Other Books by B. V. Larson

Mech

Mech 2

Shifting

Deadly Weapon

Spyware

SEEKER SERIES

Blood of Gold

Blood of Silver

HAVEN SERIES

Amber Magic

Sky Magic

Shadow Magic

Dragon Magic

Blood Magic

Visit www.BVLarson.com for more information.

VELOCITY

by

B. V. Larson

Copyright © 2010 by the author.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book (not just the sample) and did not purchase it, please purchase your own legal copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

Author’s Note: VELOCITY is an Anthology of fifteen short stories. Most of the tales are Science Fiction mixed with Horror. Others might be called Dark Fantasy. Many of the stories have been previously published in various magazines over the years. Some of them have won awards. None of them have been previously gathered into an anthology.

Table of Contents:

The Barrier – What does it take to go faster than light?

Symptoms of Godhood – How far can you modify a body and still call the results human?

Discharged – A long war and an even longer stay in an automated hospital.

Teeth at Bedtime – Technology follows us everywhere.

The Insect Requirement – Great sacrifices are required for Earth’s early colonists

Blind Eyes – If we can design our own children, how far will we go?

TA96 – Do our genes belong to us?

Zundra’s Movies – A future where video is created with the mind, and insanity is fun to watch.

Pinball – A young man builds his own watchdog.

Love Aboard the Kamadeva – A love triangle between two desperate souls and a digital mirage.

The One-Way Gang – Leaving Earth is easy, but you can never come back.

Rusted Metal – What has spent the last century in the basement?

Starplay – A window into the universe becomes a door.

Lunar Lotto – Death comes instantly to outlaws in vacuum.

The Rollers – Crime has been mostly eliminated by removing all forms of cash... Mostly.

The Barrier

(In the great void between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, a soul is lost. Telescopes on Io note the anomaly—a brilliant pinprick of light seven degrees off from Sirius. The popping of a flashbulb in the heavens. The spacestation Ulysses orbits Saturn in a cylindrical region of space known to be one of the Lagrange points in the complex gravity system of Saturn’s moons. The Station forever chases after the moon Hyperion, but never catches up. The tense minds aboard the Ulysses also watch the brilliant anomaly, and understanding it, they despair.)

“Damn,” said the computer.

I heard more quiet expletives. I glanced at the general, but he said nothing. There was no need to question the bio-processor’s single, dismal remark. I knew exactly how the computer and the general felt. The test had been another failure, the pilot had been killed.

The pilot.

I frowned and remembered Colonel Richard Boyd. Summertime beer-and-fishing trips, cruising the outboard around the delta. The time we took the girls to Catalina and Nancy fell overboard. The way his uniform always seemed to fit just right. The brownish burn scar on the back of his hand. Memories of a dead friend.

Another man killed. Another victim, smashed into the Barrier like a wineglass hurled against a concrete wall.

Soon it will be my turn. My chance to fly a human trash compactor, I thought. But I didn’t really feel that way. I didn’t feel—bitter. I felt—no, I knew that I would be the one to break the Barrier. As soon as the new ships were in, the latest models, I would get my chance to make history. I was scared, but inside a part of me ached to have my chance. I suppose the psychs wouldn’t have sent me out here if I felt differently.

“What were the losses like at Edwards, back in the fifties?” the general asked me, as if he didn’t know. Idly, his hands rubbed at the holster flap of the antiquated Colt .45 that he always seemed to wear.

“The pilots trying to break the sound barrier? About one in four. We’re running one in three,” I replied. Not all of them died, not right away, at least. The old Demon usually gave them two or three shots at it before swatting them down with finality. “Sort of like playing Russian roulette with two chambers loaded,” I added, smiling grimly.

The general grunted his acknowledgement. Then he eyed me critically. “Cold feet, Major Davis?”

“No sir.”

The general pulled out a pocket computer and tapped at it. “How many ships left?”

“Four, all obsolete models, sir. Plus two drones.”

“How many pilots?” he asked, knowing full-well the answer to the question, as he had the first one. He was a stickler for procedure, the general. I suspected that it helped to keep him going.

“Just you and I, sir,” I replied.

The general side-glanced at me.

“Two, sir,” I amended. The brief calm that had fallen over the control room during the test faded into memory and the usual clamor resumed. Everyone breathed freely again. The test had been a failure, yes, but it was over. Everyone knew that would be the last test until we received new ships and pilots. Another horrible failure, but at least we were finished for now. Technicians clicked at touchboards and slid styluses over reflective pads, checking results and reporting them. Acceleration chairs swiveled and creaked. Coffee cups were raised to dry lips.

I barely noticed them. My eyes, like those of General Crossfield, were gripped by the main viewing screen. There wasn’t much to see. The Ulysses’ computer-controlled cameras had finally caught up with the wreck and locked-in. They were tracking debris that was burnt, compressed down and mostly vaporized by the implosion.

Inside I felt a sick sort of shock, as if I had been punched in the guts while laughing at a joke. I knew I was taking Colonel Boyd’s death harder than most. I had never watched a real friend die before, not like that.

Oh sure, I had seen plenty of pilots die, but they were mostly fly-ins, dirtside hot-shots—not friends. There had been times of course, during the first Bug invasion, especially during the low-orbit battles over Sao Paolo and Stockholm, when I had seen a fellow pilot get hit and go down burning. But not like this.

When the Barrier got you, you were more than dead; you just didn’t exist anymore. Even if they did find a few of your molecules out there, maybe attached to some fused bit of collapsed matter, the molecules were changed. Pressed down into neutrons, mostly. It took theoretical physicists to figure out what was human and what was ship.

“Damn,” General Crossfield said as he surveyed the wreckage. We had all been saying a lot of that lately.

“Maybe we should try a few more of the drones, sir,” I suggested. “They don’t work past eighty percent, but the techs seem to learn a bit more each time.”

“No drones.”

I pursed my lips and grimaced. Drones never worked because their computer systems crashed at about eighty percent of the speed of light every time. Fortunately, however, humans seemed to keep operating until the bitter end.

“Sir, the support bases on Luna have notified us that there will be a new shipment of test pilots and better-designed spacecraft here in less than a week.”

The general was silent for a moment, as if he hadn’t heard. Then he wheeled on me, the heels of his vacc-boots clacking on the plastic decking.

“We’ve got to break the Barrier, Major Davis. We’ve got to have FTL. We’ve got to have it now.”

“I know the Bugs got your family General,” I said, my mind reeling in disbelief as I spoke the words. “But that’s no reason to send us both out to die in obsolete ships we’ve proven don’t work.”

We both knew that all the eyes in the control room were on us now, but we didn’t care. The tensions, the deaths, the worry, it all came out at once, and the last two test pilots on the Ulysses faced one another in sudden flash of rage.

“You and I, Major,” shouted the general, stabbing me in the chest with his thick index finger, “will get into those ships out there and we will fly them and we will either break the Barrier, or run out of test ships, or we will die in the attempt.”

“Just like Boyd,” I yelled back, breaking every rule of protocol. “Without a hope.”

The general stepped up to me, putting his face into mine in the exact way that my drill sergeant had in boot camp, so many war-torn years ago. “Right, Major. Just like Richard Boyd.”

I decided right then that the General had gone bonkers. He was vacuum-happy and was ready to make us all walk the plank. Next he would be stuffing terrified techies into the cockpits of the airless drones, shouting ‘Go faster! Push her to the limit!’

“Why?” I asked simply.

His face fell then, and he seemed to deflate. He glanced around at the audience that watched us silently from their terminals. A green radiance bathed every one of their pale, hollow faces.

“I might as well tell you all,” he began, puffing back up a bit. “The Bugs have been sighted again. It’s a new fleet, a bigger one than the last, coming from the Tau Ceti region this time.”

My face drained of color. The mere mention of a second invasion was enough to freeze any human in their tracks. We had beaten back the first one, but back then we had been fat with population. There had been billions of us to throw into fight. It took me a moment to realize that the general was still talking.

“... many more than the first wave. The last time was really no more than an exploration group, you know. They’ve hidden it well in the press, but we haven’t seen a real Bug warship yet. Our warfleet is ready to fly, but if we have to fight again close to home, if our ships can’t move one-tenth the speed of theirs...” he shook his head. “Their weapons systems will tear us apart. Our ships will be blown from the skies like biplanes, like Sopwith Camels facing F-87 fighters.”

There was more, but I wasn’t really listening. I was heading for the hatch, heading for the test ships. If the Bugs were coming again, in force this time, the general was absolutely right. There was precious little time left for humanity to figure out the Rheeth drive system and get it into production to use effectively in the fleet.

The Bugs had screwed up and left us an FTL drive behind to study during their first invasion attempt. We had duplicated it perfectly, but could not yet control the power of the reaction. So far we had only managed to kill a lot of good pilots with it.

“Where are you going, Davis?” boomed the general as he followed me through the hatch.

“I want to fly this one, sir,” I said pointing to one of the lonely-looking huddle of test ships in the vast hold. “That weird-looking bird with the big nose.”

“Another frontal-armor theory job, huh?” snorted the general, coming into step beside me. Now that we both knew the real score, our differences were gone, and we were back to doing our jobs again. I had completely forgotten my anger, and the general had dropped his.

It didn’t matter that these ships had all been tried and failed. It didn’t matter that we would die. The entire human race was about to die. We had to try. We had to take the chance, even if it was no chance.

All that mattered now was getting past the Demon. That’s what they had called the deadly physics that destroyed their test planes when pilots had first tried to break the sound barrier a century ago. Their Demon had eaten many pilots in Old America. But they had eventually beaten their Demon, and I was going to beat ours.

The Barrier had to come down. We had to be able to travel faster than light. We had to have a working FTL drive in order to beat the Bugs.

The general and I stood looking up at our prospective flying coffin. The test ship was larger than most and carried an unusually large nose-cone on the front of it, which was just hollow space. The theory behind this one stemmed from the fact that our test ships that had failed early had all shown blast-scarred noses. Often the mix of molecules after a full collapse showed early damage to the nose section as well. The theory went that somehow these craft had survived the fantastic pressures built up on the craft by letting a frontal section take some of the shock for the ship.

In truth, it was more of a hunch than a theory.

“The thing does nothing for the physicists, you know. They can find no basis in to support the idea,” the general told me.

I shrugged. “True, but I believe in what seems to work.”

“Interesting, but it isn’t your turn yet.”

I turned in surprise, my eyebrows arching.

“I’m taking the next shot at the demon,” he told me.

“May I ask why, sir?” I felt cheated somehow.

“I’m a better pilot than you are. Here, hold my revolver for me,” he said, handing me his gun belt with his black-barreled Colt .45 automatic tucked into the holster. He grinned at me. “No sense taking any extra mass, I weigh enough by myself. I’ll be back for it when the Barrier is history.”

I didn’t agree that he was the better pilot, but kept my thoughts to myself. Twenty minutes later the general was going through pre-flight in the cockpit of the ship I had chosen, while I paced the deck back in the control room.

The ship was eased out of the Ulysses frontal bay into space and boosted away, floating to a safe distance before engaging the drive. The countdown commenced. On the big viewscreen I watched as the general reached up to flip the switch which fired the core and released the Kheeth reaction.

The screen flipped to a serene view of the heavens as seen from behind Hyperion. The testship was a tiny streak. I moved with incredible rapidity. I watched for one second... Two... Three...

At six seconds it was over. Another brilliant flash of detonation. I lowered my head.

“He’s still transmitting, sir,” said one of the techies. Kumar, I thought it was. My head snapped up. Kumar pushed his sweat-sliding glasses back up his nose and pointed to the counter on the wall. It read 96.54 then 98.50.

“Is it right?” I shouted. “Has he made it?”

No one had ever passed 97.65 before. The speed of light was so near, he had to be compressed and slowed to a fraction of our space and time.

Kumar nodded vigorously, his glasses slipping again.

“Ease back down,” I whispered to myself, knowing that the general would never do it. Many of the pilots had gone up close and knocked on the Barrier before, then eased off the throttle and lived to tell about it. None had ever gotten so close before. I was sure that if he still lived after that initial detonation, as the transmissions indicated that he did, we had made a giant leap forward in reaching a solution. I wanted him to slow down, to return, but I knew he wouldn’t. He was going to knock down the Barrier and tweak the Demon’s nose, or die trying.

Then there was a second flash. The telemetry coming back from the General’s ship ceased. The final reading was 99.71.

I put on the general’s gun belt, which I was still holding. Somehow the weight of pistol felt comforting against my hip. For the first time I thought I understood why the general always wore it. In the act of buckling it on, I mentally came to a decision. I paused only a moment to grieve over him before rushing down to the hold.

The general had come close. Very close. Now it was my turn to see it through. I selected another craft with a very narrow profile, almost a needle-shape, and climbed in. Fixing on the headset, I contacted Kumar on the control deck.

“Test 968 ready to launch.”

“Sir, we haven’t had a chance for the pinnaces to locate and retrieve the previous wreckage yet,” objected Kumar, sounding nervous.

“Don’t worry, I doubt I’ll run into it,” I said soothingly, firing up the maneuvering jets to get out of the hold. “I want you to do something special for me this trip, Kumar. I want you to fly a drone right in front of my nose-cone.”

“Sir, regulations on this mission state that you can’t launch without first allowing us to recover the wreckage.”

“Screw the wreck, Kumar!” I boomed, my breath blowing over the mike and distorting the transmission. I wanted to just do it, to get it over with. I knew inside that I was probably committing flashy suicide and I suddenly had no patience for formalities. I was Earth’s last Kamikaze, and I was going to get after that carrier, right now.

“I’m in command now, and I order you to launch a drone!”

He did so, and I maneuvered directly behind it. Using the computers to synch-up the firing of the reactions, my ship and the drone sped off together, like two bike racers on a sprint, one following in the other’s wind tunnel.

The reaction started and I took off, only feeling a slight pain of acceleration due to the partial stasis field that the ship generated to keep my bones from pressing out of my skin. Even so, I had to be under a good eight gees of force as I watched the drama of a Barrier run play out in front of me. Only this time, I was in the cockpit.

First heartbeat.

A brilliant flash of color that was Saturn swept by the quartz window, beginning to blur.

Second heartbeat.

My eyes blinked away the afterimages, my mouth opened of its own accord due to the acceleration. My eyes crawled up to the gauge: 33.45 already. That was good.

Third heartbeat.

I closed my eyes, then opened them again.

Fourth heartbeat.

The gauge read 67.90 percent and climbing. I tried to lift my hand for the shut off switch, made it half-way there. The fifth and sixth heartbeats went by in a haze, but I managed to wrap my thumb around the kill switch that would shut off the reaction that throbbed behind my crashseat.

Seventh heartbeat. It seemed that I was closing in on the drone. I was less than three hundred kilometers behind it now. I knew its onboard computer systems had failed. Red digits showed: 96.89 percent.

Eighth heartbeat. 98.89 percent. I was less than one hundred kilometers from the drone and about to collide with it, my thumb applied pressure to the kill switch.

Then there was a massive flash of light and my vision was gone. I lost count of heartbeats, but tuned back in a few seconds later. The sensation of acceleration was gone.

My dim vision focused on the gauge. It read: 0.00 percent. I blinked, thinking that it must be damaged. I looked out the front dome and saw that the drone had vanished. More incredibly, the entire universe had vanished.

I was sitting inside what looked like a rocky cavern. The stars, planets and asteroids were gone. The ship was moving. It glided very slowly along on a sliding portion of rock, like a conveyor belt, that led deeper into the cavern. For a few moments I couldn’t think, I couldn’t react. I was dazed. Then I saw the General’s ship and his body, and I kicked into action.

The cavern was full of Bugs, at least ten of them. Two and a half feet tall, moving on six legs with two upraised mandibles held close to the thorax like a wary mantis, I watched one scuttle forward toward my ship. All around the cavern, which was about the size of a school gymnasium, were odd-looking alien machines and partially dismantled test ships. Against one wall was a large freezer with transparent walls. Through the misted surface I could see a dozen or so men in the blue uniforms of our pilots, or rather pieces of them. They seemed to have all been dissected.

I slapped the emergency release button and the hatch popped up. Grabbing at my belt, I clawed out the General’s Colt .45 and prayed that he kept it loaded.

When the first two alien scientists rushed me, I learned that he did keep it loaded. The gun kicked twice and blew their jewel-eyed heads off. The aliens weren’t armed, this puzzled me until I had time to really look at the General’s ship. It was cut in half, which had removed his legs. Perhaps their device for grabbing ships did the job for them of cutting the vessel in half. Or maybe that was just an unfortunate side effect of dropping from near light speed to zero in an instant. It seemed that having the drone in front of me had saved my life, although it had nothing to do with how fast I was going.

It took two entire clips—fortunately the General always kept spares on his belt—but I finally managed to kill all the Bugs in the cavern. Apparently, their system for grabbing pilots who got too close to the goal took a little bit of time, and since I had brought two ships and went for it right after the General, they had not quite been ready.

Before any more of them could show up, possibly better-armed, I managed to escape through the airlock at the end of the tunnel, through the same portal that had snatched me out of the void. Steering the vessel around in a circle, I quickly got my bearings.

I shook my head grimly, marveling at the simple horror of it. The Bugs were ingenious, you have to give them that. I was in the middle of Saturn’s beautiful rings. The enemy base was hidden inside one of the small rock-and-ice, chunk-sized moons that orbited with the rings. They must have stashed this base away during the first invasion while we were too busy dodging clusterbombs and maser blasts to pay attention. Basically, I was right back where I had started.

On the way back to the Ulysses I could not help but feel exalted. The Barrier had been artificial, and I had personally exterminated the little demons behind it. Light speed was now achievable for our fleet, and best of all, when we came back and took their base we would have much more of their technology to study before the enemy fleet arrived.

Symptoms of Godhood

“I need to warm up, Suzy. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything for your people,” Mulciber told his employer. Mulciber Sten sat with Suzy in a high class Chicago office, twenty-eight floors below ground level. Hidden vents circulated filtered air around the office. Mulciber could hear the distant, low thrumming of fans somewhere far above.

He sat rigidly upright in his seat. Only his eyes moved, examining the newly reconstructed muscles and veins of his ruddy-skinned hands. No hair grew on the backs of his new hands and his fingertips were just rounded points of flesh, lacking any sign of nails or cuticles.

“Why don’t you warm up here?” Suzy suggested in a warm voice. “I would like that.” She leaned forward, placing her elbows on the expensive desk of molded cellulose that separated them. Her smile mixed with her perfume and washed over Mulciber like a bath of sweet oils. Suzy was a cop. An official of the United Chicago police force, who held the ambiguous title of District Executive.

Mulciber himself was referred to as a ‘special forces unit’ in his dossier. He was a one-man unit; he always worked alone.

Mulciber stood up slowly. It seemed to take a long time for him to rise to his full height. He moved with grace and care, in the smooth manner of a predator that does not wish to startle its prey. He took a stance in the middle of the room and began stretching.

Mulciber was a heavily modified man. His nervous system was only remotely similar to the one he had been born with. His reactions, his senses, and the coordination of the two had been greatly improved. Body-shop surgeons had taken him apart and rebuilt him, doing genetic regrows on most of his muscles and organs, and using synthetic replacements for the rest. They had in fact overbuilt him, perhaps being curious to see what they could create with their skills fully unbridled. He had many unique and experimental features to aid him in surviving, the pet theories of anatomical designers in proto-type form. One of these experiments was his skin. It was tougher, thicker and healed faster than human skin. It was less porous than normal skin and had an artificial texture to it, a shiny smoothness. It also lacked the capability to grow body hair or nails. This didn’t bother Mulciber much, as some women, such as Suzy, said that they found his baldness exciting.

Suzy clicked briefly at the keyboard built into her desk. Her blue-polished fingernails flicked over the plastic keys efficiently. The computer’s printer buzzed, spitting out several sheets of thin, synthetic paper onto the desk. She examined the printout. “Your target is leaving for the Tau planets on the two A.M. shuttle tonight.”

Mulciber made no sign of acknowledgement. He had finished stretching his muscles and tendons. He paused, then with a specific mental effort shifted his modified nervous system to battle-speed. His perceptions slowed time, allowing his brain to keep control of his blinding speed of movement. He was fast enough and strong enough to damage or kill accidentally in one careless moment of action. First he loosed a flying kick at head-level that would have smashed through a wall of cinder block. He followed through with a five-punch combination of straight-armed body blows intended to rupture an opponent’s abdominal wall and shatter his ribcage.

Suzy wriggled up into a better position to watch. She was also the product of body-shops, but for her the surgeons had been artists, working to create beauty. Her long hair—golden blonde this week, her natural color—spilled from her shoulders to hang around her face. She absently curled a yellow lock around one finger while she stared at him. Her eyes shone, reflecting the florescent lights in the ceiling.

Mulciber sped up. His fists and feet snapped out and whipped back like the pistons of a combustion engine gone mad. The air hissed over the smooth unnatural skin of his limbs.

Then he found himself doing something he never did when he was up to full speed. He found himself thinking. He thought about the Tau planets, the destination that his victim would never see. Colony ships were leaving from all the orbiting ports. Every city was sending up all the volunteers they could gather on upper deck tickets and cramming criminals from their swollen prisons into the holds below. The Tau planets were advertised to be nothing but vast rolling gardens, but things were rarely as they were advertised to be. Mulciber had never been in any kind of garden. He thought, just for a moment, of what it would be like to live in the midst of a sea of living things.

Mulciber misjudged a kick. Soundlessly, a tiny crease appeared in the plasti-foam wall of Suzy’s office. He halted his warm-up immediately. A matching crease appeared on his forehead, the equivalent of a fierce scowl for him. He reproached himself silently for his carelessness. Thinking at full battle-speed about anything but combat was dangerous. Suzy gave no sign of having noticed his error. Mulciber sat down and took up the computer file print-out from her desk quickly, so as to keep her eyes away from the dent in her office wall. He flipped through the file quickly to the most important part, the physical description. He always wanted to know first what he was up against. His eyes were arrested by a single item on the page, almost before he had had time to read anything.

What caught his eye was the age. Nine. They wanted him to kill a nine-year-old. For a second time his forehead creased in uncommon emotion. But this time the emotion was that of disgust. He flipped quickly to the slightly grainy, computer-generated color image of the child. His target looked back at him, a sturdy-looking boy with dark hair and dark, serious eyes. His lips were parted as if he had been speaking when the photograph was taken. Mulciber could see two gaps in his front teeth. Mulciber dumped the print-out back onto Suzy’s desk. The pile of paper sprawled out with a ruffling sound.

Suzy, who had been watching him closely, looked up from the file to Mulciber’s grim face. She looked worried.

“No,” said Mulciber.

“It won’t be as easy as it looks, Mulciber—there will be guards...”

“No.”

“But we need you. You know you’re the best we have,” Suzy pleaded, her words sliding off her tongue. Her voice worked on his mind like a balm on a wound. “This isn’t just family-to-family, city-to-city politics, this is bigger than that.”

“If your people want me to kill children then I’m out.”

“This boy’s family, they’re just criminal—” Suzy began, a sharp note creeping into her voice. She quickly checked herself and changed tacts. “Maybe you need a vacation Mulciber... Maybe after this we could go to Io, like we did last year. We could rent a cottage and spend all day feeling the ground tides and just watching the storms on Jupiter. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend some time... together?”

She leaned across her desk to lay her hand on Mulciber’s. There were jeweled rings on three of her fingers. She smiled at him, a bright-eyed smile, full of promise. Her teeth gleamed, matching her diamonds. Gently, with the air of a man picking up an injured songbird, Mulciber lifted her hand from his. He quelled his urge to give her a slight, apologetic squeeze as he placed her delicate hand back on the desk between them. Her hand was small, white and perfectly formed. His was huge and unnatural-looking, built of over-sized artificial bones and overlapping chunks of heavy muscle.

“You don’t understand, Suzanne—”

“Whatever happened to Suzy?” she asked, tilting her head to one side and looking hurt. Her full red lips pouted. She fingered the rings on her rejected hand sullenly.

“—All right, then... Suzy,” said Mulciber in resignation. It hurt him to see her looking dejected. He tried not to let it, but it did. “I don’t kill kids.”

Mulciber turned to one side, away from Suzy’s flashing rings, red lips and expensive desk. He looked down into his lap. His two powerful arms, networked with rope-like veins, ended in the square, thick-fingered hands of a killer. “There’s no challenge left. I’m not a hunter anymore... I do not stalk and defeat equals in combat. You want a scavenger, a thing in the night that steals children.”

Suzy came around from behind her desk. Her sheer clothing clung to the curves of her body and emphasized her attractive shape. She climbed into his lap, sliding herself between his arms and pressing herself against his unnaturally smooth, hairless skin. Mulciber remained motionless, staring grimly past her, staring at the crease he had put in her office wall. He did not shift to accommodate her weight; his desensitized nerves could hardly feel it. It was as if a butterfly had alighted on the lap of a somber bronze statue.

“Mulciber,” Suzy began softly. She pinched up a lock of her long blonde hair and traced the relief of his chest muscles with the end of it, like an artist applying brush-strokes to a painting. “We need you... I need you...”

Although he could hardly feel her weight on his lap, Mulciber could not help but be aware of her. Her perfume, mixed with the scent of her body, filled his sensitive nostrils with every breath he took. Suzy’s scent and the soft warmth of her body so close to his filled his head like a narcotic. He found his hand on her calf, feeling her smooth skin. Then his hand moved slowly up her soft thigh. He turned his head to look down at her. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips parted, waiting for him to kiss her.

But then he heard, saw, smelled and felt something else. Dying screams cut short. Doomed faces, twisted in the horror and surprise of their final moments. The sharp stink of fear. Warm clotting blood, washing his hands scarlet. Mulciber raised his head again, leaving Suzy’s face and the faces of his victims behind. Effortlessly, he lifted his manager off his lap and set her on her feet.

Suzy did not pout this time. She did not look dejected, she looked stunned. She straightened the flimsy material of her clothing with quick, harsh motions, like a cat shaking a wet paw.

Mulciber reseated himself. He sat as silent and impassive as a rock in the ocean. He gazed at the carpet. Suzy moved back behind her desk. When she spoke her voice held a different tone, one with a metal edge in it. “They won’t like this, Mulciber. They won’t let you quit.”

Mulciber made no move to reply.

“What’s wrong with killing criminals?” she asked suddenly, her voice imploring. Her beautifully made-up eyes pleaded with him.

“There is no honor in it,” he replied. He stood up. His body resembled something solid—not flesh—perhaps something carved out of granite. He was built in blocks rather than in curves, each muscle and cord clearly outlined beneath his reddish-tan skin. He raised one hand and closed it into a fist.

Suzy’s eyebrows arched at this; it was rare for Mulciber to perform such an idle gesture of body language. “There is nothing for me in the killing I do now. I do not grow greater by it.”

For the first time, Suzy frowned in annoyance. “You sound as if you think there is no one who can face you,” she said in an irritated tone. She rubbed her thigh where he had touched her. “You aren’t a god, you know.”

“No,” he agreed seriously. He looked into her eyes and grimly locked her gaze with his. He saw no understanding in there, only puzzlement. “Not a god... But am I a man?”

#

A light, corrosive-carrying rain fell on the city. As with all the larger domed cities, it rained almost constantly in Chicago. Precipitation continually gathered on the vast shining dome’s interior then dripped back again in an endless cycle, like a half-full bottle of liquid left in the sun. In Chicago, once known as the windy city, there was no such thing as open air.

The most foul living conditions in the city were found at ground level or near it. In the ancient, squalid streets it was always wet, hot and dark. The sun never reached down into the black pits of shade between the buildings. It was always night there, with garish neon lights and wispy hologram advertisements smiling and selling over every intersection. Thieves, murderers and vendors of all sorts abounded, working their respective arts on the crowds that thronged the avenues.

Mulciber crouched five stories above the glare-lit streets on an old ledge of eroded concrete. Ten feet below him and off to his left a sky-street ran out of the building. The people on it did not see him. To their eyes, he was only another formless projection of the shadowy building. He had been as motionless as the concrete itself for three hours. Water ran down his hairless pate to form acidic drops at the tip of his nose. He maintained his vigil over the sky-street, ignoring the rain as he ignored all else but the faces of those who slid past his perch. It had been several hours since he had informed Suzy that he was quitting. He expected she would find a temporary replacement, and give him a chance to ‘come to his senses’ —before informing her superiors. There was a quiver of motion on Mulciber’s normally impassive face at this thought, a glimmer of a smile. The superiors would instruct their inferiors, and then they would start to come for him. There was time yet for leaving the city, but he had no desire to run from his enemies. At least they would not be children.

But now he had another errand. A laughing couple appeared on the sky-street. It was Suzy with a man that Mulciber did not know. Suzy swung her hips and bubbled with light conversation. Her arms locked on the stranger’s elbow and her cheek pressed his shoulder. Wispy suggestions of clothing trailed after her like veils of spun gossamer. The man she was with looked slick. His maroon suit was the finest and he had a water-shedding field on it, which indicated a lot of money. The field was powerful enough to keep Suzy dry too—as long as she kept close. The man wore a hat of soft white felt with a violet plume that erupted out of the band. Mulciber knew his type. He was strictly a high-class act, the kind that never got closer to ground-level than the thickness of a speeding elevator’s walls.

Suzy had found herself a new killer. One as smooth and deadly as poisoned wine. Mulciber waited until they had passed by him into the building before slipping down among the sky-street’s shadows next to the railing. At an opportune moment he merged with the traffic and followed his former employer. He tracked the wandering couple about the city for several hours, and felt confident that they had never suspected his presence. He joined them as a silent partner, a spare shadow trailing behind, always there but never seen.

It was near the end of the evening. The three of them had visited each of Suzy’s favorite nightclubs and bars. Mulciber watched Suzy’s consort discuss something with her in a dark corner of a rooftop restaurant. Suzy disagreed at first and then finally let herself be persuaded. Suzy’s new killer hailed an air-taxi that hovered near the crowded restaurant. He joked condescendingly with the hack’s pilot and put a wad of credits into his hand. The night was over and Suzy’s new consort was taking her home with him. Mulciber watched the scene intently, his face a deathmask of stone. Nearby merry-makers, noting his mood, lowered their voices and averted their eyes from him. As the couple boarded the air-taxi Mulciber made his decision. There were no other hacks hanging in space around the restaurant, which left only one way to follow them.

Scattering a startled flock of patrons with the speed of his movements, Mulciber leapt to his feet and sprinted for the hack. He followed Suzy into the backseat and pulled the door shut behind him. “Mind if I share your fare?” he asked. Suzy looked stunned. Her consort looked enraged. As Mulciber had never owned anything with a water-shedding field on it, he was soaking. Water ran across the hack’s plastic seats and quickly invaded the couple’s dry clothes. Before more could be said, all of them were pushed back in their seats as the taxi lifted on boosters and the rooftop restaurant fell away below.

Everyone’s shoulders battled over the limited space. Suzy was forced to sit low and turn sideways to fit between the two large men.

“Get out of this car!” snarled Suzy’s consort. “You’re getting us both wet!” When Mulciber made no reply, the man reached across to the hand release on Mulciber’s door. Mulciber put his own hand on the door’s armrest, gripping it firmly. The man pulled up the release and shoved powerfully. He was strong, very strong, he pushed against the door with what had to be artificially enhanced muscles. Mulciber gauged that he had probably had a skeletal reconstruction as well, otherwise his bones would have snapped under the stress.

The door didn’t budge.

“It’s all right, Kars!” Suzy exclaimed. She squirmed in her seat, her soft body half-crushed between the two straining men. “You don’t have to throw him out! Kars, you’re bruising me!”

Mulciber continued to hold the door firmly shut. Kars shifted for leverage and pushed harder. A drop of sweat rolled down into his eye, making him blink. Mulciber sat silently, gazing straight ahead, as impassive as carven stone. The handle broke off in Kars’s hand. Kars sat back slowly, looking at the twisted piece of metal in his palm. Mulciber had observed him all night, but this was the first time he had see a glimmer of uncertainty in the man’s face.

Mulciber spoke next. “Could you tell me where we are headed?”

“Listen, you streeter bastard—”

“Kars!” Suzy interrupted. “Mulciber is not a streeter—”

“You know him?”

“Yes,” answered Suzy in a softer voice. She picked up his white felt hat and straightened the violet plume. Then she ran her hand up and down Kars’s leg as if calming an excited pet. “He’s an associate of mine.”

She turned to Mulciber. She continued to rub Kars’s leg, but gave Mulciber her warmest, happy-to-see-you smile. “We are on our way to the spaceport to watch the next starship leaving for the Tau planets. Naturally, you’re invited.”

Kars stiffened. Mulciber accepted the invitation with a nod. For the rest of the trip the men sat in tense silence while Suzy talked in an incessant, bubbling fashion. Outside the cab the city swept by them with dizzying speed. The driver swung the taxi around the corners of buildings, cutting hazardously close to the concrete walls. The lights of windows and passing air-traffic gleamed and flashed at them then fell away behind. The rooftop restaurant faded to a pinprick glow in the rear window. When they arrived at the spaceport, Kars quickly led Suzy away from the landed cab without looking back toward Mulciber. Clearly, he did not want a third party along. Mulciber made no effort to catch up, but rather followed them into the crowds a discreet distance behind.

The crowds of colonists trying to board the starship surged and ebbed, their thousands of united voices merging together into a dull roar. Walking among them was like wading through a dark, warm-smelling sea. Kars and Suzy were easy to follow. They stood out from the countless common, unaltered faces of laborers and vagrant street-people. Mulciber watched as a young man dressed in the drab grays of a worker grabbed at Kars’s clothing as he passed by. The man plied Kars with shouted questions concerning the flight, having apparently mistaken him for an official. Kars answered him with a quick backhanded blow to the mouth. The young man collapsed to the concrete in Kars’s wake, spilling blood on his grays, his jaw broken.

As they got closer to the immense hull of the starship the crowds grew thicker and more reluctant to make way for them. When they had made their way underneath the super-structure of the docking towers, the vast bay doors in the hull above opened. Huge ramps lowered slowly toward the ground, with deafening low-pitched groans of shifting metal.

Mulciber was pushed back by the sheer weight of the crowd as it tided backward in fear of being crushed. In the confusion of bodies and faces he lost sight of his quarry. His keen eyes swept the gray-clad hordes for a splash of color but saw none. Moving with decision, he waded and shouldered and shoved his way toward the nearest leg of a docking tower, planning to climb it and survey the scene from above. Reaching the foot of the tower, he easily pulled himself up into the grid-work of steel and onto the first tier. He watched for a moment as the foremost ranks of the crowd mounted the ramps and entered the starship.

Then he turned his gaze down into the seething mass of faces. After a moment he picked out Suzy in her colorful, gauzy clothing. Kars was not with her. Mulciber was surprised to see that she was quite near, almost at the foot of the docking tower he had climbed. Even as he picked her out, she caught sight of him and commenced waving and signaling. Mulciber was already turning when his finely-tuned ears picked out a sound from amid the rolling thunder of the crowd. The sound of stealthy approach from behind.

He whirled to face his attacker, his arms rising into position, his perceptions slowing and his reactions speeding up. Kars, grinning, directed a hissing spray into his face. Vapor gushed out from a tiny oval dispenser in Kars’s hand, invading Mulciber’s nostrils and coating his face and eyes with tiny droplets. Mulciber’s vision began to fade immediately, but his nerves, desensitized to pain, failed to be stunned by the attack.

