Dark Future

Ghost Dancers

Brian Craig

Published by GW Books

Copyright © 1991 Games Workshop

ISBN: 1–872372–34–1

Version: 1.0

Prologue: A Boy and His Snake

As soon as he saw the dust on the horizon, the Kid ran for his binoculars. It was the kind of cloud kicked up by a fair-sized automobile, but it was way off the road, where no vehicle ought to be. Not that you could really tell the difference between the road and the desert any more—the land hereabouts was pretty flat, and baked so hard it was more like the concrete plazas in San Antone than real dirt.

When he first got the cheaters focused the limo was still a black dot, but the Kid knew it was a slug; he could feel it in his bones. Tourists never came out here, and he could think of only one reason why anyone would be heading straight as an arrow for his ace-in-the-hole hideaway.

They were coming after him.

He didn’t pause to consider the logical implications of that conclusion; in the Kid’s world, paranoia had survival value because anyone who stopped to consider alternative possibilities often ended up dead before reaching a confident conclusion.

Nor did he pause to wonder how the opposition had managed to discover the location of one of his best hideaways. He naturally made it a point of principle never to give his addresses to anyone, so that his dearest friends need not suffer the pangs of temptation every time GenTech raised the price on his head. While they couldn’t rat on him he wouldn’t ever have to blow them away; it was the only way that a guy could hang on to his friends once he was into the five-figure bracket. But the Kid was too canny to think that keeping his mouth shut was adequate protection against being located. He had heard some very hairy rumours about what the skyball snoopers could do nowadays, and he had always known that if and when the day came when GenTech wanted him badly enough to spend the money, they could find him.

He hadn’t expected that day to come so soon, but he was ready for it. He ran to stock his bike with as much as he could carry, and made a half-hearted attempt to stash some of his spare supplies in holes that wouldn’t be easy to locate. Then he gave his thoughts entirely to the matter of arms and armour.

Being found was by no means the end of the line—it was just the beginning of the hunt. The enemy still had to take him, and he had done his best to make sure that they couldn’t do it with their first strike. The Kid’s hideaways were not without their defences—both natural and technological.

The mesa was the only piece of high ground for twenty miles, and it took a lot of skill to get a bike up the long gully. There was no way up for four-wheelers—none at all. Pedestrians could climb up, of course, but the tabletop was craggy and strewn with boulders. The Kid knew every nook and cranny.

He considered himself lucky because the slug was heading out from the direction of San Antone. He’d always figured that as the most likely approach, and he’d set up his pride and joy to point that way. The missiles it launched weren’t very big, but they were top-notch target seekers—once aimed, they didn’t miss, and it took a clever counterstriker to get in their way. Whatever the slug was carrying, it wasn’t likely to have a counterstriker.

The weapon had its downside too; once he’d used it, his cover was blown and he’d have to find a new ace-in-the-hole—but there was a lot of desert between here and the Sierra Madre, and the Kid had been forced to move house before. When he judged that his spare time had run out he ran to the launcher and started lining it up.

It took half a minute to get the slug in the crosshairs of the sightscope, by which time the dot was large enough to be identified. It was a corporation car, but not exactly a war-wagon. It was defensively armoured, but its machine-guns were deterrent-quality rather than real heavy metal; nor was it big enough to carry more than four mercy boys. It had big wheels with very heavy tyres—which was why it didn’t give a damn whether it had a road to ride on or not—but it sure as hell wasn’t the kind of hardware which the Kid would have sent out to chase down an outlaw sharpshooter.

Then he saw the bird.

He would have seen it earlier but for the dust which the car was kicking up, and for a second or two the crazy idea came into his head that the slug was only there to make a smokescreen for the copter—but there was no time for turning the notion over in his mind, because he had to realign the launcher and realign fast. The bird had launchers of its own, and the Kid certainly didn’t have a counterstriker.

Things weren’t happening any faster than they had been before, but the presence of the copter made everything twice as urgent, and his healthy paranoia stirred up his nerves as hard as it could. But by the time he had the sightscope rejigged the monster was looming very large indeed, and no sooner were the crosshairs set than the bastard let loose one of its homers.

The Kid didn’t even have time to curse before firing one of his own.

His instinct commanded him to dive into a crevice and try to hide himself in the bosom of the rocky plateau, but lie knew how futile that would be. If the missile had a sight of him, it would do its level best to come right down his throat—there was no way he could shield himself from the blast. Because he knew that, the Kid suppressed the urge to dive away—and because he hesitated, it suddenly occurred to him that there was no way on earth the copter had got a sight of him. The copter had looked big in the sightscope because it was big. The Kid was too tiny to be picked out at the same kind of range.

By the time this logical analysis had told him that there was something not quite right, though, the conclusion was redundant. Both missiles had already found their targets.

First the slug exploded, then the bird.

“Holy shit,” murmured the Kid, realizing that the copter’s gunner hadn’t fired at him at all. The copter had been hunting the car.

Which probably meant, the Kid belatedly concluded, that his paranoia had misread things from the start. The car had not been coming at him hell-for-leather with any hostile intent; what it had really been doing was running away from the bird. Neither the driver nor the pilot had had the least idea that the mesa was Kid Zero’s ace-in-the-hole.

Unfortunately, the Kid also realized, he had brought about exactly that situation which he had assumed to be the case. Within two hours, there’d be a whole damn army of GenTech vehicles pounding across the plain to find out what had happened. His ace-in-the-hole wasn’t in the hole any more—he’d put it well and truly on the map.

The Kid’s heart sank as he understood that he had blown it, and given himself away for no reason at all. Then he shrugged, figuring that the neighbourhood would have become too hot anyhow, with this thing happening on his doorstep, and he ran for his bike. There was only one thing to do now—get out to the wrecks in case there was anything left in them worth picking up, and then get the hell out of it.

Lady Venom was still dozing in her cradle behind the saddle; she hadn’t stirred. Maybe that was because she hadn’t heard the two explosions—the Kid had been told once that snakes were deaf, though he didn’t know whether to believe it. Lady Venom was a hell of a lot smarter than the average snake, and seemed to understand every word that he said—but sometimes she seemed to understand even when he never said a word, so maybe she had some other hotline to his meanings and intentions.

