Gadget Man by Ron Goulart

CHAPTER 1

The mad girl flashed angrily across the bright tower room and interfered with the view of the riot. Two plainclothes therapists dived into the big circular room on her trail, apologetic, and hunkered so as to leave the tinted windows clear for watching. The girl, thin and fair, shrugged out of reach of the lead therapist and ran straight at Sergeant James Xavier Hecker. He was already up out of his vinyl wing chair, reaching one calming hand to her. “Just be easy now,” he said.

In the chair next to his, Therapist-in-Chief Weeman said, “Halt, Mrs. Gibbons.” He stretched over and slapped the slim girl with his clip-on stunrod. She stiffened just short of touching Hecker.

“Why that?” asked Hecker, steadying the girl’s now paralyzed body.

“We strive to give our more hopeful patients a semblance of autonomy and free motion,” said Weeman. He breast-pocketed the stunrod in his lime-green tunic. “Incidents can’t be encouraged, but on the other side of the token, neither should they be subdued with too drastic means.”

The two therapists hesitated, hands extending, unobtrusively, for the caught patient. Hecker said, “It’ll take her two hours to come out of that.” He let the two wide men carry the girl away and out of the top tower of the Rehab Center.

Weeman tugged at his blond beard, as though he suddenly suspected it was false. “I find your concern for a disturbed suburban housewife, a girl you don’t even know, to be almost fascinating.”

“Why don’t you turn those Kendry files over, and I’ll take off.” Hecker was a lean man, tall and slightly bent, with a bony face and too big hands. The Social Wing of the Police Corps had allowed him to grow a shaggy mustache, but would probably not promote him much beyond sergeant.

Therapist-in-Chief Weeman’s small, tidy lap was filled with carded microfilm.. He let some of the fingers of his left hand dance on the film and nodded at the view windows. “I wish you shared my fascination with these riots, though your reasons for not doing so are best known to yourself. That one occurring down there in Citrus Knolls right now seems rich in fascination. I’ve monitored all the recent suburban riots in the area, but this is the first one to take place in, as you might say, my own back yard.”

Far below and across an artificial river, a troop of cub scouts had just put torches to the community recreation center, and to the immediate left of that a mob of graying matrons were lobbing plastic bombs into the main building of the tennis club. The majority of the members of the Veterans of the Chinese Invasion were chucking surplus grenades into patios and rock gardens all along Citrus Knolls’s wide and neatly pastoral streets and lanes. Over two thousand of the residents of the planned suburb, a good third of its population, were involved in the rioting and looting. “Here come the troops,” said Hecker, turning his back on the windows.

Weeman toggled a switch on his chair arm, and television screens on the blind wall of the rehabilitation center tower snapped alive. “I want a better look at all this. These initial confrontations between the dazed citizens and the Army of the Republic of Southern California are little less than fascinating.”

Hecker glanced up at the images of the lime-and-lemon uniformed Republic of Southern California soldiers marching with locked arms down the main esplanade of Citrus Knolls. “The Kendry files,” he repeated.

“What do you, as a representative of the Social Wing, a division of our Southern California government I can’t help believing is more liberal than necessary, think causes these outbreaks in our best suburbs, Sergeant?” Weeman twisted new curls into his full beard, ticked his head forward. The army was apparently using stun gas, and the screen showed people slowing and freezing, still clutching torches and bombs and bright new rifles.

“The riots are the Junta’s business,” said Hecker. “They govern the Republic of Southern California.”

“You seem reluctant to express an opinion that is solidly yours, Sergeant Hecker.”

“I just work here.”

“Look at that,” said Weeman. “That little old lady sniped one of the cameramen off the roof of the United Methodist.” He studied then the microfilm between his legs, watched Hecker for several long seconds. “Some people, a small but vocal minority, consider the cause of the riots to be the recent tightening of law enforcement and the additional troops being garrisoned in some of our larger secured towns and cities. What do you, Sergeant Hecker, feel about the notion that the Junta has ruled the Republic with undue strictness in recent years?”

“Since my branch of the Police Corps is under the jurisdiction of the Junta, you don’t have to ask,” Hecker told him. He paced away from the seated therapist, watching, briefly, the smoke columns fuse into a thick black smear in the bright afternoon sky.

“Younger people,” said Weeman, “forget how things were back in nineteen eighty-one and those years. Before the Chinese Commandos were defeated in the Battle of Glendale, there were many, not deluded but calm and rational people, who felt Red China would successfully carry off its land invasion of Southern California.”

“If Southern California hadn’t seceded from the Union in nineteen-eighty, things wouldn’t have happened as they did.”

“The President of the United States, even though his country was falling apart, should have supported us,” said Weeman. “Had the Junta not been formed, merging our best Southern California military and industrial brainpower into one dedicated and loyal ruling think tank, there would have been black days for the Republic. You, a man in his middle or late twenties, don’t remember those bad times.”

“Probably not.” Hecker returned and sat next to the Therapist-in-Chief. “I have a contact point to be at by tonight.”

“This has been, thanks to younger residents of the Republic such as yourself, Sergeant Hecker, rightly christened the `Age of Anxiety’.” Weeman twined his stubby fingers in the swatch of beard beneath his chin. “Myself, Sergeant Hecker, I favor the conspiracy theory to explain the riots. These most recent suburban riots— there’s a strange and fascinating quality to them.” He freed his fingers from his facial hair and indicated the burning and fighting below. “Social repressions, supposed injustices and unlawful restraints, don’t invoke the kind of mania we’re witnessing at this moment, Sergeant Hecker. A thoughtful examination of the sweeping panorama of riot history tells us that citizens in comfortable one-hundred-thousand-dollar homes in landscaped and secured areas should not loot and burn. They’re not blacks, are they, most of them?” He bundled the microfilm cards and tossed them across to Hecker. “The classic riots in the United States and, especially because of our near-tropic climate, in Southern California, have traditionally been the work of militant black men, Sergeant Hecker. And sometimes the fiery Mexican-American. Though you may not be aware, at this remote place in time, of that.”

“We studied those riots in school,” said Hecker. He thumbed through the cards, holding them next up to the overhead lights in turn. “Most of this information on the Kendry family we have in our Social Wing files. I thought you had some extra stuff that couldn’t be trusted to transmission.”

Weeman drew a last card from beneath his narrow thigh. “Some background material on Jane Kendry. Tests and projections done during the brief period when she was a ward of the Rehab system. What exactly is your mission for S.W., Sergeant?”

Hecker took the new card in one big-knuckled hand, walked to a wall microfilm reader and inserted the card. “You were told that when the Social Wing requested this interview.”

“That story wasn’t a cover then? Somebody in the Kendry clan has sent the Social Wing word that they have information on the cause of the riots?”

“The nature of the information sent and the procedures suggested tend to indicate the Kendry family or some of their followers may be involved,” Hecker said. The-young face of a lean, intense girl rolled into view on the screen of the reader. She had smooth, tan skin, hair of a red-gold color, long. “Jane Kendry,” muttered Hecker to himself.

“Seven years ago,” said Weeman. “She was fifteen then, coltish. Her wild father and a bunch of the clan broke her out of a minimum-security Rehab Center down near the Laguna Sector. Lovely marine view there. She’s a quirky girl, and I believe that it is Jane Kendry who runs that band of guerrillas, that growing band of guerrillas. Her father, old Jess, is in his middle sixties now, ridden with addictions and badly healed wounds. At first the guerrillas were all Kendry family, but in recent years the ranks have been swollen with other types of dissidents and anarchists. Jane is a tough girl, Sergeant Hecker, and you won’t find that hopeful look the picture there shows us. Not any more with Jane Kendry. Is she your contact?”

“I don’t know,” said Hecker. “Our information isn’t that specific. We have a contact point fairly close to one of the unsecured towns the Kendrys are thought to sometimes operate in. There’s a safe-conduct pass of sorts. I came here to fill myself in on the Kendrys more thoroughly.”

Therapist-in-Chief Weeman rose up behind Hecker. “You look quite unlike a policeman, even a Social Wing one, in your civilian clothes.” He flickered a sequence of toggles and the view windows blanked, the monitor screens died. “Listen to me now, Sergeant Hecker. I worked on the Kendry girl’s case down there in Laguna Sector seven years ago. I liked her and felt I was reaching her. We could work together on her problems and conflicts. Then those wild men came in and smashed things and wrenched her away.”

Hecker stopped reading the micro file. “So?”

“I have authority to bring her in for rehabilitation,” he said, moving closer to the Social Wing sergeant. “If she wishes, we can help her. Fit her back into the legitimate processes of the Republic of Southern California. She’s a girl with fascinating potential.”

“She may not want back in. Her exile is probably voluntary.”

“We often think that, Sergeant, and we are often wrong,” said the therapist. “If you see Jane Kendry, offer. Tell her Therapist-in-Chief— No, she knew me as Associate Therapist and without the beard, younger— tell her Dr. Weeman can get her safe conduct here to the Pasadena Rehab Center. It could be her only chance.”

Hecker frowned. “Wait now. Why her only chance?”

“You may, Sergeant Hecker, have some competition in your quest for Jane Kendry.”

“And I may not even see her,” he said. “But who else is searching for her?”

“Are you familiar with Second Lieutenant Same?”

“Norman Same? He’s with the Manipulation Council. Why do they want Jane Kendry?”

“Why does Manipulation usually want people?” said the therapist. “The Junta must have locked her away or - forgive the dark thought - simply killed her. The guerrillas are trouble, and Second Lieutenant Same, who has been here too, seeking background material, believes Jane Kendry leads the guerrillas.”

“Maybe there’s been a leak in the Social Wing, if Same has been here already.” Hecker clicked his bony thumb against his teeth. “We’ll see, then.”

“You get to her and tell her to be careful,” said Weeman. “Once she’s here in Rehab I can guarantee they won’t touch her. Believe me, Sergeant Hecker, when I tell you I can really help Jane Kendry.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Hecker. “Now I’ll retrieve my hopper from your roof port and get on.”

On the highest roof of the five-towered Rehab Center, Hecker could see Citrus Knolls burning away, blackening the day. His unmarked Social Wing hopper was not in the reserved slot of the rooftop landing area. Two orange-uniformed soldiers of the R.S.C. Army were squatting where the small heliplane had been.

“Looking for your machine?” asked one of the soldiers, bouncing inquisitively and making his buttocks smack the topping lightly.

“Yes, indeed,” said Hecker. He, being in civilian clothes, had his blaster pistol cupped under his arm and not quickly accessible. “You boys take it?”

“Sorry, Sarge,” said the other soldier. They were both young privates. “We needed extra wings, and the order went out. Your Social Wing reported an unmarked hopper parked here, signed out to Sergeant James Xavier Hecker, and it was picked up. They got your hopper over to Citrus Knolls, using it to dust stun powder on the folks trying to dismantle the shopping plaza.”

Hecker surveyed the roof. There was a pitted old surplus hopper, with the A.R.S.C. insignia still vaguely visible on its side, parked nearby. “Who does that one belong to?”

“That’s for you if you want to use it,” said the bouncing private. “Corporal Bozes said you could use it. That’s why we hung around - to be helpful. That clunk isn’t much for altitude, and there’s not enough armor on its belly. Those humping snipers can set your tail on fire easy enough as it is, without flying over in a thing like that.”

“I hope it’ll do for me,” said Hecker. “I have an appointment.”

“Plenty good for Social Wing purposes,” said the private and bounced again.