“I can climb too, street—” Kars began, his words were cut off by Mulciber’s right hand, which had struck out like a snake to grasp his throat.

The poison worked to paralyze him, but as it was a contact poison and Mulciber’s skin was not porous, it could only penetrate through the surfaces of his eyes and sinuses. This slowed down the effects enough to allow Mulciber to squeeze Kars’s windpipe with all the crushing force of his new hands, although he could do little else.

Only the powerful muscles and tendons in Kars’s neck kept him from immediate death. Mulciber could still see enough to watch Kars’s face contort with rage and grow purple. In silent and wild anger Kars ripped and struck at Mulciber’s outstretched arm, but the iron muscles held. Mulciber concentrated all his remaining will upon crushing the life out of his opponent. He began to lose control of his body, he was distantly aware of the fact that his legs were buckling. His vision was gone, his nerves were dying. Still he held on, his hand clamped in a final grip of steel. He distantly felt sharp spikes of displeasure and warm sensations in his midsection where Kars landed heavy kicks and punches in desperate fury.

Mulciber’s artificial ribs gave, the protected organs underneath would soon be ruptured. He slipped to the metal deck of the docking tower, nerveless and blind. Kars worked with all his strength to tear away the unfeeling fingers that clamped his throat. He finally managed to pry away Mulciber’s weakened grip. Kars leaned against a steel beam, massaging his throat and making choking sounds. When he could articulate, he gave a hoarse laugh.

“You’re dead!” he gasped out, sneering down at Mulciber’s prostrate form. “When the poison reaches your autonomic centers your heart will stop beating and your lungs will no longer function.” Kars gave another short bark of laughter and kicked his helpless adversary in the abdomen. Mulciber felt a sick explosion, but could not react.

Kars paused before climbing down from the tower. “While you die,” he hissed to Mulciber. “I want you to think of me. Just think of my smiling face.”

Mulciber heard him, but could only lie motionless, his nerves in effect severed by the paralytic poison. In minutes the poison would reach his autonomic nerve centers and kill him. But there were other forces at work. His overbuilt body contained several artificially implanted organs which tapped into his circulatory and nervous systems to monitor his vital bodily processes. One such artificial organ, attached to the arteries leading into the liver, detected a foreign substance in his blood stream. A microprocessor analyzed the poison and a counter-agent was released to combat the effects. Other bodily functions, some natural and some not, worked to control the injuries Kars had inflicted. Due to the combined efforts of Mulciber’s artificial organs and his naturally strong constitution, the poisoning was not fatal. The counter-agents released into his bloodstream neutralized the paralytic drug rapidly.

After five minutes his senses had returned. Two minutes later he was able to rise stiffly. His new skin had sealed itself over his wounds. Stimulants and pain relievers borrowed time for him, keeping his injuries from slowing him. In less than ten minutes after the attack, he was ready to fight again. While his body worked to repair itself, Mulciber surveyed the docking tower and landing area with gradually improving vision. He sat crouched on a crossbeam, one with the shadowy tower. His unnatural physique had given him a second chance at his enemy, and this time he would not be taken unaware.

The crowds had evaporated for the most part. The last of the colonists were being expertly hustled aboard by uniformed officials. The remaining well-wishers stood in gray clumps on the vast littered expanse of concrete, awaiting the final departure warning that would send them scurrying back to the gates. The final warning indicated that the prisoners were to be loaded into the holds, and anyone left on the field would be treated as one of the prisoners. Kars and Suzy were nowhere in sight. He noted that there were no signs of Kars having gone after the boy that Mulciber had been directed to kill. The boy and his retainers had apparently made it aboard safely.

The final warning sounded. Mulciber’s gaze, no longer impaired, swept the scene for any sign of Kars or Suzy. He saw none. Another minute passed. The last of the gray-clad stragglers hurried away from the starship. Even as they streamed through the gates, a number of large airships floated down out of the night sky, escorted by two police cruisers each. The airships and police cruiser all bore the gold embossed letters UCP, the insignia of the United Chicago Police. The airships landed and their bays swung open. A flood of prisoners were herded out and toward the starship by cursing guards brandishing electric whips. Mulciber watched the proceedings, tensing his muscles, preparing to break for the gate. The guards abandon the prisoners several hundred yards from the starship’s ramp, as the ship was not part of their jurisdiction. The prisoners, left with the choice of boarding the ship or staying outside and being incinerated by her jets upon takeoff, boarded without much hesitation. As the last of them mounted the ramp, Kars suddenly appeared, dragging a disheveled-looking Suzy behind him.

Mulciber, who was about to leap from the docking tower and make a break for the gates, switched directions and launched himself into the air toward the starship. Mulciber hit the concrete running. His muscular legs pumped, the balls of his feet smacking in perfect rhythm. He stretched his stride further, increasing his speed. His heel crushed a discarded styrofoam cup. As he ran he cleared his mind of all extraneous thought. His body prepared itself for battle. Stimulants kept the effects of his injuries to a minimum. When he was less than one hundred yards behind Suzy and Kars he felt his perceptions slowing, so that each second seemed an eternity, giving him time to plan each move of his attack.

At fifty yards Mulciber’s quarry glanced over his shoulder and saw him coming. Kars turned on the ramp, pushing Suzy behind him and facing Mulciber’s charge. His violet plume dipped and fanned. His hat lost its grip on his head and flew off to one side. The slick man reached into his expensive clothing. Mulciber saw Kars move as if in slow-motion, but could tell that in reality the dandy was reacting with great speed. He surmised that his quarry had an improved nervous system, perhaps one as good as his own.

Mulciber was in full battle-readiness now. His body responded with machine-like speed to his will. His eyes no longer needed to blink, save to prevent injury, for the duration of the combat. At full battle-speed much could be missed in the one fifth of a second that it took to blink. All his reconstructed senses were heightened to their peaks. He smelled the litter and the warm human odors that the crowds had left behind on the landing field. He heard the rush of his own breath as it emptied and refilled his lungs.

At thirty yards Kars’ hand pulled back out of his jacket with a weapon. He snapped his arm forward, releasing it with practiced precision. Mulciber watched the twirling object fly directly toward him. It grew steadily and reflected silvery flashes from the landing field’s glaring lights as it spun. It was a throwing star, a wheel of numerous steel spikes. Each of the spikes glinted as it came into line with his vision. Mulciber gauged that it would strike his throat with its present trajectory. He used all his speed to duck to the right.

The star was ten feet away.

Mulciber’s right leg was coming up, readying for another downstroke that would carry him two yards closer to his quarry. His head was ducking, moving to the right, but still in the path of the twirling spikes.

The star was five feet away.

Mulciber’s right leg was on its downstroke now. He gauged that his throat was out of the spinning weapon’s path.

The star was two feet away.

Mulciber fought the urge to blink.

Wet tearing. The star ripped through skin and muscle. The leading spike scored his left collar bone. The bone split and the star caromed off, flying past him and into the night. His skin began closing immediately. He would bleed for less than a minute.

He did not slow his charge. The two men were still thirty feet apart. Kars’ eyebrows rose slowly as he registered surprise. His hand dived into his jacket again to fish out another weapon.

Twenty feet.

Now Mulciber slowed, shifting his weight, gauging the distance. Kars had a knife out this time. It had a short broad blade and brass knuckles for a hand grip. The hilt glinted a dull yellow in the harsh glare of the landing lights. Kars set his legs, knees bent and balance forward to meet the charge.

Ten feet.

Mulciber’s body lifted, extended, like a hurdler at the last step before a jump. Kars saw the kick coming and dove slowly to the right. Too late. Mulciber launched himself. His heavy foot smashed into Kars’ left shoulder. The force of the blow spun the man half around. Something in the joint snapped. Nerves and cartilage tore loose. The arm spasmed then hung, twisting like a beheaded snake as the muscles contracted and locked.

The knife dropped and clattered on the concrete. Mulciber landed neatly and recovered, whirling around to face his enemy. Kars was up too, although a little off-balance. His face was a blood-flushed death mask. He threw his first punch with his good arm, landing it on Mulciber’s chin.

Mulciber’s head rocked back. His jaw dislocated then slipped back into place. His teeth sank into his lips and the familiar taste of his own blood filled his mouth. Kars snatched up his knife again, underestimating Mulciber’s speed of recovery.

Mulciber’s fist slammed into Kars’ chest. Mulciber noticed that the man took the blow well, yielding with it, but he felt ribs crackle. Kars made use of his knife in a lightning uppercut for the throat. Mulciber blocked it just in time, his arm opening in a long red gash. He countered with another body blow that came in under the extended knife-arm, aiming to rupture the organs behind Kars’ already cracked ribs. Kars dropped the knife again when the shock hit him. He was weakening, but Mulciber knew that he had to end things quickly himself, before his prior injuries started to slow him. Acting with the smooth cunning of vast combat experience, he stepped back, as if to disengage and circle.

Kars, ready for a breather, took the cue and began to pull back himself. In that moment he felt relief and was off-guard. In that moment Mulciber reversed on the balls of his feet and attacked again, moving with all his great speed unleashed. Summoning his reserves of strength, Mulciber put all his power into a kick to the neck that struck home. Kars’s windpipe was crushed. The tiny bones in his throat and voice box splintered. His neck vertebrae shattered and tore his spinal cord from his brain stem as a weed rips loose from its roots, killing him instantly.

Mulciber watched with slowed vision as the slick man fell back with lazy grace onto the bare concrete. His broken head hit with a wet slap.

“You see Mulciber, I knew you would track me! You see, there are men around worth fighting!” Suzy exclaimed happily, stepping forward now that the fight was over. “I’ve given you back your spirit!”

Mulciber ignored her. He watched as a dark stain spread around the man’s ruined head immediately. He nodded to his fallen enemy, silently acknowledging the death of a worthy opponent.

She stepped calmly away from the corpse, hips swinging, toward the distant gates. Her manner indicated that she expected Mulciber to follow. “Do you know what that fool was up to?” she asked. “He was trying to get out of the city all along. He was going to drag me with him on a ship full of prisoners to some wild planet full of proles and—” here she noticed that Mulciber was not following her.

She turned to find him standing where he had been, staring at her. Mulciber’s face, normally somber and impassive, was now twisted. He took two silent strides forward. He lifted Suzy effortlessly, bringing her down into a classic killing hold, her back stretched across his knee, her thin spine ready to snap like rotted wood. Sticky blood from his hands stained her gauzy clothing. Suzy looked up into the face of a wrathful demon. Perhaps for the first time in her life she knew true terror. She did not cry out. She could only gaze up in shock and dread at Mulciber’s hairless face and dark eyes. Helplessly, she faced death, a reality that no amount of smooth talking could erase.

Mulciber eyes searched hers. After a moment, he thought he saw what he was looking for. He found comprehension in Suzy’s eyes, a glimmer only, but still, it was there.

“So, you can feel something, can’t you?” he asked her quietly.

“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes staring wide and unblinkingly up at him. With the air of one making a difficult decision, he spared her life. He rose up, releasing her. With no further words he turned and headed up the ramp into the starship. After a moment Suzy rediscovered her voice.

“Are you crazy? How can you leave Earth?” she called after him, distractedly patting her hair back into place. She was speaking to his broad back. Suzy looked back at the city and its glare-lit streets, its arcades and civilized amusements, then down at the dead man at the foot of the ramp.

She picked up the white felt hat and straightened the plume. “But I don’t want you to go!” she cried after him.

Mulciber continued to walk up the ramp. Just before he reached the top he heard the light thumps of Suzy’s feet as she ran up the ramp after him. He allowed himself a quiet smile. They entered the ship together.

Discharged

“Oh Lord, that nursebot is coming for me again. Is that a needle?”

“Nope, she’s headed for the captain’s pod.”

“There may be a moment of discomfort,” said the nursebot in a soft, soothing, feminine voice. It approached the captain in Pod Four. Its plastic feet moved with the measured, confident stride they all had. He tried to squirm, but servos whined, cinching his straps. Our movements within the locked healing pods were tightly restricted, anyway.

“Nooo, hold on. Ow,” complained Captain Jeff Tumas. The dripping stainless steel needle plunged into his immobilized thigh. “Dammit. They don’t listen at all.”

Lounging next to him in Pod Three, I chuckled at him. I could afford to chuckle, of course, I was past the need for shots now. My arms in their regrow bags were doing quite well. Soon I would be able to flex my new fingers and a few days after that, maybe I would get rid of the bags entirely.

“Laugh it up, Ensign,” said Captain Tumas in his best officer’s rumble. He had no original limbs left except for the one leg they kept jabbing needles into, but he still sounded tough.

When the nursebot had gone, we all looked to Ruth in Pod One for another activity report. She was the only one who could see outside. All the other viewports were shuttered by heavy blast shields of molecular-bonded tritanium alloy, but not hers. Her pod’s viewport had jammed and been left partly open after the battle. Her four-inch slit was our only connection to the outside world. By twisting and straining against our straps, we could all see the sky outside through her window. The sky was blue with a twinge of lavender and usually cloud-free. But only Ruth in Pod One could crane her neck enough to see the ground.

“Looks like another warm morning out there,” she told us, flashing everyone a smile. “I should warn you, the nursebots are out there in force. Looks like they might even chase us down with needles at the picnic tables.”

Captain Tumas grunted.

The figure in Pod Two was a kid. He never spoke, I don’t think his larynx had healed enough yet. But he listened to us closely and rolled his eyes around alertly to whoever was talking. I dreaded when he became Pod One’s occupant, the next up for discharge. He was only a kid with no voice, how was he supposed to keep everyone in the ward apprised of outside events?

“Aren’t there any visitors? There should be visitors,” came a call from way down the line, it was from Pod Seventeen, I think. I didn’t know the guy. It was too hard to have a shouted conversation with someone that far down in a crowded ward. Even further back down the line they relayed Ruth’s comments, I knew. The intercom system was out of course, as all communications had been since the battle, and the ship was running in full-auto mode.

“No visitors,” shouted Ruth down to the guy in Seventeen.

“We are at war, ya know, son,” said Captain Tumas. “Not everything is about our individual comfort.”

“No shit,” said someone from down in the direction of Pod Nine. Tumas’ brows beetled ferociously and he craned his neck to see who it was, but gave up after a while, fuming. Discipline was very hard to keep when you were all strapped into medical pods on full lock-down.

Since the battle, we had been without communications. Not even the nursebots responded to us, perhaps the ship’s whole network was down. The ship had gone into emergency mode and landed us here, somewhere in the Cygnus cluster. At least the klaxons had mercifully stopped after a few hours. We had all thought we were going to go mad with the wailing and flashing.

“Tell us something, Ruth,” I said quietly. Being in Pod Three, there was only the mute boy between us. The kid, I didn’t even know his name, swiveled his eyes from me to Ruth expectantly.

She looked at me and the kid, then gave a slow smile. She turned back to the viewport and gazed outside.

“It’s a warm day. I can see the lake out through the trees. There’s no haze,” she began.

I smiled and closed my eyes. The beeping equipment and the gurgling bodymats that took our waste away in tubes receded. I visualized the world outside. It was an alien world, but it wasn’t without beauty. There were pod-like creatures that looked like mushrooms or perhaps smooth rocks, but which occasionally picked themselves up and moved. There was the tent city, of course, where all the discharged people had set up camp. And there were the picnic tables set up right below the viewport so all our old friends could wave up at us. Well, at Ruth at least.

I opened my eyes as Ruth finished her story. Ten or twenty pods down, I could hear them relaying it to everyone. The whole ward fell silent, as it always did when Ruth described the outside world to us.

The next morning, Ruth was discharged. The nursebot came in and simply began disconnecting her, without preamble. She winced as the tubes and needles and glued-on monitor probes came out and off one at a time. Inside, I was saddened. I looked at the kid. It would be his turn next, I supposed, and we would get no reports from him. Everyone, in a way, had been dreading this day. I felt bad for the kid, because I think he knew we didn’t want him to be at the window.

The chute beneath Ruth opened and she held on for a second, chewing her lip and staring at us. I thought I saw a tear on her face.

“Don’t be sad, soldier! You’re getting out of this hell-hole!” I told her.

She nodded and gave me a smile. Then she was gone down the chute.

It came as a great surprise to me when my Pod came alive and started to move forward, instead of shunting down the line into the kid’s spot. Instead, my pod came out of line, slid sideways past the kid and then backed up and locked into place. I was now Pod One. I looked at the kid. He looked both disappointed, but also relieved. Obviously, the system had judged he was healing too slowly, and I had moved up in priority. Down the line, all the other pods were shifting on their rails, as the diagnostic computers sorted them out.

I turned my head then for my first look outside. Behind me, I could feel everyone’s eager eyes on my back.

“What’s it like?”

“Can you see Ruth out there?”

“Is my Johnny waiting out there for me? He’s tall and blond, at least he was before they shaved it all. He should have come for me by now.”

I stared. Outside there was no forest, no lake, no trees or tent city. There was only a desolate scene of reddish rocks and barren, volcanic-looking sands. Here and there were bubbling pools of a dark viscous substance. Liquid methane, most likely.

There were indeed people out there, nude, frozen, suffocated people in various poses of death. Their corpses showed that none of them had made it more than a dozen yards from the ship’s discharge port. I picked out Ruth’s frosted face. She had managed to make it out far enough to be in my range of vision and to lift a hand to whoever next took her station. Her fingers had twisted into a claw, but I recognized the gesture. It was a salute, such as one comrade might give another.

I wondered numbly how long I would be staring at her before it was my turn to be discharged.

“Well? Come on, tell us something!”

I didn’t look back at them. I knew I would not be able to keep the truth from my face.

After a few quiet moments, which I’m sure they chalked up to being overwhelmed, I began speaking. I recalled all the things Ruth had told us of, and I added in the things my mind had conjured up over the days.

There were a few playful children in my version from the local farming colony. And there were flowers. Flowers with swollen red petals and bright yellow balls of pollen in the center.

Teeth at Bedtime

Inside its soft red mouth the thing had teeth of real enamel.

I didn’t like the look of those teeth. They looked hard and sharp. They gleamed white as though freshly brushed.

“What do you think of it, Will?” Mara asked me. She was looking lovely. It was the day after my birthday and we were alone together in my apartment. Mara herself made a wonderful birthday present. She leaned forward on the couch, her face glowing with expectant happiness. Her whole face smiled, making me feel warm inside. I noticed that a few blonde strands of her hair had caught in her eyelashes and been stained black by her mascara. Even that looked good.

“Well?” she pressed impatiently. “What do you think?”

What can you do when your girlfriend spends a lot of money on something weird? I took the only logical course open to me... I lied.

“It’s...uh. I like it, Mara.” I said, giving her the gladdest smile I could muster. At least I didn’t need to fake being surprised.

My birthday present sat on my bed stand. The thing was a black plastic box with a lot of touch-sensitive buttons and chrome knobs. It was a clock and a radio and self-answering telephone, and it had a slot on top to connect a player.

The only unusual thing about the device was that it had a mouth. No eyes or nose or ears—just the cheeks, the jaws and the mouth. It had a human, wet, female mouth with full red lips and a bright red tongue. Because it was grinning (it had come out of the box that way) I could see its fine set of hard, white teeth.

I thought of the locked strongbox in my closet and I blinked several times, very quickly.

What sickened me most about the mouth was that I recognized it. I knew those exposed teeth and the curve of that jaw. I knew the dark flat spec of a mole that it had on its right cheek, just above the spot where the lips met. I had kissed that mouth before. It was my girlfriend’s mouth. It was Mara’s mouth.

My mind turned back to the locked metal box that I kept up on the top shelf in my closet, next to the shoe boxes filled with receipts and hardcopies of old tax return forms. I eyed my birthday present and realized that it would never fit in my strongbox. No way.

I fervently hoped that she wouldn’t want me to plug it in before she left. I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it. Mara was looking at me funny. I could tell she was beginning to suspect the truth, that her gift had horrified me. I brightened up reflexively.

“Hey, Hon, this is going to be really great—” I picked the box up, handling it gingerly, the way you would a run-over terrier.

“I’ll just put it in my room.” I pushed my lips into a smile and walked into my bedroom. Mara followed me, making me groan inwardly. I set the obscenity on the bed stand, turning it to face the bed. Then Mara reached past me and plugged it in. I flinched and blinked, as if a foul odor had found my nostrils.

“Power failure detected,” the mouth spoke in a perfect imitation of Mara reading aloud from a dictionary.

“Linking to home system... Link complete.”

It was a high-tech horror. I hated it.

“Isn’t that great, Will?” Mara asked, flashing me with eyes that spoke of smooth thighs and soft kisses. Mara had me on a sex-leash, she charmed me with every movement of her body. I knew it, and hated it, but felt helpless. She was the most attractive girl that I had ever dated. During the last few weeks we had become a steady thing. It was no longer a question of who we were going to see each night, it was just a question of what the two of us would do together. A man could lose his senses over a girl like Mara. To make sure that I never did, I kept my pictures of her in my strongbox, along with pictures of the others I had dated in the past. Just to be sure. I had never told Mara about it, of course, as she wouldn’t have understood.

“It sure is, babe.” Maybe I could sleep on the couch tonight, away from the thing.

“Don’t forget the reunion tomorrow, Will,” Mara reminded me. Nagged me.

My face went hard, like stone, the way it does when I find dog crap stuck to my shoe or when a waitress takes too long with another customer. Fortunately, her back was turned.

“Why don’t you write down the time and the address, so you won’t forget?” Mara suggested. Her voice was soft and innocent, but there was the hard edge of control there, I could hear it. Mara had a beautiful woman’s natural expertise at manipulation. I watched as my traitorous hand picked up a pencil and wrote down the words that she dictated to me. I felt like a secretary. When I had finished, I turned to face her with a pasted-on smile.

Awaiting further instructions. Yes sir. Screw you, sir.

“Now you aren’t going to forget this like you always do, are you Will?” Mara teased me. The yellow number two pencil in my fist snapped. It did it all by itself. It just broke, I swear it. Fortunately, Mara had begun fingering the monstrosity she had given me and didn’t notice the broken pencil or the surprised look on my face. I slipped the snapped pencil into the back pocket of my jeans.

“Let’s play net-music on it for a minute,” she prompted, sitting on the bed and looking at me expectantly. She put her hands into her lap and neatly meshed her fingers. Each nail was carefully painted with a light orange polish. Naturally, we would have to try out the gift she had given me. The only gift she had given me. An expensive gift. Naturally. I felt out of control around Mara, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t understand women. One did not snub your honey’s birthday gift, no matter what one thought of it. Especially, yes especially when that gift was really an image of said girlfriend. You might as well complain about a holo-portrait of her that she had had digitized.

Sure, if you spent half your paycheck on the wrong type of perfume for her you might well find yourself in the exchange line at the mall, with nothing but a frown and a roll of the eyes for a thank-you. But things didn’t work that way when Mara bought a repulsive electronic image of herself and gave it to me. Not for me, they didn’t. Most women were bitches, and Mara was no exception. That’s why I kept the pictures, safe and cool, in my closet with the others. Encased in green metal with a silvery lock of stainless steel.

Approaching the object of my distaste, I knelt before it and lightly ran my finger down the tuning sensor. A liquid amber glow followed my fingerpad as the digital tuning indicator swept across the scale of stations. I watched the mouth buzz its lips together, the white noise of static emanating from it. Each time I passed over a station, the lips twitched and loosed a brief snatch of music or a few words of an announcer. I paused to hear a brief snippet of a newscast concerning the Mexican police-action, which had bogged down only 65 miles north of Mexico City’s outlying slums. A Texas senator begged the congress for justice and two more armor divisions, amid shouts of outrage from the more liberal-minded committee members. I listened for a moment without interest, nothing had changed for weeks and my birth date had already been passed by for the year by the New Plan draft board. I slid my finger more quickly, rippling through the signals, finally leaving it on the hits-only station.

I thumbed the volume control and the room filled with digital-stereo sound. A popular tune called Forget the Alamo from the latest album of the Tazers erupted out of the device. The instrumentals and backup vocals came from the secondary speakers in the thing’s base while Mara’s lovely simulacrum mouth sung the lead.

“What sound!” exclaimed Mara.

I watched Mara’s, or rather the thing’s, mouth form the words and sing with human tonal quality. My stomach curdled like month-old milk. Every move of the mouth and twitch of the cheeks were exacting copies of Mara’s mannerisms and physical traits. Unbidden, my head was punctured by the thought of Mara’s disembodied head being crammed in that box and forced to sing by computer-controlled electronic pulses jolting down her nerves to the muscles in her cheeks, jaw and tongue. I didn’t even like the Tazers.

But apparently the sight and sound of the whole thing had gotten to Mara in a different way. I felt her soft arms clasp around my neck as she leaned forward and began to lightly kiss my neck. The artificial, fruity smell of her shampoo filled my sinuses. Her hot breath blew over my left ear. I looked down over her shoulder and eyed the smooth swell of her rear in those tight, exquisitely faded jeans. But for once I wasn’t in the mood.

“Mara, babe, let’s not start anything now. You’ve got to go to class tonight,” I could hardly believe my ears, but I just couldn’t start making out in front of that thing.

Mara, if anything, was more surprised than I. “Yeah,” she said with a small, shocked and nonplussed sniff. She sat back, straightened her clothing and arched her fine brown eyebrows at me. “Right—school. Sure.”

I felt guilty immediately, but relieved. I didn’t want that thing... watching us. I stood up and so did she. She eyed me strangely, as if I had grown a beard overnight or taken on some other odd characteristic. She glanced briefly at her watch and then straightened the sleeves on her white polyester-and-cotton blend blouse. Mara was unused to rejection in any form. For just a moment, a feeling of exhilaration passed over me as I realized I had denied her something. Then it was gone and, hating myself, I moved to kiss up to her, slipping my arms around her.

She softened immediately. It felt nice. “I do need to go to class,” she said in a quiet voice. Her eyes met mine, then dropped. I kissed her.

Mara’s duplicate mouth spat a split-second of static.

I glanced at it, my upper lip curling by itself. I decided not to let the monster ruin my date with Mara. I turned away from the thing and kissed Mara again. My girl melted in my arms. A rush of red heat passed over my forehead, making my skin burn.

“Happy birthday,” Mara whispered. Again the atrocity on my bed stand buzzed its lips. It sounded as if a lightning flash had interrupted the signal. I wondered if an electrical storm had started outside. I paused for a moment, but there was no thunder.

The Tazers began thumping and twanging again in earnest. I shrugged. Mara pulled me closer. I quickly lost interest in all else. Mara missed her class.

I awoke after midnight with a start. Mara had long since gone home to her parents’ apartment. There was a phone ringing, but I didn’t have a phone in my bedroom. Confused with sleep, I groped blindly for the lamp switch. Then, for the first time I touched it. My fingers pressed into its pseudo-skin. The flesh felt soft and smooth, just the way a young girl’s cheek should feel. My middle finger found the moving lips. I was grabbing a stranger’s face in the dark.

I gave a yell and rolled out of bed on the opposite side, thumping into the bedroom wall with my shoulder. I snapped on the light and there it was, on its sixth ring, mouth opening to expose those hard wet teeth that glistened between its red lips. As the ring died away, the lips relaxed, slipping down to cover the white teeth again. Shaking a bit and blinking the sleep from my dehydrated, sluggish eyes, I pressed the button to answer the call.

“Hello?” I asked tentatively.

“Hello,” replied a soft, sultry voice. I smiled and relaxed a notch or two. It was Mara. Then I stiffened again. Was it really Mara, or did the thing just use Mara’s voice for phone calls? No, that didn’t sound right, Koreans wouldn’t think like that. I rubbed my face and smoothed back my tousled hair. The rush of adrenalin was fading. I sank back down to sit on the bed.

“Hi Mara. What’s up?” I asked, feeling that strange ache you get when your mouth wants to yawn but you are trying to hold it back. I glanced at the digital clock on the thing’s front panel. It was 1:17 a.m.

“I want you to kiss me,” Mara said. She gave a girlish giggle.

“I want to kiss you too, babe. I’ll make a point of it tomorrow. Why are you calling so late?”

“I’m calling because I want you to kiss me,” here she gave another giggle, sounding like a fourteen year-old sharing secrets. “I want you to kiss me right now.”

I had been staring at those moving lips while she said this. The effect was mesmerizing. Those cheeks, the way they swelled up when she smiled and the way the teeth parted when she giggled. It was unsettling. How did they keep it so wet-looking in there? Was there really some form of moisture? It had felt wet when I had accidentally touched it a few minutes before. Automatically, I rubbed my forefinger against my thumb and wiped my hand on my pants.

“Come on... Kiss me.”

“What?” I asked a bit hazily, but already my heart had quickened a bit in alarm. Slowly, it dawned on me. She wanted me to kiss the thing.

“You mean...?”

“Kiss me, William,” the thing said. It made horrid puckering motions that I would have thought cute and enticing, if Mara had been making them.

“I can’t do that!” I blurted. For the first time I let my real feelings of disgust creep into my voice. The puckering and giggling faded immediately.

“Don’t you like my gift, Will?” Mara asked.

“Ah... Of course I like it. No, I love it, babe. How could I—”

“You hate it.”

“No, no Mara. I think—”

“Then kiss me, dammit.”

So that was it then. I was stuck. It was like knowing that you were going to get your teeth pulled today. There weren’t going to be any more excuses or postponements. The surgeon had started gunning his drill to tooth-burning speeds and set his robot’s-paw lamp to shine directly on your mouth. This was it. I looked at the false female mouth on my bed stand. The sight of it brought weird thoughts to my mind, thoughts of (Phone Sex. Just have your Visa ready, and a voice called Candy will talk you into ecstasy) rubber dolls and kissing robots.

The thing needed to be locked up. I needed a bigger strongbox. My lips curled and my eyes squinted closed in disgust. I decided to get it over with.

I knelt in front of the thing and bent to kiss it. It was like sinking into the dentist’s chair and clipping on the bib. I kept telling myself that it was only plastic. The thing puckered horribly, and I kissed it. It was just like giving Mara a quick smack, except that the realism boys in Korea had forgotten one thing. It felt like flesh, it was smooth and soft and pressed in like flesh, but it was cold.

Mara’s, that is, the thing’s, lips were cold like those of a puckering corpse. I nearly screamed. Jerking back, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand repeatedly and quelled the urge to spit. Stomach acids burned the bottom of my esophagus.

“Ahh... That was nice, honey,” said Mara, sounding satisfied again.

“Sheez,” I exclaimed as it hit me. I cuffed myself in the forehead with my open palm. What an idiot. What I should have done was make some kissing sounds up close to the receiver. I hadn’t needed to really kiss the thing. Damn.

“Isn’t this great? Now we can kiss anytime, we never have to be apart.”

Dream on, woman.

“Yeah, right,” I answered. I scratched my head. Funny how your head always itches when you get out of bed. A jingle from a dandruff shampoo ad ran through my mind.

“Bye, bye babe. Go back to sleep now.”

“Goodnight babe.”

The phone clucked, the tongue hitting the roof of the mouth and making an unnatural sound. The connection was broken.

“Sheesh,” I repeated to myself. I got to my feet and headed for the bathroom. I could still feel the cold press of those dead lips on mine. I washed my face and dried it, rubbing hard with the towel. Then I brushed my teeth and washed my face a second time. I headed back to bed and just as I was switching the light out, I noticed that the thing’s lips were puckered up again. I paused for a moment, frowning fiercely in the dark. Then I switched back on the light.

The thing’s mouth had relaxed. It was bland and expressionless. I shook my head, switching the light out again and climbing back into the sack. I did not fall asleep for perhaps an hour.

When I finally did slip off, I dreamt of Mara’s funeral. She lay in a casket in a Southern-style service, where they often kiss the dead. After I had kissed her, the cold touch of her lips lingered forever, a taint that could not be washed away.

The next morning found me lazing in bed, as I am fond of doing on the weekends, contemplating the day ahead. The prospects were not pleasant. It was Saturday, the day of the reunion. Every time I thought of it, a groan sounded in my mind. A tortured groan. Truly, it was going to be torment to spend a perfectly good Saturday afternoon with Mara’s relatives.

Shaking hands and mouthing greetings. Smiling, even as the flood of new names is being instantly forgotten by all. Uncle Larry from Utah with the bad foot. Cousin Paul with the headphones and the complex handshakes. Aunt Edna with the innumerable surgical scars, ancient stinking pets, blue-rinsed hair and liver spots.

They were bizarre, every one of them, and yet they were all so typical. It was going to be a long afternoon of paper plates loaded with potato salad and deviled eggs. I hate deviled eggs.

It was 8:30 a.m. and as I had not slept well I decided to catch another hour of sleep. I recalled the brush of those cold pseudo-flesh lips and rubbed my mouth disgustedly. I fingered the radio to a station that featured soft music with few commercial interruptions and set the timer for an hour of music followed by an alarm signal. Performing perhaps its first useful service quite well, the box sang quietly, and as long as I averted my eyes from the moving lips on the bed stand, I found the music quite pleasant. I soon drifted off.

I awoke to the sound of the doorbell buzzer. Immediately, I had an uneasy feeling that I had overslept. The soft music station was still playing. I glanced at the clock. It read 11:02. The door buzzer sounded again as this sank in. I was supposed to have picked up Mara at 10:30.

“Damn it.”

I climbed from bed and grabbed up a pair of shorts. When I had one leg in my briefs and was struggling with the other, shaking sleep from my head, an impatient pounding began on the door. It had to be Mara. In another twenty seconds I had the door open.

“Hi babe,” I greeted Mara with a weak grin.

Arms crossed and eyes storming, she looked me up and down and without a word walked past me and seated herself on the couch. I could tell she was too pissed to talk. Great. The frigging box she had given me couldn’t even be trusted to keep time and now I was going to have to kiss up for being late. Wonderful. My neck muscles pulled painfully taunt. I tried to relax, but couldn’t.

“Something must have gone wrong with the alarm. I overslept,” I said. I stepped back into my bedroom and eyed the distasteful machine. The settings were indeed wrong. The alarm mode was off, and the radio was on. No sleep-timer function, it was just on.

“That’s wrong!” I shouted, my voice loud and indignant. “I didn’t set it that way!”

“What?” asked Mara, sounding irritated, but curious as always. She appeared at the doorway.

“This thing has switched modes by itself!” I accused, jabbing a finger at the hideous box.

“You’ve really been acting oddly today, Will. Here you are, standing in your underwear and claiming that an inanimate object switched its own alarm off.”

I hate lectures. I could sense one coming. I decided to cut it off right here. “Let me just get dressed and we’ll go.”

Mara left with an exaggerated sigh. When she was safely out of sight, I let the box have it. I hit the top of it with a downward stroke of my clenched fist. It felt good, the way it had felt to knock the cat a good one behind my mother’s back when she played a little too rough and hooked me with one of her claws.

“Cheap Korean crap,” I muttered. I dressed quickly, skipping the shower. I shaved and started brushing my teeth.

“Don’t you think we’re late enough, Will?” called Mara from the other room. My cheek twitched, the way it does sometimes when I am having a bad day. My brush slipped because I was pushing too hard. When I spit, the white foam had turned pink, tinted with blood. As I left I gave the box a last hateful glare. I froze.