He didn’t need to check his panniers or his handguns; the bike was already loaded, and it was always ready for action. He just leapt aboard and punched the starter. It was a smart sensor and it didn’t need to interrogate him before making up its mind who he was; the engine roared into life and he was away.

Going down the gully was no less hairy than coming up, but it was a good deal faster when the Kid was in a reckless mood. Today, he was at his most reckless—but bike, snake and biker all came down in one piece, fighting fit.

It was a risk, of course, going to the wrecks before lighting out for the far horizon. The probability of finding anything to salvage didn’t really justify it. But Kid Zero had a powerful curiosity about strange things—otherwise, he’d never in a million years have discovered and befriended Lady Venom—and he was more than somewhat intrigued by the idea of GenTech sending out a spitting eagle to take out one of their own slugs. Maybe the slug had been hijacked by some sky-high-crazy joyrider—but even that would be something remarkable; GenTech was pretty careful with its equipment.

The copter was scattered all over the place, and every little piece of it had been comprehensively fried. The car was nearly as bad, but the bird’s fire-arrow hadn’t packed as much power as the Kid’s skybolt and it was mostly in one piece. If the driver had been in it when the bolt hit he’d still have been visible in the front seat, as a long stick of stinking charcoal. But he wasn’t visible, because he wasn’t there. He’d jumped before the missile had hit.

The Kid found him a couple of hundred yards back.

The jump hadn’t done him much good. He’d been going too fast, and he had been thoroughly messed up by the impact. He looked as bad as he would have if he’d hit the concrete-hard clay face first, and apart from the scraping he’d broken at least a dozen assorted bones. Although he was still alive, it was obvious that he wasn’t going to last much longer. But when the Kid dismounted and went to take a look, the guy stared up at him from his one good eye for a few seconds before fixing his gaze on Lady Venom, who was still in the cradle but craning her long neck over the side and giving out a low rattle with her horny tail.

The guy probably didn’t recognize the Kid’s face, and maybe he wasn’t even a fan of the Homer Hegarty Show, but he sure as hell knew that there was only one biker in the entire Disunited States who rode around with only a giant-sized rattlesnake for company.

“K-k-k…” he said—but that was about all he could manage.

The Kid bent down to take a closer look, and then he reached into the guy’s jacket to take out his wallet. He glanced at the folding money in the kish compartment, but looked more closely at the guy’s plastic, searching for ID. There was plenty of it, all of it holding to the opinion that the guy’s name was Blay, and that he was a tech in GenTech’s BioDiv, based at a facility cast of Dallas. He couldn’t have come from there today, though.

The Kid didn’t like GenTech personnel, and he particularly didn’t like BioDiv. He had a kind of vendetta going, on account of something unpleasant which had happened to a girl he had once known. He gave Mr Blay a very stony stare, and Mr Blay must have known why, because he tried to shake his head.

Unfortunately, Blay’s head-shaking muscles didn’t work much better than his voice—but his right hand was still capable of movement, and there was a big rip in his trousers, high on the thigh. The thigh was torn and bloody, and the Kid would have been prepared to swear that the flesh was one hundred per cent kosher, but there must have been some kind of smart sensor buried deep in the muscles, because the guy only had to touch it with his fingers to make it divide, revealing a deep pocket close to the bone.

The Kid had never seen anything like it—as hidey-holes went it was real state-of-the-art. No matter how much he hated the BioDiv people, he had to admit that they came up with some neat ideas, and that not everything they did misfired as badly as what they had tried to do to his late lamented lady-friend.

Inside the pocket were two things. One was an ID made out of some limp material which presumably wouldn’t show up on X-rays. The other was a microdisc for a portable PC. It was a perfectly ordinary microdisc, and it didn’t take a genius to work out that it couldn’t be part of the standard equipment kept in the hidey-hole. The dying man indicated that the Kid should take out these objects, and the Kid obliged.

The ID had a fancy hologram on it, and there was just enough flesh left on the guy’s face to enable the Kid to see the likeness. But this ID disagreed with the other, holding obstinately to the theory that the guy who was carrying it was called Hayhurst, and that he was a US Government Agent.

The Kid was vaguely surprised to learn that the US Government still had agents. He had supposed that once the decline in the tax-collecting business had become terminal, forcing the state to sell off all its spyballs to private enterprise, the government had to buy all their information from the websters, like everyone else. It was well known that Ollie the Prezz still had delusions of power and influence, but his regular protestations of independence from the corps were universally considered to be a bad joke. The idea of the government planting spies inside GenTech was intriguing, but it was difficult to take it wholly seriously.

At least, it would have been difficult, had the Kid not seen a GenTech bird trying with all its might to turn Hayhurst into a cinder.

The Kid looked down at the disc, thoughtfully. If it was worth killing for, it might also be worth money. Even better than that—if BioDiv wanted to destroy it, it was probably something that could make trouble for them, and making trouble for BioDiv was one of Kid Zero’s favourite hobbies. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a PC—and he suspected that it wasn’t going to be easy to get access to the kind of PC which could unload this kind of disc. The data on it was probably protected by all kinds of software locks and booby-traps.

“G-g-g…” said the dying man.

“Get it to the President,” said Kid Zero—and saw from the one eye’s flickering response that he was guessing along the right lines. He didn’t watch much TV, though he always made an effort to catch the Homer Hegarty Show, but he was a smart boy and he knew the ground rules for this kind of melodrama.

“Sure, Mr Hayhurst,” he drawled. “You can depend on me. Always wanted to see Washington.”

Hayhurst probably realized that he was having the piss taken out of him. The embarrassment seemed to be too much for him, because his one eye slowly closed. He was very red in the face.

The Kid repented of his unkindness.

“Shit,” he said. He knelt down beside the body, and touched the ruined face with his fingers. The eye opened again, but the expression in it suggested that it wouldn’t be capable of seeing much for very long.

“There’s no way I could get this to your people, even if I knew who they are,” said the Kid swiftly. “But you can bet your life I ain’t aiming to give it back to GenTech. If this is dynamite, Mr Hayhurst, I’ll do my level best to find a way to make it explode. You can bet your life on that.”

But Government Agent Hayhurst had already bet his life, and the dice had come down snake-eyes, the way they always do in the end.