In five minutes Hecker was in the air. He had to be in San Emanuel Sector, a beach town beyond the Laguna Sector, by nightfall. The town was not one the military rated as secured, and he could expect no help from any officials of the R.S.C. or the Police Corps once he got there. The old army hopper, which he’d have to ditch before he got in sight of San Emanuel, chugged through the sky. It strained for altitude, whining, for nearly a half hour, then began making rumpling, pocking sounds and dropped from the sky toward a stretch of scrubby beach. Hecker’s safety straps snapped as he tried to right the ship. When the crash came, he was slammed hard into the control panel.

CHAPTER 2

The hopper was moving away from him in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle dissolving. There were weathered, gritty hands all around him and raw smells of the sea and strong spices. Gray clothes and close-cropped hair. Hecker caught at himself and sat back. Hands were sliding through his clothes, and one hand snapped out his packet of identification material, another got his pistol. Since he’d passed into Rehab Center on retinal and voice prints, the packet contained only the faked papers he was to use on his trip into the unsecured towns. Plus the dog-eared business card with the drawing of a gull on it, the one which had come into Social Wing headquarters with the message from the possible Kendry contact.

Hands had found the card and someone said, “Kendry pass. Leave him safe and alive.”

Hecker’s pistol was returned, tucked back into its pouch and patted. “Scavengers,” he said, seeing a little better. “Beach people.” The old army hopper was dismantled completely, and its pilot seat, still holding Hecker, was tipped in a clump of beach scrub. The sky had thinned and the wind had grown warm. It was late in the afternoon now, and when Hecker touched at his head he found a swelling spreading across the left side of his face, a smear of dry blood in its center.

The man with his hands still on Hecker was old, sixty-five or more, and dry with age and sun. “Want to talk, you can talk. Want to eat you can eat. Want to hide, you can hide. I’m Rius.” He seemed to have too many ribs. They lined his thin body in places where there shouldn’t be ribs. “The military won’t venture into this stretch. You find yourself in the Manhattan Beach Sector, south of Venice.”

“I’ve got to,” said Hecker, letting Rius help him to stand, “get to San Emanuel by tonight.”

“He does know the Kendrys,” said a tall, blonde girl. She was wearing a pair of thin gray shorts and mismatched souvenir moccasins.

“We’re free and easy here,” Rius told him. He had a plastic bag of green chili peppers in the pocket of his shorts. “He doesn’t have to talk. Or share.”

“I seem to have already shared my hopper with you,” said Hecker. He found he could walk and took himself clear of the grasp of the old man.

“Rights of salvage,” said Rius. “An ancient law of the sea.” He bit a pepper in half and pointed with the uneaten portion at the Pacific Ocean.

The glare of the sun on the water made Hecker turn away. Along the beach were scattered fifty people, most of them dressed as simply as Rius and the blonde. Hecker stretched out a long, lanky arm and took his identification folder from Rius, along with Kendry card. “Much obliged.”

“Would you,” asked the blonde, “like to talk about your problems? Are you thinking of quitting the formal culture up there in the Republic?”

“He’s free to talk or not to talk,” reminded Rius, starting another chili pepper. “That’s the way we are here.”

“If you’d like to talk about what business you have with the Kendrys,” said the tall blonde, who had small breasts, “you can do that, too.”

A plump, pale man with his hair recently cropped padded over the sand and squinted at Hecker. “They didn’t mention you till now. I’m Dr. Jay V. Leavitt. What happened? Oh, no, that’s right… you don’t have to tell me. That’s how it is here.”

“My hopper crashed, and then you guys dismantled it for scrap,” said Hecker. “I’ll talk freely about that. My head hit the instrument panel in the crash because the safety belts snapped.”

“I bet nobody even asked you how you came by that old army hopper,” said the doctor.

“I borrowed it.”

The doctor smiled. and shrugged. “My wife lets me spend a month down here each spring. May I feel your head?”

“Sure.”

“We live in a condominium in Pacific Palisades. It’s our second condominium. The first one we owned fell into the ocean. But I don’t have to worry about things like that here.” He poked his sandy fingers at Hecker’s swollen face. “I’m not even sterile. I hope it won’t cause an infection.”

“Don’t worry yourself.”

“No brain damage, I guess.” The doctor thumbed down Hecker’s lower eyelids. Then rapped his head. “And no sign of a fracture. I bet you don’t even have much of a concussion. You could rest up here on the beach a couple of days if you like, though I’m not prescribing. The nights get cold but we build fires.”

“I’m en route to San Emanuel.”

“You should talk of Marsloff and Percher,” Dr. Leavitt told him. He screwed his forefinger around in the pocket of his new gray shorts. “I had some Band-Aids in here. No, all used up.”

“Who are Marsloff and Percher?”

“Drive one of the land trucks,” said the blonde girl. “They’re going to try to get down to the San Diego Sector tonight with a load of salvage. Dr. Leavitt is probably suggesting you could catch a ride as far as San Emanuel with them. If he doesn’t mind you speaking for him.”

“Not at all,” replied the doctor. “You’re a very bright girl. Were you possibly a receptionist or dental-hygiene nurse up in the Republic?”

“Only a housewife,” said the blonde. “I could never have any satisfactory conversations with my husband. He’s in riot control research and used to bring new equipment home to try out.” To Hecker she said, “You have to be a little careful of Percher. He’s a gadget freak.”

“Oh,” said Hecker. He’d worked with gadget cases in the Social Wing.

“A gadget freak is a person,” explained Dr. Leavitt, “who uses machines and appliances in unnatural ways to produce electric brain stimulation and other potentially dangerous, though momentarily pleasurable, effects. Unlicensed electric brain stimulation was outlawed well over two years ago by the Junta.”

“Where’s his partner, this Marsloff?” asked Hecker.

“They’re both of them off down there.” The blonde indicated the location with a turn of her head. “See the old fallen-down beach restaurant that says POOR BOY on its side. Their truck is hidden in there. Marsloff is the big and dark-haired man leaning on the rail. Percher’s a little blond fellow. He’s in their truck probably.”

“He rewired an electric mixer to stimulate himself with last night,” said the doctor sadly. “A bright young man otherwise, when he’s not comatose.”

“You should have been here when he got inside a rebuilt soft-drinks machine,” said the blonde. “Want me to walk over with you?”

“Sure,” said Hecker. She started down the sand, and he moved in beside her. “Been out here long?”

“A year, I guess. My name’s Hildy. You don’t have to tell me yours. We don’t care here.”

“James Xavier Hecker.” His fake papers had used his real name.

“I read your I.D. packet. `Jim’ do they call you?”

“ `Hecker’ usually,” said Hecker.

“Hey, Marsloff. Rius says it’s okay if you help this guy.” She stopped a few yards from the big man. “He knows the Kendrys. He wants a lift south.”

Marsloff strode over. He had gray-black hair, short on his head and long and swirling on most of his body. “Can you drive a truck?”

“Yes.”

“My partner, Percher, is a gadget freak. He found half a dozen old-fashioned electric toothbrushes this morning, and he’s knocked himself blooey again in the cab of our truck. Has his own portable generator back in what used to be the pantry of the cafe. He’s in a coma right this minute.”

“Shouldn’t you get Leavitt to look at him?”

“This isn’t the Republic,” said Marsloff. “He always comes out of it. He doesn’t favor anybody tinkering with him when he’s having one of his comas. I’ll leave him here in the shack, under a quilt, for this haul. You watch him a little, Hildy?”

“If you like.”

Marsloff studied the westering sun. “We’ll leave in a half hour. How far south?”

“San Emanuel,” said Hecker. The sunlight wasn’t bothering him as much now.

“You know the Kendrys, then.” Marsloff grinned. “Percher smuggled in some beer from the Tijuana Enclave, real Mexican beer. It’s warm because he’s been using the ice machine on himself. Wait here and I’ll get us a couple bottles. We can cool them off in the ocean.” He patted Hecker and the girl on their backs and climbed over fallen wood and plaster into the remnants of the seashore cafe.

CHAPTER 3

The hanging sign that caught the night wind said GIACOMO OF SAN EMANUEL on it. The sign flapped over the doorway of a building that was gone. There were only traces of a collapsed wharf out this close to the ocean now, fragments of restaurants and shops. It was his contact point, and Hecker stood there on a firm section of wharf, hearing nothing except the dark water moving across the cluttered sand below the pilings. There were mounds of seashells dotting this section of San Emanuel beach, twists of dead seaweed. The wind carried what looked like a tatter of red-checkered tablecloth up above Hecker’s head, and the cloth fought and twisted, fluttering free and fading into the darkness among the fallen timbers and planking. He thought of the girl who had tried to reach him in the Rehabilitation Tower.

“See the card. Let’s see the card,” said a boy’s voice.

Hecker carefully turned. “What card?”

The boy was too small for his age. He seemed to be about fifteen and was barely five feet tall. His legs were thin and subtly twisted, and his arms were thin, too, and bent in wrong ways. He was holding a big shaggy cat in his arms, close to his bare chest. “I’m a younger brother,” he told Hecker. “An adopted brother, actually. I’m Kendry, though.” The cat was limp but awake. It lolled comfortably, watching Hecker with its round yellow-green eyes.

“Tell me the cat’s name,” said Hecker.

“Burrwick,” the boy said, “if you have to have the countersign crap. Now let’s see the card. Fetch it out slowly or you’ll feel some steel in your fat ribs.”

“I look fat to you?” Hecker drew out the I.D. packet located the card with a gull drawn on it in pale-blue writing fluid.

The boy took the card, held it near his face. “Everybody seems fat. I hid from the soldiers too long, missed out on too many meals. They call that malnutrition, you know, all that business with vitamins and minerals. I read up on it all but haven’t been able to change myself much so far.”

“Don’t be discouraged,” said Hecker. “It takes patience. Can you tell me who sent you to meet me?”

“Not allowed to.” The cat mewed once, tapped on the boy’s narrow chest. “I’m to guide you to a conclave. A family gathering mostly, a Kendry thing. Be hundreds there, Kendrys and other of the guerrillas. Though some of the real good underground fighters don’t go for these kind of festivities. Guerrillas grew out of the Kendry clan. Kendrys been pouring into this part of California since long time before everything fell apart. You’re to palm yourself off as a cousin by marriage to old Mace Kendry. Use your real name, or whatever name you’re traveling under. You married Mace’s second oldest daughter, Reesie. They were both ridden down by the R.S.C. Army, are dead now. You been in a solitary cell down in San Pedro Sector since shortly after you got married two years ago. You were let out on the Junta’s last birthday amnesty two years ago. You got this card - here, take it back-from Mace one time, and you heard about tonight’s gathering in a bar in Venice named Uncle Avram’s. Can you remember all this crap?”

“Most of it.”

“Better get it all straight. Mace, in case somebody asks, had his left arm missing from just below the elbow due to a Police Corps blaster. Reesie was a tall girl, big-boned with bad front teeth. Okay-looking, but too meaty.” The boy rubbed the cat’s stomach. “With a couple hundred at least Kendrys together, there’s likely to be some want to kill you for the sport. If you give them the added inspiration of lying and stumbling in your yarn, you’ll surely feel steel from several directions.”

“Thanks,” said Hecker. “What’s your name?”

“It isn’t part of the password crap.” The boy beckoned Hecker to follow him.

Walking away from the fallen wharf, Hecker said, “I wanted to know just for myself.”

“Jack,” said the boy.

“Jack.”

“Know where I got that name?”

“No.” They turned onto a street that wound between still-standing but long-vacant shops and hotels. The municipal trees had grown wild, and there was a thick tangle of branches and leaves overhead.

“Off that sign back there. Giacomo. That’s Jack, more or less, in Italian. I like it down there, down by the water. Especially at night. Have you ever heard of people like that?”

“Sure, Jack. Many.”

“Most Kendrys don’t figure so.”

“But you do,” said Hecker. “Can you tell me, by the way, who’s going to contact me at this family gathering?”