There was a single drop of liquid running down the thing’s cheek. I knew what it was immediately. A teardrop. But where did it come from? Crying? Just why in the hell and how in the hell was it crying? Did the goddamn thing have eyes up there in the housing? I shuddered and turned to find that Mara had already left. I followed her out the door, walking fast.

Two steps behind, my mind whispered.

The reunion was worse than my blackest fears. I endured the long afternoon, maintaining a jovial front, while Mara continually humiliated me in front of her family. She pulled every trick in the book, obviously feeling that I owed her tribute for having been late, snubbing me to talk with cousins and aunts, ordering me to get her things from the picnic table and even taking the last folding chair so that I had nowhere to sit but on the grass at her royal feet. She offered to give me her chair, but I refused of course, hating myself for it almost as much as I hated her for offering.

She even scolded me for having too much beer. I felt like a punished serf. I dropped her off at her parents’ apartment, receiving only a slight peck on the cheek for my troubles. And no invitation to come in and talk.

“I’m sorry, but I really need to get some housework done, Will,” she explained. Her eyes flashed at me, a sexual promise. She saw the look that twisted my face for a moment then vanished and her own soft face creased with worry. I felt a pang of regret. I didn’t want to cause her any discomfort. A stray blonde hair slipped down over her eyes. She pushed it back. I remembered that she was trying to grow her hair because I liked it long. She was beautiful. She kissed me, a light brush of the lips that made the skin on my cheeks tingle.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t look too happy.”

“Nothing,” I said, making an effort to smile. My lips twitched upward a bit.

“You aren’t upset about anything are you?”

“No, of course not,” I lied. Suddenly, my mind was burning hot with alcohol and rage again. As if she didn’t know. She was playing me for a patsy and I hated it. I had to stand there and act like I was being loved. A small dog doing tricks for table scraps. I left and returned to my apartment in a foul mood. I got a can of Budweiser out of the fridge and popped the top. I gulped half of it while standing with the refrigerator door open and cool air blowing softly over my lower body. The beer felt good going down my throat.

Somehow, the alcohol strengthened my resolve. Without conscious thought, I turned and strode directly for the bedroom. I sat on my bed. There it was, waiting for me on the bed stand.

Mara’s face. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I rose and struck the box for the second time today. Sure enough, another tear ran down (her) its face.

I had had enough. It was on my mind too much lately, it sat on my brain. It mixed with the alcohol in my blood and made fire. The thing disgusted me. A man should not have to live with a thing that disgusted him. He should not have to sleep with it, for God’s sake.

I took another hit from my beer and rage seared my mind. I reached a trembling finger out and brushed the teardrop from the thing’s cheek with my knuckle. The skin was still as cold as death, but it felt just like Mara’s cheek, Mara’s cheek as it might feel on a February morning just as she arrived at school to meet me for an eight o’clock class.

For just a second, I looked at the thing and it seemed to me that it was Mara. It was Mara’s face and it was mocking me. I could stand it no longer. I stood, dropping my beer can onto the carpet where it spilled out its foamy contents audibly in a growing dark stain.

I stepped to the window and twisted the lock too hard, so that the cheap aluminum bent and would never close quite right afterward. I shunted the panel aside with a shove and cool air flushed over my sweating face. Then I turned and advanced on the box. I could see, as I grabbed it up from the bed stand and gave it a savage tug to rip the cord from the wall socket, that more tears had fallen down from the black recesses above its cheeks. The power cord held through the first tug, like a weed might hold to the earth through the first ripping pull a man might give.

The second tug was a little weaker, as I had the thing with my arm curled around it and had to twist my body at a bad angle, but it caused a momentary power glitch that made the thing’s lips shoot static and buzz together. It sounded as if it were being strangled. I felt a light spray of simulated saliva on my bicep. The third tug brought the cord loose from the wall, bending the tine on the plug and tearing the insulation so that the copper filaments gleamed red-orange. There was a short blue arc as the connection was broken.

With its last moments of life-giving capacitance, the thing spoke in Mara’s voice, “...Love...you...”

With eyes popping in rage and murderous determination, I stepped to the window and threw the box out. I watched her drop to the concrete five floors below. She smacked into the sidewalk with the sound that an over-ripe melon or a suicide case jumping head-first might make. Milky, bluish-white fluids flowed out of the cracked black case to soak into the porous surface of the concrete. Her lips of plastic flesh gave one last tremor and froze forever in death. Far above, I ducked my head back into the window and stepped back, breathing hard. A sudden surge of exhilaration shook me. A choked laugh escaped my lips. I stood in my bedroom, grinning and red-faced. I had destroyed the thing.

Like the snapshots encased in steel and hidden away in my closet, it was now harmless. Muscles that had long been pulled taunt like vibrating wires now loosened. My pulse slid down from a furious pounding to a pleasant steady drumbeat, sounding in my head like a man’s footsteps on gravel. My fingers quietly unclenched themselves, changing from a white-knuckled fist to an open palm, like a morning glory as it is touched by the first light of dawn.

I felt safe. Very safe.

The Insect Requirement

“Paul found one attached to his thigh,” said Dr. Beckwith quietly.

Captain Rogers’ body stiffened visibly in his pressure suit. “That’s it then.”

The two men stood in the tool storage pod adjacent to the ship’s engine complex. They both wore full pressure suits of stiff, crinkled fabric. They stood because there was no room to sit.

“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?” Dr. Beckwith asked. His breath blowing over the microphone poised in front of his mouth sounded like a strong wind.

Captain Rogers picked up a hand-held pneumatic drill and checked the digital pressure readings that glowed in red on the side. He held the drill to his chest and gripped the steel casing in powerful hands. His arm muscles bunched and the casing came loose with a jerk. A piece of black plastic from a ruptured gasket spun away and bounced off the ship’s hull. He could have used tools to remove the casing, but Captain Rogers rarely did things the easy way.

“We’ve lost too many men. We’ll have to leave.”

“But the contract—” began Dr. Beckwith.

“They didn’t pay me enough to die here. Nobody could pay that much.”

“It’s not that bad, really—we aren’t going to lose him,” Dr. Beckwith fought to keep the panic out of his voice. The muscles in his neck were stretched like guitar strings. When he moved his head pinched nerves twinged as if plucked by playful fingers. He rubbed and scratched his left hand through the thick material of his glove. He had to have more time.

They were in the first Earth ship to have landed on the planet, which they had christened Jade, the name specified in the promotional section of their contract. Although the executive who had come up with the name had never seen the world, Jade deserved her name. The newly-discovered planet was vast, tangled jungle. Huge land-masses of brilliant foliage dwarfed small seas. Seen from space, the seas appeared as silver-blue islands in an ocean of greenery. Above all, Jade was a world of wet, green life. An immense, tropical hot-house.

But in addition to the flora, particularly large and vicious insects had evolved. They buzzed and hummed everywhere. Every yard of ground rustled with them; they wriggled in ponds and darkened the skies with their bodies massed in overwhelming swarms. Some of them were as big as a man’s hand and just as powerful.

Captain Rogers gunned the pneumatic drill experimentally. The glowing digital readings fluctuated wildly, climbing up the scale, then dropping back. Rogers was a big man with bulky arms and shoulders. His pressure suit exaggerated his size, making him look like a massive white giant with thickly wrinkled skin.

“How did it happen?” he asked.

“What?” replied Dr. Beckwith.

“I mean Paul—how did the bug get into his suit?”

Dr. Beckwith waved impatiently at the air with his gloved hands. “I don’t know—he must have been carrying eggs or larva since his initial exposure.”

In contrast to Rogers’ build, Beckwith was a man of medium height with a bulging mid-section that barely fit into his suit. His arm muscles were like loose rubber-bands. He blinked rapidly as he brought his mind back to the present. He had been thinking about what Jade would mean to Earth. A whole planet full of living creatures men could eat without being poisoned. An entire planet to be homesteaded and explored. Back home there would be parties and bands. He could open a school of extraterrestrial biology. The colonists would name one of Jade’s mountain ranges after him.

“Is he hemorrhaging?”

Beckwith shook his head vigorously inside his helmet. He regretted it immediately, as fingers plucked painfully at his neck muscles. “We’ve got that stopped. He’s conscious, too.”

Captain Rogers said nothing. He finished adjusting the drill and tossed it back on the workbench. The heavy metal drill hit the table with a clang that neither of them could hear inside their thickly insulated suits.

Inside their suits the men were entirely self-contained. They carried nutrient pastes, air-compressors, waste-recyclers—everything. They had been living in their suits since the first day, the day they had landed, when the native insects had swarmed and killed most of the crew. That meant drinking recycled, distilled and body-warm water and breathing compressed filtered oxygen that tasted like hot vinyl. Beckwith and Rogers conversed by radio, it was either that or trying to touch helmets all the time. The only sounds that could penetrate their helmets from the outside came up through the soles of their feet, usually from vibrations in the steel-plex hull of the ship itself.

Beckwith scratched the knuckles of his left hand by rubbing them up against the underside of the workbench. He shook his head, although no one could see him. His neck twinged. They couldn’t leave Jade now, without the conclusive proof he needed. Everything would be ruined. He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably under the weight of his air tanks. Feeling a touch of nervousness, it seemed that he couldn’t get enough air. Quickly, he adjusted the oxygen-gauge on his forearm up a few hundredths. After a few moments he relaxed. For a moment longer, he listened to the hiss of his air-valves and breathed back in his own steamy exhalations.

“Let’s have a look at him,” said the captain finally. He laid all his tools on a piece of canvas and shoved them back out of the way.

Nodding his head sharply and ignoring the plucking fingers, Beckwith headed with hurried steps toward the bulkhead. Rogers followed at a much more leisurely pace.

The tiny medical ward at the heart of the ship was a tight fit. Beckwith and Rogers stayed in the corners, trying to keep out of the way. The nursing unit, named “Mom” by the crew, moved anxiously around the prone figure of Paul Foster. Her three multi-jointed arms independently, whirring and whining as innumerable electric motors and hydraulic screw-drives worked in unison. When either Dr. Beckwith or Captain Rogers got in the way, Mom politely bleeped and waited for them to move.

Technical officer Paul Foster lay on a stainless steel table. A thin sheet of sterile white paper separated his body from the metal. Tubes and sensory wires ran from where they were taped to pale, bloodless flesh up to a panel of self-monitoring devices that hung in festoons from the ceiling. As they watched, an IV bottle dribbled the last of its liquid contents down the tube leading into Foster’s bloodstream. A soft alarm went off, which was immediately acknowledged by Mom. Within twenty seconds the robot had replaced the bottle with a fresh one.

“He doesn’t look good,” commented Rogers. “I think—”

“It’s just the anesthetic—don’t think that he’s dying.”

Rogers shook his head. “Why can’t Mom just take that thing off him? Look at that—just look and think about what that must be like.”

Foster’s eyes were half-open, but glazed and obviously unaware. His dead-white arms were strapped to the steel table, so that he would not injure himself. On his exposed right thigh crouched an earth-colored lump about the size of a golf ball. Faint red lines traced up Paul’s leg from the insect, showing where its feeding apparatus were inside his arteries.

“Mom can’t just pull it off,” explained Beckwith. “See those cilia, those hair-like things around the base of it? If we even touch the carapace, it injects toxins.”

His neck twinged again, a twinge of guilt. He shook his head dismally. “I warned him, I warned them all not to use repellant that first day.”

He should have worked harder to impress the crew with his theory, but he hadn’t known what would happen. How could he have known? He squirmed inside his ill-fitting pressure suit. He rubbed the painful, itching knuckles of his left hand against the underside of the operating table, feeling the stiff fabric of his glove rasp on swollen flesh.

“I still don’t understand why the repellants didn’t—” began Rogers.

“The repellants did work,” snapped Beckwith. The captain was a fool, and Beckwith had little patience with fools. “As I tried to explain, the insects here have evolved to attack any creature bearing some sort of chemical defense against them. That’s partially why they are in such a dominate position in the ecological system.”

He recalled the way the insects had swarmed in reaction to the repellants. In seconds, five crewmen had become man-shaped mounds of biting insects. Dr. Beckwith had noted that several species had swarmed in unison. There had been blue, wasp-like creatures that were about the size of a man’s index finger, with curved retractable stingers of shiny, black chitin. He remembered seeing a double-winged variety of the flying spiders as well. Even a few of the crab-sized beetles that lived in the mossy undergrowth had joined in the attack. The crewmen had screamed and stumbled blindly like men engulfed in flames. Beckwith had been quite shocked. It was very rare to have several species combine their efforts in such a manner.

“So you’re telling me that I didn’t get attacked because I wasn’t wearing repellant?” asked Rogers.

“Correct.”

“Huh,” grunted Rogers. He changed the subject. “Couldn’t we just...” He made a hacking motion in the air with his gloved hand.

“Amputate? No—we don’t have the equipment for that here...” Beckwith stopped, remembering that he didn’t want to give Rogers any excuses to leave Jade ahead of schedule. He made a nervous fluttering gesture with his hands. “Well, of course, we could do it, but the insect’s ah—feeding tubes extend up the femoral to his heart, and...” he shook his head and then added a lie. “I don’t think any medical facility could insure the patient’s survival in such an operation.”

For a minute or so they quietly watched Mom perform her duties. Mom clicked and whirred steadily, simultaneously monitoring Foster’s pulse, breath rate, temperature and neural responsiveness. They watched as the machine gave her patient an injection. One of Mom’s three appendages slid open a compartment and a needle with a tube attached came out of it. The skin of Foster’s upper arm dimpled in and the drug pumped into his bloodstream under measured pressure.

“That bug—it doesn’t really look like a bug. It’s too big,” Rogers said. Beckwith noted the familiar tone of disgusted fascination in his voice that non-biologists always used when discussing insects. “It looks more like a hermit crab, maybe, but with a tougher shell.”

Beckwith decided to try again to impress the Captain with the importance of the mission. He had tried many times in the past few days and he knew he had begun to annoy Rogers with the point, but he had to try again.

“As horrible as it is, Captain,” he began making an effort to start from a point that the man could understand. “And it is a terrible thing, I agree... But the mere fact that these insects can co-exist with us, with human beings, is actually a great discovery.”

Rogers made a dismissing gesture. “Yes, yes, I know. Their proteins—”

“That’s it exactly, Captain,” interrupted Beckwith, unable to contain himself. He rubbed the joints and flesh of his left hand, letting the rough fabric of his pressure suit do the scratching for him. “The proteins. Of all the thousands of molecular structures for proteins life can take, Earth has evolved only a few—”

“And this planet has more or less the same set,” Rogers finished for him. “I told you I know.”

Beckwith was not to be stifled, however. “Jade is in fact, the only planet yet to be found that has organic compounds so closely compatible with ours. Think of it! Men can live here without being poisoned by every living thing they come in contact with. You can roast a bird or dig up a root and chew on it without expecting a dozen fatal allergic reactions.”

Inside his suit, Beckwith thought of it, and his face twisted with a grin. Just a little adapting to be done, and then an entire planet waited to be molded into a new world. A million new species of life to study in the field. A biologist’s dream.

“Bleep, Bleep,” Mom applied a tiny amount of pressure to the doctor’s ankles with a foam-padded fender. Startled, Beckwith hopped out of her way and let the machine pass.

“You’re talking about colonization, Beckwith.”

“Yes, certainly,” he replied, steeling himself for another round of an old argument.

“But colonization on any realistically large scale is impractical. Everyone knows that.”

“Wrong. Everyone is told that. And they are told that because there has never been a planet suitable for mass colonization,” here Rogers started to retort but Beckwith overrode him, unusually assertive due to his excited state. “Of course there are miners on several high-ore planets and numerous scientific stations and outposts strung out within thirty light-years of Earth. There even a few large stations on bleak rocks called colonies,” here he paused to drag in a gasp of breath, “But there is nothing compared to what Jade could become.”

“Look, Beckwith,” said Rogers, turning to face him squarely. A large gloved finger extended toward the doctor’s faceplate, jabbing at him in time with Rogers’ words. “I know how important this discovery is, I know how much you need to complete your tests—to get your proof—but I have a mission to run. Out of a crew of eight, you and I are the only men still standing—”

“But without conclusive proof, we’ll have trouble getting a fully equipped survey vessel to come out here.”

“And with a dead crew, doctor, Earth would never learn about this planet. Besides, I find it difficult to believe that if you bring back enough samples, Earth labs could not come to the same conclusions that you have just as quickly. I am beginning to believe that you want to hog the credit for the discovery.”

Beckwith shook his head vehemently. “False, sir. Positively false. Personal notoriety is my last concern,” he lied. He quickly decided that he must switch the topic of the discussion to something else. Rogers was quite correct about not needing to collect additional samples to prove that the proteins were compatible. But he had another reason for waiting. A vital reason. “Besides which, we now are out of reach of the insects and are in no further danger. There is no reason to leave prematurely.”

“I do not relish the idea spending another several weeks living in this pressure suit. With only two of us left, the grounds for aborting the mission are surpassed. We’re leaving as soon as we stow the equipment.”

Dr. Beckwith shook his head sharply inside his helmet. A droplet of sweat flew from his forehead to strike the inside of his quartz faceplate. His neck muscles pulled and twinged violently. He wanted to tell the Captain why they didn’t need to leave. He was all but bursting with the facts, but he contained himself. He knew that the truth would be misunderstood, that it would get him nowhere. He said nothing.

Thirty-one hours later Dr. Beckwith and Captain Rogers were working outside the ship. They had stowed approximately three-quarters of the scientific equipment and supplies. Dr. Beckwith looked up through the shielded face-plate of his helmet. The shimmering image of the K-class star overhead burned purple blotches in his retina and glowed on his eyelids when he blinked. They would be finished before nightfall, which was less than nine hours away. He knew that if he was going to act, it must be soon.

He removed his helmet. Rogers was safely out of sight, packing the meteorological mini-lab on the other side of the ship. With his helmet off, the world he had watched from the inside of it came to full color and life. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to Jade’s daytime glare. His other senses, too, were overwhelmed by the surging, frothing ocean of life that assaulted them.

A hundred as yet unclassified beasts roared, screamed, and growled, sounding as if they crouched behind every bush. Flying cold-blooded bat-like creatures screeched in the trees and unseen things rustled under moldering leaves. The air was heavy with odors that seemed particularly powerful to him. He had had nothing to smell other than his own moist body trapped in his pressure suit for days. His nose detected rotting fruit, various types of dung, and pleasant scent like that of crushed grass mingled with the smell of danker vegetation. When the ship had landed it had burnt a steaming wound in the foliage, and the smell of it still hung in the air. Dr. Beckwith stood in the midst of this black wound, but he hardly noticed it. His eyes were only focused on the vibrant forest that engulfed him and his tiny ship. He filled his lungs with the cleansing, oxygen-rich air.

He watched as an animal about the weight and height of a large dog investigated the unprecedented phenomena of open ground. It sniffed with an elongated trunk-like protuberance at a blackened and twisted plant. Fires were rare things on Jade’s wet surface. The creature acted uncertain and cautious. Dr. Beckwith watched quietly as it tested the air and picked at clods of blackened ground.

Like all the animals that had been discovered on Jade thus far, it lacked fur of any kind. Dr. Beckwith had speculated that furred creatures had probably died out because of the prevalence of parasites: on Jade, fur did little other than provide homes for insects. Inside the animal had a tough hide of layered, armor-like gray skin, similar to that of Earth’s rhinoceros. Parasites resembling barnacles were visible on one of its flanks and in clusters about its throat.

Dr. Beckwith took an immediate interest in the insects it carried. He did not recognize the species. He pondered killing the animal and examining them. He fingered the pistol on his hip, but rejected the idea. There was no more time.

He set down his helmet and began searching a rubbish pile of scorched bushes and trash from the ship. He found it difficult to use his left hand, as it was now stiff and throbbing all the way up to his elbow. Fortunately, he believed it had now reached its worst stage and would soon begin to heal. He dug through discarded cartons and used bits of plastic that held pockets of wriggling larvae. When he moved the cartons they broke one and he found himself holding two moving handfuls of pinkish scavenging insects, about the size of twelve-year molars. Finding them to be of a familiar species, he shook them unconcernedly from his gloves and continued his search. At last he found what he was looking for, a hefty length of steel-plex with a solid core.

Holding the piece of steel-plex like a club, he approached the hull of the ship. He stood before the microwave navigational sensor. The sensor was a four-pointed dish with gold foil wrapped around it. The delicate instrument was presently exposed in its pod as Captain Rogers planned to check it before lift-off.

Dr. Beckwith had discarded his helmet, but not his radio headset. He had only to speak to be heard by Rogers.

“Captain, could you give me a hand with this?”

“With what?”

“One of my experiments, I need your help to get it aboard.”

He heard Rogers sigh. It sounded like a wind storm over the mike. “Shit. Alright, sure.”

He glanced about furtively before beginning. He felt a slight movement in the humid air, not quite enough to be called a breeze. It touched and cooled the sweat on his brow and lifted a few locks of his hair. To have this world, to live in the open on Jade as men should, it was something that he knew would mean much to his race.

He patted the comforting bulge in his suit’s hip pocket. He had to do this right. Rogers was not going to give him a second chance.

Delaying no longer, he raised his improvised club and crashed it down into the delicate navigational sensor. Gold foil bent and tore. Steel-plex clanged against real metal. The force of the blow jarred his slight body. He jerked his club loose from the tangled ruin and struck again. Copper-trace circuits and microprocessors were smashed to fragments. There was a shout in his earphones, Rogers had come around the corner of the ship. Beckwith paid no heed and struck again. Fresh beads of sweat welled up on his forehead and clung to his skin. His left hand throbbed, but he continued to destroy the sensor.

“What the hell—” yelled Rogers as he came closer. Dr. Beckwith could hear his labored breathing as he trotted to him in his heavy suit. “I’ve got my needler on you, Beckwith!”

Dr. Beckwith took another swing, missing clumsily this time, managing only to gouge the protective plate that covered the sensor when it was not in use. His left arm was giving out, becoming useless. He ignored Rogers’ approach, keeping his back to the man. He gambled that Rogers wouldn’t burn down a lunatic with his back turned to him.

“You’re crazy!” buzzed his earphones. “You’re absolutely, goddamn crazy!”

Dr. Beckwith was relieved when he found Rogers’ powerful hands wrapping around him. He was yanked back from the crumpled sensor. There was a brief struggle for possession of the steel-plex club. Dr. Beckwith kicked and twisted. Both men were hampered by their pressure-suits, Rogers having the added handicap of wearing a helmet. Finally, Rogers simply grappled with the smaller man, putting him into a powerful bear hug. He managed to restrain Beckwith’s flailing limbs. It was this proximity that Beckwith had been waiting for.

Rogers powerful arms hugged his shoulders, but didn’t stop him from slipping the hypodermic he had gotten from Mom out of his pocket. If he had tried to sneak up on Rogers, the man might have seen the hypodermic and stopped him. But now there was no chance. With an underhand thrust, he stabbed the needle through the tough layers of fabric and into Rogers’ solar plexus. The pliant bulb at the other end pumped automatically, injecting its contents in rhythmic surges, like the poison sacs of a wasp.

Captain Rogers folded like a popped balloon.

#

The day of the lift-off was unbearably hot. Jade had transformed into a wet green hell. Perspiration itched as it flowed out of Dr. Beckwith’s pores to run in tiny streams down his body. He stood in a clearing he had burned in the jungle with his needler, several hundred meters from the ship. He had stacked a considerable store of survival equipment and medical supplies in the clearing. Included in the equipment were two cots, an air-conditioned tent and the nursing unit, Mom. Dr. Beckwith wished only to maroon the two men, not murder them.

“It’s all very simple,” he explained. “I, as a biologist, understood it almost immediately.”

There was no response. Neither of his two listeners was capable of making one. Both Rogers and Foster were strapped to their cots and gagged. Beckwith had gagged them after tiring of their endless alternating threats, pleas and complaints. Mom moved between them, attending faithfully to the needs of her patients. The left hands of both were in restraining casts of fiberglass. Their fingers, protruding from the casts, were red and swollen as if infected. They were, in fact, infested.

Enjoying the coolness of the air-conditioned tent and the novelty of an attentive audience, Beckwith lectured on. “Because of Jade’s parasitic ecological system, it is simply a requirement for all native life forms here to maintain a personal colony of one of the more dominant species of insect. You see, you need them here, for your own protection. One colony of a more easily endured species will keep other more harmful types at bay.

“That is just how I got rid of the particularly malevolent insect that had you in its death grip, Paul. All that was necessary was the introduction of another species to get it to retreat.”

In order to continue his lecture, he needed a model. He removed his glove and carefully rolled up his sleeve, as though peeling delicate fruit. His left arm had healed almost completely, and looked puffy and sore only around his knuckles.

He took a pen out of his breast pocket and used it as a pointer while he talked. “You see, the particular species that seems easiest to live with requires certain compounds, such as calcium, that are most easily reached at the joints—” here he indicated his swollen knuckles with the tip of his pen. “—Since the hand has many accessible joints just below the skin, it is an ideal breeding site for them.”

Scurrying creatures resembling fleas the size of small sow bugs moved about on his arm, making their way through his body hair as men travel through bushes. The holes they had burrowed in his flesh to get to the joints of his hands were in the process of healing into permanent scar tissue.

“Now, of course, I simply leave appropriate amounts of calcium powder around the area, so that they no longer irritate the flesh and joints.”

Dr. Beckwith concluded his lecture and saw to it that Mom had things well in control and was programmed to release her wards after lift-off. He left the coolness of the survival tent and headed for the ship. All around him the green flames of Jade’s countless leafy plants burned brightly with life. He almost envied the men he was abandoning and the freedom they would have here. He knew that they would not agree with his feelings, but he had to leave them. He would be incinerated as a mutineer if he returned to Earth with them. He preferred to be the sole heroic explorer bringing the wonderful news concerning Jade.

He replaced the damaged microwave navigational sensor with an auxiliary unit, then began powering up the ship for lift-off. While he searched a manual for the proper control sequence to operate the ship’s stabilizing computer, an exploring insect on a scouting mission rustled its way out of his hair. It came out beneath his ear and made its way up his cheek. He felt its numerous churning feet grip his face and its feelers making feather-light contact with his skin. He held still while it investigated his eyelashes. After a few moments, the insect crawled down across his mouth and along his neck to disappear under his collar line.

He wondered if his fellow Earth-born men would put up with that sort of thing. A twist of cold fear touched his stomach; what if men refused to come to such a place? But then he relaxed and smiled. He was confident that once Earth’s colonization companies had an organically compatible planet to send people to, that careful advertising would omit such nasty details. The promise of a jungle paradise with an open sky overhead instead of a filtered environment beneath a dead gray dome would sound appealing.

They would come. Others would adjust to Jade just as he had. Adaptability was one of mankind’s greatest survival traits.

And of course, there was nowhere else to go.

He finished with the manual and set the ship into motion. Bass-voiced jets rumbled as the ship rose through the atmosphere. Dr. Beckwith watched the aft view of Jade as it telescoped rapidly. The freshly scorched clearing shrank to a black dot swimming in a green sea. Finally, it vanished as if swallowed by a wave.

Something tickled among the hairs of his armpit. He found it difficult to ignore. He made a mental note to develop some sort of skin desensitizer for the comfort of the new immigrants.

Blind Eyes

Tamara knew the giant would kill her if he caught up. He chased her on the dark beach, each heavy step leaving a crater in the wet sand. He was wired on a handful of blur, synthetic blue crystals that looked a little like drain-cleaner. The side effect that gave the drug its name made his eyes water profusely, which was the only reason Tamara still lived.

Overhead the clouds hid the moon and most of the stars. Far away across the ocean lights gleamed along the coast marking the outskirts of New Havana, Cuba’s largest city. The waves coming up over the reefs and splashing the sand had a phosphorescent glow to them, the ghostly nimbus from plankton blooms that touches the waters of the Caribbean during certain times of the year.

As her feet slapped against the dark sand and popped the bulbs of marooned clumps of seaweed, small crabs scuttled about hoping for food. Tamara was blind, even more blind than the wired-up nine-foot tall giant that murderously hunted her. Her closed eyelids looked normal, there was even the semblance of long dark lashes, but beneath these lids she had no eyes at all. The genes for her optical organs and the brain sections that processed the input from the optical nerves had been deleted, as that left more room in her skull for other things.

She sensed the crabs at her feet, moving objects of a particular shape and size, at a certain location and depth. They had no color or shading, and except for their heat signature, they looked the same to her at midnight or high noon. Tamara perceived the crabs, rather than saw them, just as she perceived the giant.

He was behind her, over a hundred yards away in the dark. She sensed the foaming seawater that rushed over his heavy boots. She watched his huge heart pound with deliberate liquid motions in his vast chest.

Doctor Sato had been right, of course. He had bought her as an embryo from Tyro Labs, and he was the closest thing to a father that she had. He had told her to leave matters at the schools alone. She had not listened, she had used her job as an instructor to find the kids who needed help, to reach into their minds and tug here, to pluck there. She had removed the need they had for blur and other drugs, or at least neutralized it.

Things might not have gone so badly if she had stopped there. If sales had just gone down, the pushers would have been baffled, but not enraged. At least, they would not have had a direction for their anger, and would have been likely to turn it on themselves.

Yes, if she had stopped there, things might have worked out. But she hadn’t.

She was getting tired. She knew that just running was not going to work. The giant was half-blind and in the dark, but he carefully used what little myopic vision he had left, tracking her footsteps in the sand. He lost her now and again, as he had back in the village and the jungle, but always regained her trail. His stamina was boundless, he had the muscle density of a gorilla and had sunken deeply into the berserk rage that engulfed all the giants so easily, especially when they indulged in blur crystals.

It was this last genetic flaw, that when discovered, had finally moved the Office of Social Blending to enact strict regulations. They had essentially outlawed private gene-programming. Gene-shops had long profited from anxious couples. They promised prospective parents the tailor-made child of their dreams. Many sports fans had desired a big beefy son for football or boxing. Once the competition for the best growth programming got started, the free-market and the one-upsmanship tendencies of people everywhere took care of the rest. The modern giants were the result, a highly-publicized and frightening racial subgroup all their own. Every sports team had to have them, every celebrity had to have a bodyguard big enough to match his ego. They did airline and beer commercials, had a high rate of suicide and tended to extremes of violence when intoxicated.

To this day, despite the laws, in the dark corners of the globe more zygotes were poked and prodded, more poverty-stricken women moaned through emergency C-sections, and more giants were born. Tamara reached the place where the hammock and the lantern hung together on a nail sunk into the bark of a tall palm and turned into the forest.

As she had tried to tell Doctor Sato, she had done it for the children. It was not enough to stop the pushers in just her little town, in just the school where she taught. She wanted to strike directly at the people who had harmed the children. She wanted to do more than interrupt their cash-flow and sour their profits.

What had been wonderful was that she had succeeded, for a time. Suddenly the pushers hadn’t wanted to push anymore. Some of them had even turned in their colleagues, all that they knew of, to the DEA. But it had been the others, the secret ones, the ones that hid and watched, who had discovered her. Tamara hadn’t known about them, hadn’t been suspicious enough to spy every mind behind every pair of eyes that watched her.

She shuddered just to think of their minds. To touch their squirming thoughts left her disgusted, as if she had touched a sea-reptile steeped in slippery bottom-muck.

She had not suspected them, because the secret ones had been children.

Only fifty yards behind now, the giant turned after her, ripping loose the hammock from its moorings as he strode beneath the palms. He pulled it away from his chest like a cobweb and fumbled through the trees in the dark, his eyes watering and blinking.

Tamara, panting with panic and fatigue now, rushed through the humid bug-filled darkness. She crashed in the undergrowth that grew in density as she left the beach behind. Ahead, she thought to make out the tingling heat-radiance of artificial light.

Then her feet found a trail winding into the interior, and she began to run, haltingly, hands stretched out before her in case her perception failed to pick up a hanging vine or branch. Big soft leaves from jungle plants struck at her, soft as pillows. Cord-like roots sought to loop around her ankles. She stepped on some squishy, unwholesome thing in the dark and gave a small breathless shriek.

After the secret ones had discovered her identity, the assassins had come. They had been easy to spot and divert at first, until the third one, the giant that trailed her now. His mind was unreachable, a blank gray wall of impregnable brick, hidden behind a dense fog of blur dust. She had no idea who he was or where he had come from and as a natural empath, this was a concept that terrified her. For her he had no more humanity than a machine. A killing machine.

Ahead the shape of the hut was unmistakable. Inside she perceived movement, although it was muffled and vague through the adobe walls. She stumbled over the half-step in front of the door and tried the latch. It was locked, so she hammered on the ancient mahogany door.

“Doctor Sato, let me in,” she hissed up close to the door, reluctant to give the giant any sounds to follow. She could hear the giant in the jungle behind her, some ways off, crashing through the vegetation like a power shovel.

The door swung inward and she stumbled inside, the bright radiance of a lantern and the dim glow of a computer terminal flaring up like new radar contacts in her mind. Doctor Sato was there too, his mind surprised, concerned and fearful. “Tamara, what have you got yourself into now, girl?” he asked, reaching out with his hairy knuckled hands and guiding her gently into the shelter of the hut. He was a short brown man with a wide soft belly and a balding scalp. His dimensions reminded Tamara of a life-sized toy bear.

“We’ve got to run,” Tamara whispered hoarsely, her breath burning in her lungs. “Another assassin has found me, and it’s a giant this time,” here she shook her head, her long dark hair falling into her face and sticking to her sweaty skin. “We’ve got to run.”

“A giant?” he said in disbelief. Tamara sensed Sato’s heart quickening in his chest, but could not see his eyes widen with fear nor the way his mouth sagged with dismay. She felt the fear in his mind though, and she felt vaguely sick at having brought all this back to him, at having burdened him with her plight, but she had nowhere else to turn.

“Let’s go then,” he said, his grip closing around her wrist. He led her through the room, slamming the mahogany door shut behind them and throwing the bolt. He paused only to snatch up some data-capsules and turn off the bio-processor, a reflex. He fumbled with the latch on the backdoor for a moment and the stupid little hook that held the screen door shut stopped them for precious seconds. For some reason, he didn’t think immediately of forcing it. He was sixty-two, and running for his life was something new.

Behind them, something huge and ponderous pushed through the overgrown walk way and up to the mahogany door. The latch rattled, then there was a heavy thud. The hinges groaned and splinters sprayed away from the doorjamb. Together, Tamara and Sato hit the backdoor with their bodies and it popped open easily, swinging wide and smacking into the wall.

Tamara saw a startled iguana scuttle away into the jungle. Her mind automatically tracked the reptile’s movement even though it was hidden in the underbrush.

Visible on the driveway was the cool metallic form of Sato’s ATV. Hope blossomed in Tamara’s heart at its image appeared in her mind. They scrambled to the car and released the hatches, climbing inside. For a few tense seconds Sato fumbled through his clothes pockets for the keys while back in the hut the giant wreaked great destruction, smashing everything in reach of his huge hands.

“Come on!” cried Tamara, feeling hot tears welling from her empty eye sockets. She could feel the raw burning terror in Sato’s mind as well as experiencing her own.