This could be red hot, said Kid Zero to himself speculatively. Too hot for a loner like me to handle. But a boy has to do what a boy has to do.

He had no time for rational calculation; his paranoia was in the driving scat and his paranoia was telling him that he had to get away as far and as fast as he possibly could. The fact that his paranoia had recently made a mistake was not enough to destroy his trust in it, and so he went. Not until he was on the road, thirty miles and more from the mesa, did he begin to ask himself exactly where he ought to go, and what he ought to try to do with Hayhurst’s disc.

Part One: Out of the Horrorshow, Into the Fire

1

You’re moving through the streets at dead of night. There’s a light fog—just enough to blur the middle-distances and scatter the coloured light from the neons. You don’t know where you are—could be the ghetto-pit area of any one of half a hundred NoGos. The streets are narrow, pavements heaped up with reeking garbage so that you have to walk in the road. The other people about are thin and hollow-eyed, and they look at you with loathing as you pass. There are murky alleyways to either side, and pits of darkness where the doors have been torn away from derelict buildings.

The night is full of soft sounds: snatches of music, and broken conversations, the distant mutter of bikes, the sound of footfalls. Every now and again you look round—quickly, furtively, anxiously. You know you’re being followed, but you don’t know who it is, or what they want; you only know that they mean you no good.

Sometimes you catch the eye of someone behind you—someone who sees you looking over your shoulder. They always look right back at you, expressions full of hate, and sometimes they smile as if to say that they’re glad you’re scared, glad you’re in danger, glad that you’re going to get what’s coming to you.

An old junkie, jangling and jerking for lack of a fix, stumbles towards you, pleading inarticulately for a handout. When you move away from him reflexively, hurrying to get around him, his eyes flare up with the light of detestation and he spits at you, snarling curses.

A raddled whore, whose paint can’t begin to conceal the fact that she’s far too old for the game, slips out of a doorway and tries to catch you with her unsteady hand, rapidly murmuring her menu of possible obscenities—and when you flinch from the groping hand her sharpened fingernails glisten like crimson claws, striking at your eyes.

Somewhere behind you, the footfalls begin to get louder—loud enough for you to pick them out, and identify their malevolent intent—but when you turn around, there’s no one to be seen but the smirking faces who know what you’re about to get and love the gory thought of it.

(The scene is set—but you mustn’t think of it as a scene, because that’s not the way to play. You mustn’t make comparisons; you mustn’t draw back; you mustn’t take yourself in hand in order to remind yourself that it’s only a game. You mustn’t make yourself aware of the fact that you can’t feel the movement of your legs as you “walk”. You have to suspend disbelief, or the experience will be worthless. If you’re to be properly tested, you have to submit to the delusion. Now—submit!)

You make a right, which takes you into a dirtier and dingier street where the tall buildings loom over you on either side. The streetlights are mostly out and there’s no neon here. You can hear dogs and rats foraging in the garbage, and you can see half a dozen pairs of feral eyes catching what light there is and throwing it back at you as if it were some kind of accusation.

You’re moving faster now, and there’s a regular thumping sound at the threshold of perception—much fainter than the shuffling footfalls—which is supposed to be the beating of your frightened heart. You know that beating will accelerate and get louder, and you know what power suggestion has.

(Let it be the beating of your heart, then—it would be cheating to deny it, and you’re no cheat. Submit!).

You can hear your own footfalls now, accelerating as you move faster and faster. You’re running, but it isn’t doing you any good because your unseen pursuer is running too, and you know full well that you can’t shake him. He’s invisible, indomitable, inescapable. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing you can do.

(In a way, that’s the worst of it, because your real self is a man of action, and the character isn’t. You’re the kind of person who wouldn’t do this—who would refuse to run. You’d stop and turn and make your stand in the middle of the street, meeting violence with violence even though the thing which is coming to get you can’t yet be seen. You just have to ignore that; try to forget it; go along with the gag.

You know you’ll see it eventually. You always get to see it, just before the end. But you’re not allowed to turn and make your stand. You have to be a coward because you’re not in control. You have to be the kind of person who runs—the kind of person who is stupid enough to run into streets that get darker and darker, moronic enough to get cornered by a blind end.

What sort of person is that? you wonder—cursing yourself, meanwhile, for being forced to wonder. Exactly who are you supposed to be?

Forget it. Submit!)

You can hear the sound of your own breathing now, and that audible heartbeat is becoming more insistent. You look round again, and see nothing, though there’s certainly something there. You run and you run, but it’s still behind you.

There are still other people about, but their faces only loom up now and again like bizarre gargoyles, illuminated for half a second, then gone. They’re all leering at you, laughing at you, licking their lips in anticipation of the carve-up.

(How many get this far? you wonder. How many even get this far?)

But you don’t have time for that, because you’re making the next turn—the last turn—into the narrowest, filthiest, most stink-filled alley of them all, and you know there’s no way on and no way out, that you’re all alone and that whatever is on your tail is going to catch you now, whether it be a face without flesh or a rabid beast or some nightmare creature straight from the pit of Hell.

So you turn, all the way around, and you back up against the wall, and you spread your arms out, exposing your breast and your belly and your balls, like nobody would—only you don’t have any choice.

(Except for telling yourself the truth.)

Out of the darkness it comes, taking on the solidity of flesh at last—and though the footfalls are gone the noises which fill your head are very loud indeed: a cacophony of slithering and scraping, a confusion of terrified heartbeats and whispered obscenities.

It doesn’t have talons or a chainsaw; it doesn’t have teeth or shears it doesn’t have hooks to pluck out your eyes or broken razor blades to shred your face.

All it has is a bottle; all it has is vitriol.

(You always see it coming; you always have time to anticipate; you always have time to…)

Don’t!

You shock yourself with the force of your silent exclamation, which bursts out of you as though you had no control over your own voice and your own thought.

You feel it, pure and intense and wholly irrational. You feel the fear, the panic, the horror.

You feel it! And you feel a paradoxical disappointment, that at last you’ve found a script which can get to you.

(A script? Is it a script?)

Its face, just for a moment or two, is astonishingly pretty: female, blue-eyed, and innocent. Its face is filled with fear, as though you’re the attacker, the monster, the horror from the shadows….

