or even a plane? He had no way of knowing.

  He had no way of knowing anything, in fact.

  His abduction could have been a trick. These were Brendan’s men, trying to find out more about Norton than he’d originally admitted. He might have been only a few yards from where he was previously held. That could be why he hadn’t been given his clothes.

  In any case, because he was still naked, it seemed unlikely he’d been out in the open during his journey here. In this weird world, however, who could tell?

  Norton certainly couldn’t.

  “The John Wayne?” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You would if you were really born in the twentieth century,” said the third voice.

  “I was.”

  Apart from Brendan and Mandy, these were the only people he had encountered in the future. And it seemed they knew far more about the past than the first two he’d met.

  “Who was John Wayne?” asked the second voice.

  “I was,” said Norton. “And I am. It was a common name in my century. Lots of guys were called John. Lots of families were called Wayne. That means there were lots of John Waynes.”

  “The John Wayne we know was taller,” said the first voice.

  “We think he was taller,” said the third voice. “He was usually on a horse. John Wayne was a cowboy.”

  “What I want to know,” said the second voice, “is why they were called ‘cowboys’ when they rode horses.”

  “Because,” said Norton, “it was their job to drive herds of cows.”

  “To drive them?” said the second voice. “Cows had engines in the twentieth century?”

  “And because they were driven they were called steers!” said the first voice.

  “Autobiotics has a longer history than we thought,” said the third voice.

  Or maybe that was the first voice. Now that they were talking amongst themselves, Norton lost track. He concentrated on his own predicament. Despite being attached to his seat, there were no ropes holding him down. He could move his limbs a short way, he realised, but it became very hard to lift them any distance. When he leaned forward, he was always dragged back. It was as if he was held by invisible elastic bands.

  “They were using child labour, you notice,” said one of the voices. “Hence the word ‘cowboys’.”

  “Were you a cowboy as a child, John Wayne?” asked another.

  “Er… no,” said Norton.

  “But you were a cowman as an adult?”

  “Er… yeah.”

  “Was that before you became a secret agent?”

  “A secret agent?” Norton remembered his televised exaggeration to Mandy. “It was after. Well, at the same time. I used to spy on enemy ranchers.”

  “Did you know James Bond?”

  “Yeah. By reputation. Not personally. He was licensed to kill. I was only licensed to… er… give speeding tickets.”

  “What were they?”

  “If someone went too fast… er… if a cowboy went too fast… er… he had to pay money as… er…”

  “You had gold and silver coins as currency, is that true?”

  “Not gold,” said Norton. “Not in my time. Coins were called silver, but they weren’t. Not in my time.”

  “In other words, the coins themselves were not valuable, they were merely part of a fiduciary financial system?”

  “You said it,” said Norton because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “But you had paper money, and that was valuable.”

  “Yeah, bills were worth more than coins.”

  “As we thought!”

  “Do you still have dollars?” Norton asked, checking on what Mandy and Brendan had told him.

  “No, but we do use coins for low-value transactions. They have no intrinsic value, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Norton.

  “These dollars, as they were known, they were kept in banks ?”

  “Some of them, yeah.”

  “And what was the relationship between banks and bank robbers?”

  “Relationship?”

  “The banks employed bank robbers, did they?”

  “No, not exactly. Bank robbers tended to be… er… self-employed. It was their job to… er… rob banks.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “That’s where the money was.”

  “Because money, this cash, was the common medium of exchange?”

  “Yeah,” said Norton, which seemed the appropriate answer.

  The three men glanced at each other, nodding. Because they had deep voices, he presumed they were men. Although here in the future…?

  Here in the future, it seemed, the twentieth century meant cowboys and bank robbers. They were a hundred years off, but Norton wasn’t very surprised. He always got the centuries mixed up. The Declaration of Independence, for example, was in seventeen seventy-six—which was in the eighteenth century.

  “Shall we punish him?” one of them suddenly said.

  “Why?” asked Norton. “What for?”

  “Why not?” said another.

  “A beating never hurt anybody,” said the other.

  “It must have done!” said Norton.

  “Let’s find out,” said the one who had suggested punishment, as he stood up and stepped toward Norton. “Answer the question.”