“Not that either. It will happen, don’t fret.” They walked two blocks higher, and then the cat yowled, its hair stood up, and its tail went thick and erect. “Getting close.”

The cat yowled again, twisted and jumped to Jack’s shoulders and then off into the night. “He doesn’t much like Kendrys?” remarked Hecker.

“They’re good people, but not much given to gentleness.” The thin boy pointed at a rusted and twisted hurricane fence across the street. They were at the rear of a defunct public school complex, and the school gymnasium was bright with light and noise. “Gate’s fallen in. Go on through and down to the gym. Tell your story. Luck to you. I’m no partygoer.”

“Okay. Thanks, Jack.”

“You have a name?”

“James Xavier Hecker.”

Gadget Man

“Xavier part is good. I might assimilate that sometime. Good-by.” He drifted back and away into the dark beneath the trees, and Hecker headed for the loud, shining gymnasium.

***

A big woman in a sleeveless leather dress handed Hecker a second piece of fried chicken. “Look at the way she carries herself,” she shouted. “Smug, provocative.”

“A constant worry to her father,” shouted the graying woman on Hecker’s left. “Guerrilla warfare is hard enough without trying to keep tags on a snooty daughter with a mind of her own.” She grabbed an avocado off the abundant banquet table, split it with a knife sheathed on her dappled thigh. She popped out the big egglike seed and passed half the avocado to Hecker. “Eat this, Cousin Jim. You’re mighty underweight.”

“Just look at her,” shouted the big woman. “Straight as a rail and no flesh to speak of. Are they partial to skinny women in your neck of the Republic, Cousin Jimmy?”

Before Hecker could reply, one of the Kendry boys grabbed him away from the food corner of the ramshackle gymnasium and pulled him through half of the several hundred people jammed together on the yellow flooring. “Game, Cousin Jim,” he shouted. A six-foot-tall man, a shade over thirty, in cut-down noga suit, his hair long in ringlets. “We’re going to play pumpkin ball.”

“Okay by me,” Hecker said.

“Bet your ass,” shouted the Kendry boy. “I’m Rollo.”

“Good to know you, Cousin Rollo.”

“Second Cousin,” said Rollo. “Eat up that avocado and hunk of chicken and we’ll get going. See the basket up there?”

Hecker tilted his head back. Up high in the smoke and haze the old gymnasium basketball goal still hung. “That I do, Second Cousin Rollo.”

“The object of this game is to kick the pumpkin up through there. Fun for all concerned.” He whacked Hecker and sent him into a circle of eight Kendry boys. Three fat orange pumpkins were huddled in the circle center. “Cousin Jim gets first kick.”

“I already have been promised it,” said Milo Kendry, who’d introduced himself earlier.

“Bullshit,” said Rollo. “Cousin James is our guest, you lout.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” replied Milo. He grabbed up the biggest pumpkin and smashed it on Rollo’s head.

“Don’t go spoiling the game,” said another Kendry. He backed and kicked one of the remaining pumpkins. It rose up toward the metal-raftered ceiling, spun awkwardly, fell toward the musicians’ stand.

A dozen Kendrys were on the narrow makeshift platform, playing amplified fiddles and banjos. The Kendry with the hand microphone had been singing a song whose lyrics consisted of the word “stomp” reiterated. The pumpkin dropped on the end of the mike and was impaled there. The singer went on singing.

Rollo snatched a coil of rusty barbed wire out of his jacket pocket, wrapped it around his fist and swung on Milo. He roared, shook pumpkin seeds from his locks, and slashed again.

“You like to give me tetanus, you dummy,” shouted Milo. “Lockjaw or something, you dumb bunny.” He kicked Rollo in the stomach.

Another Kendry pulled Hecker away from the thwarted game. “Hello, Cousin Jim. I’m your Uncle Fred. What do you think about Jess’s last will and testament?”

“You mean Jane’s father?”

“Jess left all his possessions to her, he says. I don’t think he’s been quite right since Jane’s mother passed on. Army got her with a new gas they introduced that year,” said Uncle Fred. He was broad and tall, but gone to fat. “Insurgents shouldn’t have a girl up front. Women are for homebody stuff. You feel like punching somebody around. A woman is handy for that, too. I used to like to stump them, but I’m aging beyond that. Women are okay for stumping but not to lead a band of guerrillas. You getting enough to eat?”

“Yes, fine,” said Hecker.

“See these teeth,” said Uncle Fred, grinning. “My third set this month. Stole them in a raid on the Santa Monica Sector. These younger kids, their idea of fun is to kick an old man in the face. I don’t mind their funning some, but it costs me a set of teeth every damn time. You get old and you get sentimental about your teeth. That will of Jess’s, though, is a bad thing. Isn’t that the way you see it?”

“I figure Jess knows what he’s doing,” Hecker ducked a flying fragment of pumpkin.

“This conclave isn’t like the ones we used to have,” shouted Uncle Fred.

A man with feathery white hair stepped up and tapped Uncle Fred on the bicep. He was a straight-standing man, tall and leathery. “Complaining about something?”

“Just the food, Jess. Food’s not like it used to be. Chicken isn’t like it used to be. Potatoes aren’t like they used to be. Even the lettuce is different.”

“You aren’t like you used to be either,” said Jess Kendry the leader of the clan and of the guerrillas. He smiled at Hecker. “You’re supposed to be Cousin Jim?”

“Good to see you,” said Jess, holding out his hand. “Be sure you get to say hello to Jane.” He narrowed his left eye, said to Uncle Fred, “Jane’s a bright girl, a born leader. Fred’ll tell you that.”

“I already have, Jess.”

A grinning Kendry jumped on Jess’s back, and Jess, without looking around, bent and airplane-spun the grinning Kendry off and into the nearest wall. “There’s my daughter Jane over there. Trot over and pay your respects, Cousin Jim.”

Hecker had noticed the girl before, had her pointed out by relatives in the crowd. She was tall, nearly five feet eight slender. Her hair was darker now than in the days of the Rehab pictures. It was long and straight. She was wearing a pair of boy’s tapered khaki trousers and a sleeveless white pullover. Her tan face was slightly flushed. Hecker edged toward her. On the way, someone put a chicken wing in his hand, and someone else punched him in the kidneys. “Thought I’d introduce myself, Cousin Jane,” said Hecker.

She had been standing silent, not looking at anything. She blinked her gray eyes, and a slight smile touched her lips. “You’re Jim. I had something to discuss with you.”

“Oh?”

“Problem of a lost cat.”

“His name is?”

“Burrwick,” she said. “He spends much of his time down at the waterfront.”

“Around Giacomo’s?”

“That’s him.” Her hand touched his arm. “Walk with me over near that exit, and I can talk to you.”

“Fine,” said Hecker.

She studied his face as they moved toward the arched doorway. “You didn’t get hurt here, did you?”

“No, earlier.” Hecker had forgotten the traces of the hopper crash on his face.

Jane stopped, back to the wall. “You know,” she said quietly, “something about what we’re up to.”

“You want to topple the Junta.”

“And you work for them.”

“The Social Wing isn’t always obliged to agree with the Junta.”

“Perhaps,” said the girl. “I took a chance on that. The Kendrys and those who’ve joined us are getting blamed for these riots. That kind of rebellion, burning and looting, I’m not opposed to. If the motives behind it could be used by us. From what I’ve picked up, these riots won’t do us any good. They really are prompted by someone on the outside. Someone who wants to use them against the Junta.”

“You sure?”

“I’ve gathered enough fragments of information to put together a picture,” said Jane. “There are people in the Republic of Southern California who think the Junta is much too mild. I’m afraid they’re the ones behind the riots in the suburbs. Should they take over, which is a possibility, conditions will grow even worse. Our attempts to get a good government for the Republic will be set back. It’s difficult enough now.”

“Who,” asked Hecker, “do you think is behind these riots and how do they do it?”

“The “how” I don’t know,” Jane said. “As to “who”, the only name I have is not really a name. I keep hearing about somebody called Gadget Man.”

“Gadget Man?”

The girl said, “I know where you can start looking for a more definite lead. There’s some link between this Gadget Man and Nathan E. Westlake, though I haven’t been able to investigate that yet. I feel it’s time to bring in someone official on this.”

“Nathan E. Westlake, the former Vice-president of the United States?”

“That Westlake, yes. Get to him and investigate. You should find out something.”

“He’s running that dance pavilion up in the Santa Monica Sector now … ” began Hecker. He stopped, frowned at the bandstand.

Jane’s glance followed his. “What is it?”

“There, by the music,” he said carefully. “That’s Second Lieutenant Same.”

The girl caught his knobby hand. “The Manipulation Council man. You didn’t tell him to come here?”

“No,” said Hecker. “I haven’t called in a report since I left Social Wing headquarters. They already knew, of course, that I had a contact to make someplace in San Emanuel. There must be a leak in S.W. somewhere, Same must have had spotters around town waiting for me to show up. Then I was followed here.” He looked straight at her. “I didn’t set you up, Jane. It is you Same wants, though.”

The girl watched his face again. “Yes, okay, you aren’t lying. He must have men surrounding us.”

“Maybe,” said Hecker. “Same usually likes to work alone or with a small complement of men. Tactics he prefers to numbers.”

Jane turned, her cheeks hollowing and her eyes narrowing. She caught her father’s attention in the crowd and gave him a series of unobtrusive hand signals. “We worked this sign language out when I was a kid. Okay, come this way. There’s an emergency exit through that locker room. I doubt he’ll try to round up the whole clan. Dad and the boys can fight out of here should they have to.” She walked casually toward an archway marked BOYS’ LOCKER ROOMS.

Hecker came with her, and in five minutes they were outside in the night. On a wooded hillside. Suddenly below them a Police Corps hopper, bright-lit and lemon-yellow, came dropping down out of the dark above the gym. Hand torches popped on in the weedy playing fields surrounding the gym. Two dozen at least, illuminating -orange tunic sleeves and lime-green trouser legs.

“A raid,” said Jane. She hesitated, then pulled Hecker away with her. “Dad can handle this. We’ll go wait in our camp.”

From behind a white pine a few yards in front of them, a glow of light appeared, flickering on an aluminum pistol. “No one to leave this area now,” spoke a Police Corps man.

“It’s okay,” said Hecker, stepping in the direction of the bobbing hand light. “I’m with the…” The blaster crackled before he finished, and his trouser leg caught fire.

Another blaster sizzled from behind him. The P.C. man’s hand flamed in the dark, went black. The aluminum pistol pinwheeled and was lost in the brush. Jane was next to the man as he tottered toward falling. She struck him twice at the base of the skull, and he fell fast and was still.

“How are you?” asked Jane. She looked not at Hecker but at the woods, listening. “No more P.C. men around here, it seems.”

Hecker had slapped the flames out and found beneath the fresh-burnt hole in his pants that his leg was barely scorched. “Nothing. I’m fine. You?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t give me time to identify myself.”

“Often happens. Come on.”

“Where?”

“I told you. To our camp. You can hide out with us for a little.”

“I don’t have to hide out.”

“No, but I suggest we get the hell away from here. Now and fast.”

Hecker reflected a second. Then agreed.

CHAPTER 4

Out in center field Hecker paced in a small half-circle, sideways, his big knurly hands on his knees. The sun was straight above, and the rolling field glared green. Hecker watched the big Kendry up at bat and also scanned the area for some sight of Jane. The girl had slipped out of this temporary camp sometime after breakfast. While searching for her, wanting more information on Gadget Man, Hecker had been recruited by Milo and Rollo Kendry to play softball.

The batter hit. The ball came spinning out toward, Hecker, but continued on over his head. Hecker trotted after the ball. Beyond this overgrown picnic ground was a wide path and then a synthetic moat. On the other side of the moat rose a stucco mountain, two stories high. A nearly obliterated wooden sign was hanging tentatively to the wrought-iron fence guarding the moat. WELLES PARK ZOO/MONKEY ISLAND. The softball smacked the sign, dislodging it, and then bounced over the moat and came to rest on the island.