But when it throws the acid, its own face begins to dissolve and burn, its own features sizzle and smoke, its own eyes collapse like crushed grapes, its own mouth opens in a hopeless attempt to let out a scream….

Then the air around it seems to solidify, and you see that you’re looking in a minor….

And—just for an instant—you forget that you’re not a blue-eyed girl, fresh and uncorrupted….that you’re not such a sweet and pretty and spoilable creature….

Just for an instant, you believe the mirror instead of your own memory, instead of your own self-knowledge….

Seeing, after all, is believing, and that’s what you see….

And you can’t help it at all, because it’s her fear which rises up inside you, her terror which seizes and consumes you, and only because you are her, just for an instant, do you chicken out.

You find what you were searching for, determined not to find.

The lights come on. The canopy is already rolling back, as though you’re being newly-hatched from an egg. You step out, cursing. You feel that you’ve been tricked, and of course you have—but that’s all part of the game, isn’t it? Horror comes from shock, fear from surprise, and the only true test of courage is the utterly unexpected.

Pasco couldn’t believe it. In all the time he’d been playing the booths he’d never been panicked before. Despite all his determination to put himself into the scenarios, to experience the illusion as if it were for real, none of the scripts had ever got to him that way. He had been proud of that—proud of his own invulnerability. He hadn’t believed that the horrorshows could ever really test his nerve to destruction. And now…

How had the bastard booth known?

He took hold of himself. The booth couldn’t have known, and didn’t know. It was just one more script—a script which just happened to have particular significance for him. Maybe everyone had one particular script which got to them. Maybe those creaky old plane-crash scenarios the Mark Is had started out with had really scared the shit out of people who were afraid of flying. Maybe the sword-fight scenarios and the battle-tank scripts had claimed their fair share of victims. Maybe he’d allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security by his assumption that the Mark XIII was just like the X, the XI and the XII—just one more streetstalker scenario. Which of course, it was… except that this streetstalker was his own particular bete noire.

Mere coincidence? It had to be, hadn’t it?

Pasco was as healthily paranoid as the next man, but to suspect anything more than mere coincidence seemed ludicrous. For a moment, he continued toying with the notion that the whole thing had been some kind of practical joke. Maybe someone at M-M knew how fascinated he was by the horrorshows…maybe they knew full well that he would send out a bunch of SecDiv undercovers to hijack the latest model…maybe they had written the Mark XIII script just for him. But it wasn’t credible. A big org like M-M wouldn’t go to such lengths just to make a fool of someone like him.

“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, aloud. Luckily, there was no one around right now to witness his humiliation—he’d had to come out and play the thing as soon as it was unpacked because the techs would start taking the damn thing apart in the morning. M-M’s microelectronics were far enough ahead of GenTech’s to make all their new products worthy of instant and careful attention—even arcade games like horrorshow booths. No doubt M-M’s techs were just as hungry to get to grips with the products of GenTech’s superior genetic engineering techniques.

It wasn’t until he stood up, tiredly, that Pasco realized he was no longer alone. There was a man standing in the doorway of the dimly-lit room. It was Jensen—one of the SecDiv radio-men. Pasco’s heart fluttered, thinking that it might just be possible that the other guy had been there long enough to see him come out of the booth in a state of panic, but he suppressed the thought. The other man was studiously avoiding his gaze, looking anywhere but at him.

He fixed the newcomer with his bleakest basilisk stare, and said: “What do you want, Jensen?”

“Sorry, Mr Pasco,” said the other politely. “I figured I’d find you here. News just came in from some Bio-Div field-station out San Antonio way—there’s been a leak. They had a bird handy, and sent it after the thief, but it didn’t come back. Shot down. Bio-Div want it kept quiet—the boss wants you to teach them the facts of life..”

“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, with feeling, before thinking better of it. Then, in a world-weary tone, he said: “The trouble with BioDiv is that they ain’t on the same freakin’ planet as the rest of us. What leaked, and how?”

“Not sure yet—but the guy out in the field is Doc Zarathustra. We’re still trying to contact him, and we probably won’t know what the raider got until Zarathustra can check his equipment. Could be expensive, though—the Doc’s tied up with a lot of top secret experimental stuff, and he’s the number one on our team. Could be a difficult job—you know what these scientists are like.”

“Too damn right,” said Pasco bitterly. “Freakin’ prima donna scientists think they run the freakin’ world. Can’t keep their own freakin’ files secure, but think they can tell us how to run our ops.”

Jensen shrugged. He was still looking over Pasco’s shoulder instead of meeting his eye. “It’s a bitch, all right. Is that a new kind of sensurround?”

“Yeah,” Pasco growled. “Horrorshow booth—new model. Want to try it?”

Jensen shook his head. “No time,” he said. “Not my kind of thing, anyhow. The road and the news broadcasts are scary enough for me. I heard we mounted some kind of raid on M-M while I was off-shift—I guess this is what we came away with, hey?”

“You got no business hearing things like that,” Pasco observed, without conviction. “It’s getting so SecDiv is as tight as a freakin’ sieve. No wonder BioDiv can’t hold on to its freakin’ data. We got a war going on here, y’know? World War Three is already on, and the only reason nobody has noticed is that the contenders are the corps instead of what passes for nation-states nowadays. Loose talk costs lives.”

“It looks like it was a nation-state which ripped off the Doc’s data,” said Jensen mildly, while studying his boots. “Our nation-state—the U. S. of A.”

Pasco contrived to scowl again in order to hide his surprise and his suspicion. “GenTech is our nation,” he said. “It’s our employer, our flag, our mother and our freakin’ father. The U.S. of A. would be just another enemy, just like Mitsu-Makema and Chromicon and Kid freakin’ Zero, if we didn’t own it. What makes you think the government was involved in this?”

Jensen shrugged his shoulders again. “They’re running checks on the guy who lit out with the leaked data. Seems that BioDiv didn’t check his credentials as thoroughly as they should have when he joined, way back in the eighties. Our hackers think he may have been one of Heston’s men—CIA, maybe. Looks like they put him in when they still had delusions of independence. Why he pulled himself out—I guess that’s for you to find out, if BioDiv will let you.”