Finally, he tugged the clattering bundle of codekeys from his breast pocket where they had been all along and slammed one of the coded cylinders into the ignition. The engine flared into life, Sato threw it into gear and slammed down the power rod. With a tortured growl, the ATV leapt forward on the unpaved road, big balloon tires churning up wet dirt. Tamara sensed the giant had made his way out the backdoor of the hut, following them. His arms swung like a catapult heaving a boulder. An object zoomed out of the dark at them and she screamed. She sensed it as it overtook them from behind.

“What—” began Sato, then the object struck the back window and caromed off, crashing into the jungle. The object had been Sato’s bio-processor.

The back window shattered. A spray of glass shards hit them both and Sato almost drove into a mangrove tree. Tamara was so relieved she almost laughed aloud.

“I thought maybe it was a grenade,” she said.

Sato nodded while he fought the wheel and got them back on the road. They bounced along at a demonic pace, both of them laughing with relieved tension. There was no way the giant would catch them now.

The jungle plants slashed at the ATV as they passed, lashing inward and depositing shreds of cool leaves through the hole in the back window.

After a moment Sato laughed too. Behind them, if she reached out with her mind, she could sense the giant, running after them down the jungle lane. His arms and legs pumped in rhythm with his huge galloping heart. They were rapidly outdistancing him, but he didn’t slow, he wasn’t giving up. She watched the pistons churn and flare with heat under the ATV’s hood. The two of them didn’t talk much on the way back to the city.

The next day they sat together in Sato’s office at the university. Around them were the usual accouterments of the college science professor, including an antique desk, lost beneath a blizzard of flimsy plastic scrolls. Resting atop the scrolls was a dusty Mars-rock, gathered on a summer school expedition fifteen years back. The ubiquitous bio-processor sat in the midst of it all, hooked to a venerable old Steinbach CPU that sat in its chest under the desk with a tangle of optical-gel tubing poking out of the top.

“You’ll have to leave the island, Tamara,” Sato told her, raising a hand to her expected denials. “Please don’t argue. You don’t have any choice now, you can’t handle things like this monster they have trailing you. I pulled a few strings and Tyro Labs has chipped in some cash and a ticket to Berlin. From there you can easily start a new life.”

Tamara shook her head, wearily. “It would not be enough to just leave Cuba. I’ve gained the vengeful attention of international lords. I’ve thwarted people who are accustomed to bribing or crushing all opposition. There can’t be any stopping now.”

“A person can always hide, Tamara. You will have to be careful, lay low, take precautions. You must act like a normal blind person for awhile.”

“No,” she smiled, shaking her head sadly. “They know you helped me. They will come after you now as well.”

This last struck through to Sato. Tamara felt the fear blossom in him anew, a black flower planted over a shallow grave. She felt a bit sick, he was acting so brave, pretending not to be afraid. He must have known that she could read him, that he could never hide a strong emotion from her. Still though, he went on pretending, playing the brave fatherly role. She pretended too, she pretended that he could give her useful advice, that he could really help her, but he couldn’t. She was in a game beyond his experience now.

“You don’t know these people, but I do.”

“You aren’t one of them.”

“I’ve touched their minds, poppa,” she said, slipping a bit.

“You haven’t called me poppa since you were a little girl,” said Sato. For a moment he smiled.

“Listen, poppa. They don’t think like we do, they don’t feel the pain of others. They kill men the off-handed way that farmboys kill gophers.”

For once, Sato had nothing to say. Tamara reached out and closed her soft fingers over the rough skin of his hand. “They will try to kill you now, too. I know it.”

Sato was silent for a long time. Tamara, sharing his feelings intensely now that they were in physical contact, felt like weeping for him. She felt his sense of loss, of failure to her. She followed his thoughts for a time while he remembered her as his daughter. Had he not programmed much of her genetic structure? Had he not raised her, taught her his values? To not be able to help and protect her, much less himself, was difficult for him to accept. He felt old and useless.

“So, what do we do?” he asked her.

“I’m through running,” she said. Anger had begun to burn in her again, the way it had when she had felt the children in pain. Their bodies had burned on drugs, hearts beating unnaturally fast, breath hitching from their lungs. Nervous uncontrollable energy, flushed cheeks, small bright eyes surrounded by gray skin. She remembered the children.

“I will protect you, father. I can use my mind in the horrible ways that I did before. I will reach inside them and twist,” Tamara said, thinking of the things she had done to the first pushers, the ones that gladly sold blur crystals and other synthetic drugs to her second-graders. Used just the right way, her thoughts had snapped their minds like dry twigs, the way an arm or finger could be snapped by a professional.

“Before the assassins come again, I must go after them.”

Like Saint Bernard dogs that are over-bred and turn mean, the giants were genetic extremes. They had been developed for size, strength and speed only, with no regard to their mental tendencies. Quick reflexes and stamina had been lifted to their maximums, while reasoning and emotional elements had been left up to the idle whim of chance. As a result, most of them were mentally unbalanced to some degree, and nearly all of them had the capacity for a killer rage buried down deep in their genes somewhere.

When Tamara finally found the giant that had stalked her relentlessly the night before, evening had fallen once again. She found him in a nightclub downtown, a club where men and women with carefully trimmed pubic hair pranced in G-strings on a dirty stage. The glaring words LIVE SEX SHOW blinked and spun in holographic splendor over the street outside the place, switching from English to Spanish, then back again. A bum in a torn sweater and ancient blue jeans sat near the entrance, begging patrons for money or a drink. He alternately received gifts, showers of alcoholic saliva and swift kicks to the legs and chest. Whichever, he muttered gracias to everyone, even those who ignored him completely.

Inside, she found the giant at the bar, covering two stools with one leg thrown out in a leisurely fashion. Although the place was packed, he also had the immediate stools to either side free, as people tended to give giants plenty of space, even more than they needed. He hunched over a two-liter mug of draft beer, favoring his drink over the slightly overweight hooker who was doing her best to attract his attentions.

Drawing in a breath and swallowing her fear like a sharp object, Tamara walked up to the giant and touched the back of his massive hand. He turned to look down at her, and she watched with her perceptions in fascination. It was as if a statue had come to life at her touch. He looked down at her and recognition flickered across his mind. She was counting on surprise and hesitation here, and also on his supreme self-confidence. With his quick reflexes and incredible strength, he could have crushed her instantly, killing her on the spot and then fleeing the scene. But she had known a few giants, and knew that many of them were convinced of their own invulnerability.

So, when he faced her, she maintained physical contacted and mentally she gave him a shove. A very hard shove, which ran a hot bolt of pain through her head. Instead of turning into a zombie as she had expected however, she felt that his mind had merely become more suggestible, as if she had just given him a very persuasive argument when he was in a receptive mood. For a flash she almost panicked. She had given him her best shot, figuring that the difficulty she had experienced with his mind earlier had been due to the drug blur, but apparently it also had to do with his mental abilities as a giant. She had planned to simply order him outside like a robot, but instead she had to come up with something more clever. And quickly, before the effect wore off.

She did the only thing she could think of. She made him think that she was someone else. Not Tamara at all, not the girl he had been paid to kill. She dredged up the image of another girl, one she had picked up from the minds of the eighth grade boys she had taught algebra to. It was the face of a popular anchorwoman on television. Suddenly, she had blue eyes that opened, blonde hair and soft red lips.

“Would you like some company?” she heard herself ask.

His reaction for a moment convinced her that her mental shove had failed utterly. He opened her coat, brushing her breasts with fingers thick as flashlights. She shrank back reflexively while he frankly examined her body beneath. She wore a cotton jumper that did nothing to accentuate her charms, but neither did it hide the fact that she had an attractive figure.

“Sure,” he said, closing her coat again with a gentleness that belied his size. He pulled his leg off the stool to his right and ordered her a drink. Tamara climbed up on the stool, wondering what to do next. She barely noticed the hooker who thumbed her large nose at her back. After a few more drinks, Tamara suggested that they leave together, and the giant, whose name was James Billings, agreed.

They walked out into the cooling, but still humid, night air. James had to stoop down and turn sideways to get out of the door. No one had questioned his picking up a blind girl. No one had dared.

Outside it had rained. The streets were black and reflected the city lights like wavery mirrors. Storm drains gurgled and beads of water reflected like thousands of eyes off the windshields of the cars they passed. Tamara saw this through James’ eyes, she was holding his hand and understood how to move through the giant’s mind better now.

Somehow, Tamara started feeling sorry for James. He had been a victim of the same experiments that had left her sightless and—different. She felt the loneliness and alienation in him, a man but not a man. Alternately feared, hated and idolized, he was an outcast in the midst of human society. She knew that these feelings were partly due to her natural empathy with anyone she was around. She always started seeing things their way, understanding their point of view. Despite that, she still sensed that he was like her, a monster that no one really knew what to do with. Tolerated, but with poor grace.

When they reached his hotel room, she knew that she had to gain some control over him. His elemental force of personality matched his physical prowess, and he was by no means subtle. He was also becoming increasingly drunk.

“You know, Sarah,” he said, pouring her yet another drink which she would have to pour away into the bathroom sink or the planter.

“There is something different about you, something familiar.”

She knew he had seen her on the holo-net channels. She had picked a poor disguise. He thumped over to her and handed her the drink. Then he leered down at her, his warm alcoholic breath washing over her. Something in his manner, something that his mind was hiding brought her a sudden jolt of fear.

“You look just like the witch-girl I was supposed to kill last night.”

Tamara spilled her drink. Bourbon soaked quickly into her pants, spreading coolness over her thighs. He smiled at her, and took her tiny hand in his.

“You’re tricks don’t work on me, Tammy. I damned near caught you last night, but this way was much easier.”

“How...?” she gasped, fear choking her words.

“Here,” he said, grabbing her small hand up in his.

“I know all about you. Come on and read me.”

Tamara knew it was a challenge. James liked challenges, he had an ego as big as his hat-size and wanted to pit himself against her. Besides, he was half-drunk, and for a giant that meant he was close to the berserker state. Then he opened his mind to her, and she knew everything.

She knew that the giant got a thrill out of the idea of “doing her” before he killed her. He was intrigued by the idea that she might want it that way, that she would like it that way. He also had had special government training to resist empaths. In his official career he had killed nearly a hundred men, and now that he was free-lancing he would go on killing.

She did something then that she had never done in the presence of any man except for Sato. She opened her eyes. She opened her eyelids, that is, but behind them there weren’t any eyes. Instead James Billings found himself looking directly at her exposed brain cells, protected only by a milky membrane. Beyond the membrane floated living pink tissue, blood pumping through the thin squiggly lines that were arteries and veins.

James Billings opened his mouth, perhaps to laugh or perhaps to scream, but what he also did was lose his concentration. It was all the opportunity that Tamara had and she took it. She shoved as she had never shoved before. She had learned her way through his mind a bit by now, he was drunk and he was off-guard. Up close like this, she could even perceive his brain inside his thick skull. She could feel the workings of his neural network, the chemical stimuli and responses.

First, she turned him on his bosses. She sparked a tiny flame of hate, then built it up, blaming all the tragedies of James Billings’ life on them. She dredged up memories of a scared father, beating a screaming two hundred pound eight-year-old son with a shovel. She conjured his first experience with a girl, her screams, his hands squeezing the life from her afterward. Finally, she made him relive the first time he got wired on blur, the fanatical rage, the fury of the berserker. When she had turned his heart into a pounding steam-press, when his nostrils were flaring wider than a dying bull’s, she let go of him and closed her eyes. He ignored her. He pulled the closet door off the wall, reached inside and brought out a heavy combat rifle. Normal men would have to mount it on a tripod to use it, but he carried it easily in one hand. He walked through the door into the hotel hallway, not bothering to open it first. He headed for the elevators, for the penthouses fifty stories up, where the bosses were.

Lying in the wreckage behind him, Tamara wept a few tears for James Billings. Although she had no eyes, her tear ducts were in place. After a time she got up and slipped out of the hotel, before the riot police and the Special Forces teams could arrive.

TA 96

SAMUEL GIDDEON’S TRANSCRIPT, as interpreted by the ATLAS system’s network server:

... hope so, I’m not used to this transcriber thing in my head. It should be transmitting everything that I sub vocalize, but of course, I have no way of knowing.

I’m approaching the guardhouse now. I have forgotten how cold it gets here in the Rockies. I’ve only been outside a few times in my life. New Mexico, despite its name, seems to be nothing but pines, rocks and ice in the winter. Even the electric fence that runs between the two higher fences of barbed wire and chain links can barely put out enough heat to drive off the drifts of snow.

I’m having a bit of trouble with the bomb just now; it keeps riding up on my ribs. I think the gels might be contracting a bit due to the cold. I hope no one notices that my paunch is lifting itself and puffing up like a cobra’s hood.

#

Report: Dr. Robert Kieffer, Physicist, Technical Area 21.

Dr. Gideon showed up two hours earlier than expected. He explained that he had taken an earlier flight and had gotten into Albuquerque the night before instead of this morning. Gideon was the new software expert that we had been waiting for to help us with the ATLAS system. He was older than I had expected. A lot older. I had been told that he was in his late twenties, a hot new recruit from MIT. Instead I found him to be a large, slow-moving man in his late thirties or early forties. By large, I mean fat.

He passed security easily; we skipped no procedures. We signed in, went through the metal detectors and Geiger counters and unstrapped our personal computers to put them through the x-ray machine. I was assigned as his primary escort for the day, as he was an uncleared visitor.

I must state for the record that I was taken completely by surprise by subsequent events, as I believe everyone was at TA 96.

#

Gideon’s Transcript:

What strikes me most is just how healthy they all are. Their color is so good, their cheeks so pink and rosy. Few of us at the compound look so hale and full of vigor. I feel like I’m watching another speed-learning video.

Bob Kieffer seems like a friendly man. He reminds me of the older man, Reno, who services my cell back home. While we slide our security badges into the small brass dish that is the only access underneath the two inch-thick bullet-proof glass, I see the photos in his wallet. He seems to have a wife and a little girl. The little girl is holding a red figure—a Star Viking doll! I’ve seen them during culture-orientation days on television. I always like the commercials best; they seem to say the most about people.

Bob has a keen mind, I can see that already. His movements, like his mind, are very quick, almost bird-like. I sincerely hope that he makes it through today.

The guards are grim-faced. They merely stare at us through the thick, slightly greenish glass. It seems to be taking forever for our security badges to be accepted by the barcode reader. Clipboards are signed, IDs are passed back and forth, the procedures are endless. Other fully-cleared personnel are backing up at the front of the guardhouse now, looking annoyed. The security men ignore them and move at the same methodical pace.

I notice the interior of the guardhouse. Squinting through the glass into the gloom, I see a rack of guns on the wall. Two automatic rifles top the rack. Below this is a shotgun with a string of shells velcroed to the stock. At the bottom is a large, ugly, black thing with a tripod. An M60? I can only hazard a guess. All the weapons have a worn look to them, and I wonder if they have killed anyone in the past.

Finally, the guards let us pass. As though a cork has been fired from a champagne bottle, people are streaming by on both sides of us while we reorganize our security papers. My breath is blowing cold and white. I notice my fingers are quivering a bit of their own accord.

“Quite good security you have here, Bob,” I comment, relieved that I have made it into the compound without incident. Nothing in the bomb or the ignition system contains more than the amount of metal found in a single of house key. None of the detectors picked it up.

“Yes, but you get used to it.”

“An army of terrorists couldn’t bust into here.”

He looks up at me, and my blood turns cold. I shouldn’t be talking about such things. I feel a rush of paranoia. Can he hear my thoughts? Is he transcribing them somewhere the way that the computer is supposed to be doing?

He smiles, and so I smile. “No, they couldn’t. But those guns in the guardhouse and the towers are just as keen on keeping us inside in case of a disaster as they are in keeping out invaders. Plutonium dust is worked here, as you know. It’s still the most deadly substance we’ve yet to find, and it can’t be allowed out of the compound.”

I nod, relieved that he isn’t suspicious. I squint in the snow-white glare up at the towers he has indicated. Men wearing dark shades stare back at me without humor. The open-mouthed gun muzzle of each guard forms a third black eye.

Together, we walk carefully on the icy cement leading up to the reception area. I’m amazed at how normal the place looks once you’re inside the compound. TA 96 looks like any campus building, if you ignore the fences and the armed men in the towers.

I have an unreal feeling being here. I sort of expected the security to have stopped me by now. Of course, they can’t be blamed. After all, my identification is absolutely authentic.

#

Taped interview: Manuel Ramirez, security guard, Technical Area 96:

I watched him like I watch everybody that comes in or goes out. He didn’t have any of the marks of a terrorist. He was a fat middle-aged man, maybe a bit sick, but not dangerous. I can see why they sent him. Who would suspect a wimpy old fat guy?

He didn’t meet my eyes, but then, few of them do.

#

Gideon’s Transcript:

I can’t stop thinking about my cancer. I know it doesn’t matter now, but somehow carrying around blotches of alien cells inside my body is worse than this girdle of squishy explosive. I keep thinking about my cancer, all the accelerated growth caused it, they tell me. No one can live a lifetime in just a few years and come out right. All I can do is walk and talk—oh, and wet my pants—like one of those dolls in the old commercials. I’m a fake. A department store dummy. A sham.

I must stop letting my mind wander and stick to the situation at hand. I can’t fail because I’m daydreaming.

I see the receptionist now, Sarah Rasmussen. She is security, too. She has a snub-nosed .38 stashed in her desk, and her favorite-aunt appearance is deceiving, just like they said in the briefing. I can almost feel her sizing me up. Her eyes drop to my paunch. I’m suddenly self-conscious about it. Does it look right? Is it sagging in the right places, is it bulging properly? Women are so much more discerning about things like this.

Oh God, she’s frowning. We haven’t even been introduced, and she’s frowning at me, at my explosive belly.

“Sarah, this is Dr. Gideon,” says Bob Kieffer. I blink at them stupidly.

Sarah nods smartly, she already knows my name. It is her job to know me.

“Dr. Gideon,” she nods to me, smiling with her mouth, but still frowning with her eyes. “Just how old are you?”

There it was. She just came out with it. I’m supposed to be 28, right out of MIT, and any fool can see that I’m not 28, that I’m an imposter, a fat old man with a boy’s face and ID. I’m not actually old, but my body is. The aging processes have worked all too well on me. My mouth opens to answer and nothing comes out but a rumble of gas from my diseased, bomb-wrapped stomach.

“Just fill this out, will you Sam?” Bob asks me. To Sarah he says: “Sam is helping us with the software system down in the lab. He’s a networking expert.”

I gaze at him stupidly, then at the clipboard he is handing me. It takes me a moment to grasp that he is trying to save me embarrassment. He has completely misread the situation. I grab onto the opportunity like a drowning man reaching for a life vest. The clipboard almost slips from my grasp, but I recover with a nervous laugh. Right now, I realize with crystal clarity that I’m actually lousy at this.

“Could you show Dr. Gideon the orientation tape, Sarah?” asks Kieffer. I have a sudden urge to kiss the man.

The receptionist is still eyeing me, but with some resignation, like a cat swishing its tail at the foot of a tree full of inaccessible baby birds. I feel moved to make a lame reply to her earlier question.

“I’ve been ill,” I say, looking apologetic.

She simply nods, and all through the orientation, I feel her eyes boring into the back of my head. I watch inane tapes about Geiger counters and dust-proof white lab clothing. I watch people walking calmly for flashing exit signs during emergencies, and then checking in with their supervisors outside for a lackadaisical head count. No one is running, screaming on the wires, burned by radiation and blasted apart by bullets.

All through the videos I feel Sarah Rasmussen’s eyes.

#

Report: Sarah Rasmussen, Internal Security, TA 96:

Of all the people present that day, I feel the most responsible for letting Dr. Giddeon get through. I was the only one, to my knowledge, that suspected him in the slightest. What threw me off was his comment about being ill. So many of the great minds here seem to be encased in oddly misshapen bodies. I took Bob Kieffer’s flustered reaction to indicate that this was the case with Gideon, and that I was causing undue embarrassment. His face did indeed closely match the photos, as did his thumbprints.

Still, it was my mistake not to listen to my instincts.

#

Gideon’s Transcript:

The close call with the receptionist has left me shaken. I can hardly hold the red placard saying: UNCLEARED VISITOR IN AREA. Three badges now weigh down my shirt-front. One is a temporary security clearance badge, the second an ID badge, while the third, redundantly, identifies me as a security risk.

“How about a cup of coffee before we go down to the lab?”

I startle, almost dropping my red placard, but recover. Will I be able to go through with this? What if I am never alone? Can I reach inside my shirt and pull the tiny aluminum tab and kill Bob Kieffer?

Bob escorts me to the cafeteria. He, or one of the others on my short escort list, must be with me at all times. If I take a piss, they are supposed to look over my shoulder to see if I’m holding it right. We put the large ugly placard on the wall outside, where it sticks with a magnetic click. As I enter the room, the PA system announces that an Uncleared Visitor is in the cafeteria. Few of the people in the room bother to look up, but I feel like a microbe on a slide anyway. I sip my coffee and begin to realize that this whole thing is crazy, that in a matter of minutes something will go wrong. What was Sarah Rasmussen doing right now? Calling the right number at the right time?

My cancer feels bad today; it is a presence in my body. I know that if I did lead Bob Kieffer to the bathroom, there would be blood in my bowels. I can feel it.

It seems like ages have gone by. I don’t have much time left before the correct version of Dr. Gideon shows up. Finally, we get up and head down to the labs. I walk toward the first vault doors and another battery of Geiger counters in a dream-like state.

#

Report: Dr. Robert Kieffer, TA 96.

The first clue I picked up that something was wrong with Dr. Gideon came when we reached the first vault doors. I began to wonder if the man was drunk or something. When I spoke to him, he often didn’t hear me on the first attempt. He seemed distracted and a bit anxious. We had waved all the drug-screening, since he was only supposed to work on site for four days. I began to think this could have been a mistake.

#

Gideon’s Transcript:

First, I dress in white overalls, booties and a hairnet. Then they run detectors over every inch of me. I nearly have a heart attack when the detectors sing over my breast pocket. They remove two diskettes and keep searching. I pray that my belly is as inert as everyone told me it was because now they’re patting it down. Gelatinous explosive, warm from my body heat, is jiggling and pressing against my ribs.

We’re through. We walk down a long hall that seems to telescope out before us. The doors have painted arcs on the floor in front of them to show where the swing could reach. Round bubble-like mirrors like those in hospitals perch over the intersections so you can see people coming at you. I can smell a strange chemical odor now, like that of the doctor’s office back as the compound. My heart is pounding freely now, my head is floating.

We reach the second vault. Outside we drop off our keys and leave our security badges with yet another guard. He gives me yet another badge, a dosimeter badge that will change color if I get too many rads. We walk through an airlock and an alarm sounds.

“Just the airlock,” explains Kieffer to my white face. “It does that if you don’t give the doors a chance to seal before walking through.”

We give the doors what they want and proceed into a room full of glove boxes. Long rubber gloves reach into leaded glass enclosures to work with trays full of radioactive material. Next to each set of gloves is a Geiger counter, ready to detect any contamination. The chemical smell is much stronger here. It assaults me, digging its way into my nostrils.

“This way,” says Kieffer and I follow him like a zombie. “Remember, don’t eat anything. Don’t even chew gum. If there is a leak and you ingest the dust, we can’t save you. Don’t sit down, either. Don’t even lean on anything.”

I nod vaguely. “What about the biological stuff?”

Kieffer shrugs. “They share this lab, but that’s another department. They’re making three-eyed polliwogs or something.”

I crack a smile. The man has no idea. I really want to make sure he gets out alive now.

He leads me to the computer workstation, all wrapped up in its own little environment, with its own air-conditioner and power supply. He looks over my shoulder while I work the membrane keyboard. For the first time I feel a bit at ease. I can even see what they have done wrong with the system, why they are having problems. Fixing networks like this was all part of my training, to make me more authentic. It’s the only useful thing I can do.

I’m stalling. I remember a video of a kid on a big rock, looking down into a swirling green chute of water, getting up the nerve to jump. There isn’t much time left.

Stepping back, I take a look around. There it is. I can see the thing: it looks like a lighting effect device in a dance-club movie. It’s stainless steel with tubes running in and out, like Sputnik with a thyroid condition. The particles shoot down those tubes into the center, where the genes are spliced and manipulated. Next to it is the rack of vacuum bottles. Their contents are frozen with liquid nitrogen.

How do I get up there? The thing is sitting on top of the stack of glass glove boxes. To climb up there on the catwalks will take a bit of time, and it will definitely be noticed.

I reach into my shirt, through the lab whites, and finger the detonator in my artificial belly. I turn to Bob Kieffer and he looks at me quizzically. I just stare at him, and finally, realization dawns there in his face. We communicate without words for perhaps five seconds.

“Better go now, Bob,” I say gently.

He opens his mouth once, blinks rapidly, bird-like, then turns and rushes for the doors.

#

Report: Dr. Robert Kieffer, TA 96.

There was something very odd in his eyes. Partly an apology perhaps, partly a deep sadness and concern. I have no doubt that he believed utterly in what he was doing.

I have never met up with insanity before. I had no idea that it was such a human thing.

#

Gideon’s Transcript:

I climb the aluminum catwalk steps and make my way to the Sputnik thing. I get there before the guard shows up. Leaning against it, I get a last moment of peace.

I don’t know if this will work. I don’t know if the bomb wrapped around my guts will destroy all the work done in genetics by this lab. The embryos and actual lab equipment will go, of course, and the hard disks with the primary database should all be lost. I don’t know if the secondary tape back-ups will go in the fire, though. Actually, I don’t even know if the bomb will go off. I never was taught much about the bomb.

I wonder briefly if they will ever suspect the truth. If anyone, even if they find the transcript of my thoughts, will believe that I come from another Technical Area in the same laboratory complex. From a compound that has decided to end the cloning.

It’s not that I’m murdering these embryos, you understand. Even killing the fetus locked in the sputnik thing isn’t really murder. For, you see, they are me and I am them. They are my clones, all of them. To kill them, then—I consider it an act of suicide. We, my brethren and I, have simply decided to end the copying of our genes. We believe we have that right. I wonder if others would agree.

The only thing I don’t wonder about is whether or not I will do it. There is no question of that, it’s in my genes.

Around me the lab gurgles and hums. The Geiger counters that are everywhere in the room ping to themselves, counting the particles that shoot through my body on a regular basis, disrupting the DNA in my cells. I recall from the orientation that working in the lab gives you a dose of radiation equivalent to one thirtieth of an x-ray per day. That is, if there are no leaks.

I smile to myself. Radiation hardly matters to a mannequin. I’ve already got cancer. All the growth-accelerated clones get it.

I hear pounding feet and shouting on the other side of the airlock.

I pull the detonator tab.

Zundra’s Movies

The first hint of insanity came during the live broadcast of “Orbital Hospital” late Thursday evening. October winds rattled windows and gave muffled screams as they rounded the sharp concrete corners of the studio building. Smells of strong coffee and hot electrical equipment hung in the air.

Director Zundra Chelton activated the communications module embedded in her brain with a twist of thought. She commenced transmitting enquire codes to the movie machine’s data interface. The interface responded with an acknowledgement, and the two modules quickly synched up and handshaking was established. A flood of data roared into her mind as the CPU uploaded the program for “Orbital Hospital”, her top-rated racy soap opera.

It was all there, just as always. There was no hint yet of anything out of the ordinary. Dr. Ray Wazer, the male lead, jumped off the disk and into memory like a puppet springing out of its box. His handsome brows, beaming smile and chiseled chin were perfect down to the last digital pixel of shading data. Wanda Morrison, the slutty hospital administrator with her exquisitely tanned legs flashed into being with equal grace, rendering onto center stage of Dr. Wazer’s office for the opening scene. With the lightning speed of molecular processors linked in parallel, the rest of the sets, cast and background data sprang alive. Zundra opened her eyes and for an instant she was aware of both worlds, the sets and scenes of “Orbital Hospital” superimposed over the dim-lit studio full of hushed computer operators and gleaming status lights. A digital counter flipped to zero, she gave the network boys the thumbs up and performed the mental equivalent of a tapping motion that started the script rolling through the system RAM.

#

WANDA MORRISON: Dr. Wazer, I’m beginning to believe you. Nurse Tai could have a twin sister that caused all these, ah... embarrassments.

RAY WAZER: Thank you, Ms. Morrison. (Places hands to face, careful to reveal flashy watch and not to hide chin) I was beginning to think that I was the crazy one. I’m very glad someone believes in me.

WANDA MORRISON: Call me Wanda.

RAY WAZER: (Raises head, close-up shot of slightly moist eyes. Hair tousled) Certainly—Wanda.

WANDA MORRISON: (Moves closer slowly, slides buttocks onto desk, side-slit pants fall open to reveal legs. Musical score shifts to Dangerous Romance.) What I really want to know is if you’re still in love with either of them.

(Suddenly the door opens stage left, and a dark, hunched figure shambles into the office. Ray and Wanda react with comic double-takes. The figure is carrying a greasy cardboard package of some kind. It shuffles forward and slaps the thing down on Dr. Wazer’s exquisite desk. It then jerks back its filthy cowl to reveal the face of a disfigured black woman with thin wispy hair and rotted stumps for teeth. One eye droops, gazing lifelessly at the floor.)

DARK FIGURE: Pizza sir, just as you ordered! The lid flips open by itself, showing a disgusting mess of cheese and fish parts, all heads and flipping tails.

DARK FIGURE: Plenty of anchovies on this Fu—*CENSOR INTERRUPT, OUTTAKE!* (figure faces camera, close-up of rotting teeth.) Buy Zeppo’s take-out pizza, system-wide delivery within thirty minutes or it’s free!

#

Zundra continued the show despite the interruption. The cast moved like wooden marionettes, mouthing their lines without conviction, they missed their cues and fumbled when they kissed. Damn! Through the fugue of the link she felt her real-life nails digging into her real-life palms. Growling in the back of her throat, she managed to finish the show without further deviations from the script. Zundra’s eyes fluttered and her fingers formed harpy’s claws.

“Did we broadcast that crap?” she rattled out of her constricted throat. Her good eye focused long enough to make out Andy’s mashed nose and see him perform a slow, grim nod. Then she strained to see the ratings graphic on the far wall. A steady green line slowly rose to a peak two minutes into the broadcast then took a sudden dive into the red. Only during the last three minutes did the line get out of the red and into the green again, leaving them several million kilo-dollars under target.

“I’ve said it before, and now we have our proof. You’ve got the best ratings in the business, but you’re too old for this game, Z. People in their mid-fifties don’t work the nets these days. Our vast amorphic viewing audience, otherwise known as paying customers, fled like a school of startled fish when you ran that personal ad of yours,” said Andy. His mashed nose wrinkled and he clucked his tongue. “I don’t blame them, I would have been searching for less annoying entertainment myself if these monitors could be switched to someone else’s station.”

Zundra glared at him with one wide open eye, showing plenty of bloodshot white around it. A single droplet of sweat shone on her brown skin. Andy’s hands curled up and he pulled his arms back against his chest. Zundra grinned hugely, then stabbed the release that freed her from the interface. She rolled her mobile life-support module down the aisle between the operators, staring straight ahead.

“Network’s going to shut you down if we miss target so badly next week, Z!” shouted Andy at her retreating back. “Doesn’t matter that you’re black, or that you dock your floater in the handicapped zone! Not this time, babe!”

#

“Maybe it’s Alzheimer’s,” said a voice behind her in the cafeteria. Because of her life-support module she had to eat at a special table without attached benches, and tonight her back was turned to the other employees. “Rust in the brain, that’s what they say causes it, you know.”

Zundra’s tuna fish sandwich turned to pink paste in her mouth. Scattered chuckles. “Some of the best of them go out this way—even our first string directors lose it now and again.”

With a sudden whirring of servo-motors she turned to face them. Most eyes fell, but Steve, a director with wild red hair that flipped and curled in a long ponytail down his back, smirked instead.

“I hear you ran into a little trouble with your files today,” he said.

More scattered chuckles. Coffee cups became very interesting.

“Insanity,” said Zundra simply. They all stared at her, falling quiet and still. She finally dropped her odd gaze and they all shuffled in relief.

“It makes for bad video,” she told the keyboard that was permanently mounted in front of her abdomen. Steve smiled and ate another French fry bloodied with ketchup.

#

“Well? Are you nuts? What’d the pysch say?” asked Andy. He perched his skinny butt on the ledge of an instrument array and swung his legs like an adolescent. Zundra could smell the chocolate that was melting in his back pocket. Her eye caught his and her face drooped. She massaged her wispy black hair with claw-like hands.

“No tumors. They give it a sixty-seven percent chance of schizophrenia if the system was truly sealed and bug-free.”

“There are no bugs.”

“I know. Something like this would have shown up before.”

“And this system, my system, is sealed tight,” Andy said. Then he chuckled. “I guess you’re nuts.”

Zundra shook her head, her claw-like hands balling into fists. “There has to be a leak.”

“No, no way,” Andy said, his mashed nose wrinkling. He shook his head like a dog drying itself. “Not in my system.”

“Someone’s tapped into the link, I know it.”

“Well, you go on again in eighty minutes Z. Why don’t you meditate for a while or something? Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Zundra swung one baleful eye around to cover him and he flinched and shrank like a convict in a spotlight. “You’re going to do something about it! You’re going to set a trap for the intruder.”

“But I’m telling you that there isn’t any intruder,” insisted Andy, uncrossing his thin arms long enough to shake a bony hand at her.

“Don’t whine, just do it.”

“Eighty minutes isn’t long enough to produce a good piece code.”

“Do it.”

#

NURSE TAI: So, you admit to it. You did sleep with my twin sister. (Musical Score shifts to Strident Events).

RAY WAZER: What’s the point of denying it? It was a simple mistake. I thought she was you.

NURSE TAI: (Tight shot of her round lovely face, eyes shining and wet, jaw set firmly). You’re lying, doctor.

RAY WAZER: (Standing up and approaching, leans forward over the hospital bed and its comatose patient). I still want you Tai. You’re sister has your body, but not your heart.

(The couple kiss heatedly, but before events can take their natural course the comatose patient jerks awake like a puppet pulled erect by its strings. The patient is a black woman of surpassing ugliness. She makes gross slurping sounds with puckered lips, mocking the kiss.)

COMATOSE PATIENT: Whew! Sure is getting hot in here! How about a refresher? (While the two lovers watch dumbfounded, the black woman rips loose her I.V. and aims the needle-tipped tube at them. Screaming laughter, she sprays them with an amazing amount of liquid. Quickly, the I.V. tube and needle grow into a fire hose with a brass nozzle. Liquid floods the room knocking the lovers to the floor and soaking them.)

COMATOSE PATIENT: (Shudders, spasms, then looks around the room in shock). That was, ah—to teach you two cheaters a lesson!

(While RAY WAZER and NURSE TAI pick themselves up, dripping wet, COMATOSE PATIENT reaches up and rips off her face. Beneath the ugly exterior is the mirror image of NURSE TAI.)

COMATOSE PATIENT: (Voice raises an octave to match NURSE TAI’s). That’s right, I’m your sister, and before I’m done I’ll kill you both!

SYSTEM CLOSE: *Curtain Close, cue Theme Song* (short sound-bite version) cut away to commercial.

SYSTEM WARNING: *Commercial cut-away occurred 55 seconds early. Auto-readjust of schedule completed*

#

When the ordeal of Orbital Hospital was over, Zundra awoke with a nasty, morning-breath taste in her mouth. She realized vaguely that her mouth must have gone slack and hung open during the broadcast.

