The sound of a gunshot rang through the reactor. Cohaagen fell backwards, hit in the shoulder and arm. Melina stood by the elevator, blasting away. Quaid ran to kick the gun out of Cohaagen’ s reach and saw that the man had somehow managed to keep hold of the detonator. No, Quaid thought, the man was bluffing. Cohaagen wanted to live as much as anyone. He wouldn’t be eager to set off the blast that killed him.
Cohaagen saw the doubt in his eyes. He grinned evilly. And activated the detonator.
A huge explosion shook the room, destroying almost everything except the mandala, whose charge Quaid had removed. Cohaagen had not been bluffing!
A hole had been torn in the quartz roof. A powerful suction drew everything toward the aperture. Objects and bodies twirled up in a spiral, an inverted tornado.
Cohaagen clung to a piece of the reactor. Melina lodged herself in a corner. Quaid, sucked halfway toward the hole, made a Herculean effort to crawl down against the wind to reach the mandala. It had not been destroyed, and it was the key; if it remained operative, there was still a chance! How much destruction did the reactor tolerate before it triggered its own destruct mechanism? Had the No’ui allowed for the possibility of unrelated damage, such as a meteorite striking it? Maybe it wasn’t hair-triggered. He could only hope so!
He grabbed hold of a rope made taut by the wind and pulled himself down. The dome had been holed, but as long as there was a rush of wind out the hole, there was air to breathe. When that air ran out . . .
Cohaagen pulled himself over and stationed himself between Quaid and the mandala. He knew that it wasn’t necessarily over.
Quaid held on with his left hand and reached for the hieroglyphic palm print with his right.
“Don’t do it!” Cohaagen screamed above the rushing roar. “You’ll kill everybody!”
Quaid hesitated. Cohaagen’s voice rang with passionate intensity. Quaid was assailed by sudden doubts. How did he know that the memories Kuato had allowed to surface were real? What if they had been implanted, too? If Cohaagen were right, the alien machine would kill everyone on Mars. And Quaid would be responsible.
Cohaagen kicked at him, still arguing. “Every man! Every woman! Every child!” He furiously bashed Quaid’s left hand with his heel. “They’ll die, Quaid! They’ll die!”
Quaid’s mind was suddenly filled with the faces of every man, woman, and child he had seen in Venusville, the listless faces of people who had been drained of every vestige of pride and self-esteem. People who had been used and discarded like so much human refuse, mercilessly, remorselessly, by the very man who was now pleading for their lives.
One face in particular stood out: the deformed face of the child Quaid had glimpsed briefly from Benny’s cab. That memory had not been implanted. It was as real as the pain in his left hand. What kind of future would that child have under the rule of a man like Cohaagen?
Quaid knew the answer. He’d seen it all around him in Venusville. Cohaagen was lying—again. Cohaagen was playing games with his mind—again. Cohaagen was trying to manipulate him just as he manipulated everyone else. Cohaagen would say anything, do anything, to hold on to his power. He was the one who would destroy every man, every woman, every child on Mars, if he was allowed to continue.
But this time Quaid would stop him.
“Bullshit!” he shouted at Cohaagen. He stretched and placed his right palm against the hieroglyphic hand.
He felt a tingle. A voice seemed to speak in his mind. Done.
An awesome low-pitched rumble shook the control room. It was starting up! The other controls must have been mere window dressing, or intended for spot adjustments. Cohaagen had destroyed them, but it might have been like breaking the knobs off a radio: it might make it hard to adjust, but the guts of it remained operative.
All the mechanical systems started to move. The ancient machinery creaked and groaned. Hundreds of rods simultaneously descended.
Cohaagen’s armhold receded into the floor. He had to let go. He was sucked up to the ceiling and out the hole.
The rods dropped out of their sheaths into the pegholes in the ice. The whole glacier, far below, started to glow. The process was starting, and operating on its own now; Quaid’s action had been enough. The chemical processes would begin, and the nuclear fusion, and would continue until all Mars had air and heat and liquid water.
Melina was sucked closer to the hole. Quaid let himself be blown over toward her and tried to hold her in place. If they could just hang on until the pressure equalized—but that seemed impossible. First it would drop, here, finishing them.
All the junk in the abyss was regurgitated. There were more bodies, rifles, pieces of moles, rocks, sand. When it was all gone, and the air pressure dropped, the two of them would die too—but Mars and mankind would be saved. At least he would die in Melina’s arms; if he had to go, that was the way he wanted to do it.
The chamber filled with a hurricane of mist. It had a strange smell, and was warm and damp.
It was the air and water vapor from the reactor! Already the process was operating to make the new atmosphere!
More refuse was disgorged. Benny. Richter, still trailing his length of cable.
Melina was pulled toward the hole. Quaid clung to her but was drawn along with her by the unremitting wind. In fact, it was stronger now, as the No’ui’s factory gained momentum. Quaid knew that most of the air was going out through other vents, all around the planet, but as long as this hole remained, it would leak out here too.