Hecker pulled up short of the low rusty ironwork. He knuckled at his shaggy mustache, squinted one eye at the ball. A naked fat girl came out of one of the monkey caves and waved at him with wiggling fingers. “Woowee,” she inquired, “isn’t it too hot for baseball, cousin?”

“Not for the real aficionado,” replied Hecker. “Can you toss me the ball?”

“I’m clumsy in athletics,” said the plump girl. She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the game. “Indoor sports for me, if you get my drift.” She bent, jiggling, and grabbed up the softball. “We, me and some of my distant boy relatives, are in here having a gang-bang. Keeps you out of the sun on these woowee kind of sultry days.”

She was about to toss the ball when a large Kendry boy, clad in the lower half of a suit of thermal underwear, popped out of the murky cave. He whacked the naked girl on her freckled buttocks, and she and the ball rolled down the side of the monkey island and into the moat. Muddy water and dry leaves splashed high. “Woowee,” said the Kendry boy, his shoulder-length hair waving. “Now that’s humor.” He grinned across at Hecker. “There are a lot of humorless bastards in the Republic, cousin.”

Hecker said, “No wonder you’re hot. That’s winter underwear.”

The giant boy inserted a thumb under the waistband of the buff-colored underwear. “No, it’s a fetish. I can’t do nothing without I wear these.”

A chubby middle-aged man, bald and blackbeared, came from the cave bent low. “You dumb, creepy bastard,” he said. “You go and start playing jokes before I even took my second turn.”

“Woowee,” said the underwear-clad Kendry. He clutched the complaining man by the beard and pinwheeled him into the murky water. “Oh, that’s funnier than the first.”

Hecker nodded at the scummy moat water where the bearded man was dog-paddling. “She hasn’t come up yet.”

“Alice likes to swim underwater. See, this here moat connects with the alligator house over there. Whenever we camp here, Alice does this. Swims underwater over into there and surfaces on the alligator promenade.”

“You’ve thrown her in the moat before?”

“A good joke bears repeating, cousin” He shook his head. “I’m afraid, though, you’re not going to find that baseball.”

Hecker agreed and jogged back to the field of play. The game had not resumed. Instead, Milo and Rollo were on the pitcher’s mound together, battling with baseball bats.

“Tell me I don’t know a spit ball, you poor ninny,” Milo was growling when Hecker came into hearing range. “I’ll smash your unsportsmanlike coco in.”

“I’m no ninny, you fat-ass rube,” said Rollo, his ringlets tossing. Their bats met with a tremendous clack, and both men quivered. “I’ve read up on all the major sports. Read in books, you ill-read horsebutt.”

Hecker walked on by and across the field and off. There were nearly a hundred guerrillas camped here in this abandoned and unsecured public zoo. Hecker crossed a weathered wood bridge, searching again for Jane. As he was passing a partially collapsed merry-go-round, a long, lean man hailed him: “Hey, Hecker.”

Hecker joined the man in the fragments of shade that fell from the merry-go-round’s glass-and-iron roof. He’d been introduced to him at breakfast. “Hello. You’re Hash Sontag. No relation to the Kendrys.”

“Right,” said Hash. He put two fingers in the breast pocket of his chambray tunic and drew out a little plyo sack. “You’re looking for Jane.”

“Yes. Seen her?”

“She’s worried about Jack, the kid. He was supposed to join us here.” Hash shook some flakes out of the sack and into a cigarette paper he’d fished from the back pocket of his tan trousers. “She cut back to see if she could find him. Might be he got picked up in that raid last night. About six others missing, but we don’t have word yet on whether they’re captured.”

“By herself, she went?”

Hash’s slate-gray eyes flicked up from their concentration on rolling his cigarette. “Jane needs to be by herself sometimes.” Licking the cigarette to seal it, he said, “This is some of that synthetic marijuana they’re turning out in the Canal Zone kibbutz. Sort of mild. I know who you are, so you can relax.”

Hecker took a back step. “Oh?”

“As was mentioned, I’m not a Kendry,” said Hash. He had his back against a poled wooden horse. “Less of them and more people like yourself is what we need. Otherwise, it’s always going to be horseplay and the Junta. Not a new government.”

“I’m not a recruit.”

Hash lit his cigarette and inhaled. He grinned. “You’re Sergeant James Xavier Hecker with the Social Wing of the Police Corps. But you’re still more on our side than you are on the Junta’s.”

Hecker said, “Don’t expect too much. I’m on an assignment, and it means cooperating. At the end of it I’ll go back.” He gestured with one rough hand at the tree-thick hills surrounding this small valley. “I’m part of out there.”

“At the moment,” said Hash. “When Jane suggested getting help from somebody in the Social Wing, I agreed with her. This Gadget Man business will probably need the Police Corps to stop it. We don’t have the equipment and facilities. So I figure it’s okay to let you help us investigate.”

Hecker rubbed at one of the healing cuts on his face. “What do you know about Gadget Man?”

“Only what Jane does.” Hash’s gray eyes flicked up again. “She’s coming down through the trees now. Alone, not with Jack.” He inhaled, grinned, drifted away around the far side of the broken-down merry-go-round.

***

A grass-stained baseball came plummeting from above, accompanied by shards and flakes of dusty glass. Hecker hopped through the wild columbine, yarrow, and monkshood and caught the ball. “The game’s resumed,” he said.

Jane Kendry was yards away, near one blurred glass-panel wall of the overgrown park greenhouse. “Don’t be so patronizing,” she said.

Opening the brass grillwork and stained-glass door of the greenhouse, Hecker threw the ball out toward the picnic-ground playing field. “Here you go, Milo.”

Jane was wearing tan shorts, a pale-blue pullover, and tan moccasins. She kept dragging one slightly hooked finger down through her auburn hair, giving an angry twist at the end. “Second Lieutenant Same may have Jack.”

Hecker made his way over a plank parkway, through wild primroses, zinnias, and milkweed. “I could check in with Social Wing headquarters. See if they know anything. But I’m fairly sure Same must have some way of tapping S.W.‘s communications. Since I can refrain from reporting in while I’m on field assignments, I think I will. It’s safer at the moment.” He got ten feet closer to Jane, and she moved ten feet further away.

“Jack probably got away and went someplace by himself,” said Jane. “He’s a loner. He’s like me. Freer, since he’s still really a boy.” She hugged herself, her breasts moving closer together. Her shoulders hunched slightly. “I think I may go

I with you. To check out Westlake. I haven’t quite decided.”

Hecker said. “Okay. When?”

Jane picked a yellow daisy. “We’ll be organizing a raid, planning it today. The actual sortie should be tomorrow. I’m waiting for my scout party to get here. After the raid, two days from now, I’ll be able to go to the Santa Monica area.”

“I can go now and investigate the former Vice-president myself,” said Hecker. “I don’t have to wait two days. Just tell me whatever else you know about Gadget Man, about the riots, and I’ll move on.”

“Why can’t you relax, Hecker. Wait.” She smiled a slightly puckered smile. “You can’t simply go away from here anyhow. You’re supposed to be Cousin Jim, remember. Here to help out. There are men posted all around here, watching in all directions. Incoming and outgoing. You couldn’t get far.”

“The same guys who kept Same away from the conclave last night?”

“No, my own choice,” said Jane. “They haven’t been celebrating.”

Hecker didn’t reply.

Jane continued, “You come along on the raid, in my group. If I decide to go along, we can take off from there. If not, it’ll be easier for you to get off unnoticed.”

Hecker watched the petals from the daisy as Jane tore them free one by one. “Okay,” he said. “Your way, then.”

“Makes you feel better, doesn’t it?” said the pretty girl. “Taking orders. They trained you for that. A yes-sir person they made you into.”

Now an arm’s reach from her, Hecker said, “Worry about your adopted brother, that’s okay. But don’t mix me up with what you’re mad at.”

“Rehab Center crap,” said Jane. “Find a reason for this girl’s hostility. All the anger. Not the real reason, but some kind of polite sweep-it-under-the-rug reason. Trauma over maternal loss during early pubescent years.” She breathed in hard through her nostrils. “They killed her in the street, Hecker. Yeah, it made me angry. Yes, sir. I was quite impressed at the time.”

Hecker put a knotty hand on her bare shoulder. “Easy now.”

The colored-glass door smashed open and Jess Kendry came in, stepping over bright fragments of yellow, gold, red, scarlet, orange, purple glass. “What sort of tęte-a-tęte is this, for Christ sake?” he said. His fine white hair was high and tangled, giving his head a bashed-in look. His tan, leathery face was overlaid with a pink flush. “Some kind of incest among blood kin do I see before me? Janey, Janey, what is all this?”

Jane reached up and touched the hand Hecker still had on her shoulder. “He’ll be okay in a while,” she said quietly to Hecker. “Sometimes this happens. Stay back here for a bit.” She walked to her father, hunched a little and hugging herself again. “Cousin Jim is only a relative by marriage in the first place, Dad. And secondly, we’re just talking about the raid.”

“What raid? What raid, Janey?” He tripped among the wild marigolds, stumbled to his knees. “Why do you favor this damn hothouse? It’s too hot. It’s hot, Janey, this hothouse. Christ.”

Jane helped him to rise. “Who have you been with?”

“Uncle Fred and I were up in the elephant house with a couple of bottles of smuggled rye, Janey,” said Jess Kendry. “Listen, Janey, this business last night. I’m all spun around. I’m losing my nerve, honey. You see? Listen, Janey, I promised you I’d not let it upset me. Not lose my nerve. Jesus, I can’t hold on.”

Jane stood straight and put her arm around her father. “Everybody gets frightened. There are real dangers. You know that, and you handled things well last night. It’s okay you’re afraid sometimes.”

Jess began to cry. “No, it’s more than that, Janey. I’m so goddamn old, Janey. They can kill me so easy now, honey.”

“No, they can’t,” said the girl. She walked him toward the smashed doorway. “You go over to the bunk area and lie down, Dad. I’ll wake you for lunch.”

“That’s a good idea, Janey,” said Jess. “I will. Sleep it off.”

Piano music sounded out on the picnic ground. A moment later, Milo Kendry appeared in the greenhouse doorway. “Hey, Jess, come on out and play something for us.”

“You got a piano out there?” asked Jess, laughing now.

“The twins just dragged it in,” explained Milo. “They stole it from a teenage bordello down in Baja. Smuggled the damn thing all the way up here.”

“Those crazy goddamn twins,” grinned Jess. “Janey, come on and I’ll play you a song. I haven’t touched a piano in months. That’s very thoughtful of the twins. Isn’t it, Janey?”

“Yes, Dad. You go on. I’ll be there soon.” After Jess and Milo had gone, she came back to Hecker. “I’ll be with my father for a while. We can talk again later.” She left.

Hecker stayed inside the greenhouse even after the music started outside.

CHAPTER 5

The lion house had been turned into a briefing room. A blackboard borrowed from a defunct junior high school was wired up to the bars of one of the shadowy, empty wall cages. Using a carpenter’s ruler, Jess Kendry was chalking in a street map. He kept his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he drew the lines, his shoulders slightly bent. On a large square he lettered in MOTHER OF CHRIST HOSPITAL. He paused, rubbed the tip of the chalk against his chin. Then he turned and walked slowly and carefully to the scatter of folding chairs and wooden crates in the center of the vaulted room. Jane was sitting on a tipped slat crate, her knees under her chin, her arms hugging her legs. “I really am sorry, Jane,” Jess said. “You know how I get sometimes. Don’t be mad.”

