Buck Rogers- A Life in the Future Read online

  Finally he stood before a curving viewpane of armored glass. Directly before him, Wilma Deering sat by the bedside of Buck Rogers, who was in deep hypnosleep. She held his hand in hers.

  She's already started, Kane told himself. She knew even

  Buck Rogers

  before I did that the council would approve this program. . . .

  Wilma sensed his presence. She turned her head to meet his gaze and acknowledged the slight nod he gave her. That was his only message. It was enough. Bring him back, it said. Keep him alive and on his way to recovery.

  Chapter 8

  "Who . . . who are you?"

  Buck Rogers looked at the woman seated at his bedside. "I have the strangest feeUng I've seen you before," he said slowly.

  The attractive red-haired woman smiled at him. Even the sight of her was disturbing. She kept reminding him of Angelina. But that didn't make sense. Angle didn't even look like this woman. Their familiarity came from the intensity of life they resonated. Smart, quick-witted, dazzling smile. But he was sure now he had never seen this woman before.

  "You have seen me," she said quietly, speaking slowly to let her words sink into his still-unbalanced powers of reasoning. "Right here, with you. Many times."

  "I don't remember ever seeing you," he persisted.

  "You were sedated," she explained. "The drugs allowed you to hear me, even see me when your left eye resumed functioning. But the drug blocks out certain memories. It's really quite selective. You retain only those memories your subconscious judges as pleasant, or worthwhile, and eliminates all memory of pain."

  He studied the woman carefully. There was something about her he had never before encountered, a sense of sharing whatever was haunting him emotionally and the physical pain he had been enduring for so long.

  Buck Rogers

  Buck stopped short in his thinking. His mind was rushing off in different directions, learning little. Get a good grip on yourself, Ace, he ordered himself Start at the beginning. . . .

  She seemed to sense the questions roiling in his mind. "You asked who I am," she reminded him. Her hand rested tenderly on his forearm, one of the few places where his skin had not been burned. He felt a profound closeness to her. Was she a nurse? Whoever she was, what he was experiencing at this moment was hardly rare, he knew. It was common enough for injured men to fall for the women who nursed them back to life. At the same moment he ran that thought through his mind, he still felt there was something more than met the eye here. Again he castigated himself for not thinking clearly.

  "Yes, I did," he answered finally, grateful for her bringing him back on track.

  "My name is Wilma Deering. I'm a pilot."

  "Oh." He studied her again. "A pilot," he repeated. "Well, isn't that a coincidence? So am I."

  "I know." She smiled.

  "But. . . the way you spoke, it sounded as if you've been here with me for ages. You must be a nurse."

  "Not exactly, but you're close."

  "I'm confused."

  "Among other things, Buck Rogers—"

  "Just Buck, please."

  She nodded. "Among other things, I'm a medtech . . . medical technician. What you would call a paramedic."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And a psychologist."

  "That's good. Because I feel as if I'm going a little crazy," he said, beginning to relax with her easy manner. "I mean, first of all, I don't even know how I'm alive. When that engine came back at my chest, I figured it was curtains. Then there was the fire . . ." His voice trailed away, and his face grew serious. "Wilma?"

  'Tes?"

  "Where the hell am I?"

  She took a deep breath. This could be an unnerving time for this man. What he would learn in the next few minutes would be both a mental and physical shock, and the last thing he needed

  A Life in the Future

  was for his system to overload. But from what she'd determined so far, she felt he could handle the impact as long as she proceeded slowly and carefully.

  "You're in Pennsylvania. The MedTech Center in Wyoming—"

  "Wyoming is a state," he broke in.

  "Not many people know about this Wyoming. It's an advanced medical center. We named it Wyoming. Perhaps the designer of this center called it by that name because the state of Wyoming was his home."

  He shrugged. The brief physical movement was like a ballet movement to her practiced eye. His instincts and reflexes were coming back quickly.

  "You called it MedTech. I've never heard of that."

  "You're in an advanced medical center. Everything is underground. That way we can control the air flow, contents, and temperature very precisely, with no interference from external effects such as sunlight or cold. The computers run the system."

  "Okay." He closed his eye for a moment, breathing deeply. "One eye?" he said finally.

  'Tes."

  "But I'm lucky to be alive, right?"

  "More so than you can imagine."

  "Hell, I know a few pilots who have only one eye, and they can still fly anything."

  Another sign. Accepting a loss, a disability that would be a crutch to many men who were pilots, to whom good vision was ever3rthing. It seemed a good time to elevate his hopes.

  "This place, where you are now—"

  "MedTech, you said," he broke in, pleased with his recognition and memory of where he was. He frowned. "Sorry to interrupt, but I've been out of touch," he added ruefully. He looked about them. "I've not only never seen a place like this, I've never even heard about it."

  "I can understand that," she said cautiously. He had seized on her remark. This is incredible, she thought. Somewhere in that mind of his is a steel trap, and it's very much alive! He's quick, and his grasp of change gets better every moment. If this keeps up. . .

  He was thrusting and parrying words with her, and that was the best of all signs, for now Buck was jumping ahead of the

  Buck Rogers

  immediacy of their conversation. He's trying to trap me! she thought jubilantly. How marvelous!