Pasco hated interdepartmental politics. The worst thing about having been promoted was getting embroiled in the disputes between the sections. He still thought of himself as a field op—as a fighting force rather than a bureaucrat. He could tell that this was going to be a nasty job. He had never met the infamous Zarathustra, but he had heard plenty, and he knew that it wasn’t going to be easy taking orders from him as well as from his own boss.

“What’s the order of events?” he asked Jensen tiredly.

“As soon as they get Zarathustra they’ll bring him back in.By that time we ought to have figured out what leaked, what happened to the bird which chased the raider, and what our appropriate response should be. You’ll have to head up our operation—but first you’ll have to sell it to Zarathustra. You have to meet him when he comes in, and explain to him why we have to do whatever we have to do—then you have to collect your team and go do it. If the Doc gets pig-headed, the boss will back you up.”

Sure he will, thought Pasco. But in the meantime, who takes the flak? Who gets to be the freakin’ cannon-fodder? He put his fingers to the side of his face—the bad side—and remembered the curious climax to the horrorshow script, with its ironic mirror-imaging. SecDiv had taken him on because his face had a way of making his adversaries feel intimidated—now, it seemed, they were unleashing him against their own divisional rivals. The world in which he was forced by circumstance to operate was a very convoluted one, in which few things were as they seemed and there were always wheels within wheels.

“Okay,” he said to Jensen with a sigh. “I’m on my way.”

2

The child was by no means the ugliest that Carl Preston had seen lately, but it was nevertheless very disconcerting. It was three years old, or so its mother said, but it was as thin as a rake and hardly ably to walk or talk. The face was not particularly horrible—on a seventy-year-old man it would have seemed perfectly okay—but on the baby it was grotesquely out of place. He had learned to look at the real freaks with a steady eye, as if they were made-up monsters in a horrorshow, but this weird combination of ordinary appearances got to him somehow. It was as if the kid wasn’t a kid at all, but some kind of malevolent subhuman midget.

What if there are others? he wondered, not for the first time. What if there are ones which look just like ordinary kids, but aren’t—ones whose mutations are purely internal?

The mutants gave Carl the creeps, and he sometimes wished that the Doc had rebelled against the instruction to investigate them. He didn’t even like to be near them. Even so, when Judy took the infant out to the carrier, he went with her, leaving Doc Zarathustra to do the dickering alone. This one wasn’t going to come cheap—the word had got around, flying on the swift wings of rumour, that GenTech was laying out hard cash for freaky babies, and the mothers were getting increasingly determined to strike a good bargain.

When they had started out, Carl had been surprised by the lack of reluctance with which others sold their children—he had been clinging on to some old wives’ tale about mothers loving children no matter how loathsome they were. Now, he wondered how long it would be before people started trying to turn their healthy kids into grotesques in the hope of trading them in for jangle money. That was the way the world seemed to be going. It made Carl feel positively—but unrepentantly—old-fashioned.

The Doc came out, having done the business. The bioscientist didn’t look pleased—maybe he, too, had a trace of lingering sentimentality about him which made him feel sick every time he had difficulty negotiating his way through the minefield of a mother’s greed. It certainly wasn’t that he didn’t like parting with the money—Carl knew his boss better than that. The Doc was a very hard-headed person, but he genuinely didn’t give a shit about money. Carl respected that.

The day was a scorcher but Zarathustra’s blue eyes were cold, and his blond eyebrows were set in a frown. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, tersely, as Carl opened the carrier door for him.

The Doc always travelled in front, with Carl—he let Judy look after the kids until they were back in the lab, at which point they became numbered specimens in the great investigation, objects of fascination rather than revulsion.

Carl got in and started up, looking anxiously around for signs of trouble. The carrier had guns and armour, but it wasn’t built for serious combat. Carl was glad that the power of rumour was adequate to let the locals know just what kind of cargo this particular carrier had in back. They had done half a dozen trips through this particular NoGo shanty-town by now, and no one had tried to ambush them. For a GenTech vehicle with no escort that had to be a record. San Antonio itself was practically a Civil War zone, with the sixth- and seventh-generation teen gangs constantly fighting to hold their territory against new ims from Mexico; it could be dangerous even this far out.

“That’s a new kind, huh?” said Carl, hesitantly. He could never tell when it was safe to strike up a conversation with the Doc and when it wasn’t. Sometimes, the Doc would treat him like a human being—maybe even a friend—but other times he was made to feel as if he was only part of the decor. Lately, he’d been on the outside rather a lot.

“I’m not entirely sure it’s what I’m looking for,” confessed Zarathustra. “It could be just some form of accelerated progeria—odd, but accountable. I can’t take chances, though.”

Carl decided to chance his arm, thinking that the Doc’s hesitation over this case may have put him in a mood to talk about all his doubts.

“Are we anywhere nearer to figuring out what’s responsible for these mutations?” he asked. “Surely we have enough by now to start sorting out common factors.”

“The more we get,” said Zarathustra, sourly, “the more confused we get.”

“It’s not so surprising,” opined Carl. “The NoGos have become such hellholes, pollution-wise, that there must be thousands of variables to take into account, and there might be any number of culprits. A real puzzle.”

“You may be right,” said Zarathustra, absent-mindedly. “It may simply be a matter of having too many possible causes, and no way to sort them out.”

“But you don’t think so,” said Carl, stating the obvious. “You think there’s something new going on—something more sinister than chemical and radioactive waste.”

“Even if I knew what I thought,” said the scientist, “I couldn’t tell you. But as it happens, I don’t.”

“There’s been some talk about the laws of nature breaking down,” Carl observed, tentatively. “Some people say that it isn’t just America that’s going to hell in a handbasket but the whole damn universe.”

“That would make a lot of people feel better,” said Zarathustra, tiredly. “If what’s happening to the world is just a symptom of some ongoing cosmic catastrophe, then we don’t have to take the blame for anything and there’s no point in trying to put things right. But I don’t know exactly what’s meant—or could be meant—by the laws of nature breaking down. If it only means that some of the things we thought we knew for sure aren’t true after all, that’s okay; that I can take aboard. But if you mean all this new Millenarian stuff about evil’s empire bidding to take over the world before the messiah comes again, forget it—you know how I feel about that kind of stuff. You shouldn’t watch so much TV, Carl.”