Jane looked up, but not quite at him. “I’m not.”

Hash, slouched in a folding chair labeled DUMLER & GIROUX FUNERAL SERVICES, said, “I heard Milo and some of his buddies talking as if they plan to raise a little extra hell on this raid, Jess.”

Jess moved away from his daughter, glanced around at the two-dozen guerrillas in the room. “No more than usual, Hash. We don’t have to debate the point any more. We’re agreed on the use of a certain amount of terror.”

Hecker’s wooden chair grated on the decorative tiles of the floor as he put it a few feet nearer to Jane. “I’m just a guest, Cousin Jess,” he said. “Still, I had the idea we’re raiding this town of San Cabrito for the purpose of getting medical supplies from that Mother of Christ Hospital.”

Back at the blackboard, Jess tapped the hospital on the map when Hecker mentioned it. “Exactly, Cousin Jim. However, we like to unsettle the populace if we can. When people hurt, they’re more likely to listen. When they listen, then they’ll hear what Jane and Hash and some of the rest of us are trying to say. That the Junta is no good. That the Junta has to be replaced by a more democratic government.”

Hash began rolling himself a fresh marijuana cigarette. “I think Milo and Rollo and their bunch out to concentrate on doing their assigned jobs and forget about providing terror for the teenage girls of San Cabrito.”

“There won’t be any more incidents like that,” Jess assured him. “We’ve kicked that around enough, Hash. Stop envying the boys their high spirits.”

“We need supplies,” said Hash, licking the cigarette, “not recreation for Milo and Rollo and the boys. I figure we’d have a smoother raid if we left all the high-spirited fellows here to play softball.”

Jess resumed chalking in the names of key streets and buildings of San Cabrito. “We need fifty or sixty men to bring this sortie off right, Hash. The twenty-five of us who do the planning and lead the raids, we need the others. An army can’t be… ”

“All generals. You need privates, too. Foot soldiers and fighting men. Men who think less and fight more,” finished Jane. “We know, Father. Just because we have a guest, there’s no need to repeat our entire last dozen meetings for him. I’m sure he’s seen enough squabbles.”

“Right, Janey,” said her father. He grinned over at Hecker. “Okay. Here on the run-down stretch of the old Highway l01 is the Police Corps hut. Two and a quarter miles south of the San Cabrito turnoff. There are six P.C. men there now, according to our scouts. Henry, you and your group have to take them out. The way is up to you. We want no contact between them and the bigger P.C. stations, and we want no warnings to get out to the Republic of Southern California Army. Keep their P.C. hoppers on the ground, too. How many is it they have?”

“Three,” said Jane. She frowned at the wide, bald Henry Kendry. “I think we ought to talk, very carefully, about Henry’s . part in the raid.”

“He won’t repeat last time,” put in her father.

“Jane,” said Henry, smiling. “Sometimes you’re still just a pretty little teenager, like you were when they locked you up in the Rehab Center. You get too squeamish, Janey. You cut out all your criticizing now. You and Hash and your new buddy, Cousin Jim.”

“You didn’t have to kill those three Police Corps men in Redondo,” Jane told Henry. “Not that way.”

“One way, another way,” said Henry. He shot up, angry, from his upright orange crate, jabbed a fist in the air toward Jess. “I’m tired of all this bullshit. What’s `guerrillas’ mean? Another word for fairies and faggots? We ought to rip up that town, and to hell with a bunch of bandages and aspirins for a bunch of fairies who play sick so they don’t have to work.”

Hash inhaled on his cigarette. “You’re out, Henry. Leave now.”

Henry snatched up his crate and came for Hash, swinging it with both big hands. “I don’t get bossed around by some hophead pansy.”

Pivoting slightly as he rose, Hash avoided the thrust of the wood crate. He jabbed a stiff hand into Henry’s neck, and the heavy man slackened, fell to his knees, clutched his crate to him like an accordion, hit the tile with a loud splintering. “We’re going into San Cabrito for medical supplies, that’s all,” said Hash. “Jess, you’ll be responsible for delaying the Police Corps boys and taking out their hoppers. I’ll be in charge of getting what we want out of the hospital. Jane, you and Jim will head up the group that comes in on the backside of the town and sets up roadblocks to cut off ground pursuit after my group gets the stuff and makes for 101 again.”

Jess placed his chalk and ruler on the edge of the lion cage, amidst some dry, dusty straw. “Who voted you in to command, Hash?”

“Father,” said Jane, still hugging her knees to her. “We need medical supplies. In this camp and in the others. That’s all the raid on San Cabrito is going to be about. No slaughter, no rape. No bullshit.”

“Don’t talk that way,” said Jess. He started toward her. “What’s happening, Janey? Nobody cooperates around here any more.”

“Cross-purposes,” said Hash. He was between Jess and Jane, dragging the unconscious Henry over the smooth floral patterns of the floor.

Jess’s leathery face seemed to grow thinner, more wrinkled. “You’re right, Jane. We’ll do this your way. Hash, when you’re through with Henry, you come and outline the raid for us, explain the workings.” He walked away, left the room by a side exit.

Jane said, “There’s just no way.”

Hecker leaned toward her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said.

CHAPTER 6

In the bright, late-afternoon garden, rounded by yellow adobe walls, the brown-robed priest was signing autographs. A dozen people, casual and in their early thirties, stood close by the plump priest, and a score more wandered in the flagstone courtyards and formal gardens of the Shrine of San Cabrito. Immediately at the rear of the smiling priest rose a marble fountain topped by a figure of San Cabrito, who was helping a leper get his footing. Colored water sprayed from the top of the saint’s staff, making rainbow patterns in the declining day.

In a patch of shade beneath a transplanted cypress tree, Jane, wearing a blonde wig, sat on a stone bench. On her lap rested a book: Gourmet Cooking for the Poor by Father Frederico Caparizzi. Hecker, his back to the autographing Father Caparizzi, stood with one foot resting on the bench. “He cooperates with you?”

Jane nodded, said, “This is another thing you can leave out of your report.”

“I’m not obliged to make a formal report to the School Wing,” Hecker told her. “All they’re interested in is the riots, and the possible causes of them.”

“You can continue on to Santa Monica once night falls and the raid commences.”

“You’re not going along?”

“No. I decided it’s better to stay with my father for now,” answered Jane. “Our job here is to set up roadblocks out on Vista Del Mar Road there. With a little help from Father Caparizzi.”

“I didn’t notice any ocean.”

“They filled it in,” said Jane. “To build ranch-style homes. Before that, this part of San Cabrito was right on the sea.”

“We voted for an artificial ocean,” said the blond man who’d been passing, a lean, pretty brunette on his arm. “We’re Paula and Jerry Dingman.”

“You go around voting in favor of oceans?” Jane stood and moved to the far side of Hecker.

“We lived here in San Cabrito three years,” said Paula Dingman, “before we moved to Pedro Loma.”

“Every year we’d have a local election, and I would give our okay to having a small artificial ocean built across the street there. I don’t actually swim myself, but for the kids.”

“The ocean always got defeated,” said Paula, smiling.

“Anti-ocean forces are pretty strong here in San Cabrito,” said Jerry.

“Lots of the older residents remember that the Chinese Commandos came in across the ocean,” explained Paula. She began absently stroking the underside of her right breast. “No ocean, no more invasions. That’s how they see it.”

“Where we pro-ocean people made our big mistake,” said Jerry, “was in trying to get the ocean fluoridated. If we’d gone after a plain salt-water ocean, we might have made it. But for the kids, cavities and all, we decided to go first cabin. Fluoride ocean. And we lost three years running.”

“That why you moved?” asked Hecker. He noticed there were still three people waiting for the brown-robed priest’s autograph.

“That and the threats,” said Paula. She rubbed the alternate breast.

“We began to get a lot of crank calls on the videophone,” said Jerry. “Threats. People would ring up and call us water-lovers, describe how they were going to kidnap our kids and drown them.”

“Don’t forget the perverts,” added Paula.

“Perverts took to calling and exposing themselves on the phone screen,” explained Jerry. “If you’re fast you can flash for about five or ten seconds before the phone company notices and blacks out the call.”

“That takes nerve, in a way,” said Paula. “You can’t use your own home phone because it would be traced. Imagine exposing yourself in a public phone booth while wearing a domino mask.”

“We haven’t heard from one pervert since we moved down to Pedro Loma.”

A white dove came fluttering down over the tile-topped adobe walls of the churchyard and rested for a moment on a dry portion of San Cabrito. “There’s one of their famous swallows,” said a thin man in a blue jumpsuit.

Jerry Dingman caught the man’s arm. “You’re mixed up and thinking of Capistrano. It’s Capistrano the swallows come back to. At San Cabrito it’s seagulls.”

The thin man asked, “You mean people get sentimental about when seagulls come back to San Cabrito?”

“They used to,” said Paula. “Except the seagulls don’t any more, since the ocean is gone.”

“He’s free now,” said Jane, close to Hecker. “I’ll go talk to him.” She glided over the flagstones, touched by bright sun and then deep shadow. Hecker grinned at the Dingmans, touched his shaggy mustache in a casual salute, and drifted after Jane.

Father Caparizzi signed a copy of his book for a bronze-tanned Norwegian woman and blessed the flyleaf with water from the fountain at his back. “Bless you, Mrs. Rasmussen. May this book fill you with happiness.”

“The ink’s running,” pointed out Mrs. Rasmussen. She dabbed at the fresh inscription with her paisley bodice-scarf.

“It’s the Lord’s will, perhaps.” Father Caparizzi had a large round face, his hair was a reddish brown, worn long and upstanding.

“I want my husband to be able to read it,” said Mrs. Rasmussen. “He doesn’t believe I’m here. He thinks I’m over at the Vista Del Mar Retirement Compound having an assignation with a retired napalm consultant.”

“He should know that you are dedicated to good works.”

“Right, Father. If I was going to sleep around, it would be with poor people.”

“Bless you.” After Mrs. Rasmussen gave the inscription a final blot and strode off, Father Caparizzi said to Jane, “Is it to be today?”

“An hour after sundown.” Jane opened her copy of the cookbook.

Father Caparizzi was about to write, stopped, gave a slight gasp. “May the Lord forgive me. I almost wrote your real name here, dear Jane. Too much rests on these humble shoulders, I fear. Two Masses each day, my underground activities, and running a cordon bleu soup kitchen. Yet the Lord seems to give me the strength.” He put his plump fingers on Jane’s. “And recipes.”

“Who?”

“The Lord,” said Father Caparizzi. “I know you don’t believe. Yet I assure you the Lord has appeared to me on several occasions and provided me with recipes for my books. That’s His bouillabaisse on page twenty-three.”

Jane smiled. “What about the cars?”

“For the roadblock? Yes, all here in the wine warehouse off there. You will be careful to set up the block a goodly distance from here? Yes, I’m sure you will. As I wrote you in my last code message, dear Jane, there are five vehicles. None can be traced. Each was brought in separately and under cover of night. One is a quite handsome pre-invasion Chevy. Oh, and one, I neglected to mention before, is shaped like a hotdog.”

“A hotdog?”

“Belonged to a meatpacker who used it for promotional purposes before he went bankrupt. I couldn’t resist it, because of the food angle.”

“As long as it blocks off ground pursuit,” said Jane.

“What of the Police Corps hoppers?”

“Dad and his group are taking those out of action.”

Father Caparizzi widened his eyes and said to Hecker, “You are a new recruit to Jess Kendry’s cause.”

“Jane Kendry’s,” said Hecker.

The Police Corps hoppers skimmed the silver lamppole tops, bleating harshly and flashing red. In the doorway of the darkened shrine-warehouse, Jane cried out, “All three, Jim. What happened?”