  “What question?” Norton tried to lean further back as the shadowy figure came closer, but he couldn’t
move.

  “Did I ask you a question?”

  “Er… no.”

  “Don’t say ‘no’ to me!” snarled the man, and he lashed out with his hand.

  Norton was held rigid. All he could do was close his eyes. There was a whack! But he felt nothing. He realised that the man had punched his fist into the palm of his other hand to make the sound.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” said the man, as he turned and went back.

  “Well done,” said one of the others, and he produced his own sound effects with a few handclaps.

  “Yes,” agreed the third, who also briefly applauded.

  They had all seen too many bad films, Norton realised.

  “What we would like to establish, John Wayne,” said one of them, “is precisely when your previous existence ended.”

  “I’m sure that was in the interview with Miss Mandy,” said Norton. “June 26, 1968.”

  His captors could only have known about Norton because they had seen him on television. The broadcast must have included Brendan’s address so customers could go along, just like in a commercial for a used-car showroom. And Norton had been up for sale, exactly like a used car. Until he was hijacked.

  “That was after you went into the ammunition store,” said one of the other two.

  “What?” said Norton.

  “You were wounded,” said the man, “and then the storeroom exploded. That was when you died.”

  Norton stared through the gloom at him. He hadn’t understood very much during his time in the twenty-third century, but one thing he was certain of: He hadn’t arrived here through the Pearly Gates.

  “I didn’t die,” he said. “I was in suspended animation.”

  “Why?” asked one of them.

  “When?” asked another.

  “We know when,” said the other. “He told us when. The question is ‘how?’ ”

  “I don’t know how,” said Norton. “Or why.”

  “But you know where?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Alamo.”

  “What?”

  “The fort was overrun by enemy soldiers. All your colleagues were being permanently killed. You escaped into suspended animation.”

  “Just hold your… er,” said Norton. “Just hold on a minute.” He looked at them all. “You’ve heard of John Wayne? The other John Wayne? And you’ve heard of the Alamo? You must have seen The Alamo, the movie. John Wayne was in it. I’m not that John Wayne. That was all invented. It didn’t happen. It was a film.”

  “It didn’t happen?”

  “No.” Norton paused. “Okay, it did happen. The film was based on history—”

  “On history!”

  “Yeah, a true historical event, but—”

  “A true historical event!”

  The trio were becoming very excited. One of them stood up; so did another.

  “This is what we need. He’s a valuable resource.”

  “Priceless.”

  “We can’t afford to have him.”

  “We can’t afford not to have him.”

  “He could be ours.”

  “He should be ours.”

  “Yes, possibly, but that’s not why we’re all here.”

  “Excuse me,” said Norton. “Could I be untied? Could I have a drink?”

  “He wants a drink.”

  “Maybe he wants to go to the saloon.”

  “For a glass of red-eye!”

  “I’ve never been to Texas,” said Norton. “I wasn’t at the Alamo. Neither was the other John Wayne. He was playing a part in a movie. He was acting the role of… er… Jim Bowie. No! He was Davy Crockett.”

  “We know that.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Norton. “The battle of the Alamo, the real battle of the Alamo, okay, it occurred in the nineteenth century. Cryonic technology didn’t exist then. How many cowboys have been defrosted? I’ll tell you: none. Because I’m the oldest person ever to have been thawed out. Isn’t that right?”

  That was what Brendan had told him, and it made sense.

  Resurrection technology must have been brand new in 1968. Before he became an unwilling participant, Norton had been completely unaware of its existence.

  And he certainly hadn’t seen it in a Western.

  He imagined how it could have been: unable to dig a deadly bullet from one of the Earp brothers, Doc Holiday rushed the fatally wounded victim into the Dodge City suspended-animation chamber for the medics of the future to save his life.

  “So you claim,” said one of the three.

  “But you must know,” said Norton. “There must be records of when cryonics began.”

  No one said anything.

  “You mean there aren’t any records?” he said.

  In the shadows, he could make out three heads nodding.

  “Brendan knew I couldn’t have been frozen in 1947,” he said.