“I didn’t say I believed it,” Carl countered, defensively. “But if these mutant births are getting more and more frequent—well, hell, the future looks bad enough even without things like that. Do you think, when you do figure it out, you’ll be able to cure these kids?”

“That depends how it figures out,” replied the scientist. “But I doubt it. In fact…”

He was interrupted by the radio. Carl picked up the receiver.

“This is Drechsler,” said the voice at the other end, testily. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past hour.”

“We were out of the vehicle,” Carl told him. “I left my pager on the dash. What’s up?”

“Everything. Someone’s been tampering with our webwork—we think it’s a major leak, but we can’t say for sure until the Doc checks it out. Blay’s gone—headed out into the desert—and the Sec boys scrambled a copter to chase him. They haven’t told us yet who he was working for or how much weaselling he got done, but you’d better warn the Doc that he might have lost his entire stash.”

Doc Zarathustra practically grabbed the mike out of Carl’s hands. “What kind of leak?” he demanded to know.

“We think Blay got into your PC. We don’t know exactly how, but we think he might have rigged the healthchecker to turn a blind eye to some kind of nasty—maybe a virus, but more likely a major worm. We need you to check it out for us, right away.”

Carl had never seen Doc Zarathustra look so bleak and so anxious. It was the kind of expression that could scare the hell out of people, and often did, but Carl had been around the Doc long enough to know that he wasn’t quite the ice-cold psycho some people thought. But the Doc wasn’t the kind of man to blow up—he even apologized as he handed back the mike.

Carl could understand why the Doc was so wound up. A man’s PC was an extension of himself—his extra memory. Guys on his level never hooked their PCs into the datanet for fear of infection by viruses or corruption by worms—if they wanted to take aboard webster data they always double-decanted it, taking it on to disc first and running the disc through a comprehensive health-check before unloading it into their own equipment. But no system was foolproof, and a health-check was only as good as the software which carried it out. Back at home base security was iron-tight, but out here in the sticks, where they were working in the field, there were opportunities for hacker-type trickery which could never otherwise arise.

Carl had to pluck up his courage before asking a question, but curiosity made him do it.

“How much could he have destroyed?” he asked.

Doc Zarathustra wasn’t too distraught to be asked. “By trashing the hard core—not much,” he replied, levelly. “I don’t keep all my data eggs in one basket and everything’s backed up on microdisc. I’ll have to get another PC in any case, now that one’s been invaded. It’s what may have been copied from the disc that’s worrying—I was updating the mutant data-file with the new cases, and I had data relating to some of my other projects in there too.”

“It’s unlikely that he could have taken anything out just by sneaking a worm through the healthchecker, isn’t it?” asked Carl, trying desperately to sound like a man who understood such matters as fully as a real intellectual should. Technically, he was only a minder, but he didn’t like the Doc to think of him as hired muscle.

“Why else would he do it? Blay’s been with us for years—if he was an undercover man for a rival corporation he must have been planted as a sleeper. No one goes to that much trouble for some petty act of pointless sabotage. But he can’t have drawn the data directly into the net or put it into transmissible form. In all probability, he’s taken it on microdisc, locks and all, in the hope of winkling it out at his leisure. If he’s still got the disc on him, we might get it back intact.”

“It’s a good bet,” said Carl, reassuringly. “If Security are already on his tail, there’s nowhere he can run to. They’ll catch him.”

“Perhaps so,” agreed Zarathustra, his pale brows deeply furrowed. “But the real danger is that he’s already passed on the disc to a contact, or left it in a drop to be picked up at someone else’s leisure. It won’t do any good to kill him if we don’t get the disc—in fact, hand me that mike, Carl.”

Carl did as he was told, and stayed quiet while the Doc issued strict orders to the effect that the runaway was not to be harmed.

“It’s okay,” Drechsler assured him. “Security know what they’re doing. They probably caught him by now—wait, Doc, there’s something coming through now.”

There was a pregnant pause, during which the Doc’s lips got tighter and his pale eyes more anxious.

When Dreschsler came back on, he didn’t waste any time being diplomatic. “The freakers messed it up,” he said, tersely. “Someone blew them out of the sky. They’ve scrambled a search-party but the crash site is too far away. You have to get back to base as fast as possible. They’re sending a plane to pick you up, but you’d better have a good look at the equipment first.”

Doc Zarathustra wasn’t a man for cursing, but Carl could see that he was close to making an exception.

“Get going, Carl,” he said, tersely. “We’ve got to take charge of this before those clowns in Security let the whole world know what’s happened. Take us home, as fast as you can.”

Carl didn’t bother to reply. He just put his foot down hard, and prayed that they wouldn’t run into any trouble on the road.

When the Doc finally came out, Carl could tell that the news was bad. He’d already heard a whisper about the copter, but he hadn’t been told any details—clearly the Doc had been given a full briefing while trying to figure out exactly what kind of hostile software had sneaked into his PC.

“They killed him,” said the scientist. “And then they got blown up themselves.”

“I heard,” said Carl. “Who was it—Mitsu-Makema? Chromicon? EuroCentral?”

“If only it were that simple,” said Zarathustra, with a sigh. “Let’s get something to eat, Carl—I want you in on this operation, because you’re the only Security man I know who has half a brain. They’ve got a man of their own lined up to tackle the problem, but his main concern will be saving face—I want you to look after my interests.”

Carl was a little surprised, and grateful for the trust which the Doc was willing to place in him. He’d been reasonably confident that he was making a good impression, but this was welcome confirmation. On the other hand, there was no way this was going to be an easy job, and it might be one that could mess up his whole career if it went wrong.

“Sure, Doc,” he said, quelling his anxieties. He followed the scientist to the dispensary, where they microwaved a couple of bladderpacks and got springwater from the machine. Zarathustra peeled back the plastic with his knife, very carefully, before inspecting the contents of the pack suspiciously. It was supposed to be GenTech’s finest, but it owed far more to the ingenuity of BioDiv’s food scientists than it did to Mother Nature’s Fields of Plenty. Carl could only just remember real food, but he knew that the Doc belonged to an earlier generation, and had probably seen Kansas in the days when it was one big wheatfield instead of one big sandpit.