“Easy now,” Hecker told her. There were fifteen of them in the warehouse, ready with the cars to block the road after Hash Sontag and his group passed on their retreat from the raided hospital.

The P.C. Hoppers were still about six blocks distant. Directly below the flickering hoppers were two olive-colored sand trucks. The truck in the lead was Hash Sontag’s. He was doing seventy-five, ignoring the amplified warnings from the police ships. Three blocks short of the Shrine of San Cabrito, Hash swung his truck hard to the left. The second truck followed, and the pair went bucketing off Vista Del Mar Road and over gravel and turf and onto a thin strip of synthetic beach.

“He’s leading them away from us,” said Jane. She tapped Hecker’s arm, signaled to the rest of the guerrillas in the warehouse. “Cut the engines, get those cars back under the tarps and straw. Then scatter on foot. Make for the hills beyond here, the woods.”

As the figures in the wine-smelling warehouse quickly went about following Jane’s orders, Hecker said to her, “Wait and I’ll go try to talk to the Police Corps men. Maybe I can do something to help Hash if they catch him. While they’re interrogating him.”

“They won’t question him.” Jane scanned the interior of the warehouse, then walked quietly from the doorway, along the dark street by the adobe walls.

“Sure they will if he doesn’t get away.” Hecker caught up with her, checked back over his shoulder.

An explosion slammed the night, and then flames bounced up, down on the synthetic sand where Hash had gone. Three more explosions came. Finally a new gusher of firs. The P.C. hoppers ceased their flashing, their amplified warnings, and dropped down into the fading fire, hovering a safe distance from the burning trucks.

“No survivors,” said Jane. “Come on. We can use Tower Hill Road and come out above 101 and near the woods.”

Hecker didn’t move. The adobe wall he rested his palm against was still holding the warmth of the daytime. “They’re,” he said, “not supposed to do that. What just happened to Hash, the others. There are ways of stopping people without that.”

Jane continued on, not turning back. “You shouldn’t have come this far outside.”

A glass Mexican hit the flowered tiles three yards in front of Jane and exploded into a brittle confetti. They were nearing the crest of Tower Hill Road and passing a bright complex of restaurants. ”

“You okay?” Hecker put his knubbly hand on her slim arm.

“Yes.” She was looking up at the balcony of the nearest restaurant. A sign in man-size neon letters said MEXI-EATS VILLAGE! There were two glass vaqueros still on the balcony, one flashing orange, the other green. Hopping between them was Milo Kendry. He was being chased by Rollo, who swung a beautiful Spanish guitar. “They never got as far as the Police Corps hut,” said Jane.

Through the black, grilled windows of the lower floor of the Mexi-Eats cafe, a rich orange light showed. A piano was being played inside, and while Jane brushed flecks of colored glass from herself a song began to be sung.

Oh, God don’t never change,

He always will be God [sang Jess Kendry],

God in the middle of the ocean,

God in the middle of the sea,

By the help of the Great Creator,

Truly been a God to me.

“That’s fine,” said Jane. She took one of Hecker’s big bony hands and squeezed it with both of hers. “It’s been getting worse, Jim. Once, well, he’s different now. Sometimes. I think after all, I’d like to come along with you for a while. We’ll, well, look for Gadget Man together. Would that be okay?”

Hecker said it would. Then, “What about Jess and the others in there? P.C. may search the whole town tonight.”

“They can take care of themselves.” Jane started running. Over the top of the hill. Across the dark, ruined highway. She stepped in among the trees, masked by darkness.

CHAPTER 7

The pale Negro girl tilted back slightly in the straight, green wooden chair and took another shot at the robot. The air-rifle pellet pinged against the robot’s humanoid head. “Oh, golly,” said the android. “I wish you’d stop pestering me, Juanita.”

The girl grinned close-mouthed, made her eyes go wide. She was frail and pretty, wearing a tan pullover and pegged tan trousers, a cowboy-style straw hat on her long hair. When she noticed that Hecker and Jane Kendry had stopped on the narrow roadway and were watching her, she stood, blew imaginary smoke from the air-rifle barrel, and set it aside.

“I guess they’re merely being playful,” said Jane. She nodded at the dark girl and the blond android in the bright early morning field of grass.

“Didn’t realize it was an andy when we came over the rise,” said Hecker. “If it’s her andy, I guess she can shoot at it.”

“Let’s move on,” said Jane. “I know some people on a beach about ten miles down from here. They’ll loan us some kind of transportation.”

The Negro girl was two hundred feet from them, under the single apple tree in the wide field. Next to her stood a faded red barn. She snatched off her cowboy hat and waved it at them. “Hey,” she called, “you want to be interviewed?”

Hecker gave a negative shake of his head. He was about to start walking again along the warm morning road when a chubby man ran out of the barn.

“Hey, Jim.” The man was big, with two chins and knobs of fat at his wrists. “Wait up.”

Jane asked, poised to move on, “Who is he?”

Hecker said, “He’s okay. A guy who used to work with me in the Social Wing. With the Welfare Office now.”

“I’ll be Anne McRae anyhow,” Jane told him. “When you introduce me.”

Hecker grinned at her. “Your mother’s maiden name.”

“That’s right. You know all my files by heart.”

The plump man arrived puffing, stayed on his side of the field’s raw wood fence. “Jim, hello.” He reached a fat hand over the top rail. “You on official business?”

“Vacation,” said Hecker. “We had some land-car trouble.”

“What sort?”

“Somebody swiped it. We’re hiking to the next big town to rent one,” said Hecker. “Robb-Collins, this is Anne McRae.”

“Hi, Anne,” said Robb-Collins. “Look, I can provide you with a ride as far as Motel City. I’m giving a lecture there this noon.” He pointed a big thumb at the red barn. “Our bus is in there.”

“We’d as soon walk,” said Jane. “But thanks.”

“No, that’s unheard of,” said Robb-Collins. “Motel City is the nearest town of any size, and a good ten miles from here at least. It would be unconscionable to allow anyone to walk that distance. Come on, Jim, tell her I’m really sensitive to people’s feelings.”

“He’s got a lot of empathy,” said Hecker.

“Thinking of you doing all that walking would give me little pains in my chest and right around here,” explained Robb-Collins, tracing an arc on his stomach. “That’s why I got out of Welfare Audit, Jim. I kept developing a different pain for each type of hardship case I handled. Malnutrition hurt up here in these bones around the eyes. Worm cases gave me a twinge on this side here. Desertion, which was a rough one hit me way down here. One day I covered eighteen desertion cases down in the New Watts Sector, and I had to go home and throw up. I quit, and I’m in a much better job.”

“What is it?”

“Hadn’t you heard? I’m the Riot Commission.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yes. Well, me and Dr. Wiggs and our andy, Rex. You remember when the Junta, last month, promised to set up a Riot Commission. I’m what they did. We have a big bus full of research equipment, and we drive up and down the countryside, the safe parts, and interview people and gather statistics. It’s great. Especially when the weather is good, like today.”

“Why is Dr. Wiggs shooting at Rex with the air rifle?” asked Jane.

Under the apple tree the frail Negro girl had put her cowboy hat back on. The air rifle was at her shoulder once more.

“Darn you,” said Rex. “I’m not kidding, Juanita. You just stop that.”

Robb-Collins said, “She thinks he’s a fag. Brilliant girl, one of the best Motivational Therapists I’ve ever run into. Met her when I transferred into Violence Backgrounding after I fled Welfare Audit. She’s quirky, is the problem. Anybody she suspects of being at all gay she gets feisty about. So far none of this has held back our research.”

Another pellet pinged on Rex. “I’m just going to tell Bucky,” promised the android. “Then you’ll be really sorry.”

“Come on over,” said Robb-Collins to Hecker and Jane. “We’re pulling out any second. Stopped at this way station for a coffee break and a stretch.”

“We’ll join you in a minute.” When the plump man had gone bouncing back toward the old barn, Hecker said, “We can trust him, Jane. We can ride as far as Motel City, and from there find your friends on the beach.”

Jane put one slender hand against her throat. “I don’t know.”

“We’ve come a good twenty miles since last night. We might as well ride for a while. Not taking Bucky up on his offer would look suspicious. If not to him, to the girl.”

“Okay. For your sake. I’m not tired. It takes more than what we’ve been doing to wear me down. Didn’t it say that about me in my file?”

Hecker frowned for an instant. Then he grinned, and his shaggy mustache uptilted. “Our bus is waiting,” he said and swung up and over the fence.

CHAPTER 8

“Men have no balls any more,” said Dr. Juanita Wiggs. “That’s what’s causing the riots.” She leaned back on her elbows, her slim back against the bus’s biggest computer.

“Is this what your Riot Commission has decided?” asked Jane, hunkered in a vinyl deck-chair across from the computer.

“Riot Commission isn’t going to find out nothing,” said the Negro girl. “Got men running it, men financing it. They’re all emasculated. Can’t even manufacture a robot who ain’t queer.”

“Nobody’d have you,” said Rex-06896, who was driving the Riot Commission bus. “You’re such a darned old nag. That’s why you hate men.”

“As a girl I used to read of rich matrons jiving with their chauffeurs,” said Juanita Wiggs. “Some fun that must have been. Now I got me a chauffeur, and he’s a fairy appliance.”

“Don’t you really have anything on the riots?” asked Hecker. He was at one of the porthole-style windows.

“Nothing but a lot of conflicting opinions,” said Dr. Wiggs. She took her floppy cowboy hat off with a circular gesture. “Nobody we interviewed so far admits to nothing. `Something came over me,’ they say. `I had an uncontrollable impulse to destroy.’ Or maybe `A voice commanded me to burn down the Veterans of the Chinese Invasion hall.’ Jive like that.”

“You don’t accept any of it?”

The black girl half closed one eye and grinned a close-mouthed grin at Hecker. “That’s a handsome mustache. Makes you almost manly. No, I don’t believe in voices and impulses. I believe in people get mad and they do things. You’re in the Social Wing and get around some. Aren’t you mad?”

“Not about the same things as the people in the good parts of the Republic of Southern California.”

“Juanita,” warned Rex over his shoulder, “you better stop making cracks about the Junta.”

“I never said nothing.”

The tan door leading to the rear section of the bus opened, and Bucky Robb-Collins came back into the main room. “I have to change clothes three times a day, Jim. Sorry I took so long. Enjoying the ride so far?”

“Pleasant view.” Hecker nodded at the rolling hills, the green fields and distant pines. “A secured area.”

“The Army of the Republic of Southern California has it in hand,” said Robb-Collins. “You shouldn’t harass Jim, Juanita. His folks started doing helpful things here in the Republic years back. Didn’t they, Jim?”

Hecker frowned. “You can hear what we say from the back room?”

“Mike picks it all up, yes.”

“That’s Bucky’s fat hobby, eavesdropping.” Dr. Wiggs let herself drop into an empty vinyl chair. “This whole bus gives him a thrill. He’s practically a gadget freak. Why, he loves this riot job. Gets to play with lots of surveillance and interrogation equipment.”

“I don’t know what kind of therapy you think you’re practicing, Juanita. It isn’t working with me, I can tell you.”

“She’s a natural-born nag.” Rex punched two steering-panel buttons, and the bus sped off the road and into a vast cyclone-fenced parking lot. “Motel City.”

When they were all out on the gray-topped lot, Robb-Collins suggested quietly to Hecker, “Have lunch here, Jim. After I make my lecture I’ll ditch my two associates and join you and Jane.”

Hecker caught the fat man’s arm and guided him a few cars away. “Jane, you said?”

“I know who she is, Jim. I’ve seen her files in the line of my work. It’s okay. I know you Social Wing officers can take action on your own, don’t have to cooperate completely with the R.S.C.A. or the Police Corps.” Robb-Collins glanced at Dr. Wiggs, who was beckoning to him impatiently. “I’ve found out something you ought to know, Jim. Ought to know before you go on any further.”