  “Because that’s his trade,” said one of the men. “Specialist knowledge handed down through the generations.”

  “But there’s no record of it,” said another.

  “There’s no record,” said the third, “of anything.”

  They lapsed into silence again.

  Norton looked at them. “Of anything?” he said.

  “No.”

  “There must be newspapers,” he said.

  “No.”

  “No papers.”

  “No paper.”

  “There must be books,” he said.

  “No.”

  “We said.”

  “No paper.”

  “What happened?” he asked. “Or is there no record of it?”

  “Don’t make a joke of the greatest tragedy—”

  “—disaster—”

  “—catastrophe—”

  “—in the entire history of the world.” The man paused. “Or as much history as we know.” He laughed for a moment, then glanced at his two companions. “Sorry.”

  “After your time, John Wayne,” said one of the others, “books became redundant. The printed word ceased to exist because there was no need for printing. Data was stored electronically, and it was all available for instant retrieval. Everything that was in books was copied onto computer. The entire sum of human knowledge was accessible to everyone.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “Until there was a sickness—”

  “—an epidemic—”

  “—a plague—”

  “—the greatest disaster in history.”

  “On Day Zero, everything was wiped out.”

  Fingers snapped again.

  “Just like that.”

  “There must still have been old books,” said Norton.

  “Some. Not many. Not enough. Paper was a valuable resource, but nothing lasts forever. No trees, no paper. Apart from the most ancient and precious volumes, books were recycled for more basic human needs.”

  “You remember books, do you?”

  “Yeah,” said Norton.

  “You held them, you touched them, you turned their pages?”

  “Yeah.” And he had done. Sometimes. “All the time.”

  “You lived in the golden age, John Wayne.”

  “Did you read Shakespeare?”

  “Sure,” said Norton, knowing this was the right answer. “To read or not to read, that is the question. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your magazines. Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain… er… Mickey Spillane. Drugstore paperbacks, fifty cents a copy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ah.”

  “Oh. Ah.”

  “You mean he’s genuine?” asked a new voice, a fourth voice.

  Norton had been right. There was someone else in the room, someone behind him. He tried looking back again, but his head was held rigid.

  “As far as we can tell,” said one of the three, “he is from the twentieth century.”

  “But we cannot guarantee his occupation,” said the second.

  “Or his name,” said t
he third.

  The man stepped out of the shadows and stood in front of Norton. He was tall. It seemed that everyone was tall. He leaned closer, into the light. His hair was long, straight, pure white. His face was pure black.

  “Who are you?” asked Norton.

  “I’m the police,” said the man.

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “That’s what they all say.” The man smiled. “If you were a cop, you should know that.”

  “I was. And I do.”

  “Once a cop, always a cop. Did they say that in your day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good. Because it’s true. I’m your new boss.”

  Norton looked at the man. The man looked at him.

  “I’m a cop?” said Norton. “Still a cop?”

  “Yes, and I’m your colonel.”

  “There aren’t any colonels in the police.”

  “There are now. Do you want to tell me your name?”

  “It’s John Wayne,” said Wayne Norton.

  “If you say so,” said the man. “And I’m Colonel Travis.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Hello, my little cutie,” said the first convict, who was waiting in the woods ahead of her.

  “Hell—,” Kiru said, as she retreated behind one of the trees, “—o.”

  “Hello, you doll,” said the second one, who was already standing there.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, as she moved sideways.

  “Some call it hell,” said the first.

  “But you must have come from heaven,” said the second.

  “That’s why she looks like an angel,” said a third, who materialised at her side.

  They appeared to be human, they sounded Terran, but they were the most alien creatures of all: men.

  “Nice to see you.”

  “Very nice.”

  “Ever so nice.”

  “You must be lonely.”

  “Out here on your own.”

  “But not anymore.”

  All three of them were gazing at her, grinning, leering. Then they glanced at each other.

  “I saw her first.”

  “Didn’t!”

  “Did!”

  “She’s mine!”

  “Mine!”

  “Mine!”

  They suddenly became silent, looking around. The three had become four, and this one really did look like an alien. Small, broad. Staring at Kiru with crazed, unblinking eyes. So scary that the other three all stepped back.