“The worm unlocked everything,” said Zarathustra, between mouthfuls—for an intellectual, he wasn’t a particularly elegant eater. “It was a clever beast—too clever to have any obvious signs of its own origin built in. The data he managed to pry out is still encoded and locked up, but a good hacker could probably unscramble it, given time.”

“Is it valuable?” asked Carl.

“Of course it’s valuable,” said Zarathustra. “Even in vulgar commercial terms we’d be talking millions—but it’s not just details of products and services. There’s a lot of sound basic research in there—enough to save years of work for some parallel project worker. Any of our rival corporations would be quite happy to kill for it, and Blay wasn’t quite good enough to save himself from dying for it. I want it back, Carl—I think you understand how I feel about it, quite apart from the practical matters involved.”

“Sure,” said Carl, feeling free to be a little less careful than usual. “Raiding a scientist’s PC is like raping a virgin—or so they say.”

Zarathustra didn’t seem pleased by the comparison, but he made no objection. He only said: “Do you know anything about a person called Kid Zero?”

Carl raised his eyebrows. “Only what I see on the Homer Hegarty show,” he said. “Same as everybody else knows, I guess.”

“Who is Homer Hegarty?” asked the scientist.

Carl’s eyebrows couldn’t climb any higher, but they tried. “I guess he’s just about the most famous man in America, these days,” he said. “You must have heard of Homer Hegarty, Doc—he has the top-rated show on TV.”

“Does he work for us?” asked Zarathustra, in all apparent innocence. It was the knee-jerk response of anyone in GenTech—or any of the big corps—when told that somebody was important.

“Not really,” said Carl, still not quite able to believe that anyone—even someone who hated TV—could not know who Homer Hegarty was. “He’s on ZBC, but likes to pretend he’s independent—just like the President. He has this newsvid show, only the kind of news he deals in isn’t the same as you get in the bulletins. He says it’s the real news, but that’s just a line. He says that he’s the only man really involved in chronicling the decline and fall of the American Empire, because he’s the only man who doesn’t turn a blind eye to what’s really going on. He follows all the gangs—films their raids and their battles from a copter. He keeps track of all the ops and the bounty hunters, but he keeps track of all the bandits too—talks a lot of hooey about the new frontier and the importance of the outlaw as an American archetype. He claims to be neutral but you can tell that he admires the bad guys more than the good guys—loves bikers, in particular. He calls them the only authentically free men in the so-called free world. Most of the guys he builds up get killed eventually, but some of his old favourites go on and on. Kid Zero is a psycho who takes a particular delight in blowing up our wrappers—he had a girl-friend once who was in a BioDiv experiment which went wrong. You must have heard of him, Doc!”

“I thought the name was familiar,” admitted the scientist. “That may help to explain why he blew up the helicopter which was chasing Blay.”

“Kid Zero blew up the bird! I thought it was Blay’s contacts—the ones he was taking the disc to.”

“Perhaps Kid Zero was his contact—he may work for one of our rivals.”

“Not according to Homer. Homer says that guys like the Kid are the only people in the world who know who their real bosses are, because they’re the only people in the world who haven’t got any.”

“Do you believe him?”

Carl couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d innocently taken aboard yet another old wives’ tale. Instead of answering, he asked a question of his own: “What happened to the disc that Blay ripped off?”

“Nobody seems to know,” said Zarathustra, grimly. “When the follow-up team got there Blay was dead. There was a deep flesh-pocket in his thigh, but it was empty. Because the copter crew was wiped out we can’t be sure that Blay didn’t pass the disc on before he met his untimely end, but we do know that the man who shot down the copter—Kid Zero—rode out to the wreck afterwards. He may even have been able to talk to Blay. It’s possible he doesn’t have the disc, but…”

“But he has to be the red-hot favourite,” Carl finished for him. “And SecDiv have to pick him up before he sells it to someone who knows how to decode it.”

“I want you to go after him too,” Zarathustra reminded him.

“It’s not really my bag,” said Carl, uneasily. “I rode shotgun on the wrappers often enough when Bro and I were just mercy boys, but all I know about bikers is what they look like when they’re shooting at you.”

“The Security Division operative will presumably have that kind of expertise, Carl,” said Zarathustra, wiping his hands fastidiously as he finished his meal. “But I want this handled as quietly and as sensitively as possible. If we can only keep the theft secret, you might be able to get it back before anyone else—including Kid Zero—realizes what’s on the disc. And there’s something else, too.”

Carl knew that the Doc was a genius, but he also knew that there were certain features of the real world with which he was not entirely familiar. It was easy enough for him to make casual remarks about keeping matters secret, but this affair had already had more than its fair share of publicity. He said nothing, though, but only looked quizzically at his companion, waiting to be told what the “something else” might be.

“When I inquired of our Security men as to who Kid Zero might be, they told me one interesting fact which you have so far omitted to mention,” said the scientist.

Carl controlled a frown. He hadn’t realized that this was a guessing game. He knew that he had only a couple of seconds to redeem himself.

“Oh,” he said, dully, “the snake. According to Homer, the Kid rides around with a big rattler for company—a tame rattler, as loyal as any damn dog.” Carl didn’t like snakes. He didn’t even like thinking about snakes; that was why it hadn’t occurred to him to mention the item when the Doc had asked him what he knew about Kid Zero.

“Carl,” said Zarathustra, gently, “there is no such thing as a tame and loyal rattlesnake—unless it is a very peculiar mutant. I’d very much like to meet that snake, Carl. So I want you to do two things for me, if you can: I want you to make sure that my data doesn’t fall into any more wrong hands than it already has, and I want you to bring me that snake, dead or alive—but preferably alive. Do you think that you can do those things?”

It was one of those occasions, Carl thought, when diplomacy took precedence over honest calculation. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound as if he was the kind of guy who could handle anything. Then, more cautiously, he added: “At any rate, I’ll do the very best I can.”

It wasn’t easy, he realized, to be the strong right arm of a man like Dr Zarathustra. But nobody had ever promised him that life was going to be easy, and even if they had, experience would soon have made it clear to him that it was a damn lie.