“How are the ratings?” she croaked, tapping the button for a shot of glucose. She pursed her lips over the plastic feeding tube that rose up from her life-support module and drank a few swallows. The fluid smelled faintly of lemons.

“They wavered terribly during your little hose-job, but somehow you pulled it all off. We made target by a three-point-eight percent margin. You didn’t plan all that wacky stuff, did you? That was just your alter-ego coming out for an encore, wasn’t it?”

She ignored him for a moment, forcing her blurry vision to focus on the wall-trend. It was indeed in the green by the end, with a few precious kilo-dollars to spare.

“Of course, the network won’t put up with this goofing around at their expense for long. Even if you claim that you’re not nuts, that you’re just ad-libbing—artistic license and all—they’ll pull you quick for all these deviations from the script. All the old ninnies back in the writer’s shop must be chewing the walls by now,” Andy said, rocking himself and chuckling at the thought.

“What about the trace? Did you get anything?”

Andy made a flippant gesture of annoyance. “I told you, there’s nothing to trace.”

“Did you get anything?” pressed Zundra. “Did you run a full systems-level diagnostics?”

“There were some low-level anomalies, but nothing worth commenting on.”

“Get me the file. Net it over to my workstation. Now.”

With a supple shrug and a pinched look of irritation, Andy netted her the file. Fifteen minutes later she had analyzed the trace, and soon after that she had a handle to what had to be the return code.

“When does Cyborg Command run next?” she demanded suddenly.

“It’s on right after the Killer Kitty Show, say forty-two minutes. Why?”

“Vector me to this port address in forty-two minutes,” she said, then fell back into her chair with her eyes closed.

After a minute or two of trying to resume the conversation, Andy shrugged again, snorted disgustedly and punched the port address into his hand terminal.

#

CYBORG WARLORD: The enemy are in our grippers, we’ll crush them like ruptured egg-casings!

(Shot switch to the stylized war map. The tunnel complex of Deeth Kar flashes up, tactical decisions are transmitted in from all the junior rebel leaders via mind-modem. Once the votes are tallied those that came closest to predicting the computers tactical plan are awarded game points. Advertisements for Cyborg Command Collectibles hum down the mind-modem lines, Action figures and T-shirts are purchasable with game points and a nominal fee of real money from the accounts of your parent or guardian.)

MR. SQUIBBS: (The cybernetic parrot squawks and ruffles its metallic scale-like feathers before speaking). Looks like the rebels are getting away again.

CYBORG WARLORD: Shut up you tin-plated cockatiel. Building you in the first place was a mistake.

(Shot flips over to the War Map again, where the kid- icons in blue are devouring the metallic cyborg icons in a steady get-away path toward the top of the volcano and the distance escape chute.)

MR. SQUIBBS: At least they didn’t manage to penetrate to our headquarters.

CYBORG WARLORD: You’re right there, Mr Squibbs. They will never manage to stop me completely!

(Suddenly, a third figure bursts into the cavern in an explosion of rock and debris. It is a large red-haired kid with a toy rocket-launcher in his hands. With a whoop of delight, he fires a blue rubber ball into CYBORG WARLORD’s chest, pressing the big red off-switch that has materialized there.)

MR. SQUIBBS screeches in protest.

RED-HAIRED KID: Cyborg Command’s tyranny is at an end! Next week we’ll have a new show in this time-slot kids, so don’t go away!

#

Steve jerked upright, the keyboard and joysticks in his hands clattering to the studio floor. His red curls surrounded his face, framing the boiled-egg whites of his wide staring eyes. Operators shuffled back, stirring their coffee cups nervously with thin red shoots of plastic.

A roar of rage bubbled up from the depths of his chest. The roar died into almost a pitiful sound as Steve focused on the wall-trend, which had bottomed out in the red. The network cancellation notice was already up on his e-mail screen, making a soft beeping sound.

#

Zundra came awake slowly, smiling. She tapped at the keyboard mounted in front of her and brought up the network e-mail system.

“Andy,” she called. “I’m considering a bid for a new show to replace Cyborg Command. I need your technical appraisal.”

Andy sidled up and slumped on her desk. He quietly studied his thin fingers and awaited her orders.

Pinball

Chuck Mather had built the watchdog robot in his room, but he always let it out at night to roam around downstairs. Pinball couldn’t climb stairs or open doors, so its job was limited to patrolling the kitchen, the living areas and the study. Pinball wasn’t much like what most people thought of as a robot, it was just a personal computer really, slung between two ten-speed bike wheels. The wheels gave it mobility, the optical-liquid CPU gave it brains and a little IO board with an array of sensors gave it input. It didn’t have a video input unit, that was expensive and too hard to program, but it did have several motion detectors and infrared heat-detectors, not to mention a highly accurate sound-directional guidance system.

“You want to let it loose again, Chuck? Couldn’t you just keep the thing in your room tonight?” Sylvia Mather asked, with a faint note of hopelessness in her voice.

“Pinball is good protection Mom, especially since Dad died.”

“Alright,” she sighed in defeat, cinching her housecoat tighter. She disappeared down the dark tunnel of the upstairs hall.

Chuck was fifteen years old, overweight, had a lot of zits and had been sentenced to a wheelchair two summers ago in a boating accident. The same accident had cost his father his life.

Maneuvering himself out of his wheelchair and into bed was an effort. First he threw his weight forward, landing his face on his pillow, then sat upright with a practiced roll. He settled into the large double-sized sleeping bag that he liked to use during the summer nights, whether he was camping or not. Grunting a bit, he stuffed his numb, useless legs into the bag and wiggled his way down into it.

First checking to make sure his mother had really gone to bed and was not fooling around in the hall closet or the bathroom, he vertically set a ruler in the middle of the sleeping bag so it would hold up the center like a tent post. From beneath the sleeping bag he unearthed a wireless netbook. He then ducked down into his make-shift tent and zipped up the sides. Using a flashlight, he surfed to his favorite sites: a mix of porn, gaming news, pirated movies and social-networking. In some ways, this was the best part of the day.

He fell asleep in the early morning hours. When he finally awoke, mother was in his room and fooling around as usual, checking the batteries on his wheelchair, even though they had spent the night charging up. He shoved the netbook down deep into the sleeping bag before popping his head out of the top.

“Good morning,” she greeted him. Like Chuck, her hair was very straight, fine and blonde. It resembled fragile cobwebs and tended to wisp about on windy days.

“Mourning is right,” Chuck groaned. Bright July sunshine streamed in slices through the miniblinds making him squint and blink.

“I was thinking that I don’t really need to go to the wedding, Chuck,” she told him with a pursed-lip frown. She was already made-up and ready to go, wearing a green silk dress, a French braid and a heavy layer of lavender lip-gloss.

“Yes you do, Mom,” he said, rubbing his eyes and waiting for the blood to make it up to his brain.

“Aunt Marron has been married before, and you don’t need to be alone.”

“Go to the wedding, Mom.”

“If you’re sure you can take care of yourself...”

“I’m fifteen years old, I can spend one night on my own. Give me a break.”

Sylvia nodded and left the room, her hands behind her head, tugging and tucking loose hairs. Soon afterwards Chuck heard a short yell of surprise as Pinball caught her at the door. Pinball let out an alarm chime, and he couldn’t help smiling. The sound of servos whining and his mother making shooing sounds floated up the stairs.

“Chuck, your pet is ramming itself into my legs. If it runs my nylons again, I’ll have your tail son!” she shouted. Chuck grabbed up the garage controller that he used as an override switch and stabbed the button. It took five or six tries, but Pinball finally got the message and quit attacking Sylvia.

“Battery must be going dead,” Chuck muttered to himself, fiddling with the garage door controller. Pinball should have stopped right away.

His mother finally got away and slammed the front door behind herself.

The rest of the day was wonderful. For breakfast he had a bowl of mixed cereals, all different brands of sugar-fluff, and drank a root beer float on top of it all. Feeling only slightly queasy, he rolled to the escalator arm and let it carry him up the stairs like a giant, whining electric hand. He placed Pinball on top of a card table with his wheels off and hooked his serial port to another PC with a light blue cable.

Its numerous infrared sensors stared at nothing: the numerous eyes of a dead spider. Chuck spent several hours tapping the keys on his PC, downloading additional software onto Pinball’s ultralite 600 petabyte disk. Then he pulled the bottom drawer of his dresser completely out, almost dumping over his wheelchair in the process. Hidden underneath the drawer, down in the open space most dressers have between the last drawer and the carpet was a large rumpled shopping bag. Chuck pulled out the bag then glanced around and listened for a moment. Somewhere, Sylvia’s cat Peter was meowing, and outside someone was mowing their yard. Otherwise the house was silent.

He opened the bag and pulled out two objects. The first was a cattle prod with a long plastic handle, a red rubber grip and two copper prongs at the end. Next was the new purse he was hiding for his mother’s birthday, two weekends away. He had gone to great lengths to purchase the thing through friends at school and even greater lengths to hide both the cattle prod and the purse from his mother. He affixed this device to Pinball’s housing, strapping it with plastic snap-on ties to the frame underneath the motherboard. He wired the switch up to one of the screw terminals on the IO board. He tightened down the first the green wire, then the blue, and leaned back.

“There you go,” Chuck muttered, patting Pinball’s battery case.

“Now you can do more than just bark. Now you’re armed and dangerous.”

That night Chuck sat in his room and ate two microwave dinners and watched all the Friday night net shows. Once the credits had finally scrolled up the screen on Bleak Justice, he climbed back into his wheelchair and rolled into the dark hall. Little thrills ran through his intestines as he rode the escalator arm downstairs. Hugged tightly to his chest was Pinball, the aluminum rims of its wheels cold against his belly where his sweatshirt had ridden up. He reached the bottom and set the machine down gently, making sure that the cattle prod didn’t overbalance it. With a grunt of pride, he sat back and activated the machine with a touch on the warm-reboot button. Pinball came to life slowly, its disk light flashing as the operating system took control and megabytes of programming began to execute. After a few moments it rolled and tilted back six inches, like an animal sitting on its haunches. It held the cattle prod high, a knight saluting a king with his lance. Each of the forked prongs glinted, like two metallic eyes winking. With a sense of purpose, the machine rolled away into the kitchen.

“Goodnight, Pinball,” said Chuck with fatherly pride. Pinball did a sharp about face by spinning its wheels in opposite directions and followed the source of his voice, but Chuck was already riding up the stairs again to his room where the TV and a pile of magazines awaited him. Soon after he had let Pinball loose, Peter, the cat, came running up the stairs, looking for refuge. He found it on top of Chuck’s monitor shelf, and lazily let his tail drift in front of the screen. Peter was a fairly big tomcat with dark gray fur and a cream-colored underbelly. He normally spent summer nights outside, but tonight Chuck had forgotten about him.

“Don’t like Pinball, do you?” Chuck laughed. “Well, you had better steer clear of him tonight, boy, or you’ll be one unhappy kitty.”

“Merrooow...” commented Peter. He eyed Chuck with a mixture of deep thought and mild contempt. His tail slid further down the screen, blotting out the upper half of a comedian doing his monologue. As a precaution, Chuck pushed his door shut, so the cat wouldn’t get zapped during the night. Settling down on his bed, Chuck noisily pulled open a king-sized bag of cheesepuffs and ate until his hands and tongue were dyed orange. After the net programs got old, he got out his netbook again and enjoyed surfing his favorite pages in the open. Some hours later he flipped shut his computer and worked himself into bed.

He awoke when a dreadful yowl came from downstairs. At first he rolled over and pulled his pillow over his head, trying to get back into his interrupted dreams. Then he thought he heard a bang followed by a crash, and reluctantly opened one eye. He saw the door was ajar and knew instantly what was going on. It had happened before. Peter and Pinball were having a fight.

He almost yelled Mom before he remembered and sat up, cursing. He was going to have to handle this himself. He was vaguely worried for Peter, as Pinball was armed tonight. Climbing into his chair, he fumbled with the junk strewn over his workbench and finally came up with the garage door opener. He stabbed the button about ten times for good measure, then rolled his chair toward the door. As an afterthought, he put the controller in the wheelchair’s basket, taking it with him. The house was dark, hot and still. The walls were still radiating the heat of the summer day, and although the upstairs windows were open, there was no breath of wind to cool the house.

Trying to be quiet, Chuck rolled his chair to the top of the stairs using arm-power. He paused there for a moment, listening. He could hear nothing but the crickets outside and the vague sound of cars on the interstate, five miles east. He rode the escalator arm downward.

At the bottom of the stairs he hit the hall light, and nothing happened. He flipped the switch several more times, then remembered that he had left it on in the first place. A fuse must have blown down here, because the upstairs lights were still working. The downstairs was on a separate circuit, and the fuse box was located outside the house. Frowning, he unstrapped his chair from the grip of the escalator and then paused. He heard the whine of an electric motor, coming from the back of the house. Pinball was coming.

“Damn,” he muttered, pulling out the garage door opener again and pressing the button with unnecessary force. His thumb sunk deep into the plastic box, but still the high-pitched sound continued. There was a thump from the archway at the end of the hall that led into the family room, Pinball had miscalculated and run into the wall with one wheel. The sounds shifted as it reversed directions and corrected its course. For the first time, Chuck felt a sliver of fear run through his heart. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and for no apparent reason, his limp legs started to ache, dead nerves sending ghost-impulses up his spine. He looked back up the stairway, and realized that he didn’t have time to strap himself in and ride up to the top, especially in the dark. If he tried to make it without the harness, he could slip off the metal platform quite easily.

His tongue darted out and he chewed his lip. Down the hall, the tiny red glow-lights on Pinball’s motherboard could be seen, coming out of the gloom. Chuck wondered what the cattle prod would feel like it if touched his legs. Would they jump of their own accord, like frog legs in a skillet?

Pinball was closing fast. Chuck made his decision and rolled into the kitchen. Pinball followed the sounds with the guidance of its motion detectors, swinging through the opening without a hitch. As Chuck rounded the kitchen island he pulled the trashcan out from underneath it and dumped it behind him, directly in Pinball’s path. He caught a brief whiff of orange peels and moldy meat, then he rolled out into the living room. He glanced back and saw a snapshot of Pinball as it rolled through a pool of light coming in from the streetlamp outside. The cattle prod was lowered and leveled, ready for action. The two wheels spun together with smooth precision and the spokes flashed silvery lines of reflected light that seemed to hang in the air for a moment as it passed. Then Pinball ran into the dumped garbage and began trying to get past it, trying to negotiate a path over a loose mess of eggshells and cereal boxes.

In the living room, Chuck paused, breathing hard. He knew that he had about thirty seconds to think before Pinball’s program timed out and it backtracked, using its software map of the house to find another way. It would probably make it around the other side of the kitchen island within a minute. He used this minute to pull out the garage door opener and a penlight he kept in the wheelchair’s basket that he had forgotten about until his mind had tightened with adrenalin at that moment. With the penlight gleaming in the dark living room, he quickly learned that it was not the battery, but rather the spring for the button that was the problem. The contact wasn’t being made, it was that simple. All he had to do was get a screwdriver and open up the casing, fool with the spring and maybe brush the contacts a bit and it should work like new. The only problem was that Pinball wasn’t going to let him have that much time.

“This is crazy,” Chuck shouted in frustration. He tossed the garage door opener on the couch and snapped off his penlight.

“I should just grab you and switch you off!” he shouted at Pinball, who was still grinding gears, thumping its bike tires into the yellow plastic trashcan. Then there was a snapping sound and a terrific flash of blue electricity as the prongs contacted with the metal surface of the refrigerator.

Immediately, Chuck thought two things: Damn, Mom will be ticked if it scorched the paint and There’s no way I want that thing to touch me.

Not knowing what else to do and needing time to think, Chuck drove his wheelchair across the room and parked it between the armchair and the wall. While programming Pinball to the task of patrolling the house, he had played this game many times before. If he was quiet and still, Pinball would probably never find him here. If it did notice him, it would in all likelihood take him as a piece of furniture. Unexpectedly, Pinball emerged from the hallway rather than the kitchen. It cruised by the coffee table, did an abrupt right turn and headed back toward the kitchen entrance where it had last located Chuck’s voice.

Chuck smiled and couldn’t help feeling proud. Pinball had reasoned out another course, had attempted to cutoff and surprise its opponent. He frowned after a moment, however, at the implications of this. Pinball was not programmed to think of things like this unless it was sure there was a break-in in progress. The machine rolled into the kitchen from the other entrance, and he could hear its tires rubbing on the vinyl flooring.

He decided to make a run for the stairs again, he couldn’t very well spend the night imitating an armchair in the dark. Before he reached the hall his wheels crunched over the broken shards of a lamp that was lying on the floor. Trying to hurry, he drove over this like a tank revving over a hedgerow and then ran into another lump, this one felt soft under his wheels. He looked down and felt sick. It was Peter. Behind him Pinball wheeled out of the kitchen and charged across the living room, having picked him up again with its sound-directional unit.

Taking the time to roll around Peter, hoping the cat was only stunned, Chuck raced into the hallway. Behind him was a vicious snapping sound and another blue spark. He glanced back and saw that Pinball was repeatedly shocking the cat, making Peter’s muscles jump with electric current.

“God help me,” he muttered, rolling swiftly for the stairs. Soon Pinball tired of zapping Peter and followed him. While Chuck backed his chair into the escalator harness he watched Pinball charge him out of the gloom, looking for all the world like a small self-propelled field gun, its electric lance raised like the barrel of a cannon.

What if it gets to me, like it did the cat? Chuck’s mind screamed at him. What if it stunned him, knocked him out of his chair, maybe? Wouldn’t it go on zapping him every time the charge built up, following him as he tried to crawl away? Could he drag his dead legs fast enough? Would his heart stop?

Giving up on the harness which was fighting his groping fingers, he stabbed the UP button and the held onto the railing to steady himself. The platform tipped and neatly dumped him off, then continued up the stairs without him, disappearing into the dimness. Fortunately, he managed to keep his seat in the wheelchair and had a second or two to face the culmination of Pinball’s charge down the hall. The prongs stabbed right between his legs and made contact with the metal chair. The jolt wasn’t as bad as it could have been, it just felt like a buzzing sensation, a sharp uncomfortable pain in his hands and back where he was touching the wheelchair.

Then he grabbed Pinball’s spinning tires and lifted the machine right up, like a father grabbing a naughty child. The wheels gave a sudden, life-like spin in his grasp, and the cattle prod dove past his face and down. He realized that the prong must be going down toward his crotch, between his limp legs, and he grabbed the rod, his hand closing on the prongs themselves and he took a second sickening jolt. His stomach rolled over and went hard in his guts, while he ripped loose the cattle prod before the capacitor could charge up again, tearing it loose from the snap-ties and dropping Pinball back to the hall carpet. The machine bounced and clattered, then paused for a second, getting its bearings. It then bumped into his numb shins, following the imperatives of its tiny, insect-like mind.

“If my legs would move, I’d kick you across the room,” Chuck told it.

#

Around noon the following day Sylvia Mather came home. She walked in the front door and found the broken lamp.

“Sorry, I must have nudged it as I went by,” said Chuck, who was waiting for her.

“No big deal,” she sighed, setting her bags down and going back out to the car. Chuck followed her, his chair humming.

“You look like you didn’t sleep much Chuck. Did you have any problems?”

“No, no,” he said, forcing a smile. It was hot outside, but he parked his wheelchair in front of the garbage can and didn’t go back in until his mother did. He could hear the car engine ticking as the metal contracted under the hood. “Did you have fun with your family?”

“Yes, it was good to see everyone. Tammy has grown so much and Sarah is due in September, can you believe it?”

Eventually, they went into the house. Off and on, while Chuck listened to his mother’s excruciatingly detailed description of the wedding, he couldn’t help but lift the mini-blinds and peek out at the garbage can. Inside it was a paper sack containing a cattle prod and a dead cat. Fortunately, the garbage truck would pick it up tomorrow morning.

“Where’s Pinball, honey?”

“Oh, he’s upstairs. He had a problem and I had to take him apart.”

Love Aboard the Kamadeva

The entire hollowed-out asteroid formed the colonyship Kamadeva, and we were heading out from Earth at about twelve percent of the speed of light. As far as we knew, Rahashi and I were the only living souls onboard.

Neither of us knew how the fighting was going inside the rock. Since the rebellion had started, all the transmitters from the bridge and the interior decks of the Kamadeva had been ominously quiet.

The fundamental problem with combat in space had always been the same: everyone tended to die. In vacuum, staying alive even when everyone cooperated fully was difficult, but when crewmen turned against one another anyone could pop a critical membrane or cause a fire, destroying all the things that were required for life. Death stalked everyone in vacuum, every minute. Humans required a precise temperature range, a precise air quality and pressure, not to mention absurdly low radiation levels. We were like tropical fish when in space. You had to watch us every minute or we died mysteriously from any one of an array of possible causes.

The two of us were trapped inside a tubetrain on a superconductive railway. All that was left of the railnet ran from the automated mines in the Ohio crater up to the gutted observation pods that crested the Banfield cliffs. Up at the cliffs, the tracks ended at the station under the dead depressurized bridge of the asteroid ship. Just trundling around between these stations had gotten old fast, but we hadn’t yet built up the nerve to try to walk the surface to another station.

“Weaver, why are you always talking to Pandi? What have you told her?” Rahashi asked me. Rahashi wasn’t a tech, while I was, which gave him virtually nothing to do. Because of this he had become increasingly withdrawn and obsessed with a personality program, which he called Pandi.

“I’m not always talking to Pandi,” I said disgustedly, while soldering another lead onto the cannibalized transmitter I was working on. “I’m trying to save our skins by getting this dish online. Besides, her name isn’t Pandi, it’s Beth.”

“Her name is Pandi and I can tell that the weights in her neural net have fluctuated. I can tell,” said Rahashi with great intensity. His large, luminous brown eyes stared at me. I frowned at my work and hunched forward in my spacesuit, which had begun to stink with fresh sweat. Pandi was our greatest source of contention lately. She was a remarkable computer personality that was our only true female influence now that we were cut off from the rest of the Kamadeva.

Of course, she was only a program. We knew that, but somehow, after a few months in cramped isolation, this didn’t matter anymore.

“The firing frequency too!” shouted Rahashi suddenly, almost hysterically. “You can’t tell me that you haven’t altered her neural firing frequencies!”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded, surprised. I didn’t think he would notice. He wasn’t much of a programmer.

“She’s changed,” he said, his voice on the edge of tears.

“Come on, man,” I said looking at him incredulously.

“I can tell,” he hissed at me.

“How can you tell?”

“She’s starting to turn away from me. It’s little things,” he said, dropping those wild staring eyes for once. His hands nervously fluttered over his suit, tearing open self-seal pockets and watching them reknit themselves. Each time he tore them open, I winced.

His voice dropped to a whisper. “She doesn’t even call me Rashi anymore.”

I guess I shouldn’t have done it. In fact, I knew that I shouldn’t, but I laughed. I laughed long and loud and mean. A deep, resounding belly-laugh. The soldering laser in my hand slipped and a wisp of resin smoke spiraled up toward the recycling vent in the side of the tubeship. When I had finished laughing I squinted at the small brown-skinned man and saw a touch of madness in his face, a glimmer of insanity. He reminded me of an animal in mortal pain.

“I’m sorry. Cool down, Rahashi, you’re just getting cabin fever.”

Rahashi stood slowly, as if he had come to some great decision. He headed for the open manhole in the floor. I waved my hand disgustedly, snorting. Let him go off and pout. Then I heard the manhole cover slip quietly shut behind him. I whirled, listening, and then heard the electronic chime as the bolt shot home. I frowned for a moment, pondering the move. He had cut the tubetrain in half, top from bottom.

The little shuttle was built like a tennis ball canister, cut in half the long way. The upper deck was for carrying passengers, the lower for cargo. Being isolated in the upper half I still had air, food and water, and even the ship’s guidance control systems. I chuckled, he was just pouting again, shutting himself in the bathroom like an enraged teenager.

“Hope you like it down there Rahashi,” I shouted at the manhole.

If Beth liked me better and he couldn’t handle it, well, too bad. I sat down and finished off the last three solder connections on my transmitter, then flipped it on. Now we had a steady distress message going out. If there was anyone left around to hear it, they would. They had to. Then suddenly, I realized that the computer terminal was down there, with him. Instantly, his plan was clear. If he spent a few days alone with her, just making time with Beth, then he would swing her back his way. In my mind’s eye, I could see him putting on the awkward skullcap, buckling on the restraints and slipping into his favorite fantasy with the help of a good dose of blur-dust capsules. I growled and slammed my fist into my thigh. In a couple of days, with the higher firing frequencies I had given her to counterbalance the increased time that Rahashi had been spending with her, she would forget all about me. She would probably insist that I call her Pandi, of all the galling things. Worse, he might even be able to coax her into bed with him, something neither of us had ever managed.

I stomped on the metal manhole cover three times in rapid succession.

“Open up Rahashi!”

I heard only the echoes of my heavy boots hitting metal and Rahashi’s high-pitched laughter. Listening closely, I could make out Beth’s voice, raised up an octave, the way that Rahashi liked it, talking to him. I heard him answer and panic gripped me. I had to stop him, he was making time with my girl. My eyes swung around the tubeship’s passenger deck, looking for possibilities. My gaze stopped on the security cameras and the passenger arrival monitors that were arrayed just over the airlock doors. I smiled, forming a plan. Half an hour later, I had managed to hook into the superconductor tubeway’s network. Hooking into the network’s optical backbone, I managed to connect the auxiliary output for Rahashi’s computer terminal to one of the monitors on the passenger deck.

I was rewarded when an image of Rahashi’s Pandi and Rahashi himself flashed up on the screen. The two of them were having a quiet meal above the streets of Bombay. Pandi served him in nothing but slippers and silk. They spoke Hindi together and sipped a green liquor. I noticed with a chuckle that Rahashi was at least six inches taller and broader than he was in real life. He had obviously doctored up the scanned-in imaged of himself. Pandi herself was a bit more of a shock. Instead of Beth, the buxom redhead with blue eyes and shoulder-length hair that I was familiar with, Rahashi’s Pandi was slight and dark, with fine sharp features and beautifully shaped olive-colored eyes. There was the definite hint of the orient in those eyes, indicating that Rahashi had a thing for the girls from the Far East.

What I found most upsetting was Pandi’s scanty clothing. I had never gotten so far with Beth, although I had plied her with song and strong drink on countless dates. I fiddled with a makeshift tuner until I got a channel up that spoke English. This dropped Rahashi’s part of the conversation out, although his lips still moved and occasionally parted to reveal a set of straight white teeth that were the purest fiction. Although Beth/Pandi would appear for us in any guise we wanted, her mind retained its knowledge of both of us. She truly knew that she had two ardent pursuers, and I am convinced that she enjoyed our competition for her attentions.

I twiddled with the translation until I found the audio track for English.

“Of course I love our time together, Rahashi,” she lilted, running her delicate fingers over the back of his hand. I growled then sighed. Even as Pandi, she still had her magic. Rahashi smiled, gesturing her forward.

“Certainly, my love.”

Then my jaw dropped open as I watched the bastard pat his silk clad knees and help ease Pandi down into his lap.

My heart pounded in my throat, he was taking gross liberties! No wonder he had been so desperate, he almost had her.

Having seen enough, I turned back to my tangle of dripping, optic-liquid cables and connectors and rigged up the security camera. Ten minutes later, I interrupted Rahashi’s little fantasy with my own looming face, drowning out his terminal’s output. I imagined him wincing under his skullcap and smiled wider.

“Hi Rashi!” I beamed. “I was just about to purge our little girl from the disk, and I thought that you would like to know about it.” So saying, I nudged the camera so that it would focus on the laptop that I had spliced up to his machine across the network. “Here goes those files! I’m going to type in these confirmation letters real slow now, so that you don’t miss anything. E - R - A - S—”

I got no further than this before the manhole chimed again and the bolt retracted. Out popped a furious Rahashi, his little fists balled up and ready to swing. His pupils were fully dilated and his eyes slid around in his head, the side-effects of too much blur. He staggered to the laptop, while I chuckled, side-stepping to the manhole behind him.

“I thought that might get you out of your hole,” I told him, then shimmied down the steel ladder into the lower deck.

Again the manhole chimed, and now I was locked below. All alone with Beth.

I slid the skullcap on, but ignored the open bottle of blue capsules next to it. Two hours later I had managed to get Beth into a kissing mood. I had taken her to the Busch stadium in St. Louis, eating hot dogs and drinking squeeze bottles of beer while we participated in one human wave after another, each rise and fall of her body, arms uplifted, making my heart jump as her bust rose and heaved. The park wasn’t like that anymore, it was really a scene from my childhood, but Beth always seemed to like going there. After the ballpark, we had headed down to an Irish pub I knew of in the old cobble-stoned section of town, and there we kissed.

It was a long, lingering kiss of true love.

The only sound was the click of a relay, followed by the clittering of the drive as the files were purged. Inside my skull, the mental image vanished, to be replaced by the miserable form of Rahashi coming from the security camera I had rigged up. He was weeping with his head resting on the laptop’s keyboard.

He had really done it. I had not thought that he would. He had erased everything. He had killed Beth and Pandi both.

For a moment a fantastic rage shook me. I felt a lust for murder that I had never known before. I charged up the ladder and popped open the hatch. I stood over Rahashi’s weeping form, shaking with anger. My breath rushed in and out, my heart slammed against my chest. A single bead of sweat ran down my nose and hung there, clinging to the tip until I wiped it roughly away.

“I had to do it,” Rahashi blubbered. “She would not stay faithful to me.”

I blinked at this. Suddenly, I felt foolish. I was ready to kill over a program, a game, a fantasy. My anger deflated like a ruptured vacc-suit. I felt numb. Rahashi had lost everything: his love, his sanity, perhaps even his life. We both knew that we would probably not get out of this alive. The air, water and food would only recycle so many times before turning toxic. I hunkered down beside him, and clapped him on the back, awkwardly.

He was real, Beth and Pandi were not. It was time that we put our energies into escaping this damned tubetrain physically, rather than mentally.

Rahashi ignored me, his sobs changing to Hindi mutterings after a time. I hung my head beside him, thinking hard.

“What does that light mean?” he asked finally. My head whipped up and a glad smile split my face. “It’s the transmitter. Someone has heard our broadcast!” I rushed to my makeshift equipment and gingerly adjusted the resistance on the lines going to the speakers.

“Repeat: do you read me, Weaver? Come to Ohio Crater for pick-up—”

Excitedly, I keyed in a response and sent it. They acknowledged and I whooped for joy, then made my way to the control cubicle by swinging from the loops of plastic that hung from the roof of the tubetrain. I jerked up the power rods and the tubetrain lurched into to motion, accelerating rapidly. We were saved. Rahashi looked at me as if I had lost my mind, and perhaps I had.

Twenty minutes later we donned our vacc-suits and headed out onto the floor of Ohio Crater. The majestic walls of the crater towered above us, ringing the blazing stars overhead. Still our largest star, Earth’s sun shone bright, just over a light-year behind us.

I smiled to myself in the darkness of my helmet as Rahashi and I signaled a group of men on the upper decks of the automated mining plant. I was fully ready to sing the rebel anthem, or dance a hornpipe jig for the captain and his officers, whatever would make our rescuers happy. Whichever side had won, the Kamadeva would have officers. And we would serve them, happy just to be among humanity again.

Idly, I patted my right breast pocket, which had tightly self-sealed its own flap. Inside the pocket was my backup copy of Beth, safely stowed away on a coin-sized molecular disk.

Starplay

1.

“Twiddle it to the left,” suggested Jason.

I did as he suggested. The wavering image shimmered, brightened, then flew apart into a liquid rainbow splash of a million colors. The picture went dead, fading to black as if the commercials were finally over with and the show was coming back. But it didn’t.

“No, no, dumb-ass!” moaned Jason. “I said left, LEFT. You know what I’m talking about, moron?”

“I did turn it left,” I protested remotely, too interested in the Space-television to get annoyed by Jason. I pressed the reset button—at least, that’s what it seemed to do—and started twiddling again. The dusty workshop around us was quiet except for the humming of the machine’s transformers.

Jason made a move to shove me out of the way and get his butt into the folding chair we had set up in front of the console. But I weigh more and have two inches on him, so I managed to elbow him back.

“Knock it off, Jason.”

“Well, I found it!”

“No, you didn’t. We both did. And besides, it was my crazy dead uncle Chet that invented the thing.” My uncle had been totally bananas according to my dad. Mom said he was disturbed, but a gifted inventor, which should tip you off to which side of the family he was on. All I remember was that he lived in a plaid bath-robe, never brushed his teeth and screamed a lot at night. Eight years ago they had put him in a nuthouse and he died shortly after. It was when they committed him that they closed up his workshop. My folks were always kind of funny about the subject and never wanted to discuss it.

Curiosity has always been one of my weak points, so when they left the ranch this year for a vacation in Wisconsin, the time seemed ripe for an investigation. It had been no mean feat to cut that padlock, let me tell you.

“So?” Jason retorted, refuting my entire argument with one syllable. He flopped back into his folding chair, which was to my left. His chair squeaked because one of the legs didn’t sit right on the floor anymore. I turned back to the Space-television. We had decided to call it that when we first found it because it worked kind of like a television, and it showed mostly pictures of space, nebulas and stars and stuff. When it showed anything at all, that is.

“Lookit, I want to try for a while,” Jason said with a touch of wheedling in his voice that I detected and enjoyed. He put one elbow on the console beside me and leaned into my view. One finger went to his forehead, which was covered up by overly-long brown-blonde hair. He started poking at the zits he kept under there.

“Tough.”

“Come on, Steve.”

I ignored him and concentrated on the dials in front of me. The damn thing was so hard to focus, it seemed to be made for someone with finer hand control than I was able to manage. I had a certain goal in mind, I wasn’t just jacking around. I wanted to get the settings back to just the place where they had started, when we had first touched the console and brought it into life.

“Come on, Steve. Why don’t you give it a rest, huh?”

“Shut up. I’m trying to get the trees back.”

“Oh... Uh, I don’t know, Steve,” Jason’s tune changed from that of a dog watching dinner through a sliding glass door to one of concern. “I don’t think we should mess around with those things.”

The screen blurred a reddish haze, then an image of orange-red fuzzy stars like hairy tangerines solidified. My tongue slipped out to wet the corner of my mouth. I moved my fingers in the tiniest increments of pressure that I could manage. The picture focused. I sat back and smiled.

“It’s the wrong picture,” Jason pointed out unnecessarily.

“Yeah, but it’s clear, my man. It’s clear!” I slapped his back with slightly intimidating force. He winced and scowled at the picture. Then the bastard reached out and, just as random as you please, twisted the third dial from the right.

“Jesus! What the hell do you...”

I drew back my arm. I was going to slug him, and he knew it too, but he wasn’t ducking. He was pointing at the screen. A calm part of my mind wondered what made Jason do crap like that all the time and why I let him hang around with me. He was kind of like Beetle Bailey, always farting around with the Sarge, knowing full well he was going to get his teeth pushed in.

“Look!” that was all he said.

I paused, but didn’t look in case he was planning to duck and spoil my aim. He didn’t do anything of the kind.

“Damn, that’s weird! Look, Steve!”