  "Why?" he countered.

  "Why whatr

  "Why can you understand that I'm not familiar with this place? Wilma, as far as I know, and I am very privy to advanced military and scientific programs, this place simply doesn't exist."

  Her laughter was like silvery bells in a forest glade. "Very good, Mr. Rogers," she replied with feigned deliberation. "You're right, of course."

  "Look," he said quickly, his hand moving without a deliberate thought to rest upon hers. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that something here is way out of line. Your clothes, the medical gowns, the equipment around us, even the floors, the lighting, it's . . . well, it's just different, that's all. So I've got to ask you what I asked before, but sort of change the emphasis."

  "You've got the floor," she answered quickly, not wanting this frank back-and-forth exchange to end too quickly. His strength was already beginning to wane.

  "I do not have the floor. Wilma, I'm aware you've been devoted to taking care of me. I look like a locomotive ran over me and then made room for a couple of bulldozers to finish the job. I've seen my reflection in that glass partition. I look like the Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech. By all rights, your smile should be a look of revulsion, but I've never seen a hint of it. So you are very, very good, and I haven't yet figured why I'm getting the twenty-four-karat-gold treatment."

  "But you have some idea," she said, leading him on.

  "Not really. But I sure have some questions!"

  "Go ahead."

  He stifled a yawn. "I'm getting sleepy. Am I under drugs?"

  "Yes. They're in your system to help revitalize your strength. We have a system here, noninvasive, that monitors all your physiological parameters. That system—the bed you're lying on is an integral part of it—detects when you're overstressing yourself You need healing, surgery. The MedSensor detects when you need rest, and it sends an EM—"

  "Electromagnetic?
"

  "Yes. An EM signal into your brain at twenty-two hertz. That's your natural brain wave. It also begins to close down your

  A Life in the Future

  receptivity to external stimuli. You'll fall into a deep sleep soon, but not right away. You still have some time to go."

  "I'm starting to get some crazy ideas about things," he told her. "If I ask short questions, I'd appreciate short answers—but straight answers."

  "You will receive whatever you wish, but I warn you that what you hear probably won't be to your liking. It's bound to have a shock impact, and if I feel you're going into overload, you'll be in deep sleep immediately. I'd rather you simply drifted off"

  Again he shrugged. "Hey, don't hold back. Drop the hammer on me."

  Once more that dazzling smile. "In your idiom, shoot."

  "In my idiom? Why do you keep making me feel like a stranger to this land of yours? I feel like an alien."

  "You're not. Let's get that clear from the start."

  "Where am I?"

  'Tou already know that."

  "Yes ... in a place that, to the very best of my knowledge, doesn't exist, not even as a top-secret government program."

  "Go on."

  "Did I die in that crash?"

  She laughed easily. "Not quite, but you came very close. Let's simply say you were on the edge of a one-way trip. However, you did not die. You've been kept alive for a very long time." She hoped these hints would lead him to question his leap into the future.

  "How long?"

  "Hang on to your bed . . . tightly. Very tightly."

  "Lay it on me, Carrot Top," he said with a crooked smile.

  "Do you remember the story of Rip Van Winkle?"

  "Sure. A man falls asleep. Something—I don't remember what—keeps him zonked for years and years. He wakes up with a long white beard in a future time. Why?"

  "Do you think something like that might really happen?"

  He studied her carefully. "Wilma, you're setting me up for something."

  She nodded.

  "Are you trying to tell me," he said slowly, very deliberately, "that I'm somewhere in the future? From my own time, I mean?"

  'Tes."

  Buck Rogers

  "Why?"

  "It was the only way to keep you ahve. The medicine of your time couldn't save you. We can. In fact, we have. You're living proof"

  He closed his eye, leaning back in the bed. He fought off a sudden wave of drowsiness. "Whoa! Hold on, lady. You mean I've been kept on ice for—" He looked directly at her. "How long?"

  "First things first. It's obvious you were thinking about an experimental process of your day called cryogenics. It involved freezing a body in supercold liquid and, as you say, keeping it on ice until some future time when medical science could cure what was incurable while the patient was still alive."

  "Is that what—"

  She gestured for him to wait. "No, we didn't put you on ice. Nor did scientists of your time use such a procedure. It simply didn't work. The problems—crystallization of the blood, brittle tissues, hardening of vital nerve networks—were endless. You can't stop time and the aging process that way."

  He stared at her, knowing she was leading him to where he must believe the unbelievable. "Let me get the crux of all of this first. You know, the short synopsis." Again he fought off the wave of sleep descending on him.

  "How—what—happened? You're telling me I was kept alive artificially?"

  "Yes."

  "But how r

  "There was an experimental program in your day—secret, but heavily financed. It was a matter of dematerializing biological material."

  "That's me. Thanks," he said wryly.

  "In the most basic of terms, if a biological creature—you— could be reduced to the most essential, basic structure of his mind and body—"

  "That's a big if," he broke in. "You'd have to get all the way down to subatomics."

  Elation gripped her. "Exactly."

  "They—scientists—did that to me?"

  "Yes."

  He was hearing her words now in a thickening fog. "How?"

