Evolution

Snowy was stark naked, but he wasn’t cold. He picked up his ration pack. It was a clear vacuum-packed bag containing dried banana, chocolate, and other goodies. He ripped into it with the only tool available to him, his teeth. The bag popped and air hissed. He dumped out the goodies on his bed and crammed some banana into his mouth. He felt like he’d been ru

But something was wrong with his bunk. He could see where he had been lying, his body had left a very clear imprint, like the gruesome dead-mother’s-bed scene in Psycho. He probed at the mattress. It was lumpy and hard. And the sheets on which he had been lying crumbled as he poked at them, like a mummy’s wrappings.

He felt a gathering sense of dread.

Ahmed was helping a girl from one of the upper bunks. Her name was June, so, naturally, she was known as Moon. She was a cutie, in or out of her clothes; but now, naked, she looked fragile, even ill, and Snowy felt nothing but an impulse to help her as she clambered awkwardly down from her bunk, flinching as her bare flesh brushed against the metal.

With Moon awake, Snowy started to feel self-conscious. He reached under his bunk, looking for his clothes.

But the floor seemed to be on a tilt. He straightened up, expecting his head to clear. But still the bare floor seemed askew, the vertical lines of the bunk frames leaning like drunks. Not good, Snowy thought. He could think of nothing reassuring that would tip up this hundred-ton emplacement.

He reached under his bed again. The cardboard box that had contained his clothes was gone. His clothes were still there, in a heap. But when he grabbed them the cloth just crumbled, like the sheets on his bed.

“Forget it,” Ahmed called, watching him. “Get your flight suit. They seem to have lasted.”

“Lasted?”

“It’s the plastic, I think.”

Snowy complied. He found his boots were still intact too, made of some imperishable artificial material. But he had no surviving socks, none at all; that might be a problem.

Snowy helped get some food inside Moon, while Ahmed continued his patroling.

The woken gathered in a circle, sitting on the lowest tier of the bunks. But there were only five of them, five out of the twenty who had been stored here. The five were Snowy, Ahmed, Sidewise, the girl Moon, and a young pilot called Bo

For a time they were silent, as they tucked into banana and chocolate and drank vials of water. Snowy knew that was a good idea. If you were dropped into some new situation it always paid to give yourself time to just sit and listen and think, and adjust to the new situation.

Snowy had pressed Ahmed about the CO. Ahmed showed him. Barking Madd’s body was shriveled and shrunken, literally mummified, just hardened flesh over the bone. The rest, the other fourteen, were the same.

Sidewise, predictably, couldn’t keep his mouth closed. Sidewise was an air warfare officer. He was a thin, intense man, and he had earned his handle for his habit of making sideways crablike moves whenever he got on a dance floor. Now he glanced around at the little group. “Fucking hell,” he said to Snowy. “So much for the safety margins.”

“Shut it,” Ahmed snapped.

Bo

Tally, for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. “There wasn’t one,” Ahmed said bluntly.

“So if not a tally, what woke us up?”

Ahmed shrugged. “Maybe the Pit has an automatic timer. Or maybe something just failed and it pitched us out.”

Bo

“Especially not humans like you, Bo

The bit of low humor seemed to relax the group, as Snowy had hoped.

Ahmed said, “This Pit might have been originally built for elephant embryos or whatever, but it was man rated. We all saw the lectures on the safety parameters, the reliability of the systems.”

“Sure,” Sidewise said. “But any system will fail, no matter how well it’s designed and built, if you give it enough time.” That silenced them. And Sidewise said, “Anybody noticed the clock?”

Most of the Pit’s instruments were dead. But there had been a backup mechanical clock that had drawn on a trickle of thermal energy from deep roots planted in the earth below. Before they submitted to the cold sleep they had all been shown the clock’s working — the cogs made of diamond that would never wear out, the dials that spa

But now Snowy saw that the clock’s hands had jammed against the end of their dials.

Snowy thought of his wife, Clara. She had been pregnant when he had gone into cold sleep. Fifty years? The kid would be born, grown, with kids of its own. Maybe even grandkids. No. He rejected the thought. It made no sense; you couldn’t have a human life with a gap of fifty years in the middle of it.

But Sidewise was still talking. “At least fifty years,” he said relentlessly. “How long do you think it would take for Barking’s body to mummify like that, for all our clothes to rot away?” That was the trouble with Sidewise, Snowy thought. He was never shy of saying what everybody else didn’t even want to think about.

“Enough,” Ahmed snapped. He was short, stocky, squat. “Barking is dead. I’m senior here. I’m in charge.” He glared around at them. “Everyone happy with that?”

Moon and Bo

Snowy shrugged. He knew Ahmed had served as a watch chief — the navy equivalent of a sergeant major. Snowy thought of him as competent, oddly thoughtful, but inexperienced. And, incidentally, not popular enough for a nickname. But there wasn’t anybody better qualified here, regardless of rank. “I suggest you get on with it, sir.”

Ahmed gave him a look of gratitude. “All right. Here’s the deal. We’ve had no tally. In fact, no contact from the outside. I can’t even tell how long since we last got a contact of any sort. Too many of the systems are down.”

Moon said, “So we don’t know what’s happening out there?”

Snowy said briskly, “Tell us what we do.”

“We get out of here. We don’t need protective gear. Enough of the external sensors are working to tell us that.”

That was a relief, Snowy thought. He wouldn’t have welcomed relying for protection on his NBC suit — nuclear-biological-chemical — if it had been subject to the same ferocious aging as his other clothes.

Ahmed hauled a steel trunk out from under one of the bunks. Inside were pistols, Walther PPKs, each packed in a plastic bag filled with oil. “I checked one already. We can test fire them outside.” He handed them around.

Snowy cracked the bag, wiped clean his pistol on crumbling bits of sheet, and tucked its reassuring mass into his belt. He rummaged through more of his surviving kit: helmets, life jackets, survival vests — a pilot’s equipment. The plastic components seemed more or less intact, but the cloth and rubber had failed. He took what he thought he would need. He regretted leaving behind his helmet, his venerable bone-dome, even if it was painted United Nations blue. Still, he somehow doubted he would be doing much flying today one way or another.