I finally looked. And my mouth fell open twice as far as his did. Jason doesn’t have all that much in the way of imagination, but he knew weird when he saw it. The screen was a wash of blue. A blue painted sky above and a shimmering blue sea below. It wasn’t space, it was a planet.

My stomach just fell away, like when you first start down in an express elevator from the seventieth floor. My insides turned to jelly. It was the first time since we had started fooling with my uncle’s invention that we had seen a planet.

It wasn’t just an empty sea, either, there were somethings moving in the water, dark sinister shapes. My mind immediately conjured images of mermen, killer whales and platysaurus herds. Unknown things from an unknown world. And I was watching them in my own home.

Hungrily, I leaned forward, forgetting completely to slug Jason. I could have kissed him. Almost. I rubbed my hand on the ball that moved the view in place, doing a complete 360 degree rotation. I spotted land and my heart leapt again. My hand moved to the knob farthest to the right, the one that never seemed to do anything but make the image shimmer a bit. I had long suspected that it was for fine tuning movements.

“Go for it, Steve!” whispered Jason, sensing my intent. “Go for it!”

The last knob was spring loaded, or something, because when you twisted it, it resisted you and always moved back into place when you let go. I felt the cold metal knob under my fingertips. I centered the land with the aiming ball and gave the unknown knob the slightest hint of a twist. The image of the land leapt away and dimmed to a smudge on the horizon.

“Zoom lens!” shouted Jason. He kept pointing at the screen, as if to keep it there.

“But in reverse,” I said as I nudged the dial the opposite direction.

The land loomed, filling the screen. And there they were. The trees that we had first seen when we had powered up our space-television.

2.

The landscape was definitely alien. Our viewpoint was perhaps fifty feet above the ground, just over the treetops. In the distance, hidden somewhat by the haze in the air, mountains loomed. Closer were green carpeted hills with great flapping pink and white birds flying lazily over them. The hills and the jungle that covered them marched right down to the pebble and shell strewn beach in front of us. The trees weren’t like trees at all, they were more like giant ferns. Huge green fronds swayed and tossed about in the wind like green-haired dancers at a neo-punk concert.

“I did it!” shouted Jason. “I twisted the right dial and there are the trees!”

He whooped and stood suddenly, still aiming an index finger at the screen like a bird dog in pheasant farm. His fingernail had a black crescent of grime around it. I gave him a dark look, remembering the well-deserved slugging. But then I softened.

“Yes, you did it, all right,” I admitted.

“So...” He said distantly. He turned to me and looked troubled.

“What should we do now, Steve?”

The elation of what had just happened overwhelmed me again. I had trouble focusing my thoughts for a few moments.

“Hell if I know.”

“Well, should we tell someone?”

“No. Absolutely not. Haven’t you seen enough movies man? We want to keep this to ourselves. I’ve always wanted something like this to happen to me.”

“Me too,” said Jason, his voice falling away to a near whisper. “But now I don’t know what to do with it.” Then he spotted something. He went into a point again.

“Holy crap, Batman! Would you look at those little dudes!”

For the next full minute we gaped at the screen like a couple of specials. Everything was fairly normal, Earth-like that is, except for the green people in the fern-trees. I could see seed pods, up under the fronds, like coconuts on a palm. I could also see a lot of skinny little green guys in the fronds with the coconuts. Jason broke our stunned silence. Nothing could stun him into silence for long.

“Jeez. They seem to be looking at us.”

“You’re right,” I said. For the first time, I felt a cold hand grip my bowels and give a gentle squeeze of fearful excitement. I shifted in my chair and rubbed my fingers against one another nervously.

“Those little green bastards...” Jason muttered wonderingly. “They’re goblins!” he stated with sudden decision. “That’s what they are.”

“Goblins, huh?” I chuckled. Then I spotted a glint of metal and straightened up. “They have weapons too,” I said. “See there? That one has a knife of some kind, and the three in the tree next to him have bows!”

“Maybe they’ll shoot at us!”

“Maybe you should shut up.” But I was worried. Just what, I wondered, did we look like to them? It was clear that they could see us. Just thinking about what we were seeing was enough to scare the spit out of my mouth and to start the sweat running out of my relatively cool armpits.

Then one of the skinny little farts fired an arrow at us.

“Duck!” Jason all but screamed. And though I didn’t see any real danger, and the arrow looked like it would probably fall short anyway, I ducked. When we looked back, we saw that the arrow had indeed fallen short and that we were apparently out of their range. They shot several more arrows which dropped into the sea below us before they finally gave up.

“Come on Jason, they can’t hit anything. It’s just a picture.” I was a bit pissed that Jason had gotten me to duck.

“I don’t know...”

“Here, let’s just give them something to shoot at.” I reached forward to the fine tuning knob and brushed it.

The image zoomed in and we found ourselves in the middle of one of the big fern-trees. We stared into the startled faces of three goblins. Up close they looked kind of nasty. They were about three feet tall. They might have been a little taller but they seemed to move about in a crouch all of the time, as if their knees were permanently bent. Their hands were long with thin fingers and large bony joints. Their facial features were sharp and pinched into a perpetual snarl. Surprised by our sudden move, they produced thin screeching sounds and displayed mouthfuls of protruding yellow teeth that glistened wetly. We were right there in the middle of their fern-tree and it was like shoving a torch into a snake pit. They squirmed away and hissed excitedly.

“There now...” I began.

“Are you CRAZY?” Jason screamed at me.

I turned to him, startled. Jason was reaching for the fine tuning knob, doubtless about to pull another move that would throw us into the ionosphere. I reacted by reaching for his wrist, but before either of us achieved our objectives, the goblins got into the act.

A thin knife-blade, perhaps eighteen inches long, stabbed out of the picture on the console and opened up a deep gash on Jason’s forearm. Jason screamed like a girl, his voice cracking and going high. Blood surged out of the wound, wetting the goblin’s blade, which was instantly withdrawn. Red drops spattered the control knobs.

For a moment I was paralyzed by this. Jason, squealing like a stuck pig, tripped backward over his folding chair and went sprawling. His fingers gripped his forearm to staunch the flow of blood. The chair clanged against the floor and neatly collapsed into its folded position.

The clang seemed to bring me back to life. My eyes went to the goblin, who crouched directly in front of the screen. His lips were drawn tight and his slitted eyes slid back and forth between Jason and myself. About four inches of his knife protruded onto our side of the screen. I slid out of my chair and to one side, out of his reach. He made a lunge, his arm coming through right up to the bicep and his knife jabbing at my midsection.

I managed to dodge and get out of his reach. I circled the room to Jason and helped him up and over to my uncle’s bed. I eyeballed the tuning knobs. If I could get to the console, I could send the goblins a thousand miles away. I wondered briefly if the goblin’s arm and blade would come with us.

The one knife-wielding bastard was so far the only one brave enough to come up to the screen, but he was jabbering over his shoulder to his more cautious companions. His speech reminded me of the ringing and clacking of castanet’s. I realized that if the ones with the bows got their peckers up, we would be peppered with their arrows. I had to fight not to panic. I needed a weapon.

“Jason!” I yelled. He was sagging on the bed, he was losing it, maybe due to shock, maybe fear. “JASON!”

He didn’t answer, he just bled on the sheets. The goblins were getting increasingly brave. I could see a few moving up cautiously through the fronds. There was no more time. I had to act and I couldn’t get to the console without getting cut. I ran for the stairs and ran up them, three at a time, something I am quite good at and practice whenever I get a chance. At the bottom I turned at break-neck speed, grabbing the doorjamb to swing myself around the corner. I guided my wild progress by slamming hands against the walls of the hallway. I hung a left at the bathroom, bounded across my brother’s snarled bed in one step and thrust a desperate hand into his closet.

My fingers wrapped around a slim cold metal tube. A rifle barrel. I yanked out my brother’s .22 caliber semi-automatic Ruger, my heart thrilling to the feel of it. I put my hand on the wood-grain stock and instantly I felt some of my usual self-confidence flow back into my limbs. We had always had guns around the house and I have done quite a bit of hunting on our ranch. I’m a good shot, and having a gun in my hands always gave me a boost of courage. I dug ammo out of the dresser. In the top drawer I managed to find a box of .22 caliber hollow-points, just what I needed.

I trotted back down the hall and up the stairs, madly cramming bullets into the clip. I snapped the bolt as I came to the top of the stairs and had the gun to my shoulder as I entered the workshop. The goblins had not been idle during my brief absence. Three of them were now completely in the room. The ballsy one that had cut Jason was standing on my chair, watching for my return. Another was at his side, with his bow drawn.

Fortunately, the bowman faced toward the console. The third was actually standing on the console, his feet carefully planted so as to avoid touching the control knobs. As I entered, he was in the act of handing something through. Of Jason there was no sign, other than the bloodstains on the sheets and the carpet. The goblin with the bow turned my way and I put the rifle’s bead on his breastbone. That was when I realized what the goblin standing on the console was handing through to the other side. It had been Jason’s legs. Even now his Reebok sneakers were disappearing into the screen. His left one was untied, and the laces trailed lightly across the console.

The goblin with the bow swung to shoot me, but I beat him and put two slugs into his chest. His arrow went wild and thudded into the plaster a yard to my left. He fell back, knocked on his can, squealing and grabbing at the wound.

This appeared to enrage the green knife-wielding guy on my chair. He gave a ragged shout that shot spittle from his yellow teeth and threw himself at me. He charged in low (naturally) and I wasn’t able to bring him into my sights at such close range. So I hit him with the butt of the rifle and threw him back. His head opened across his bald scalp. Red blood welled up, contrasting sharply with his bell pepper-green skin.

“If you little suckers killed Jason, I’ll gut-shoot your whole tribe!” I shouted. A momentary look of fear passed over the goblin’s features as the volume and power of a human’s voice assaulted his ears. Then he slashed at me once and took a bullet in the teeth. He fell back and rolled in gargling convulsions. The third in the raiding party had disappeared back into his fern-tree. I moved to the console and looked through, breathing hard and feeling elated. My hands and stomach shivered a bit with the adrenalin of the moment. Pinpricks of salty sweat popped out on my forehead.

The fern-tree was empty of goblins. Jason wasn’t in sight either, but I was sure that they couldn’t have carried him off too far. Then I heard his yelling. A sickening feeling swept through my gut. My mind numbed as a dozen horrible tortures came to mind at the knobby green hands of these aliens. I knew that I had to go through and find him, but my mind balked. It is not every day that you take your first step into an entirely unknown and decidedly hostile world. Especially when such a step went through a touchy device that your psycho uncle had invented.

I stalled by reloading the rifle, even though its magazine held fifteen rounds. I fumbled with the box and dropped a few rounds onto the console. They clattered and rolled around between the knobs.

I looked at those knobs. I looked at them hard. All I had to do was reach out and twist one, any of them, and Jason and the goblins would be history. I would be safe. My eyes focused on a seed pod nestled up against a waving frond. A second later my vision shifted back to the tuning knobs.

Then Jason screamed again, that cracking, high-pitched womanish scream like before. “Steve! Steve! Oh shit, STEVE!” he cried.

My eyes rested on the blood drops that Jason had lost from his forearm when the goblins had first attacked. It was still wet. It was too much. I climbed onto my folding chair and placed my foot on the top of the console. The dark metal barrel of my brother’s .22 Ruger preceded me into the new world.

3.

Stepping through the portal felt like walking into a huge soap bubble. It was as if a membrane of some kind between the worlds stretched and spread, adhering slightly to my body, before it opened and allowed me to pass.

I found myself crouching in the fern-tree, and was suddenly struck by all the sounds and smells of a rain forest. I found the bole of the tree to be reasonably sturdy footing. The going was made difficult only by the innumerable giant fronds that brushed against my face and arms. I made my way to the nearest edge and spread the fronds to allow a view of the ground, some twenty feet below.

It was open earth and looked wet and damp. A few vines crawled their way over the forest floor, entwining themselves with the rope-like roots of the fern-trees. A black trail of ants, or some similar insect, was scaling the tree nearest to me.

Then I looked over my shoulder and got my first look at the window I had just come through. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a shimmering image of the workshop, the way it would look through a heat-wave on hot asphalt. Maybe a glowing golden border around it that pulsed ominously like a Star-Trek prop. Instead I saw my uncle’s workshop, in perfect clarity, sort of super-imposed on the air. It was a two-dimensional rip in space. There wasn’t anything special about the borders either. It was almost weirder that way. No glowy blue edge. Just a perfect line, where one world ended and another began.

Enough tourism. I had a rescue mission to perform. There were no goblins in sight, but I could hear their snarls and chattering nearby. They had moved farther back from the beach, deeper into the fern-tree forest. I slung the rifle over my back and quickly found a route downward. The tree’s trunk was similar to a large squat palm. It’s scale-like surface afforded many handholds.

Once I had descended to the forest floor I unslung the rifle and looked back at the tree above me. I noted the heart-shaped twist of a root at the bottom of the tree and how far back it was from the beach. I also mentally marked a rock on the shoreline as a reference point. I had no desire to lose my way back to the one way I had to return home. After memorizing the spot, I turned and trotted deeper into the forest.

I didn’t have far to go. Jason had stopped yelling, but the noises made by the goblins left me plenty to home in on. As I approached the source of the sounds, I considered simply charging in and shooting everything in sight, Clint Eastwood style. But this seemed overly risky, as I had no real idea as to their numbers or how many bowmen might be stationed as sentries. With all the stealth I could manage, I found a thicket of brush near my goal and threaded my way into it. Within a few minutes I found a vantage point where I could spy on them without being seen. At least, that was my hope.

What I saw startled me. I expected to find Jason strapped securely to a stake with high piles of kindling at his feet, or perhaps a boiling cauldron nearby. Instead, he was strapped firmly into a harness that was suspended above a spear planted in the forest floor. The goblins were going to great effort to impale him. They were having considerable difficulty, however, as Jason was far too big and heavy for the harness, which was obviously fashioned for a goblin-sized victim. The trees overhead were thronged with goblins of all sizes and ages. Many of the goblins in the fern-trees were hauling on four leather straps and trying to maneuver Jason over the spear point. Jason was doing his best to foil their efforts by twisting and lurching. He was gagged, and all that came through the wad of moss and leaves in his mouth were snorts and choking sounds. His face shown with the sweat of his efforts. Drops of perspiration dribbled from the tip of his nose and from his brow. His eyes were wide pale orbs that carefully tracked the glinting metal tip of the spear point.

On the ground were only two warriors with bows and knives and one older-looking figure, even more bent and malformed than usual. This one appeared to be an elder and a leader of some sort, and gestured and chattered at those working with the harness with obvious impatience. I raised my rifle and put the bead just below the right ear of the old guy. I didn’t see any other options but to start firing before they managed to get Jason under control and put the broad stabbing point through his belly. My immediate plan was to drop the leader to cause some confusion.

But then, unexpectedly, the elderly goblin stepped forward and spoke to Jason in garbled English. “Human, you die now,” he croaked. “You boy-wizard and your evil will die with you.” With these words, he gestured to the goblins handling the straps to lower Jason onto the impaling spear. It seemed that the old guy had met my Uncle or some other human before. Someone who had not made a favorable impression.

I squeezed, putting one, two, and then three ounces of pressure on the trigger. But I realized all they had to do was drop Jason and it would all be over. “Chief!” I roared, deepening my voice for effect. “If you kill the boy-wizard I will kill you!”

The old goblin, startled, turned to face the thicket I was hiding in. The rest of the tribe followed suit. His old eyes wrinkled further as he squinted, trying to see the source of the voice. One of the warriors next to him pulled and released an arrow in my general direction. The arrow sailed into the brush twenty feet to my left, cutting through twigs and leaves. In immediate response I leveled my rifle and fired. A bullet punched through his cheek-bone and pierced his brain. He went down as if clubbed and lay shuddering on the forest floor.

The effect was similar to that of a leopard trotting out into the middle of a baboon troop. The goblins screamed and shook the fronds of their fern-trees anxiously. The females herded their young away from the scene, up into trees deeper in the forest. Several warriors dropped to the ground and took cover behind tree trunks and brush. Jason swayed precariously over the spear point in the commotion, but the chief signaled those holding him aloft to wait. The chief gazed down at the body of the fallen warrior and then raised his eyes back to the thicket.

“Human,” he said, “Show yourself.”

“Release him or die. And don’t move for cover or give the order to attack me, or I’ll start killing.”

As soon as I had finished this message, I began worming my way further back into the thicket and off to one side. I took up a new vantage point in a kneeling position. I didn’t want them to pin-point my location.

“If you kill me, you will be killed by my people. None of them can speak the language of humans,” the chief informed me.

I had to chew over that one. The old guy had some brains, I figured. If he was telling the truth and I killed him, then it would just be a blood-bath and Jason would be dead meat. I might become hamburger myself, in fact. I didn’t like the idea.

The chief, getting over his initial surprise, started talking again. I got the immediate impression that he liked the sound of his own voice. “Humans,” here he spat yellowish phlegm dramatically, “Bad for us. Always bad. They steal, they kill, they stink. They are cowards. You want boy-wizard, then come and talk with us.”

Craftily, the chief peered at the thicket, doubtless hoping that I would trot forward into easy bowshot. One bony hand rubbed the wrinkled green skin of his face. I noticed that while he talked to me, several of the warriors had faded from view and were doubtless moving through the forest to encircle me. I decided it was time for another demonstration. If I was going to keep control of the situation, I was going to have to keep them cowed.

I spotted a warrior on his belly, about forty yards off to my right moving between two fern-tree trunks. Not an easy shot. My first round splashed dirt in front of his nose. The rifle lurched in my hands and the spring-loaded clip neatly pushed another bullet up into the firing chamber. Fortunately, the first shot so surprised the goblin that he jumped up into a crouched position and started back for the cover of the tree he had just left, like a runner that has strayed too far from his base. I caught him between the shoulder-blades with two more quick shots. He was knocked ass-over-teakettle right into the base of the fern-tree he had been dashing for. He squealed for a while before he died, making me feel a little ill.

The others started pulling back after that. The chief didn’t look too happy. He shouted a few impatient orders and waved his hands. I guess that he had gotten the message, because the guys in the trees began to haul up on the straps suspending Jason. They moved him up and away from the spear point and then lowered him to the ground.

He came down sort of headfirst. I thought to myself that I’d never seen anyone so happy to have his face pushed into dirt. They cut him out of his harness with those long thin blades of theirs. Then he was up and running for the thicket, ripping and spitting moss out of his mouth. I started moving back, watching the goblins rather than Jason. But they didn’t seem to be interested in attacking us. They were pulling further back, fading into the forest.

Jason was limping a bit, as if one of his legs had gone to sleep, which seemed likely. As he reached the edge of the thicket and plunged into the sheltering greenery like a burning man diving into a cool lake, the panic started to leave his face.

“Steve!” he hissed, picking his way into the brush. “Steve, where are you, man? You’ve got a kiss coming!”

4.

When he got to me, his sweaty face, caked with dirt, was split in a toothy grin. I noted that the chief had ducked out of sight, and out of range, when Jason had entered the thicket. I pushed off Jason’s panting, sweaty hug of greeting.

“We aren’t out of the woods yet, Tonto.”

“Right,” he agreed immediately. His face shifted to a look of absolute seriousness. I felt that he had changed in some way, probably permanently. “Which way back? You didn’t get lost, did you?”

As he spoke he hunkered down beside me and looked back at the impaling spear. He stared at it fixedly for a moment, still slightly mesmerized by it. The goblins were nearly out of sight now.

“Let’s go,” I said. There was no argument. We moved quickly out of the thicket in the direction that I had come. By the time we reached the edge, we were crashing through the brush at run. Bleeding from the face and hands where branches of thorns had caught at us, we charged thorough the forest in full stride. Our breath came in hoarse pants. Large sweat stains turned cold and clung to the skin under our arms. Panic was overtaking us. We were running for our lives.

Unerringly, I led the way to the beach. We came out a little off from where we had started. For a minute or two I was lost. Jason knew it. He didn’t say anything, but his face was white with fear. We moved back into the forest for cover and made our way in the direction that I hoped the window was.

Laughing with relief, I found the right fern-tree and tackled the trunk, climbing like a chimp at dinner-time. Jason was right behind me all the way. We pushed our way up through the fronds and climbed onto the top of the tree.

And there we found the chief goblin. He was in the act of climbing into the window, into our world. He was alone and he was scared. He must have been the only one with enough balls after all the killing to come after us. We charged through the waving fronds after him. Fortunately, he was old, scared and slow.

I watched him get to his feet on the other side and to my horror I saw him reach for the tuning knobs. He was smiling at me in a nasty sort of way. The way an older brother would when he locks you out of the house and your folks are on vacation. Almost without thought, I snapped the rifle to my shoulder and began firing. The first shot went wild, I saw the plaster in the back wall of the workshop sprout an answering puff of dust back at me. I fired as fast as I could squeeze the trigger.

Before he could reach the knob, his smile fading, my second and third and fourth shots hit him. He jerked back flailing, and collapsed in a heap on Jason’s folding chair, which was still lying in its folded position on the floor.

We clambered toward the window quickly, but we weren’t quite fast enough. The chief goblin was a tough old guy, I have to admit that. He reached up and twisted one of the knobs. I’m not even sure which one.

The window vanished and left us behind in the alien jungle.

We both stood there, panting and dripping a mixture of blood, sweat and dirt onto the bole of the fern-tree. For once, Jason didn’t call me a moron.

5.

I envisioned it all. I hadn’t gotten A’s in history for nothing.

They might just kill us out of hand when we ran out of bullets. Or maybe we would get hungry and weak and fall asleep one night. An arrow out of the night might do the trick, or maybe even something more mundane and natural, like the purplish infection that had puffed up Jason’s slashed arm.

But whatever it was, we were going to die here. Unless Mom and Dad found the workshop and the dead goblins. Maybe they could get my crazy Uncle out of the nuthouse long enough to help. Maybe he would twiddle the dials for them, returning the window to this precise spot.

Or maybe my parents would find another world, ignorantly dip the window into the bottom of some ocean, and flood our planet with a billion gallons from an alien sea.

Still, the window’s return was our best hope, so we dug in on the beach snugly up against the fern-tree. I had forty-seven rounds of ammo, a sick friend and a beautiful sunset to ponder. Wherever this world was, it was certainly wild and full of lovely vistas. Tiny blue crabs, each with ten rippling legs, ran around in the surf. When night fell, two moons rose, both bigger and more colorful than our own. One looked green and blue and had clouds of its own. A second waterworld, I felt sure.

By morning, Jason’s breathing was raspy. I thought about waking him up, but what was the point? Whatever dreams he had were probably better than this.

I’m thinking now about the blue ten-legged crabs. They might be good to eat. Then again, they might poison me. Pretty soon, I will have to try one, but not now. For now, I’m watching the sea. It’s strange, beautiful and entrancing.

The One-Way Gang

Beth held a limp hanky in her freckled hands and cried over the dead salesman. “You’ve got to do something, Paula,” she blubbered, rocking herself with her arms wrapped around her own shoulders. Her face was hidden by a long stringy mop of brown hair.

“Things will get better,” I lied to her. I bent over and gave her a squeeze, while she continued crying and rocking. I watched her tears make dark streaks as they rolled down through the dust that coated her cheeks. She used to be pretty. I thought. Really pretty.

“Paula, stop them this time,” she whispered to me.

Suddenly, I was disgusted with everything, including myself. I stood up and walked away from Beth. What could I do? Fight all three of them over some salesman from Fresno who should have kept his BMW on the Blowdirt instead of stopping here? The only thing I could do was ambush them, and they all slept with their guns in their hands. Killing Kyle wouldn’t be enough, the others wouldn’t let me get away with it. Besides, I considered Raymond my friend, and didn’t think I could kill him.

I glanced at Beth and frowned. If I had been planning to make a move, the last person I would have told was Beth. She would have blabbed my plans and then I would have been bleeding in the dust, with Kyle ripping chunks out of my face with those damned pliers of his. She wasn’t entirely with it these days, since Deb and Kevin had stepped out. She was too chicken to follow them alone, so she cried a lot.

I shook my head. No, I couldn’t tell her, she would have blabbed for sure. I walked over to the others, who had just found the salesman huddled up with his chin on his chest and his arms wrapped around his head. He was sound asleep, leaning against our One-Way sign, just as if he owned the place. He wore a navy blue pin-striped suit, now a patchy dust-brown, with a red tie that flapped a bit in the west winds.

Kyle gave him a long, low whistle of appreciation which woke the man up.

“Mister,” Kyle said, “you have a lot of balls to be sleeping up against our sign that way, but you didn’t have quite enough balls. You should have just stepped out, right through that ripper.” He gestured toward the flaming, shimmering fields of color that danced over the parking lot.

The man blinked at us.

Kyle shook his head to himself with his lips compressed. “You should of stepped out.”

The salesman looked up at the four of us, blinking in the pink morning light and the dust that forever blew in our faces. He looked at Kyle, a guy so pale white that his skin was pink and his eyes were yellow. The saleman’s eyes moved over the double-twisted snake tattoos on both arms, the bandana over his mouth and the goggles over his eyes, then finally to the pliers which he held raised high in his left hand. Rather than fear, puzzlement was his first reaction.

He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Raymond had shoved the roughcut barrel of his shotgun in his open teeth, corking his words. Raymond was part black, with one of those wild razor-cut hair-dos to prove it, but you could hardly tell with all the dust covering his skin. When the salesman tried to close his mouth, Raymond stuck his thumb in the man’s lips and pried his jaw open, working the barrel in there.

Everyone but me chuckled at this. I knew what that barrel tasted like. I knew how it depressed your tongue and scraped the roof of your mouth with the flanges of steel the hacksaw had left on the crudely sawed-off tip.

They always loved the look of surprise on someone’s face when they first tasted Raymond’s shotgun. Steve, the third man of our gang, pulled out his regulation police handcuffs and snapped them on the salesman’s upraised wrist.

“You’re under arrest, bud,” Steve said. The man’s eyes got even bigger when he looked at the helmet that sat on top of Steve’s pockmarked cheeks and crooked teeth. Steve always wore a gold CHP motorcycle helmet that he had picked up along with the handcuffs from some dead cop. He was only sixteen and a geek. He enjoyed playing Highway Patrolman. He chuckled at the man’s comic surprise.

I stood to one side and gripped my revolver nervously, rubbing the handle with my thumb. Inside I hoped, no I prayed that we were just going to rob this guy, that when we had whatever we could use from him, whatever we felt like taking, we would toss him past the sign and let him run for the ripper.

But Kyle had that yellowy gleam in his eyes, the light that meant trouble.

We did rob him. We took the keys to the Beamer, driving it around the deserted parking lots and up and down Geer road for fun with the sunroof open and the stereo cranked up all the way. He had all the usual shit that people try to take with them to the other side, money, booze, camping gear, even a coffee can full of old coins and jewelry. He had a little .22 caliber target pistol in the trunk too, which Kyle later used to shoot out the beamer’s tires for a laugh. I looked through his wallet, although money was useless these days and credit cards were nothing but curiosities. I learned that his name was Kevin Simpson, and he had a wife and a little girl somewhere.

I think he knew that Kyle was going to kill him even before I did. I think he knew because he kept muttering prayers to himself, under his breath. Hail-Mary type stuff. Riding around the parking lot in the cushy leather backseat of his car, I looked at him, but he just kept his eyes shut and muttered his prayers. Raymond kept his shotgun pressed against the man’s cheek and had his fist wrapped double in the man’s red tie.

It was when we were done having fun, when we had everything that the Kevin Simpson could give us, that things went bad. The old way, the way we used to do things, we would take the guy and put him just past the One-Way sign, just at the edge where the fields started, and give him a quick kick in the ass to give him a proper send off. Then he would fall forward, tumbling into the new world wearing his butt for a hat. It was a great laugh.

But then Kyle had gotten into his pliers and things had changed. The last two people had gone through bleeding, and Kevin Simpson was never going to make it at all.

“You’ve got to do something,” Beth sobbed to me again. “Let’s step out, Paula. Let’s just do it. There has to be something better than this.”

She followed me into the wreckage of the furniture store that had become our home for the last several months. It was convenient, as there was plenty of furniture to go around and there was no way for travelers to get to the fields out in the parking lot without walking in plain sight of the big front windows.

“Just do it yourself,” I told her. “You don’t need me.”

“I can’t do it alone,” she told me, her hand gripping my wrist, her eyes bright. “I’m afraid to go alone. What if it’s something bad. What if something really bad is on the other side? I don’t want to die alone, Paula.”

“Then don’t go. I’m just not ready yet,” I told her in a gentle voice. I reached up to push the hair out of my face. She jerked her hand away from my wrist.

“You owe me, Paula!” she yelled, suddenly furious.

“Go tell your cats about it,” I hissed at her. My eyes flashed with anger and slapped her, slamming my hand over her big mouth. Kyle, Steve and Ray could be anywhere, and all I needed was for her to blab about me stepping out or maybe even turning on them. Kyle was not likely to take to either idea. Once you were in his gang, you were his property.

Beth gave me a hurt look and ran away, deciding I guess that I was just as bad as the others. Maybe I was. I watched her flabby rear as she ran away, thinking that she was crazy to want me to go through the fields, to step out with her, just because she had helped pull a few guys off me one time. Who wanted to cross over? Earth was bad, but who wanted to take a chance on whatever was happening on the far side? Some said that the fields didn’t really work anymore, that if you stepped into them you didn’t get through the wormhole to Tau Ceti Minor. Some said that you were just stepping out into empty interstellar space, into a void where you froze solid in seconds. Some said that when you went through, aliens grabbed you and turned you into a slave, or shot you out of hand. Others said that if you went into the fields, it was random where you might end up, that the physics were unpredictable.

The only thing that everybody knew for sure was that you didn’t come back. You bought a one-way ticket when you stepped into the shimmering colors at any of the ripper points that dotted the planet.

I turned and walked through all the trash we had thrown around since we had taken over the store and sat on a coffee table next to the front windows. Absently pulling a candy wrapper from the sole of my shoe, I watched the shimmering fields outside, where they hung and twisted in the air a few feet above the parking lot. They leaped and danced like a rainbow-hued bonfire.

The sun was setting behind the building, and the colors in the ripper were shifting down from the yellows and oranges into the reds and violets, as they usually did in the early evening. Did that mean you would come out someplace else if you went through now? No one knew.

Silhouetted by the ripper’s strange, moving light, the salesman’s body was a dark lump on the asphalt. Next to him, the One-Way sign pointed into the colors, looking like a mailbox.

“He’s a deader, alright,” said Steve, coming up next to me and putting a hand around my waist down low, just an inch from grabbing my rear.

I shoved his hand away automatically. He smelled like spoiled meat.

“You should know,” I replied coldly.

He ignored me, his deep-set eyes fixed on the salesman’s lifeless form. His gold helmet glinted, reflecting the light from the rip outside.

“When I get close to the rip, I freak out a bit,” he told me. “The fields have an unnaturalness about them that fires up your instincts, you know? It makes your movements stiff and makes your skin crawl as if static tugs at every hair on your body. You know, when you are that close, that if you just take a few steps, or stumble, or somebody pushes you, you are on your way into nothingness.”

Steve was our resident ripper-baiter. He liked to go past the sign, every once and a while, and run back at the last second, but for the fields could suck him in for good. He had been closer that anyone I knew of.

Outside, the fields sparkled and shimmered, playing like cold fire on the asphalt. My family had gone through when the rips had worked both ways, but I had been in college then and had decided to wait. I pondered the dancing colors with the same old wonder they invoked in everyone.

“I remember climbing up to Nevada falls in Yosemite when I was a kid with my dad and my brother Tom,” Steve told me. “I stood out on the brink, looking down thousands of feet into the valley, with my sneakers placed side by side at the edge. I closed my eyes and it felt as if I were going to get sucked off, to fall into an endlessly deep pit. The fields are like that you know, only more scary, more alien.”

“Did you have to kill the guy?” I blurted out.

Steve shrugged, as if it were no big deal. He gave a nervous, adolescent laugh. “It was kinda fun. We always scare them, give them the old treatment with the shotgun in the mouth and the handcuffs. We just do it to soften them up some, get them in a talkative mood. But this time Kyle decided to snuff the guy,” again he shrugged. “It’s the same to us either way. If he’d gone into the rip, he’d be just as absent from our world.”

“No, it’s not the same.”

Steve was quiet for a while. Then he changed the subject. “You think the Berkley boys at the Livermore Labs were really the ones who started all these rips?”

“I guess. That’s what they say,” I said, taking a half-step away from him. Sometimes it was creepy just to stand next to Steve, and this was one of those times.

I thought about the way the rips had started. The Government Service boys had been playing with the theoretical physics of wormholes. No one knew just what they had done, because the biggest field had appeared in the middle of the labs and many of the Ph. D.s and their pale, spectacled grad assistants had vanished. At the same time, over six hundred other known spots had flared up all over the globe. Some were no larger than campfires, others had swallowed a city block. There were more of them in California and under the ocean on the shelf just off the Pacific coast than elsewhere, but there were enough around to let everybody get to one who wanted to. The first brave adventurers that had stepped through these rips to Tau Ceti Minor and returned to tell of the wonders they had seen.

They had pictures, too. Digitals movies that played on every house on the net. Tau Ceti Minor was a dream world. Green and lush, its surface was three-fourths land and only one-fourth sea. Once the population learned that a fresh new planet with virgin forests and oceans and without pollution was on the other side, people had flooded into the rips in droves. The fleeing population brought on a worldwide depression, which only served to accelerate the flow of humanity out of their old worn-out world and through the rips in space to the new one.

“I remember when they all switched around on everybody,” said Steve with a wheezy snort of laughter. “It was right after Christmas in December when the solar flares started in both systems and I remember that’s when all the weird shit started, like the people seeing the northern lights all the way down to New Mexico. Remember that?”

“Sure I remember. Messed everyone up, because they were all with their families on one side or the other, then the door slammed shut. I’ve never seen my parents since.”

“My folks were gone too. I was a kid then,” he said, ignoring my look which said: And you aren’t now?

“The people stopped coming out of the fields. People still went in, and disappeared, but they never came back out. I remember thinking that Santa Claus had taken back his gift.”

After that, with the earth population cut nearly in half, the world rapidly declined and many areas fell into anarchy. Few nations still stood as organized powers. Dictatorships and petty civil wars flourished. For years the steady, silent exodus continued. Like lemmings leaping from a cliff into the unknown, like forest creatures running from flames, the people continued to step into the shimmering fields and vanish. The bleeding never stopped, and soon the Earth had slipped into a new age. I suppose they would someday call this a dark age.

“This last year has been a weird time,” Steve said, tracing the outline of a face on the dusty store window. “Evil things have happened that nobody’s ever going to know about later. I think it’s kind of fun, it feels dangerous.”

He left and I let go a breath of disgust. I felt an involuntary shudder go down my spine, and tried to control it. I grabbed an ugly green ottoman out of the nearest family room display and pulled it up to the window. There was a bullet hole through the cushion and as I watched an ant crawled out of it, feelers waving. I flicked the ant away and sat on it. A few minutes later the trash rattled and crunched as Raymond walked up to join me at the window. He leaned up against the glass.

“You thinking about steppin’ out?” he asked me. I glanced at him but he wasn’t looking at me, he was staring out at the fields and the dead salesman. “Sure is weird shit, ain’t it?” he added.