  "Laser dematerialization."

  A Life in the Future

  "You're telling me they reduced me to primordial soup?"

  "Much more than that. The best way to say it is that you were transformed into a state of quantum energy. You—or rather, the atoms and subatomic particles of your body—were reduced to light quanta."

  "Photons?"

  "Yes. This enabled them to accelerate what was you to the speed of light. Are you familiar with time dilation?"

  "Yeah." He felt he was mumbling, groping in his memory for what he knew of mass and the speed of light. "Einstein. The old boy's theories—realities, I mean—that if you travel at the speed of light, time stops."

  "Excellent."

  "But—but you can't go faster than light. Infinite mass. Crazy as hell, but they proved it would . . ."

  "That's enough for now. You'll sleep deeply."

  He was spiraling downward, struggling to ask the one question burning in his mind. "What—what year is this?"

  "Twenty-four twenty-nine."

  He gaped. The enormity of the numbers overwhelmed him. "Four hundred and thirty-three years," she added as his eye closed. The last words he heard were, "Welcome, Buck Rogers, to the twenty-fifth century."

  "Good God." He was never sure if he really spoke those words as consciousness left him.

  Chapter 9

  "So I'm going to be a descendant of the original bionic man . . ." Buck laughed, a sound that startled him.

  'Tou were going to say something else," Wilma prompted.

  "Oh, yeah. I don't suppose you ever heard of that television show about two people who got torn up in accidents and were rebuilt through bionic science."

  "Buck, it's been more than four hundred years."

  "I know. Forget it. I was going to add that I feel like a character in some movie. And the heroine in this story is the prettiest I've ever seen."

  "Compliments," she said with a smile, "will get you everywhere. But to answer those questions, you may be surprised to know that bionics was not the answer. Oh, it helped, but it's just stopgap medicine. It's an excuse, really, for doing a job that medical science of your day couldn't yet manage. The real answer is genetic control and helping the body to do what nature created it to do."

  "Which is . . . ?"

  "Heal itself"

  Buck gestured to take in his entire body. "You can heal someone who's ill or injured," he said defensively, "but this—what's left of me—well, I'll put it this way. I'll take all the artificial

  A Life in the Future

  parts that work, thank you."

  "We'll do better than that. Look," she said earnestly, holding his hand in both of hers, "we'll make you as good as, if not better than, the original. But we'll do it with biology, not bionics."

  "That sounds as if you're going to grow me back in a nutrient tank."

  She leaned back, sharing his smile. "In a sense you're right. The world is nothing like you remember, and—"

  'Tou've never explained that. Only hints and inferences. I get the idea I'm in for a shock, or I may not like what I find."

  "Possibly. But you have an adaptive mind," she responded quickly. "As I told you before, everything in due time and in its proper order. The first priority, above all else, is a whole, well, and fully functioning Buck Rogers."

  She halted, obviously searching for the words that would best explain their program. "Let me put it this way. We know how to rebuild you as a bionic man. With several centuries of technology behind us, the science of replacement parts of the human body is old hat. But it has several major flaws, and they're as much psychological as they are physical. In fact—"

  "Let me guess," he broke in suddenly, his manner intense. "It's like the mechanical man from the Wizard of Oz."

  "I'm really not acquainted with your fantasy world. Buck."
r />   "Oh, it's fantasy, all right. It was a movie, about a Kansas farm girl who gets picked up by a tornado, along with her dog, and is somehow whirled off into a fantasy land and—" He chuckled. "Never mind. The point is that there was a mechanical man in the movie, a sort of lovable, clanking parody of a man. But he was miserable because, while his body and brain worked, he didn't have a heart. No ticker inside his chest. His life's dream was to get himself a heart so he'd be a real, whole man."

  "Is that what you believe might happen with you?"

  He laughed. "That question is loaded v/ith traps, so I think I'll step around it and just say that I don't know. I've never been bionic or mechanical or anything but myself"

  "That is precisely what we want," Wilma said immediately. "But you'll be even better than the original. When you get into the surgical and restructuring program, the idea is to make you not only what you were, but an improvement."

  "Hell of a speech, Wilma."

  Buck Rogers

  She flushed. "I didn't mean for it to sound like one."

  "Take it again, one step at a time." His expression showed his seriousness. "Please?" he added.

  'Tou are familiar with biogenetics?"

  "Somewhat."

  "All right. A good proportion of your skin was burned. You already know that."

  "I know. You can prevent the escape of water from a body with temporary measures until the skin has time to scar. You end up with skin that's like wrinkled tarpaper, but it's better than nothing." He sighed.

  "That won't happen with you."

  His one eye widened with surprise. "Why not?"

  "Your genetic code was determined with a small patch of unburned skin. The computers provided the code down to the smallest detail. Since you arrived here, we've been busy growing your own skin. Soon we'll be able to replace every burned part of your body with that skin. Since there's no danger of rejection, the old and the new will join together and follow your genetic pattern."

  He remained silent, then placed a finger over the mutilated space where his other eye had been. "And what about this? A miniature television camera? Fiberoptic hookups to the optic nerves? That's bionics, no matter how you cut it."