“What?”

“Not now. Juanita is getting jumpy. Look, I’ve taken the liberty of calling ahead from our bus phone. I’ve made a reservation for lunch at one of the motel restaurants.”

“No, Bucky. We should move on.”

“What I have to tell you is serious,” insisted Robb-Collins. “There are fifty-seven motels here and fifty-seven restaurants that go with them. The place I’ll meet you is built around a mountain-lodge theme and called The Mayerling. I’ll hit there about two. You and Jane relax until then. What I have to say will save you both a lot of future trouble, Jim.”

“You could have told me in the time you’ve taken to give directions.”

“Two, then.” He punched Hecker’s shoulder with a lumpy fist and trotted off to join Dr. Wiggs, who was now chasing Rex through a hopper section of the parking lots.

***

The lama in the green robe said, “Om mani pad-me hom.”

“Beg pardon?” said Hecker as he and Jane crossed the metal fretwork bridge into Motel City.

The lama was resting with his arms folded on the handlebars of a parked bicycle. “It’s Oriental talk,” he explained. “That’s us up there next to Fort Apache. The Monastery. I’m drumming up trade.”

Spreading out before Hecker and Jane were rows of motels. Each covered three acres and had its own theme. The Monastery was built to resemble a Tibetan stronghold. Fort Apache was a nineteenth-century cavalry stronghold, fronted with sand and a sprawled Indian.

“We’re only here for lunch,” Hecker told the lama.

“Reluctantly,” added Jane. She stepped ahead and bent to study the lama’s bike. “English, isn’t it?”

“You remember England?” The lama was old and faded under his yellow make-up. “Before it merged with Europe?”

“I know English bicycles.” A pleased smile touched Jane’s face. She tilted her head slightly, said, “I used to visit the Wheelan Studios sometimes, where they used to make motion pictures. Long after it had collapsed, this was. I liked to go there and be by myself. They’d left a whole half a warehouse full of bikes, you know, and somehow the place hadn’t been looted much. Bikes a,-d land cars of all kinds. I’d ride the bikes, and I had an English one which was my particular favorite.” She looked from the bike to the old man in the lama suit and then around at the vista of motels. “The Wheelan Studios, their sets were more convincing than this.”

“Yes, I know,” said the old lama. “Still, we do a good business here, year “round. Our place we stress the Tibet idea, mysteries of the East. Not much about the Chinese angle. You’d be surprised to learn that lots of people in the Republic still hold a grudge against the Chinese because of the Commandos. I say, a man is what he is, and just because he invades your country once upon a time, you shouldn’t carry hate around in your heart.” He grinned at Jane. “That’s sort of an Oriental notion. Some of this rubs off on me.”

“We’re looking for The Mayerling,” said Hecker.

“You’ll need luggage. The place is run by a religious group from Santa Monica.”

“We’re only here for lunch, remember?”

“Right you are. Well, Mayerling is in the center of the layout here. Best way to go is up this way and then left at Yucatan. Go through Sherwood Forest and right when you pass King Solomon’s Mines. Watch out for those Robin Hood guys, by the way. They’re a little bit gay, if you ask me.”

While they were walking by the pyramids and dripping jungle foliage of Yucatan, Jane asked, “What did your friend mean about your parents?”

“Bucky is a compulsive dossier-reader.”

A guest van stopped in front of the Yucatan Motel, and a bellhop, dressed as an archaeologist, rushed to meet the arriving guests.

“I know,” said Jane. “Are they in the Social Wing some way, too?”

“Both dead,” said Hecker.

They continued on into a small shade-spotted forest of oaks and synthetic redwoods. “Well, at least the Army didn’t kill them.”

Hecker said, “Only one of them.”

Jane stopped. “How could you have been cleared for the Security Wing, cleared by the Police Corps and the Junta, with something like that on your record?”

“It’s not on my record,” said Hecker. “Not everything in my file is exactly true. Now, let’s quit on this.”

Jane lifted one shoulder. “I always ask a lot of questions when I’m uneasy.” She smiled at him, the same kind of pleased smile she’d given the old lama with the bicycle. “Okay.” She turned and resumed the trail, striding straight.

Hecker followed. They didn’t see any of Robin Hood’s men, though there was a green leotard hanging on a low branch off to their left as they emerged from Sherwood Forest.

Jane paused in front of the Gothic Motel, noticing the girl in the long white dress screaming on the second-floor balcony of the turreted country house that was the motel building. The girl held a candelabra. On the wide gray front porch the desk clerk was reaching under his cloak for a packet of snuff.

“How far to Mayerling?” called Hecker.

The man blinked and made the sign of the cross. “Shun that place, sir.” He ducked back inside the shuttered motel.

“Authentic,” said Jane. “I remember finding a box of Gothic novels in an abandoned town we hid in when I was fifteen. The loveliest quiet town out in the valley. All trees and orchards, birds. I sat out in the woods and read forty-three Gothic novels all that fall.” She put her hands about eight inches apart, then pointed a finger at the now empty balcony. “All these books were small and had that girl on the cover. I loved them. I wanted to meet a sinister, dark man so badly. For way into the next year.”

They commenced walking again. “Plenty around.”

“Not romantic,” said the girl. “They have to be tall and handsome. I kept meeting fat, puffy ones like your friend Bucky.”

“Easy now. Bucky can be trusted.”

“Perhaps.”

Mark Twain waved his black cigar at them from the porch of the Stormfield Motel. Around the next corner it seemed to be snowing, the snow rising up from the ground and getting as high as the tops of the thick, frosty pines. Set in among gradually rising hillocks were rustic cottages and a larger chalet with MAYERLING in quiet neon script over its wide wooden door. “Let’s have an actual lunch,” suggested Hecker. “Not discussing Bucky until he shows up. Okay?”

Jane was moving more slowly. Finally, she said, “Okay, agreed.”

The wood door of the Mayerling inn snapped open, and a man came out and fell down the stairs. He stopped in a snowdrift. A middle-sized, and middle-aged, man who looked like a very affable but very tired nine-year-old boy. Sitting up, he showed them a small stamped package. “Going to the mailbox with this.” He stood, and the gold keys on the chain around his neck clanked and clattered. “Welcome to The Mayerling. I’m your host, Tuveson.” He sprinted to a pine tree at the corner, which held a blue and gold letterbox. On the way back from posting the package, he fell over into the snow again. Back at the foot of the stairs, he said, “You must be James Xavier Hecker and Anne McRae. Right? Certainly. I’m Tuveson. Your host. Also the chef. Also the wine steward. Obviously. Know what I dropped in the mailbox? Probably not. A video tape of myself. I make them here on the premises. You wouldn’t have guessed? Hardly likely. This one is going to the Riot Commission. “Let’s get to the bottom of this unholy mess and find the root cause of the problem plaguing the Republic of Southern California. Enough screwing around. Signed, a friend.” I like to keep my anonymity.”

“Don’t they recognize your face?” Jane asked him.

Tuveson led them up the steps and opened the door of the inn. “I wear disguises. Naturally. A technique I stumbled onto back when I went in for nasty videophone calls. I was a dirty-phone-call freak for a couple years after I got out of college. I feared for a time they’d perfect this voice-print idea, but our society never got over the collapse of the United States sufficiently to follow up on something fancy like that.”

They walked a long pine-paneled hall and entered a large circular dining-room that gave a view of snow forests and simulated mountaintops. There were four-dozen white-clothed tables in the room. All empty. “We seem to have avoided the rush,” said Jane.

“Do you realize how embarrassing this is to me? Possibly not.” Tuveson bumped against the nearest table. “Ours is not, I’ll have to admit, the most popular of the sixty-two motels here.”

“I thought,” said Jane, “it was fifty-seven.”

“Well, if you’re going to start something like that, I’m through.” Tuveson fell over. Got up and stalked out by way of the swing doors to the kitchen.

“How about a table by the fireplace?” asked Hecker.

“Want to stay?”

“We have over an hour until Bucky gets here.”

From out of the kitchen returned Tuveson, an ice bucket over his left arm. “Have you noticed I’m changeable? Not yet perhaps. You will. Forgive me for losing my temper. I’ll be frank. One reason nobody dines here is my changeable temperament. It’s an occupational hazard. Our wine cellar is much too good. Look at this, for instance. A rare vintage champagne. Taylor’s New York champagne from 1975. A good year. There was still a United States then. You wouldn’t remember. You’ve heard of New York, though? I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and so on. Sit down, won’t you?” Tuveson stumbled once righted himself, got the ice bucket set up on a three-legged stand next to their table. “This calls for a better class of glassware. Excuse me, won’t you? Obviously, you will.” He went again into the kitchen.

“Eighteen-ninety,” said Jane. Through the large window a vast and intricate wooden house could be seen rising up beyond the trees and false snow. Jane leaned far to the right. “Yes, and they’ve got a motel called Nineteen Hundred next to it. All the decades from eighteen-ninety to today. Around in a circle.”

“That must… ” began Hecker. He stopped, feeling an artificial cold coming from across the empty dining-room.

Slowly and stiffly, a long, thin man was coming through a now open window. His face was long and regretful, the exact indoor shade as his moderately gray, seamless suit. He held an alloy pistol in his narrow hand. Keeping it trained on Hecker and Jane, he stepped completely over the sill and in. “I’m pleased to have located you once again.” His smile was more a faint sound than a physical expression.

“Second Lieutenant Same,” said Hecker.

Tuveson returned, with four champagne glasses on a silver tray.

CHAPTER 9

“I would like,” insisted Same in his even, slightly taut voice, “you to turn Jane Kendry over to me, Sergeant Hecker.”

“No.” Hecker got to his feet and placed himself in front of Jane.

“No, sir, you mean. I am your superior officer, Sergeant Hecker.”

“Not actually. Since Manipulation Council is autonomous and not part of the Police Corps, Same.”

Moving closer, gesturing with his alloy pistol, Second Lieutenant Same said, “M.C. automatically outranks everyone, Sergeant. Stand aside. I’m taking this girl into custody.”

“You have to have some kind of authorization.” Hecker saw that Tuveson was nearing their table.

“I am my own authorization. Jane Kendry is now officially ; a prisoner of the Republic of Southern California Manipulation Council.”

“Let me,” suggested Hecker, “call in to the Social Wing and report your request.”

“Unnecessary,” said the sad, thin second lieutenant. “Give up the girl now, Sergeant Hecker. M.C. will mail you a receipt.”

Hecker bent down as Tuveson stumbled by. Using his right shoulder, Hecker boosted the waiter and spun him into the advancing Same. The tray clanged against Second Lieutenant Same’s thin jaw. One of the bright champagne glasses cupped Same’s ear for an instant, then fell and smashed on the floor. “Retreat,” Hecker told Jane.

She was already up, her slender hands lifting the ice bucket. She took three steps ahead, swung the bucket. The New York champagne fell, ice cubes trailed out, and the metal bucket hit the still off-balance Same hard under his chin. As Second Lieutenant Same clunked to his knees, Jane bent his gun arm over her thigh and wrenched his pistol away. She smashed him across the temple with it, and he dropped sideways, then slammed down and out.

“Another celebration that’s getting out of hand,” said Tuveson. “No wonder customers shun us. Too much violence. Even with such a nice stock of wines.”

“For a few minutes,” Jane ordered him, “be quiet.”

“Why don’t you lock me in the wine cellar?”

“Lock yourself. Get going.”

Tuveson hurried, stumbling, off.

“Well?” Jane asked Hecker.

“Let’s continue,” he replied.

“You can get off here.” Jane’s pretty face was slightly flushed. “Tell Same I used a weapon to make you stick with me.”