I noticed his 12-gauge was slung over his back, so I casually holstered my gun before speaking. “I think it’s going to go all purple tonight.”

He nodded, but didn’t repeat his first question. We watched as twilight set in and the flaming colors darkened and deepened into their cooler, more ominous night hues. In the violet glow the saleman looked less like a lump and more like a corpse, perhaps one that would animate somehow.

“Looks like he’s going to stand up and come for us, huh?” Ray asked me. The unwelcome image of Kevin Simpson’s corpse standing up and staggering toward the furniture store to exact his revenge on us sprang into my mind. His eyes would be two bloodshot orbs staring from the gray-brown dust that caked his face. I could see him dismembering each of the One-Way gang, including myself, while Beth cried for us all.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, suddenly wanting to know. Raymond had been the one to finally squeeze the trigger on his shotgun and ventilate the back of Kevin Simpson’s head. “Why did you kill him?”

“I shoved the gun in his mouth and all, but that was just part of the bit. Just to scare him, you know? After that though, it started gettin’ bad. Kyle... those pliers, man,” he looked down, shaking his head. His hand was a fist against the cool glass. “You don’t know, ‘cause you checked out early. It was all a waste.”

“He didn’t know anything?”

“Kyle kept sayin’ he did, kept sayin’ that he was holding out, but no, he didn’t know shit. Everything he owned was in that Beamer we trashed.”

“So you killed him.” Raymond gave a slow nod, his lower lip jutting out a bit and his eyes locked on Simpson’s body outside. The winds had picked up a bit and the dust was blowing heavy, coming in off highway 99. The highway had once been known as the Blowdirt, back in the 1920’s before irrigation had really gotten going. Back then, this section of California’s Central Valley had been a big windy dust bowl, and 99 had high mounds of dirt on both sides of it. Every car had left a billowing cloud of dust behind it, and the locals had called the highway the Blowdirt. Now the people were mostly gone, but the dust was back and the old name had come back with it.

“Kyle was pissed, wasn’t he?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“Tough,” snorted Raymond. “That really breaks me up, you know. I feel for him.”

I thought about my family on the other side. I wondered what they were doing on the new planet, how they were making out. I had always been afraid that if I stepped through one of the rips I would end up in some other place, some dead end that I couldn’t get back out of. I had always hoped that the fields would start working both ways again, that somehow I might have a chance to rejoin my family, without having to face the terrible unknown.

“Ain’t never killed a man before,” muttered Raymond. He gnawed on his fist now, rubbing his knuckles against his teeth. “Not like that. I guess it was a mercy-killing. You know, like if you found a run-over beagle in the road and it was all twisted up. You’d kill it maybe, to stop it from suffering.”

I nodded and got up off the ottoman.

“I’m going to bed.” Raymond didn’t say anything. He just kept staring out at the shimmering lights—they had gone purple now in the darkness, as I had predicted—staring at the man he had killed. I left him there and went back to my “room” an area formed out of fake walls and office dividers and filled with new luxurious furniture. Beth was there, folding down the sheets on her bed. She had stopped crying, but she looked at me reproachfully when I walked in. I didn’t feel like talking to her, so I went back out front, pushed a pile of dusty clothes off a loveseat and stretched out on the flowery patterned fabric. Eventually I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was still dark. I must have heard something and awakened automatically. Groping for my revolver, I wiped my mouth and got up, blinking. I walked to the front of the store and saw someone was out there standing over the body, doing something. I moved quickly to the window, ready to sound the alarm if it was another gang, or maybe some friend of Mr. Simpson’s who’d come calling.

I squinted and recognized the outline of a shotgun slung over the figure’s back. It was Ray. I rushed out of the store and into the cool night air, doing the hundred yard dash across the parking lot. I was afraid that Ray would step out on me. So many people had, and for some reason I didn’t want him to go without saying something to him.

“What’s wrong, Ray?” I asked, panting a bit from my run across the parking lot. He didn’t answer. I noticed that the salesman was much farther into the field than he had been before. He had been rolled or pushed up almost to the point that he was sure to vanish into the ripper. I realized that Ray had done it, that he was trying to get the body into the fields for some reason, but he hadn’t pushed him quite far enough and couldn’t go in any further himself without risking getting snatched up by a flare.

Our One-Way sign was there to stop people from getting too close as well as to mark the rip as ours. Even though the fields generally stayed back a few feet from where the sign was, there was an occasional flare or ripple that could reach out and suck up someone standing too close. Without getting too close, Ray was trying to drag the man back by his heels, and first got nothing but his shoes. Then he was tugging on the dead man’s feet, his hands slipping on the socks. He looked like a man trying to retrieve something from the edge of a bonfire without getting burned. He became more daring and grabbed his ankles, giving a mighty heave that brought the body a foot or so closer.

“What are you doing, man?” I asked quietly.

“He’s gonna make it,” Ray grunted at me.

“What?”

“He’s gonna step out, just like he would’ve done if he hadn’t of been so stupid as to wait for us to catch him,” he jerked and heaved, pulling the man back presumably for another try. “Come on, you dumb bastard,” he muttered.

“He’s dead, Ray,” I said gently. I was standing next to him, and thinking that he was going over the edge. Ray was losing it, even while I watched.

“I’m tired of lookin’ at him, and I don’t feel like digging a hole,” Ray explained.

“I’ve got a lighter,” said a voice. The voice chuckled when I jumped and then Steve stepped out of the shadows from behind the Beamer we had joy-rided to death earlier. He was wearing his crazy gold helmet as always, and seemed amused by the two of us.

“We could burn him. I’ve got a lighter and we can use the gas from the Beamer.”

Ray suddenly stood and got right up in my face. His arms were cocked back and he was ready to go for me right there, I could tell.

“You gonna stand there and watch, or are you gonna help?” he asked me.

I looked at him for a moment, then without even a glance at Steve I reached down and helped Ray with the body. We lifted him up Ray working his legs and me working his arms. The head lolled and flopped as we swung him to and fro. With a mighty heave we sent Kevin Simpson through the rip. The fields rippled and loomed a bit like a fire that is fed a dry stick of tinder. I wondered what the people on the other side, if there were any such people, would think of their latest immigrant.

“Oh man, you guys are dog meat,” laughed Steve, holding his rifle to his belly and bending over it a bit. “When Kyle finds out you tossed him through, you’re both friggin’ Alpo, man.”

“Why’s that, Steve?” I asked.

“Because you tossed old Senor Simpson through the rip.”

“So what?”

“So you were about to take the stuff out of the Beamer and step out with all of the loot,” he explained, as if we were simpletons. “You were stealing from Kyle, stealing from the gang. At least, that’s what I’m telling Kyle. You guys have been acting weird lately anyway, he’ll believe me.”

“Yeah, well—” began Ray, casually turning a bit and laying his big black hand on his shotgun, which protruded over his shoulder.

“Hold it right there, man,” said Steve, instantly grim. He held his rifle confidently, aiming it from his hip. It was pointed at Ray’s chest, and all of us knew that he wasn’t likely to miss. He was good with that rifle, he was forever stalking around in the fields and vacant lots, shooting at everything that moved like a ten-year-old with a BB gun.

Ray let his hand ease away from the shotgun, while I took a nonchalant step forward. “You too chick,” barked Steve, swinging the barrel to cover me. I froze. “You are two of the sorriest nuts I’ve ever caught out farting around in this parking lot,” he laughed, shaking his head. “Now both of you will drop your guns and kick them over here, nice and easy,” he said it just like a gangster in an old video, which is where he got most of his ideas.

“Hey now,” I said after we had kicked away our guns, forcing a jovial smile. “We’re all buds, Steve. Let’s go have a sixer in the store and talk it over.”

“Not anymore,” said Steve, shaking his head with grim finality. He was obviously more relaxed now that we were unarmed. He glanced to the One-Way sign we had knocked over while tossing Simpson through the rip. He frowned, walking over to it while keeping an eye on us. “You guys even kicked over our mascot here, just to prove you’re traitors.”

He looked down at the sign for a moment, a good long moment, but not quite long enough for us to get to him. He got his rifle up in time to check us, and the look of shock in his eyes was good to see. Ray had stepped quickly and silently up to within five feet of him, and I was right behind him. He could see the deadly intent in our eyes, and we could see a moment of fear waver through his. He and Ray were practically face to face, with Steve’s back up against the fields. We were all very aware of how close Steve was to going into the rip. One step back, maybe two, and he was stepping out for sure.

“I’ll blow your guts out, Ray. You back off now.”

“And I’ll jump you Steve, you skinny little psycho. I’ll rush you and we’ll both go steppin’ out together, just like we was dancin’,” Ray told him in a low, gutteral voice.

“I know what you need right now Steve. You need a little chemical courage, a little crank or smack or maybe a good dose of blur,” I said, baiting him. “You’re a scared weasel without a little bit of blur, aren’t you Steve?”

“You shut up, or I’ll blast off you—” I never heard what part of my anatomy Steve was going to blow off, because right then Ray hit him. He had swung his gun to the side to aim at me, and Ray took this opportunity to shove him into the fields. The rifle went off and missed me, although I suppose it was just luck that it did. We saw him fall back into the fields and try to catch himself on the edge of the transfer point, at the point where a man’s molecules are spread half-here and half-there. He fired his rifle again, and it made a distant popping sound, as if he had fired it into a king-sized foam mattress. The muzzle flashed, but we never felt or heard the bullet strike, I have no idea where it went.

We could see for a second that his vocal chords strained, his mouth gaped open and his hand stretched toward us, but it was all silent, his voice never reached us. Just before he disappeared, his helmet slipped back and I saw his pimply face one last time. In that moment he wasn’t a gang-member or a vicious bully, he was a sixteen-year old kid and he was scared out of his mind. Then the fields rippled and he was covered up, like a man drowning in a vat of swirling paints.

Then Kyle came out. He was very rational. He was almost always calm, even when he was tearing chunks out of your face with his visegrips. “So let me get this straight, team,” he told us in that fatherly voice I hated. “Mr. Simpson had wanted to get through our rip so badly that you felt sorry for his corpse and tossed it through. Then Steve came along and accidentally stumbled through after the body?”

“Nothing like that, Kyle,” I said, watching him slap his goddamn pliers into his palm like a school master’s paddle. Slap, slap.

“I pulled Steve out of his drug scene, you know,” Kyle said quietly. “I pulled Stevie up and out and then you guys tossed him into oblivion.”

Slap, slap.

“He might not be dead, Kyle,” I said, feeling a bit defensive. “He’s probably better off than we are. No one knows what’s on the other side.”

“I do!” shouted Kyle at me suddenly, glaring with those intense big yellow eyes of his. Then he looked down at his pliers again and I followed his gaze. The light from the fields shimmered and glinted on the shiny metal. Dark blood stained the jaws and ran down to smear the grips. I wondered briefly if Simpson’s blood still felt tacky in Kyle hands and cold fingers of nausea tickled my guts.

Kyle lowered his voice, all calm and reason again. “We all know why nobody comes back out of the rips. Because there’s nothing on the other side now, nothing but death.”

“He pulled his gun on us, Kyle,” I said.

“So you iced him, nice and neat. You guys are a pretty pair, alright. Couldn’t have just tripped him, could you Ray? Couldn’t just give him a nice judo throw, knocking the wind out of him and some sense in? No, you had to make an interstellar iceball out of him, you had to turn him into a sixteen year-old popsicle, zits and all.”

Ray stared glumly into the dancing colors, silently brooding. When he finally spoke he didn’t take his eyes away from the colors. “You know what I want to know, Kyle? I want to know what’s with you and those friggin’ pliers. Did your daddy beat your lil’ butt with his handtools, or somethin’?”

“No Ray,” said Kyle quietly, the snake tattoos jumping on his forearms the way they did when he was pissed. “No, but I bet your daddy beat your butt good, didn’t he? Too bad he never got a little carried away and tossed you over a cliff or out a window, like you did for poor old Stevie.”

Then Kyle stalked over to the Beamer, lifting the trunklid and dug out something that crackled like paper out of the darkness. He returned with a long paper sack in his hands, the type that liquor stores used to put booze bottles in so that drunks could pretend they weren’t booze bottles—back when there were liquor stores. He walked back to us and held it out a sack to Ray, grinning.

“Would you like a drink, Ray?” There was something funny about the way he held the bag. It was upside down, with the open end covering his hand. Ray’s eyes slid to Kyle’ side, to his holster. My eyes followed his, and widened. Kyle’s holster was empty.

“You gonna shoot or what, Kyle?” asked Ray in a dead voice.

Kyle waved the gun under his nose a bit, chuckling. The bag slipped half off, revealing black metal.

“Not a drinker? On the wagon, Ray?”

My hand slipped down to my gun, and Kyle caught it.

“Hold it right there, Paula,” he said, darting a glance my way. “I’ll shoot you both before you’ve got it out.”

I froze, but tensed to go for the gun if he shot Ray.

“You two were going to leave me, you were gonna step out. No need to deny it. You were going to leave me here, alone.” he hissed the words between clenched teeth.

He pulled out his pliers then and reached up to grab Ray’s cheek with them. “Well, I’ve got just the thing to keep you around.” The tattoos on his arms did a snake dance as his muscles tremored with tension.

Sweat popped out on my skin and I could see sweat on his face and arms too, glistening oily beads that reflected the shimmering colors of the fields. I heard Beth coming up from the store, her sandals slapping on asphalt and crackling in the dead ivy that had once grown on the cement islands in the parking lot.

“Don’t kill each other,” she said, her voice sounding desperate. Her fear for our safety had finally overwhelmed her fear of the confrontation. “I know what’s wrong with you Kyle. You’re afraid we’ll all leave you here.”

Kyle laughed, his eyes snapping over to Beth, then back to Ray, who flinched at the touch of the bloody pliers.

“He’s nuts Beth,” I said quietly. “Over the edge.”

“I think he never wanted to see anyone leave,” Beth continued. “Perhaps each time he saw our fiery rip eat another one, a strip of his sanity came loose and burned with them. We’re all incredibly lonely. We all grew up in towns, where people and cars filled the air with noise and smells. How long had it been since you saw a movie Kyle, or caught a whiff of diesel fumes?”

“Fuck off,” growled Kyle, his lips lifting away from his teeth in a snarl.

“You don’t want to kill us, Kyle,” Beth said gently. Her face came into the light now, dusty tear-streaks and all. “We’re the only friends you have left now.”

This last struck home and Kyle looked at her, his mouth gaping like a fish, his eyes wide and lit with insanity. It was all the chance that Ray had, and he took it. He knocked the gun aside and it went flying away, firing inside the brown paper sack. The blast blew out the back of the bag and the sack gave birth to the black pistol in midair, like an alien bird. Before the gun clattered onto the dusty asphalt, Ray pulled out his shotgun. He struck Kyle just below the ear and he went down.

We stood there for a moment, guns out, panting and sweating. A breeze came up and glued grit to our moist skins. Blood trickled down Ray’s cheek and ran into his mouth, staining his teeth red. It looked like a terrier had taken a bite out of his face. Staring down at Kyle’s motionless form, all of us felt a new freedom. With this feeling came decision. Moving quickly, hardly speaking, we gathered together the camping gear from the BMW and what other belongings we wanted. Like parents on Christmas night, we shuffled past Kyle with muffled steps, hoping he would not wake up until we were gone. It would be harder to leave with his crazy eyes boring into our backs.

Standing at the brink of the rip with our backpacks full, we took a last glance at old Earth. Just over the horizon the moon hung high, looking white and clean over the dirty world. The parking lot was barren and empty, the rusting hulks of cars everywhere like a slaughtered herd of metal beasts.

Kyle slept peacefully on the asphalt, unconscious and undreaming. A clear spot in the dust had appeared before his blowing nostrils. Ray’s cheek had stopped bleeding, and he had his shotgun in his hands. Beth had a struggling cat tucked under each arm. We were ready.

“Let’s make sure that wherever we end up, we’re together,” I said, and put my hand on each of their arms. Together, we took a step forward. Swirling liquid color closed over us, and we left old Earth behind.

Although as years passed and Beth, Ray and I lost track of one another under the yellow sun of the new world, none of us ever forgot the man who had tried to hold us back. In the frontier boomtowns that dotted the wild landscape of Tau Ceti, I often wondered what had become of Kyle. Had he gone completely mad? Had he eventually stepped out? Or was he still back on old Earth, possibly the last man there, a beetle rattling about inside the ribs of an ancient behemoth that had long since died and rotted away?

I tended to think the latter.

Rusted Metal

Tom Riley, the brewery’s night watchman, was just arriving at work. There was a touch of corn snow in patches on the ground and Tom’s boots crunched as he headed down the backstairs to the employee’s entrance. It was Wednesday night and it was a cold one. The wind blew hard and had an icy edge to it that stabbed deep into your lungs. It was normal weather for mid-January—but not for the end of October.

Tom paused before the employee’s entrance to listen to the wind whipping the trees like an enraged master. The trees creaked and groaned under the assault, lashing and scratching at the brewery’s gray cinder block walls with leafless branches. He worked to force his key into the frozen lock with numb hands. Finally he succeeded and the door opened, immediately the comparative heat of the brewery’s interior washed over him like hot breath.

He stepped inside, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. It was 11:30 pm precisely when he clocked in, and John Shepler, the night foreman, was waiting for him.

“Barely made it tonight, Riley,” Shepler remarked while knocking a cigarette out of his pack with an experienced flick of the wrist. Shepler was a thin-armed man in his late thirties who smoked and sweated constantly. He wasn’t supposed to leave until Tom was on duty and he always resented every extra minute that he was forced to wait. He leaned back against the bulletin board next to the time clock and lit up.

“But I made it, didn’t I?” Tom replied with a winning grin. Shepler didn’t smile back, so Tom added: “Sorry, it comes hard to get out of bed for the dead shift when you pass up fifty.” Shepler wasn’t supposed to smoke inside, but Riley was willing to let it go if it got the bastard out of the plant quicker.

Shepler still wasn’t smiling. He crossed his skinny arms and puffed on his menthol cigarette. He gazed at Tom with dull, piggy eyes. Tom wondered whether the foreman was only an obnoxious prick at the end of his shift, or if he was like this all evening long.

There was silence between them while Tom took his cap and gun belt out of his locker. He snapped his big, four-battery flashlight into place and checked the revolver. The pistol was supposed to be just for show, but Tom always kept a stash of spare cartridges in his breast pocket. When he was dressed he swung the locker shut. The unoiled hinges screamed in the silence of the closed brewery.

Shepler still hadn’t said anything. He drew deeply on his cigarette and gave a brief, rumbling cough. Tom hoped he would just put on his coat and go. Technically, the foreman outranked him, but now that he was pushing sixty Tom was past the days of licking boots. Especially for piss-ants like Shepler.

“There’s been a break-in downstairs. We think some kids did it.”

“Where?” Tom’s tone became serious. This sort of thing was his department. Inwardly he smiled, this explained why Shepler hadn’t left for home the moment Tom had arrived. Shepler shrugged a hunched pair of bony shoulders and took another puff before answering. Tom cinched up his gun belt impatiently and with a little more purpose than usual.

“They came in through a window—way in the back. I guess they busted up some cartons, took some stuff.” He took a faded bandana out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his brow. The brewery was always warm because of all the boilers and refrigeration units, but no one sweated as much as Shepler.

“Did you call the cops?”

“Nope, didn’t seem worth it. They didn’t get anything of value anyway. Just a pile of crap back there, everything from adding machines to antique bottle-cap presses. Hell, that stuff has been gathering dust back there for forty years or so.”

Tom nodded and rubbed his lower lip against his teeth. The stuff was probably valueless, except possibly as scrap. He recalled too, that Shepler had had a few run-ins with the law in his time and was never one to be too fond of alerting the police. He reflected silently that it was just as well, at least this way word of it would probably never reach high management and cause some college boy with nothing better to do to try to make a name for himself by “tightening up plant security”. Tom knew that any changes in the security system were likely to begin with the removal of old fossils like himself.

“Who discovered the break-in?” Tom asked.

“Nick Moore did. He said he was looking back there for empty crates, but I say he was looking for a quiet place to sit on his lazy ass and smoke dope. Anyway, he’s the one who found the broken window.”

Tom nodded and frowned down at his shoes while tucking his shirt in. Then he looked up at Shepler sharply. “Does anyone upstairs know about this yet?”

“Nope. And they ain’t going to, either.”

“Well, I think you ought to take me down there and show me where it happened.”

Shepler took a deep drag on his cigarette, as if it were his last. The tip flared orange then dimmed. He exhaled in a big smoke-filled sigh. “Alright,” he said resignedly.

They headed through the boiler rooms to Tom’s tiny office first to find a flashlight for Shepler to carry. There was no question of turning on the overhead fluorescents. The management was clear on that—no one was to waste the power it took to fire them up without some major reason. And that certainly did not include the convenience of a couple of night employees. By the time they had reached Tom’s office and crowded inside, Shepler was already puffing as if he had just run the hundred. Tom silently thanked himself again for never having taken up smoking and began rummaging behind his desk for the flashlight.

Shepler picked up a book laying open and face down on Tom’s desk. He read the cover and gave a barking cough into his closed fist. “You still read this shit, Riley?” he asked holding up the book.

Tom glanced up from behind his desk. The book was a copy of Jack Vance’s Maske: Thaery. The sight of his book in Shepler’s bony hand, moist from recent bouts of coughing, pulled Tom’s face into an immediate scowl. With an effort he contained himself. He noticed that Shepler had already managed to close the book and lose his place. His nostrils flared in annoyance.

“Didn’t know you were a literary critic, Shepler,” he remarked, letting loose on the sarcasm.

Shepler snorted, put the book down on the desk with a negligent toss and stepped out of the office into the hallway. He hitched up his drooping pants and said, “Don’t need to get all butt-hurt about it.”

John Shepler was a man who had better things to with his time than read books. Tom doubted that he read the text on his favorite porn sites. He found a suitable flashlight and a set of fresh batteries in his top desk drawer behind a box of extra-large paperclips. He locked up his office and handed the flashlight to Shepler, who took it without looking at him. Tom got out his own and they both headed toward the stairs in silence.

The break-in had occurred way in back of the dingiest, most cluttered portion of the brewery’s very dingy and highly cluttered basement. Tom was intent on the window the moment Shepler put his light on it. Leaving Shepler in a narrow aisle-way formed by towering stacks of moldering cartons, he climbed over a worn-out bottling machine caked with dust and grease.

When he reached the window he examined it closely. A cold gust of wind ruffled his hair and whistled over the opening. The window had been smashed alright. The reinforcing wire netting inside it had been torn through in the middle. As he examined the window his eyes narrowed and his lips drew taunt to one side. The glass seemed to be broken outward, rather than inward. The wire in the glass was twisted and left hanging outside the basement.

He quickly stooped and played his light on the small drift of snow that had leaked through to lie between the keys of broken IBM typewriters and on the stained cement floor beneath them.

“What is it?” Shepler asked.

Tom didn’t answer immediately. He brushed an open patch in the thin layer of snow on the floor. Delicately he probed the crunchy mixture of frozen air and water.

“There’s no broken glass here,” he said, speaking half to himself.

“What?”

“There’s no glass on the inside. We’ve had a break-out, not a break-in.”

“You sure, Riley?” Shepler asked, sniffing and wiping his hand on his sleeve. The basement was quite cold compared to the plant floor above. Tom stood, brushing off his knees, and examined the window further. His frown intensified. “This is too small.”

“What’s too small?”

“The hole. It’s too small for a man to squeeze through. Only a kid could do it. Only a small kid.”

“Well, so what? So we had a kid in the plant and he hid for a while and then broke his way out.”

Still frowning, Tom climbed back over the bottling machine and rejoined Shepler in the aisle-way. He took a good hard look around, playing the beam of the flashlight in a circle around them. The probing light revealed festoons of cobwebs and leaning stacks of forgotten office furniture, heavy machinery, newspapers and wire. A lone black rat dropped off the back of a typing chair and scrabbled back into the rolling hills of crates against the far wall. It was an industrial graveyard.

Shepler snatched up a half-crushed coke can from the pre-Coke Classic days and even the pre-diet days and tossed it at the scurrying rat. He missed badly.

“That’s odd,” muttered Tom, looking after the rat as it disappeared in a loose mound of junk.

“Sure is,” said Shepler, “I don’t usually miss that bad.”

“No. I mean the rat. That’s the first one I’ve seen down here. Would’ve expected a few more.”

Shepler snorted. “And you’re complainin’?”

Tom shook his head. Another small mystery. They were beginning to pile up and he didn’t like that. “Anyway, we’ve found where kid broke out, but what about where the kid got in?”

Shepler looked at him and sighed. The sigh turned into a hacking cough that shook his hunching body. He cleared his throat, then hawked and spat into a nearby carton. “I suppose we should search the place for it,” he admitted grudgingly. With Tom and his flashlight in the lead, they carefully made their way further back into the basement. When they got near the back wall the going became more difficult. They soon found spaces between towering piles of cartons and heavy old-fashioned machinery that they could not easily squeeze past.

“This is bullshit,” Shepler complained while trying to pull his shirt loose from a protruding segment of pipe. His elbows jostled a pryamid of boxes and sent a 7up bottle that had been left on top of them down to the cement floor with a crash. Shards of clear green glass sprayed a set of metal bookshelves, clattering and tinkling.

“Look, you stay here and guide me,” suggested Tom. “I want to have a look at what is behind that boiler over there.” He gestured toward the west wall with his flashlight.

“Sure,” Shepler muttered, continuing to tug at his shirt and sweat. When he had freed himself, he sat down with a grunt onto a crate and lit up another cigarette. He sucked on it heavily, wheezed and blew out a gust of smoke with a satisfied sigh.

Tom frowned and considered reminding him of the dangers involved in smoking around old equipment, but then reconsidered. It wasn’t worth it, Shepler would only glare at him with those half-shut piggy eyes of his and continue smoking anyway. He turned to pick his way toward the boiler.

As he came closer he became more sure, and when he finally crested a pile of worn out machinery he was certain. Yes, there was something behind the boiler, some kind of opening. An alcove in the basement wall, perhaps. His flashlight showed the opening as just a black patch in the wall behind the boiler. You could only see it from a certain angle. Tom stood up straighter and shined his light back the way he had come. He gauged it to be 200 yards back to the stairs in the other room. You couldn’t even begin to see that far. The basement was piled clear to the ceiling with junk. He wondered how they had gotten through fire inspections all these years. He suspected pay-offs or brother-in-laws. It was always one or the other.

He turned and made his way around the boiler to shine his light into the blackness behind it. What he saw there made him gasp and draw back.

“What did’ja find?” asked Shepler. Tom smiled at the quaver in his voice.

But the hole behind the boiler made his smile slide away to nothing. It was more than an alcove. It was a room. A forgotten room at the back of this ancient graveyard of brewery junk.

“Found some kind of room back here,” he said back over his shoulder. His voice was hushed. Unlike the stacks and piles of trash in the main room of the basement, this room was nearly empty of debris. A freezing hand tickled his stomach and gave a playful squeeze. How long had it been since anyone had been back here? Twenty years? Since the war? Before that? He knew that the building had been around for a long time and had been a warehouse before it had been a brewery and had been a chemical plant originally, about a million years ago.

He leaned in through the narrow crack between the boiler and the basement wall to get a better look. He saw something. He saw something glitter like eyes then disappear—and then he was falling.

The stack of rotting paper he had been standing on gave way and he half-fell, half-slid into the chamber behind the dead boiler. His flashlight struck the cement floor and everything when black. Only splotchy after-images crawled across his vision like purple slugs. He groped for his flashlight, found it and shook it in desperation. Nothing.

Suddenly, he was afraid. He was caught up by a black fear near to panic. His mouth dried and his heart pounded like a revving engine before a race. He had not felt such fear since his childhood and it was like an old enemy, an old bully, long since left and forgotten, but now returned to taunt him again. It giggled and capered in his mind for a few moments, free to have its way with him, to do its worst. He thought about his heart, whether it could take this kind of shock and that brought on yet another pounding flight of panic.

And then the lights came back on. His flashlight blazed into life again and he swung it around him, eyes wide, mouth open and panting. He gripped the flashlight like a pistol, holding it up in both hands. He found himself sitting on a damp floor in a large room. Alone. There were no eyes. Nothing.

“Tom!” he heard Shepler calling to him. “Tom! What the hell are you doing back there? Where’d you go, man?” Shepler’s voice was girlishly high. He fell into another hacking, coughing fit.

Tom played his powerful beam around the room. There was little to see. A pile of old magazines and a few dozen old pop bottles. Near the opening sat a legless chair, looking old and helpless, like a cripple begging at the city gate.

Then he found a coffee can and a carton of Lucky Strikes. He knew the brand. It was Shepler’s. He never smoked anything else.

He heaved a big sigh. He had discovered Shepler’s hideout. His secret smoking den. It did stink, now that he thought about it, like cigarettes down here. The smell of stale butts was overpowering.

“Okay, Shepler. I found your stash back here.”

“What are you talking about?” came the answer, muffled.

“Cut the shit. Why didn’t you just tell me this was your hideout? Don’t tell me it was anyone else, either. These are your brand.”

There was silence for a few long seconds. Tom approached the magazine pile and took one off the top. He read the faded date on the cover: May, 1916. It all but crumbled to dust at his touch. Rotted by the dampness, he thought. He noticed that it was damp down here, and remembered that this side of the brewery was closest to the lake. Water seeped through the ground to make the walls sweat.

“No one will take your word over mine,” said Shepler. “Just drop it and do your job.”

Tom nodded. It was Shepler’s shrine, alright. He was surprised he didn’t have a mass of ancient girlie mags back here. But there were no modern magazines. Just cigarette butts, thousands of them. He ran the flashlight over the white-gray mass of them. Many of them looked chewed. The man must be desperate to smoke.

He looked back at the magazines. 1916. That was before his grandpa had been born. And he was an old man. 1916 was a long time ago. That chill, that natural fear we all have of the ancient, of rotting tombs and dark, closed-in spaces, hit him all at once. The chill hit like a second wave from his earlier panic. The skin on the back of his neck and his scrotum crawled. Cold sweat formed beads under his arms and matted the hair that covered his forehead.

That was when Shepler screamed. It was a high-pitched, womanish scream. A cry of sheer terror, that any man would have been embarrassed to have attributed to him. The scream was followed by scrabbling noises and what sounded like a man gagging.

“John? John!” yelled Tom as he climbed back out of the alcove and struggled to slide between the boiler and the wall. There was no answer. The boiler, the junk, everything seemed to be fighting to hold him back. He grunted and ripped his pants on a twisted metal obstacle and felt a trickle of blood run down his right leg to wet the top of his socks.

His flashlight played wildly on the ceiling of the brewery basement. And then he was out. The vast cavern of the basement seemed airy and open after the alcove he had left behind. He swung the beam in an arc to cover the area that Shepler should have been in. He breathed hard and sniffed. His nose had started running because of the dust and exertion. Shepler was nowhere in sight.

“John, answer me.”

Nothing. With hands that trembled slightly, Tom immediately followed the emergency code that he had worked out during his long hours of reading fiction in a dark factory. He loaded his pistol with the live rounds from his breast pocket and to his credit he didn’t drop any. Then he switched his flashlight to his left hand and gripped his revolver firmly with his right. He immediately found comfort and a feeling of power in the weight of the weapon.

He set his jawline and straightened his spine, then warily moved toward the spot that he had left Shepler. Before he found Shepler himself, he found his blood. His right foot stepped into a puddle of it and Tom nearly slipped. He managed to catch himself before pitching forward into a carton of sharp-looking worn-out spindles. Then he brought his beam down and splashed the bright light onto the corpse that had lain so silent and still that he had nearly walked past it.

Shepler’s throat had been ripped out. Strings of bloody flesh dangled down his chest and his eyes were wide open and staring, lifeless.

Tom’s reactions were numerous and immediate. Horror and grief shook him. Mortal alarm caused him to turn quickly around, scanning for the killer. Up, down and in a circle around him. His gun barrel followed his flashlight, tracking the circle of brilliance around the room like a skeet-shooter tracking a disk across the sky. Then disgust caught up with him. A sudden bolt of nausea hit him and a stiff rod of vomit pushed up against the back of his throat. He controlled himself however, and once he was certain that the attacker was not in the immediate vicinity, he forced himself to examine the body more closely.

It was difficult to think. His mind was yelling a dozen things at him all at once. He must run. He must fight. He must somehow save Shepler, somehow bring him back to life. Would the cops think he had done it? Was he soon to be killed himself?

Examining the torn up body was enough to shock anyone into catatonia. Not only was Shepler’s (his name is John, dammit. I should have called him John more often) throat open and exposed, but he could see now that his chest and belly had been lacerated as well. Tom didn’t like the way the brilliant beam made Shepler seem so large and over-real in the dark basement. It was disrespectful to the dead to expose them in such a harsh white glare. He considered reaching up and closing Shepler’s dead eyes, but couldn’t quite do it. Let some detective do it later, he figured.

He played the beam on his hands and his heart swelled a bit with instinctive pride. There were bits of flesh, the flesh of the killer, in John’s fingers and caught underneath his nails. The killer had not gone unscathed.

Then he caught sight of what the flesh looked like, and his mind chilled. It was definitely not human. It was brownish and peeling, and there was no blood on it. It looked more like the brown mottled leather that a snake sheds than human skin.

Suddenly, Tom’s head cleared. He understood now. Before he hadn’t been sure what was going on. But now he knew. He was in a battle. He was at war, and his life was at stake. It was time to take a hike and let the big boys handle things from here on in.

He looked back toward the distant basement door. The span between where he stood over Shepler’s body and the door seemed to telescope into infinity. Would he make it back without being torn to (hamburger) shreds by whatever had attacked Shepler?

He thought of those magazines back there (1916) and a stiffness crept over his muscles. This new fear was a paralytic thing that turned the sweat on his face and drenching his fruit-of-the-loom undershirt and J.C. Penny’s briefs into a slimy slick envelope.

He took his first step toward the door, feeling the discomfort of moist clinging clothing and wondering if he would make it out of the brewery tonight. His feet dragged forward through his second and third steps. He swallowed, the dryness of his throat making it painful.

May 1916. Just how long ago was that? Had this been a brewery then or a warehouse? Or had it been a chemical plant?

Yes, he thought as his legs dragged after one another, his soaked underwear shifting and bunching around his crotch, 1916, World War One. This had been the basement of a chemical plant when that magazine had been first bought.

He made it as far as the next big chamber of the basement, the room where most of the IBM equipment and cobwebbed bottle-cap machines stood silent guard. As he entered the room, walking under the wide arched opening with his gun extended, he looked to the sides and up. Most people might not have looked up, but Tom Riley had read more science fiction and horror than most people, and had seen every bad movie on those topics Hollywood had bothered to produce.

What always finished people in most movies was the unexpected. When facing an unknown monster, actors almost never looked in unexpected directions, and that was precisely where such attacks came from. So, instead of looking ahead at the door, he beamed his flashlight upward. This unusual move extended his lifespan a few minutes further.

A thing was up there, gazing down at him. No doubt, it was just such a thing that had killed the skinny, chain-smoking Shepler. It looked like a bat, sort-of, or maybe more like a spider with leathery wings.