They sailed up toward the dome, still linked. Quaid stretched out and tried to block the hole, but the pressure was too strong. It doubled him over, shoving him and Melina out.
Outside the wind quickly dissipated. Quaid and Melina dropped to the side of the volcano, a few yards from Cohaagen’s body. That was a grotesque thing, its eyeballs ruptured, tongue swollen and protruding, and blood at the ears. Cohaagen had had countless people executed by depressurization for such minor things as resisting false arrest; now he had been served similarly. That was justice.
The air was drawn out of Quaid’s lungs. He and Melina gasped for breath.
Quaid squinted, trying to protect his eyeballs as long as possible. Even in this hopeless state, he was fighting for life, for just a few more seconds!
A mammoth geyser of water vapor and gas was spraying out of the dome, forming a huge white cloud. The warmth of it blasted out at them.
Quaid grasped Melina’s hands and felt her fingers squeezing his. They were dying together, knowing that Mars and mankind would live.
The mountain vibrated as the No’ui equipment intensified its operation, and wind tore out of it. The dirt was shaken from the side of Pyramid Mountain, revealing traces of an actual alien pyramid underneath. Its nature had been concealed, but now it needed to be hidden no longer.
Quaid’s and Melina’s mucous membranes started to bleed. They clung tightly to each other’s hands, knowing that this was the end.
Then the expanding cloud engulfed them. Drops of warm water splattered against their bodies, and bits of fluff sailed by. Those were the winged seeds of the special plants the No’ui had engineered, he knew, being flung out on the wind, to take root and start converting the hostile Mars soil to organic matter so that regular terrestrial plants could grow there later. It was the start of the terraforming of Mars, making of it an Earthly paradise. He was very glad he had seen this before he died.
Then he realized that he was breathing! Melina was panting beside him. They drew in more air, hungrily. They looked at each other. Was this the other side of death, and their spirits were breathing free?
The cloud moved on, but they still could breathe. They looked up.
The red Martian sky was turning blue in the region above the mountain.
The new air was spreading out, and they were close enough to receive its benefit! That was why they had suffered but not died, and now the air was thickening, and they were breathing almost normally! They were not dying after all
!
They recovered some of their strength and sat up. They became aware of the chill of the air. It had burst from the mountain warm, but as it expanded it cooled. Snowflakes were falling on them. But the ground itself was warming now, as the heat of the nuclear reactor spread out, so they were merely cold, not freezing.
They noticed the snowflakes on each other’s hair. They touched them and licked them off each other’s faces.
They looked around again, awed. The sky was blue, but it was snowing more heavily now.
They clung to each other, for warmth, but they also kissed. Life was wonderful!
That thought was echoed in the shouts and cheers that rang through Venusville.
All of the domes on Mars had collapsed when the reactor kicked in. Deprived of their protection, people fell where they stood, in an agony of depressurization. The wealthy tourists writhed in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, and the miners still at work in the great mining hub had dropped their tools and stumbled to their knees.
For the rebels, the shattered dome was almost a welcome sight. Depressurization was a horrible way to die, but it would at least put a quick end to their slow death by suffocation. In The Last Resort, Tony had just enough strength left to shake a weak fist at the sky and then—
A miracle occurred. Thumbelina stirred on the floor and then sat up. The bartender raised his head from his chest and inhaled. Tony stared at them, stunned. He took a deep breath, and then another. There was air! There shouldn’t be—the great fans hadn’t started up again—but there was! He gulped in great lungfuls and laughed out loud. There was air!
In a moment, they were all laughing. Soon they were up and dancing a jig of joy. They danced out into the street and were joined by others—men, women, and children—who joined in their crazy conga line as it wound its way around the Venusville Plaza and through the streets. There was air! The tyranny of the Cohaagen monopoly on air was broken!
It did seem like a miracle.
Quaid and Melina looked down at their feet. The snow was melting as it landed, and the ground was wet and spongy. Water was trickling over the parched soil. There would be some erosion—but already the No’ui plants were landing. They would be rooting quickly, taking hold of the dirt, anchoring it, turning it into humus. Red Mars would become green!
Melina nestled up to him. “Well, Mr. Quaid, I hope you’ve enjoyed your trip to our lovely planet.”
“ ‘Enjoy’ is not the word,” he replied somewhat gruffly. They had won the right to move on, as people and as a species, but the horrible cost remained too fresh in his mind.
“Come on. Didn’t you see the sights, kill the bad guys, and save the planet?” She smiled seductively at him. “You even got the girl of your dreams.”
She was teasing him, but her familiar words chilled him. “I had a terrible thought,” he said. “What if this really is just a dream?”
“Then kiss me quick,” she said seriously. “Before you wake up.”
Quaid cast the specter away. He took Melina in his arms and kissed her robustly. He was through with dreaming; reality was much better.
Piers Anthony, Total Recall
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