“We’re looking for Gadget Man,” said Hecker. “We’ll find him. Out the window. Let’s go.”

Jane ran to the window that showed the circle of decade motels and opened it wide. “Won’t the Social Wing disapprove of your leaving an M.C. man flat on his ass in Motel City?”

“Once I finish my job,” Hecker said, “I’ll file a report on Same. Despite what you think, S.W. doesn’t let stuff like he’s been trying go unquestioned.” He waited until she’d jumped out into the false snow, followed.

“Your friend,” said Jane, running toward 1900, “Bucky must have called in to Manipulation Council.”

Hecker said, “Yes, that occurred to me. Same found us fairly easy.”

In a gingerbread garage next to the registration gazebo of the 1900 Motel, a four-and-a-half-foot-tall man was loading plyo sacks of dirty laundry into an antique electric automobile. “They won’t let us have a laundry room, no,” the man said when he noticed them in the garage. “Say it’s an anachronism. Every day I’ve got to haul all the dirty linen over to Nineteen-sixty to wash. Kee-rist.”

“We’d like,” said Hecker, “to borrow your car.”

“Oh? Kee-rist, don’t ask for it now. Wait until I take this stuff to the Day-‘N-‘Nite Laundromat, huh? Otherwise, I’ll have to carry it all by hand to Nineteen-twenty, where they’ve got a washing machine and a clothesline.”

Jane made a pie-size circle in the air with the pistol. “We need a car right now. The keys.”

The small man dropped the sack of stained sheets and fished a ring of keys from his vest pocket. “Big one in the middle. Why’re you swiping this heirloom anyhow?”

“For a getaway.” Hecker helped Jane into the passenger seat.

“Oh? That’s sort of exciting,” said the small man. “That’s a break in the routine. Usually it’s mostly laundry and anachronisms around here.”

Hecker swung into the driver’s seat, figured out how to get the ancient land car going. They drove away from l900, and in five minutes were free of Motel City and on a back highway heading in the direction of Santa Monica.

Hecker shouldered the car a few feet further into the forest of dark pines. “No sign of air surveillance yet, and it’s been an hour.”

“Maybe,” said Jane, her back against a tree bole, “Second Lieutenant Same doesn’t want the Police Corps in on the kill.”

“He doesn’t want to kill you, Jane, or anyone.”

“I keep forgetting,” the slender girl said. “We’re only about twenty miles from Santa Monica, Jim. We can hike on these back roads until sundown, and then borrow transportation for the rest of the way to Westlake’s dance pavilion.”

They’d walked a half mile on a dirt road when someone called, “Well, what a pleasant surprise. Hi, folks.”

Up a hillside some thirty yards was a cleared space in the woods. A shield-shaped sign designated it as R.S.C. Free Roadside Park. Seated at one of the three simulated redwood tables were Jerry and Paula Dingman, the couple who’d been at the shrine of San Cabrito. “Hello,” called Hecker.

“Hiking?” asked Paula. She was wearing white shorts.

“Had some car trouble,” Hecker told the smiling couple.

“It’s recurrent,” said Jane.

“We gave up on land cars,” said Jerry Dingman, who was in a one-piece tanksuit-style hiking costume. “They’re unsafe. Slipshod, too. We never could get one where the stereo worked right. Ours would always play the tapes backwards. We have a family hopper now.”

“Only two crashes in four hundred air hours.” Paula had a small circle of insect bites next to her left nipple, and she was absently rubbing at the spot.

“Come on up and join us for a glass of proteinade or an ale,” invited Jerry.

“Well,” said Hecker.

“They’re okay,” said Jane quietly to him.

“How do you know? After Bucky.”

“I get hunches. Like I did with you. Their suburbs, remember, is Pedro Loma. About two miles above Santa Monica. We’ll get a ride with them.”

“Okay,” said Hecker and climbed up the hillside. “You folks heading our way? Towards Santa Monica? Looks like our land car will be in the shop for a week, and we’re stuck.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” said Jerry Dingman. “This is the last lap on our vacation. We’ll give you a lift. Paula and I should be pulling up camp in, oh, roughly, half an hour.”

“As far as the outskirts of Santa Monica,” said Jane, “would be fine.”

“We only have to make one stop first,” said Paula.

“That’s right,” said her blond husband. “At a pot-luck supper in the Rancho Dos Passos suburb. About fifteen miles from here.”

“We wouldn’t do it, since we’re pretty worn out, as you might imagine, except it’s for a fund-raising thing.”

“For a good cause,” said Jerry.

“It’s to stop some conservatives from ousting a liberal teaching machine,” said Paula.

CHAPTER 10

A half hour before the riot, Hecker was being told about the suburb of Rancho Los Passos by a retired nerve-gas publicity man. Rancho Dos Passos was grassy hills, low L-and T-shaped houses of tinted glass and white metal. From the red-tile patio of the publicist’s home, Hecker could look clear through the house and see the forest of pines sloping away across the road.

“Once I realized,” Bryson Whorf was saying, “the root source of my unease, I was able, fortunately, to do something. You see, I realized I was trying to sell a product I didn’t really believe in. Making, you see, for tension. I was getting these little pains all in through here.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.” Hecker selected a nearbeef-on-soy sandwich from the buffet table.

“For me, you see, the moment of truth came in a hovercraft. An odd place for an insight, but nevertheless, there it was. Insights are like orgasms. You can’t always control them or tell where you’re likely to have them. We were up there testing a new nerve gas on some rioting farm labor in the Fresno Sector, and I suddenly said to myself, “Bry, this is a dirty business. You ought to quit.” I did, soon as we landed.” Whorf was a lean, shaggy man, with a large, sharp face. He poked his finger into various parts of himself as he talked. “Now I support liberal causes and help the arts.”

“Jane returned to Hecker’s side, touched him. “How so?” she asked their host.

@. Whorf poked himself in the navel. “If you have time later, I can show you around our community. We’ll have to go by land car, since I never go up in a hopper or any aircraft any more.”

“Why is that?” asked Jane.

“Tell us,” put in Hecker, “about local art.”

“In answer to your question, Miss McRae, I was telling Mr. Hecker here that I haven’t always been a liberal and a champion of the underdog,” explained Whorf. “Once I was a public relations man for the nerve-gas industry.”

“Oh,” said Jane. She wandered away to another part of the moderately crowded patio.

“A lot of people still react that way,” said Whorf. “But you see, the past is over. Once I dropped nerve gas on braceros and wrote, produced, and directed prize-winning documentaries for the industry. Now I help our Rancho Dos Passos community finance things like that beautiful all-night tennis court down the road. I’ve invested heavily, too, in the Cinema Hut which provides a growing and avid segment of our neighbors with film classics. Southern California, you see, was once the capital of the motion-picture industry. If you two are going to be here tomorrow, you won’t want to miss the start of our John Agar Film Festival. A wonderful minor artist from the nineteen-fifties and -sixties. Tonight there’s a panel discussion on Porky Pig.”

“We’ll have to miss both events.” Hecker grinned without disturbing his mustache and went toward Jane.

The slim girl had just taken a gibson from a tray and was listening, with three other guests, to the controversial teaching machine.

“Ach,” said the machine, which was human in shape but painted an olive-drab shade, “der trouble is dat der school is too conservative yet for zum uff mine notions. Yah?”

“Now, Hans,” argued a middle-sized and balding young man, “don’t try to rake that up again, because it simply is not so. The Everyman Condominium School here in Rancho Dos Passos is one of the most liberal in the whole Republic of Southern California.”

“Zo? Dot ain’t saying much maybe.”

A plump woman in a silicone-treated paper dress said, “Hans is right, Dr. Purrletsky. You’re deluded because you’re the principal of Everyman. I think your admissions policy is dreadful, narrow.”

“Yah, yah,” said the teaching machine.

“For instance,” said the plump woman, “when our Fairplay for Commandos Committee petitioned you to allow Chinese Commandos to attend Everyman, you balked, refused, Dr. Purrletsky.”

“Anna-Maria,” said the Everyman president, “the City Council had a valid objection. Nobody has seen a Chinese Commando for years. They’d be pretty old if one did show up in Rancho Dos Passos.”

“You’re trying to mix morality with logic again,” said Anna-Maria. “I think the reputation of Everyman would have gone up if you’d gone on record as being in favor of a fair deal for Chinese invasion veterans.”

Purrletsky shook his head. “I didn’t want to annoy the Junta over something so abstract and, as was decided by a 5-to-1 vote, trivial.”

“Der Junta,” said Hans. “Dose guys ought to be taken out und shot. Yah?”

“It’s that kind of talk that got you in trouble, Hans,” warned Purrletsky.

“Dot’s right. Because I figured out how to program mineself. Yah?”

“What’s so fair about your admissions policy anyway?” demanded Anna-Maria.

“Well, for a junior college I think we’re quite liberal,” said the Everyman head. “We started off in our first year admitting students no matter what their race or creed. Then we voted that high-school grades were not important, and shortly thereafter to even allow kids in to Everyman who hadn’t made it through high school. Next we liberalized our admissions further to allow kids who hadn’t even gone to high school to enter Everyman. We next ruled, under pressure, that age was not a factor in admissions. We now admit any kid over six who wants to come, and the vice-president of the sophomore class is a ninety-six-year-old Hindu. We now even have eleven toddlers in frosh English, and last semester a one-legged grandmother captained the football team. What’s all that if not fair?”

“No Chinese Commandos,” said Anna-Maria. “And, furthermore, not one course giving students the Chinese Commando side of the invasion.”

“You’ve got me there, admitted Dr. Purrletsky. “I tried to have the Chinese Commando cause treated more fairly in our Collapse of America course. I’m afraid, though, if I insist too strongly the Junta will step in.”

Anna-Maria said, “I hear that at Pomona Everybody’s College they teach Chinese Commando philosophy and tactics in Collapse of America 2A.”

“They did until Manipulation Council shot the instructor,” said Dr. Purrletsky.

“Dot’s only a rumor,” said Hans the teaching machine. “I tink it vas just vun of der students fooling arount.”

“This was a sophomore class, Hans, and kids aren’t allowed to go armed to class until their junior year. That’s the rule at Pomona.”

“Vell, I tell you something. Maybe I stop messing around mit you humans und get mine own people behind me.”

“Meaning who?”

“Der machines, who else?” Hans raised a mechanical fist. “Maybe I march on der Junta capital, right in Sam Yorty Square, mit a few hundred servomechanisms und androids. Dose Junta guys vould tink tvice if dey see me strutting down Spring Street mit two hundred angry refrigerators marching behind me. Yah?”

“What about the guerrillas?” asked Jane, setting her empty glass on the edge of a coppered barbecuing unit.

“Vot?”

“Why don’t any of you feel concerned about the guerrilla army, about the people who are really doing something?”

“We’d better not go into that topic, miss,” said Purrletsky. “Some subjects are, after all, too touchy to chat about right out in the open.”

“Oh, bullshit,” said Jane.

“Easy,” said Hecker. He took her hand, but she jerked free.

Anna-Maria suddenly grabbed the barbecuing cart, slammed on its fire buttons with her fist. “She’s right. Everybody talks too much in this dumb town.” She hefted the heavy machine up and threw it smack into a glass wall. Bryson Whorf was down on his knees clawing up patio tiles. When he clutched up an armful he jumped into his next-door neighbor’s yard and started tossing. The other guests, except for the Dingmans, who stood looking upset, began to grow violent. Jane ran into the Whorf house and ripped down draperies.

Hans looked at Hecker. “Mine Gott, it’s here. Der riot fever.”

Hecker started after Jane. Dr. Purrletsky tackled him just short of the house, punched him in the side. “What a lousy-looking mustache that is

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10