He squeezed off a shot almost before he had his gun up. It went wide, but did make a loud report that rang through the basement. The thing reacted, dropping from the ceiling and fluttering away like a fleshy, flying leaf. It rippled in the air as it flew, unlike any animal he’d ever seen. Then, finally, he knew what it really reminded him of. It looked like a loach, from the Great Lakes. Gruesome things that attached themselves to fish and suckled with teeth. This thing, however, was a flying loach. Not the normal swimming variety. Perhaps it was a different breed of loach. Something that had come in from the early cold this year.

He ran. He might have been screaming now, he couldn’t be sure. The wetness in his pants was at least one part piss now, he was pretty sure about that. He was pretty sure too, that this plant had made some very special chemicals in its day, back at the start of the last century. Maybe they had made mustard gas here, or worse things. Secret things. Things that might have warped a creature from the lake. Maybe something had come up to the lakeshore outside and soaked up the chemicals they had spilled into the soil down here.

In truth, he hardly cared why the thing that chased him existed. It was good enough to know it was there, it was real, and it was deadly.

He hated to turn his back on a flying loach but he couldn’t run backward in this place. He’d be down in a heap in about eight seconds, like a woman in a fifties monster movie, if he tried to back out of here.

He ran, with his left hand holding the flashlight over the back of his neck. He didn’t want to make it easy on the little monster by blowing his own fool head off, so he kept his pistol aimed downward.

It came at him again as he reached the last big chamber. The stairs were in sight now. It got his flashlight hand, probably while trying to get to his neck. He screamed and dropped his light. It flashed out with a tinkle of broken glass.

He felt the grinding teeth sink into the back of his hand. He felt it suckle, with a tiny fluttering tongue. He shook it off, and it didn’t go easily, taking a chunk of skin with it.

He almost went down in the dark, but made it to the stairs and scrambled up them. He locked himself into his office and called emergency. As he wrapped his hand in a spare white shirt he kept in his office, he watched it soak through and turn bright red in moments.

He wondered if this would make the news. If it did, he expected a cover-up would turn the chemically-warped freak into an unknown assailant. A pay-off or a brother-in-law would keep the brewery open. They always did.

Lunar Lotto

What Toad really wanted was to get off the moon entirely. That was why he had begun spending almost half his shares from running supplies across the southern reaches of the Lunar Sea on the Lunar lottery. When he won (there was no if about the lottery with Toad, always when) he would pay off his indenture and go back to Manchester England a wealthy man. England was as crowded as the moon was deserted, but after seventeen years he dreamed of people, he wanted to see millions of them.

He dreamed too, of course, of leaving behind his hated nickname. He was born Reginald Basil Croft, but everyone on the moon called him Toad, due to his appearance and sour temperament. He was a short squat man in his middle forties. Almost completely bald, Toad had only enough hairs left to emphasize the numerous viral warts that circled his scalp. Unkind people whispered that they were tumors, that Toad was too stupid to keep out of the blasting radiation of the lunar day or to see Plethman the surgeon, but in truth they were just warts. To compound matters, one of his eyes was a false one, so that it seemed to move apart from the good one in a disconcerting, lizard-like fashion.

Toad drove his Vox 400 caterpillar at a jolting twenty-five miles an hour across the roadless face of the moon. The impossibly heavy vehicle would have been barely able to crawl on Earth, but with the lighter tug of the moon’s gravity, it was able to trundle along at a surprisingly high speed. Every few miles Toad spotted the tracks of another vehicle, but it was impossible to tell how long ago they had been made, or who had made them. Without wind or rain, tracks were permanent unless marred by a freak meteor strike or run over by someone else. For all Toad knew, he was seeing his own tracks from previous runs.

Overhead the Earth swung like a dim blue-white sun, but the real sun was nowhere to be seen. This part of the moon was dark now, keeping the temperature down. Toad only had six hours left until sunrise, and he had to make it to New Lancaster before daybreak. The venerable Vox 400 wasn’t really up to taking the sun’s unshielded heat and radiation anymore. Inside his pressuresuit he shivered a bit, but was comfortable enough. He was entering the most dangerous part of the run now, and cold drops of nervous sweat were forming one by one between the warts on his scalp and rolling down his cheeks.

Recognizing three peaks nearby know as the Three Brothers, he flicked off the bank of eight halogen headlights and powered-down his green and red running lights as well. This caused an alarm chime to sound in his helmet and a red glowing warning to flash on his dashboard, but he ignored them, grimly steering the Vox in the bluish half-light of the Earth.

Toad hated more about the moon than the nickname that people had given him. The thing he hated worst was how hard it was to get anything that the authorities didn’t want you to have. Smuggling in a cargo across a quarter million miles of space was not as easy as crossing the oceans of Earth. Any kind of drug or alcohol, if not illegal, was strictly controlled. Smoking too, of which Toad was inordinately fond, was highly illegal. Air recycling systems did not take well to smoke. Toad had long ago decided to do his part in the smuggling that inevitably resulted from these restrictions. He felt he was striking a blow for free trade as well as making a healthy profit. His cargo consisted primarily of the heavier items that were not economical to transport by flight.

The frozen, unpressurized interior of the Vox was crammed with oxygen tanks, water tanks, propane tanks and rolls of insulating Aerogel fabric, which though light, was bulky and difficult to load into flyers. Into the nooks and crannies between the steel pressure tanks and the bails of crinkling Aerogel insulation he had shoved the higher profit items: two cases of Jack Daniels, cartons of genuine dried meat without soy, nearly a quart of all-purpose cologne and a selection of fifty popular video disks. Down underneath the Vox, stashed in the spare parts compartments he had hidden six spring-rifles that shot darts just powerfully enough to puncture a man’s vacc-suit. With that was a small store of Turkish tobacco, as highly illegal as the guns themselves.

This run made his twenty-sixth, and he could have easily paid off his indenture by now by saving half his pay each time at the Wang bank, instead of handing it over to the Lunar Lotto, conveniently located next door. But he figured his luck had to change soon, it was bound to turn around and smile his way. The fact that it never had before didn’t dissuade him now.

The nervous sweat on his face itched, and Toad worked his lips in a futile attempt to relieve the condition. For the thousandth time he wished that they would invent vacc-suit helmets that let a man scratch his nose, or rub his neck. Toad was nervous because he was passing by the Jehovah crater, a small geologically new pockmark on the abused lunar surface with tall sharp ridges forming the outer walls. Inside those walls some of the earliest private bases had been built. Although they had been ruptured and depressurized in a reactor leak thirty years before, survivors had hung on, living in terraformed caverns. Hidden away, they lived by melting buried ice to form secret reservoirs and farming patches of lichen and fungus in the dark interiors. To get supplies they could not replace, they never traded with the other bases, as no one had ever found a product that they felt they needed to augment their austere existence. Instead, they preferred to rob prospectors and merchants like Toad, and others who managed to eke out a living through sweat and honest toil.

A few expeditions had been sent out to punish the outlaws, but they had met with no success in either finding their bases or killing more men than they lost. Another hour passed before he reached the closest point on his route to the Teeth, a landmark along the Jehovah crater walls that marked the end of the outlaw territory. As he neared the Teeth, his fear and his enthusiasm for finishing the run reached their peaks simultaneously. His good eye slewed rapidly back and forth, his false eye following it loosely, as he scanned the dark landscape outside, looking for a telltale silhouette, a reflection, a puff of escaping gas.

His claw-like hand was heavy on the power-bar, the rig sped up to thirty, thirty-five, then forty. He knew that this section was relatively clear of obstacles, and figured it was best to push his luck at navigating rather than tempting the outlaws.

Then he saw it. Up from the Teeth themselves, a reddish glint of light that splashed right off the Vox’s dark metal hide. He didn’t think it was a weapon, maybe a targeting device, or more likely an alarm system, designed to detect movement past the Teeth and give warning.

He reached out and flicked the emergency switch, sending out a signal for rescue flyers to home in on him, should they bother, then shoved the power-bar to full throttle. The Vox bounced and bucked like a thing alive, shuddering and flashing computer diagnostic warnings at the seemingly cruel Toad, who kept his hand clamped down.

Toad was by no means unfeeling, although he could only hear the vibrations that came through his buttocks, his feet and the controls in his hands, he could feel the pain the Vox was having. She was an old rig, well-built, but ailing. He imagined each bit of grit that was sucked past her filters to wear down the engine. He felt each rivet as it loosened and finally let a plate go flapping from the treads, sure to be torn off and lost when it hit the fenders. It pained him, but he valued his life more than the venerable Vox.

He soon had his answer about the nature of the red light. It had not been a guidance system, it had been an alarm of some kind. Bounding down the slope from the Teeth, a dozen or so outlaws moved to intercept him at a narrow section ahead between a boulder-strewn gully and the steep rocky slope. Slamming the power-bar the other way, Toad threw on the brakes and made a terrifying turn to the left, before the gully yawned open and forced him to follow the slope. Nimbly, the bounding outlaws changed directions and headed out to follow him on the open plains.

Toad sped up again and the ride became more violent than before, tossing him around the cab while he cursed and determinedly clung to the power-bar. The outlaws were quickly left behind.

Before Toad could begin to gloat, two missiles came flashing down, striking not the Vox, but the ground in front of it. Flame and dust engulfed the caterpillar, wiping out Toad’s vision and forcing him to slow down. Two more missiles exploded closer, the orange flashes burning Toad’s one good retina and leaving twin purple splotches to blink away. It was obvious that they would rather blast him apart than let him get away.

“Damn it all!” he shouted inside his helmet, raging at his misfortune. The fact that he had beaten the odds by making dozens of trips through this section unmolested before didn’t comfort him. He slammed the power-bar to full brake and nearly cracked his helmet open as he was thrown forward. He grunted, snatched up the bundle of still-good lottery tickets from the dashboard and threw open the cab door to consider escape.

Looking out through the dust-clouded vacuum at an endless empty plain of gray rock quelled that idea. It was a good hundred miles to New Lancaster, farther to go back the way he had come. He might lose them in the dust, but he could never carry enough supplies to make it. Besides, daylight with its intense radiation was coming soon and he didn’t trust his suit to shield him. He didn’t wish to arrive in New Lancaster half-baked and full of cancer cells.

Cursing some more, he pulled out one of his spring-rifles and as an afterthought, grabbed his supply of Turkish tobacco as well. Climbing back up the steps molded into the front fenders, he slammed the cab door again, set all the locks and waited for the crazies to show up. He kept the Vox engine idling just in case.

By the time they caught up the dust had just about settled again, keeping its mushroom shape as it sank back down to the surface with that odd unnatural slowness that vacuum caused.

The company, tribe, whatever they were encircled the Vox and carefully used cover as they approached. “Not a trusting lot, are you boys?” Toad chuckled at them. Most of them were in homemade vacc-suits constructed with several layers of Aerogel and coated with shielding. This type of protection was effective and actually allowed greater freedom of movement than a factory-made pressure suit, but it was easily ruptured and generally had poor climate control.

Some of them carried spring-rifles, but most had simple spear guns, designed to rupture suits more than to kill directly. They used an obviously complex set of hand signals and gestures to communicate, maintaining radio silence throughout.

Toad felt like a settler in the old American West, watching as the aborigines cautiously approached his wagon. Seeing the way that they moved, so naturally in the moon environment, he wondered a bit about what kind of people they had become, having been cut off for over thirty years. He yearned for a cigarette.

Finally when he had all his troops set in place, the leader stepped up to the Vox and rapped on the rig’s bulbous nose-section. A ripple of static came across the intercom, as the leader used a low-powered signal.

“Make peace with the gods and abandon your vehicle.”

Gods? thought Toad, pursing his rubbery lips. Obviously, their doctrines had undergone a shift during their long isolation. Then a chill ran through him as he considered the words, which held an ominous suggestion.

“I am the rightful owner of this rig and I will not abandon her. I’ve come to trade with you,” Toad lied.

“This place is a haven of the righteous, and all things that enter it are the property of the priesthood,” the solemn voice said in a slow careful manner, as if explaining the obvious to a child. All the while he spoke, he moved about the Vox, peering into the dark interior, but unable to see Toad because of the heavy tinting. Toad lamented that it was too bad he didn’t have a video unit on the rig, he could sell this to the documentary boys for a fortune. He chuckled.

“You laugh at the priesthood?”

“No, no,” said Toad nervously. “As I say, I wish to trade. I have things of value, and for a good price, they can be yours.”

“As I have explained, all such goods are already the property of the priesthood. There is no need for us to barter for them.”

“Do you feel the vibration in the vehicle?” asked Toad sternly.

“Yes, but this is not relevant. Abandon the vehicle, or you will be expelled.”

“Wait! You should know that any attempt to do this will cause this caterpillar to explode.”

“You would destroy yourself to protect goods? This is against the way of the gods.”

“Never-the-less, I will do so,” said Toad. “In fact, I have no choice, there is an automatic device attached to the Vox to detonate it if violated. It is a policy of my company, I am afraid, to discourage thefts like this one.”

“Then you and your company are the thieves, this vehicle is the property of the priesthood.”

Toad frowned in the sweaty darkness of his helmet. The outlaws indeed seemed unbalanced by their beliefs. This made it difficult to predict their reactions. He could sense that the idea of a booby-trap to thwart them was enraging their righteous indignation, rather than impressing them with fear. He decided to changed tacts.

“I am Reginald Croft. Who are you?”

“I am Jezzeriah, second elder of the Hand,” said the outlaw. He gestured to his band and two more figures bounded up, disappearing to the right and left of the Vox, out of Toad’s sight. Before Jezzeriah could tell him to abandon the Vox again, Toad tried his sales pitch. “So, Jezzeriah, how long has it been since you tasted real Earth whiskey?”

“Your terminology is unfamiliar.”

“Whiskey, spirits, booze,” said Toad, getting a bit exasperated and panicky. “Umm... Wine of the gods.”

“You have wine?” asked the elder, halting his methodical search of the Vox’s exterior and sounding interested for the first time.

“Yes! Strong, good wine, the best for every holiday or religious ceremony.”

“We have tried to make wine, but always the lichen has refused to ferment properly, and the mushrooms have always turned toxic.”

A light blinked on Toad’s dashboard, indicating that the compartments in the Vox’s undercarriage had been violated. Hopping up with sudden inspiration, Toad snatched up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he had been saving for his own consumption and opened the cab door. Instantly, a dozen spear guns and spring-rifles were leveled on his chest. He paid them no heed, waving about the bottle and proclaiming the “wine” as the best on Luna. Opening the bottle and sliding the nozzle into his liquid-entry portal, the elder filled his water bladder with whiskey and sucked on the straw inside his helmet. Toad was very thankful that the bottles had been depressurized so they would not explode on the journey, otherwise the elder might have gotten hosed down with booze. After a short bout of coughing, which had Toad’s few remaining hairs standing on end in anxiety, the elder proclaimed the whiskey to be excellent wine.

“But I thought that the color of proper wine was the red of blood,” he questioned.

“Yes,” said Toad glibly. “But I didn’t know of your requirements when I brought this. This is, ah, amber wine. I will most certainly bring the red variety on my next trip.”

“Next trip?” questioned the leader while handing around the bottle for tasting. “But you’re suit is to be ruptured and you are to be dropped into the recycling pits to freshen up the organics.”

“Naturally, but think: if I don’t leave and return, then I will not be able to bring you more wine.”

“Why should you return?” asked the elder suspiciously.

“Ah, and this brings us to another essential element of trade. You must now provide me with some goods that I may transport back to New Lancaster so I might procure more wine.”

After some very light bartering, Toad gracelessly accepted a load of mushrooms caps the size of platters and a generous bag of colorful dried lichens.

“Don’t you grow anything else?” he asked, trying to keep the amazement from his voice.

“Very little,” the elder admitted. “The problem is the lack of proper radiation. We have a few caverns that are lighted with lenses from the surface, but the council frowns on these as they might be found from above. Besides, we have no seeds to plant other things.”

“But you have large, pressurized caverns?”

“Yes, we have ranches that run for miles,” said the elder, a bit of pride swelling in him. The whiskey had brought a slight color into his naturally pallid face.

“Very well,” said Toad, his mind no longer working on the problem of getting away from the outlaws, but now churning busily on the preferred subject of profit. “Next time I will bring more than wine, I will bring seeds for things that can’t be grown anywhere else on Luna. That way your crops will have great value.”

The elder frowned and made a gesture of confusion. “How can we grow anything better than the bases?”

“Because you are outside of their laws, my friend,” said Toad, smiling. Already he could see the huge profits in luna-grown tobacco and other commodities. Fresh vegetables need no longer come exclusively from Earth, as the company monopoly contracts kept it now. Toad ended up spending the next lunar day in the caverns hidden beneath the Teeth and in the walls of the crater. On the long drive home the following day, his eyes were glinting with the light of fantastic profits. He would keep his trade secret as long as possible. He dreamed of the day that people would start to call him Mr. Croft again, daring never to utter the word Toad in his presence. He could even see good reasons for staying on Luna now. His luck had finally turned around, just like he knew it would.

Behind him, dropped in the lunar dust and forgotten, were several hundred losing lottery tickets.

The Rollers

Devon walked through the unlit streets, stumbling on debris and muttering to himself. He shoved his grime-coated hands deeper into the pockets of his ancient trench coat and hunched his shoulders against the biting cold of the wind. He found his grandfather’s gold-plated pocket watch in his left pocket and fingered it gingerly.

“Five friggin’ more bottles of zinc tablets!” he complained out loud to the cold skies. Remembering where he was, he shushed himself, touching a knobby finger to his blistered and brown lips.

“Shhh!” he admonished, waving the finger from side to side in front of his face. “Rollers gonna get me!”

His muttered complaints continued, but they were quieter. It was going to cost him, it was going to come dear. Five bottles would run him at least three hundred new-bucks, and he wasn’t even sure if there was that much in his account. A hundred new-bucks could buy a man a large bottle of wine—strong wine—with maybe enough left over for a can of malt liquor and a loaf of bread. Devon’s tongue slicked up with saliva just thinking about it.

It was all those damned pods it kept having. If it would just settle down and quit laying pods, maybe it would have time to do its own friggin’ shopping. Sometimes he regretted having helped the alien out of its capsule and hiding it in the abandoned buildings he called home. Now it had him and all his friends running errands for it, and the demands had been getting worse lately.

“Might as well have a friggin’ job!” he said aloud, then shushed himself again.

The lights from the supermarket were just ahead now. The red and yellow special-offer holos were faded and curling, the dingy cinderblock walls were in need of a paint job. The place was an antique, one of the last of its kind in the area. No one with a computer needed to leave their homes to shop, not these days.

“Like Old Red always say,” Devon told the fireplugs and the shot-out dayglow streetlamps, “‘We can’t all live like the friggin’ Jetsons!’” His joke sent him off into a wheezing gale of laughter that ended with a coughing fit and then more shushing.

Somewhere under his low-brimmed, tattered hat his blue eyes twinkled in the filth, and his cheeks crinkled up in a way that had reminded children of that outlaw Santa Claus, twenty-five years earlier.

As he stumbled up onto the curb over the clogged storm drain, he felt relief. He had almost made it to the antiquated electric-eye doors. Then he halted, stiffening like a hare that smells a redneck with a hot-barreled rifle.

A figure slouched against the wall next to the doors, almost invisible due to the blinding effect of the glaring sulfur tube lights inside the store. The only thing that had tipped Devon off was the orange glow of a stimstik that hung from invisible lips.

Reflexively, Devon shoved his hand back into his left coat pocket and clutched at his grandfather’s watch, holding it tight in his greasy fingers. The cool metal disk felt good against his palm, like a big old-fashioned coin. He knew that protection was in his hand, but he didn’t want to call on it without real need. After a moment’s further hesitation, he continued to approach the store, knowing that the Roller would be even more likely to move if he turned back into the darker streets, showing weakness.

The figure slipped away from the wall and swaggered toward him. Devon, mumbling a bit, kept his eyes down and shuffled on, his old papery-thin heart pounding. Again he considered calling on his friends right away, but restrained himself. It had been made very clear that help should only be summoned in the most dire need. Otherwise, there would be dire consequences.

But then the circumstances became considerably worse as the first Roller stood directly in his path, hands on hips, grinning around his smoky stimstik. Devon sensed another Roller coming up behind him. The blood rushed in his ears and then his chest and stomach hardened up together, hurting.

“What’s an old drunk like you doin’ at the market, ay?” asked the Roller behind the stimstik.

“You boys go home to your mamas now, before you get hurt,” Devon said, his voice rattling. “I was in the Shale Wars, you know.”

This broke up the Rollers into rough laughter. Suddenly, heavy hands fell on Devon’s shoulders. His vision was filled with a hot flaring stimstik tip as the first Roller knocked Devon’s hat from his head and shoved his face up close.

“You been coding in some money, haven’t you? Maybe your old bag sister from New Miami or someplace coded you some money ‘cause she felt sorry for your sorry old skin, am I right? And now you’re steering in for a drink, aren’t you?”

“Let’s steer him right into our office,” rumbled the Roller behind Devon, holding him. Devon kicked for their knees and tried to break their bone-crushing grips, but he was too old, too weak.

He got a glimpse of the second Roller during the struggle. The haggard, sunken eyes and slack cheeks made him suspect that the man was a user, and the raised sores like a dozen wasp stings that rubbed against his neck made him sure. That worried him as addict Rollers were generally the worst.

They dragged him into the darkness, and slid up his right sleeve, revealing his tattooed barcode. Pulling out a cheap plastic scanner that looked like a portable car vacuum, they ran it down the skinny blue-veined arm. Devon felt the familiar touch of the plastic rollers in the scanner against his arm and the slightest warmth from the laser inside, the feeling of violation.

It was this very act—the stealing of a person’s barcoded account number—which gave the Rollers their name. Devon was old enough to remember the feel of good green money in his hand, but his attackers weren’t. In these days money was transferred with the use of scanners and a person’s personal account number, in the form of a barcode on the right arm. It was supposed to eliminate muggings forever, but instead it had only given birth to the Rollers.

Devon struggled, managing to scramble the first two readings. Then the smoker plunged a fist into his stomach four times and he held still for the third attempt, coughing bloody phlegm. In his left hand he gripped his grandfather’s watch in desperation. He tried to thumb open the latch, but one of the Rollers was holding that arm too, and he couldn’t get it open.

“There, we finally got the old bastard’s number,” grunted the smoker. He tapped gray ash into Devon’s hair and smiled with the genetically strong teeth that all the young had these days.

“Now, you give us the access code.”

Devon glared at him. There was no way he would just give these two his last twenty bucks. They could see this right away, and so they began methodically beating him without even speaking. In the grips of the two men, Devon could not remember having felt so alone.

Soon, spitting blood, he gave them the series of nine letters and digits that formed his secret code. Eagerly, the two stood up and tapped keys on the scanner, like lotto players hoping for the big jackpot. Devon took the opportunity to reach deeper into his pocket and pop open the latch on his grandpa’s watch and put his thumb into the broken interior. He found the button-pad there, which activated to his touch and recognized his dirty thumbprint. With one squeeze he could press the button and call the pod children, but he hesitated.

He watched the young men, still waiting for the slow scanner to relay the account transfer up to the main networks and retrieve the balance. Knowing what his friends would do to them, he felt pity. He had been beaten and robbed of all his new-bucks, but was that enough to alert the pods? While he thought about it, he muttered and raved aloud like a man with malaria.

“What’s he talkin’ ‘bout?” asked the user. “I don’t know, some sludge about zinc tablets and pods. Vid-dream stuff. He got a little too much gas in the shale tunnels, I’d gamble,” the first Roller snorted. His stimstik, almost out now, quivered and rolled in his mouth as he laughed. Then his laugh cut short as the account balance flashed up on the scanner’s tiny screen.

“Two hundred ninety-three friggin’ bucks?” he burst out, his stimstik falling to the cracked concrete to join the sea of debris. Devon watched as they turned toward him.

“You faked us out, old man,” the Roller hissed. “You conned us.”

Devon saw murder in their eyes. He had seen it before. Lips trembling in regret, he pressed the button in his coat pocket.

From a nearby alley came wet popping sounds. Three pods released children and they came, their tiny feet tapping against the asphalt with incredible rapidity. Behind them five more pods popped. Mantis-like creatures with bodies like yardsticks and wire-thin limbs sped to Devon’s rescue, moving with blinding speed.

Both the Rollers pulled out their vibro-blades and knelt. They planned to do it right: a single double-plunge with both blades, piercing his sternum and the old heart beneath it at the same moment.

“On the count of three,” said the first Roller. “One....”

The first three pod creatures arrived before he got to two.

Devon squeezed his eyes shut as the killing began, wishing he could block out the sounds as effectively as the sights, but fingers in the ears never did as complete a job as shut eyelids. He looked only once, when the initial screams had changed to gurgles and grunts, and watched for a moment as two of the pod children held the stim-smoker aloft and immobile. A third one kept the Roller’s jaws clamped shut while it wrapped its wire-like limbs around his the neck and squeezed, blood spurting.

The scanner dropped from the jerking hand, plastic clattering on concrete. Struggling to get up, Devon vomited and staggered away. Tears running down his face, he found his old hat and shoved it firmly down over his head.

“You made me do it,” he muttered, clicking shut his grandfather’s watch. “Didn’t want to....”

He wiped the blood from his face and shoved open the broken automatic doors. After releasing so many children, it would want the zinc tablets all the more, he knew.

And it was best to do what it wanted. Devon knew that too.

End of Velocity

BONUS SAMPLE:

SHIFTING

by

B. V. Larson

One

“Are they dead?” Vance hissed in my ear.

I gestured for him to be quiet. I stared at the wreck for a full minute more, but nothing changed. The steaming sedan lay on its side in a ditch full of dead leaves. The windshield was a spider web of silvery cracks. A long, pale arm had punched out a hole through the windshield. A single fly crawled over the knuckles in hops and jerks.

The fly on the knuckles vanished.

“What do you think, Gannon?” asked Vance, still whispering.

I glanced at him. He was my younger brother, the only family I had left. Like me, his hair was black and his eyes were blue. His face was bloodless and tight with fear. His breath came in hard puffs that made white plumes in the crisp air. It was a cold day for Indiana in October. You could feel the first frosty promise of the winter to come.

“I think they’re dead,” I replied.

“Are they going to stay dead?”

“I hope so.”

“Are we going down there?”

“Not just yet,” I told him.

He didn’t argue, and we waited. The arm hanging out of the windshield did not stir. The ticking engine cooled and the wisps of steam died down. Vance squirmed nervously, licking his lips and gripping his hunting rifle, a Mauser .30-06. I could not blame him. I had the hilt of grandpa’s old Marine dress saber gripped in both hands myself. Vance seemed to be looking everywhere at once. We had heard the crash not more than ten minutes ago and had worked our way down through the forest to it. We still were not sure as to the cause.

After a reasonable time, I stepped out onto the asphalt. I looked up and down SR 446, not that you could see very far in the forest. There was no other traffic. Cars were rare these days. One end of the highway went north and back home past Redmoor. In that direction lay what locals called “the Cutright”, a boat launching area on the lakeshore. Farther north, the 446 went on over the bridge across Lake Monroe. In the other direction, heading south, you eventually hit U.S. highway 50, which drew a stripe across the southern tip of Indiana. At least it used to, before things had changed.

This car had been traveling north toward Redmoor and the lake. It had Kentucky plates, and they were probably coming out of Louisville. We had heard rumors about Louisville—none of them good.

“Let’s go,” I told Vance. He watched me with frightened eyes then finally got up and followed five paces behind.

The woods sound different on a cold day. Each footstep is muffled somehow. Most of the leaves were still on the trees in their fall yellows and reds mixed with green, but there were enough on the ground now to make every step crunchy.

I peered inside the windshield. The car had come to rest on the driver’s side. The driver’s body lay against the side window with his face pinned between the steering wheel and the windshield. It was his arm that had punched through the windshield. Still gripped in his other hand was a large revolver. His throat had been torn open by something. No doubt, this had caused the crash. His eyes were open and he looked decidedly dead.

There was another passenger, however, a woman in the backseat. After the car had done its death roll off the highway, she had ended up crumpled against her closed car door.

Vance clucked his tongue in my ear. I glanced at him. He had come to crouch next to me.

“She’s pretty, dammit,” he said. “There’s blood all over her shirt. She’s dead. What a dammed shame.”

I moved around to the back window and kicked it out. I looked her over. Her wrist hung at an odd angle, probably broken. There was a matted bloody area in her hair where she had hit the car roof. I reached in and put my hand on her neck, just to be sure. I felt a light, fluttering sensation under my fingers.

Vance paced behind me, shaking his head. I gripped his coat, stopping him.

“She’s not dead. Help me get her out.”

Two

It took us about twenty nervous minutes, but we managed to build a crude stretcher out of the dead man’s coat and some branches. I wondered how she would react if she woke up and noticed she was riding on the bloody clothes of her companion.

In the open trunk I spotted a large wad of newspapers. They were copies of the Louisville Courier Journal. I checked the dates, and they were from last month. I decided to take them with us. Outside news was valuable.

While we built the stretcher, I noticed a tripod-shaped print in the mud near the car. It was a deep print, indicating something big had made it. It looked like a hoof-print. I chewed my lip for a second, glancing at Vance. I knew what his reaction would be; he would want to run—right now. I covered the hoof-print with a scoop of dead leaves and worked faster on the stretcher, eyeing the trees around us distrustfully.

“What’s wrong, Gannon?” asked Vance.

“Nothing.”

When it was time to lift her, she seemed to weigh nothing at all stretched out between the two of us. I wondered if we were doing the right thing taking her in. Sometimes, these days, strangers went bad on you. They rotted and changed overnight, like fruit that you had forgotten about and left on the counter for too long.

Vance at first took up the rear position, letting me lead. But almost immediately, he halted.

“Let me lead,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s no good,” he shook his head. “I can’t keep a sharp eye out with her stretched out in front of me, I keep thinking if she’ll die or not and what her voice will sound like and…”

“Okay,” I said, and we switched places. Walking behind him, I noticed he had a new heavy lump weighing down his coat pocket. It had to be the dead man’s pistol. Vance still believed in guns, but I did not. They did not always fire anymore, because like everything else, they had changed. Sometimes, usually when you had a frenzied monster chewing on your foot, they would misfire or jam. That’s why I carried my grandpa’s saber. It always worked. Vance’s theory was to have a lot of guns, hoping at least one of them would go off. I didn’t argue. There was no need. Whoever lived the longest would be proven right.

As we carried her, I thought about the benefits of being attractive. Would we have worked as hard to save the driver, if he had been the one to survive? We had even brought the backpack she had with her in the backseat. True, she didn’t weigh much, but I had to wonder if we would risk so much for someone less interesting. The world was anything but fair.

“You think she’s a hitchhiker?” asked Vance from up ahead between white puffs. We were going uphill and the loose leaves were sliding around, slowing us down.

“I don’t know.”

“How old do you think she is? She looks like she’s maybe twenty.”

“Kind of young for you then,” I remarked.

“Really young for you,” he said with a dark glance.

“You’re still thinking about her, even though we switched,” I said, grinning.

“Yeah. I bet you are, too.”

I didn’t respond, I didn’t have to. We both knew the truth of it. She was possibly the only adult female under thirty left alive in the county. We trudged westward, deeper into the woods and away from the highway. The shores of Lake Monroe were to the left and less than a mile off.

“Who do you think she is?” Vance continued when the land leveled.

“She’s probably up from Louisville. Plenty of people have been trying to get out to the countryside.”

“So what went wrong? Do you think one of them changed and caused the wreck?”

“Makes sense.”

“It would have to be her if that happened, it was the driver’s neck that was ripped.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking of the hoof-print I’d seen. I had hoped Vance would shut up and walk faster if I didn’t talk much. But as his brother, I knew better.

Vance glanced nervously over his shoulder at the girl between us. “She looks really normal. I bet something got in. Maybe they had a window down, and something flew in there.”

“Could be.”

“I hate the flying ones.

“Yeah.”

“You know, I’m not sure that we should take her back to our cabin.”

It was my turn to frown. I said nothing, but he had a point. You never knew who was dangerous.

“We should take her to the Preacher. We are supposed to be patrolling the highway, and we definitely have something to report,” said Vance, “He’ll know what to do, and I bet he could tell if she’s dangerous or not.”

“We couldn’t make it there before dark.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to carry her that far anyway. We’ll have to take her to the cabin. Then we could get out the Durango and drive her over.”

“It would still be dark before we got back.”

He nodded. We both thought about it as we trudged on. Things always got much worse in the dark. Vance managed to shut up for about twenty minutes, saving our breath for walking.

“What time do you think it is?” I asked him finally. The girl was slowing us down now, getting through the denser trees was a problem with a stretcher, and we had to hunt for open trails.

“It looks like four o’clock at least,” he said. Neither one of us wore a watch, of course. Watches didn’t work right anymore. Complex electronic things were useless now, they either ran too fast, or too slow, or simply spit sparks and died when you turned them on. No one knew why. The Preacher simply said that the laws of the world had changed, and it was time to learn how to live by the new laws.

“Let’s pick it up,” I said.

He glanced back at me, immediately suspicious. “Tell me,” he said with eyes narrowed.

I sighed and told him about the tripod-shaped print in the mud back at the wreck. Half-way through my confession, he dropped his end of the stretcher. The girl rolled partly off the stretcher and her head lolled into the leaves.

“You idiot, Vance,” I said, easing her back onto the stretcher. “What if her spine is damaged?”

“Then she’s dead anyway,” he snapped. “I can’t believe you had me running around in the woods cutting sticks to carry her without telling me something big was out there. I used to wear your hand-me-down feet-pajamas and the moment a girl shows up I can’t trust you anymore?”

“You would have run off.”

He scowled, stamped around and threw up his arms sputtering. “Maybe! But I would have told you, Gannon!”

He had a finger pointed at my chest, and I looked down. “Sorry.”

Getting an apology out of me was rare, and he was impressed, but still angry.

“Something is out there and you were letting it follow us back home without even telling me.” He complained further for about a minute before I cut him off.

“It’s getting dark fast, we’ve got a ways to go, let’s just get going and pick up the pace,” I said. I took my end of the stretcher and looked at him.

Vance hesitated. He looked around at the trees, which seemed to crowd in closer every minute. A bird cried and the wind rustled the upper branches of the forest. He looked down at the girl, and I knew he was thinking about ditching her. He lifted an arm that had flopped off and placed it back onto the stretcher. We both saw smudged high cheekbones and eyes that would be wide and bright if they ever opened again. I wondered what color they were. Her hair was a honey-brown blonde. I could tell just by looking at it the color didn’t come out of a bottle.

I could not carry her alone and defend myself if Vance took off, so I was quiet, letting him think it over. We both knew he was deciding if she lived or died. He stared at her.

I think it was her face that saved her in the end. I wondered how many times over the millennia lives had been decided in just such a moment.

With a grunt of annoyance, Vance took up the stretcher again and we hustled deeper into the woods toward our cabin.

END SAMPLE of SHIFTING

Other Books by B. V. Larson

Mech

Mech 2

Shifting

Deadly Weapon

Spyware

SEEKER SERIES

Blood of Gold

Blood of Silver

HAVEN SERIES

Amber Magic

Sky Magic

Shadow Magic

Dragon Magic

Blood Magic

Visit www.BVLarson.com for more information.

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