3

Pasco scowled at Carl Preston, and saw him look away uncomfortably. Pasco knew that he had a big advantage when it came to scowling, by virtue of the fact that half his face was a wreck. That was one of the reasons why he’d never had the wreck fixed up, apart from the artificial eye—and he’d deliberately chosen a new eye which looked anything but natural. Synthoflesh patching was almost indistinguishable from the real thing, even on the face, and souped-up electronic eyes could be matched so closely that you could hardly tell them apart from real ones, but Pasco was a guy who liked to disconcert people. He liked to be frightening. It wasn’t difficult, given that he was such a tall man—he towered above Preston, who wasn’t small—and such a hard-voiced one. The face just put the final finishing touch to his frightfulness.

“I’m taking my own team out,” said Pasco levelly. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take you along. I know you have experience, but it’s not strictly relevant to this kind of work.”

“It’s what Dr Zarathustra wants,” Preston replied, politely but firmly.

Pasco could see how uncomfortable Preston was—and he knew that it wasn’t just the sight of his intimidating face which created that discomfort. Preston knew well enough what he was asking, and what Pasco’s response to it was likely to be—but he was Zarathustra’s man and he had to speak with Zarathustra’s voice.

Pasco had a bad feeling about this one. It was all very well for his division head to make vague promises about backing him up—but he’d been sent to see the bioscientist all by himself, in order to be briefed before deciding what to do. The fact that the chief was staying clear probably meant that the job had a high foul-up factor: it was too likely to go wrong, in such a way as to wreck someone’s career. The buck had stopped with Pasco, and he had none else to pass it to—no one in SecDiv, at any rate.

He had cooled down after his unfortunate encounter with the horrorshow booth, and felt razor-sharp; he knew that he would need to be.

“Well,” said Pasco carefully. “Dr Zarathustra is an important man, and I guess he can get his own way if he wants to—but I’d have to go on record as saying that I think it’s a bad move. I know what kind of world Kid Zero moves in, and you don’t. I know the kind of places we may have to go to in order to root him out, and I need a combat team whose members know the ropes—I can’t take a passenger into that kind of shooting-match.”

Pasco had started out as a bounty hunter way back in the early eighties, and had made quite a name for himself before GenTech had made him an offer to make the transfer into the big league. Kid Zero had been a babe in arms back then, but Pasco had done his share of hanging out in the places which were later to be frequented by the Kid. It would have been an exaggeration to say that he knew Kid Zero personally, but he certainly knew Ace the Ace, who ran the Low Numbers—the gang of which the Kid had once been a member—and he didn’t think it was any exaggeration to say that he was an expert. He figured he knew what kind of animal Kid Zero was, and that he understood the species. He liked to think that he was still a loner at heart himself. But for the whims of fate, he thought, he might as easily have become a gangster as an Op.

“The Doc would like to avoid a shooting-match, if it’s at all possible,” said Preston doggedly. “We think that the Kid probably doesn’t know what he’s carrying, if in fact he has the disc at all. With Blay dead, it’s probable that no one else knows—not even the people Blay was supposed to meet out there in the desert. Zarathustra’s view is that if we can move swiftly and discreetly, we may be able to save the situation before it gets out of hand. He’ll explain it to you himself when we get there.”

“When we get there,” said Pasco acidly, “ I’ll explain things to him.”

The corridors through which they were walking were empty of people now, but there were cameras at every intersection which locked on to them automatically when they came into view. Every move they made and every word they spoke would be recorded, digitized and stored in a memory-bubble—which nobody would ever bother to play back. Total security was, in effect, no security at all until after an event, when the relevant tapes could be pulled and inspected. Pasco knew the implications of that fact, but he wasn’t overly surprised to learn that a guy like Doc Zarathustra didn’t. Scientists and SecDiv men lived in worlds of their own, overlapping but distinct. Zarathustra’s world was full of secrets; Pasco’s was full of stray information which nobody could quite contrive to conceal.

That was the way the world was nowadays. A guy could do more or less anything he wanted to, and skip—but he couldn’t get away with it if somebody wanted to find out who did it, and punish him. All the data was there, somewhere, and it only needed a reason to make someone start chasing it. It was like that in every GenTech establishment, and getting like that in every PZ. Privacy wasn’t quite dead, but it was a short-term thing, unless you were careful to use it wisely. Pasco knew that it would be the same with the affair of the disc. A bird had been blown up, and urgent messages had been shooting back and forth through the ether. The messages themselves had been scrambled, but the mere fact that they’d been sent would be enough to make people curious—and once they got curious, they’d have ways and means of figuring out what had happened.

Pasco knew that it was too late to try to keep things secret. The eyes and ears of the opposition would already be glued to the ground. Blay’s employers must already know that there was a game on—all the other potential players would soon know it too.

“You’ve run up against Kid Zero before, then?” asked Carl Preston hesitantly. He was presumably trying to be friendly.

“Not exactly,” admitted Pasco. “But we have mutual acquaintances. I’ve kept an eye on his career.”

“Homer Hegarty seems to think he’s quite a guy.”

“Homer Hegarty sucks,” opined Pasco. “We ought to shut the scuzzbag down instead of giving him the prime spot on our network.”

“ZBC isn’t ours,” Preston pointed out. “It takes sponsorship from all the corps.”

“It’s ours,” Pasco contradicted him. “We pay for twice as much airtime as anyone else, and we own twice as many of its stations. We could close the freaker tomorrow if we wanted to—only we don’t, because its our loudest voice in America. That’s why letting Hegarty operate makes it look like we approve of his shit.”

“It’s very popular,” Zarathustra’s man pointed out mildly. Pasco knew that Preston could have argued that GenTech presumably did approve, for its own arcane reasons which mere hirelings like Pasco—despite their free use of the word “us” when talking about the corp—wouldn’t be allowed to know, but he avoided the gambit. Pasco was glad; it showed that the other man was being diplomatic.

“It’s popular with scuzzbags,” said Pasco sourly. “It makes them think they’re bigshots when they’re just little pieces of shit. All that crap about true freedom and the frontier spirit makes me sick. It’ll give me extra pleasure when I wipe out the Kid to think that I’m putting down one more of Homer’s little pets.”

“The Doc doesn’t want Kid Zero killed,” said Preston quickly.

Pasco looked at him stonily. “Out in the field,” he said, “I do what I have to do. If the Kid surrenders, that’s fine—but I won’t take risks for the sake of Zarathustra’s preferences.”

“We’re all working for GenTech,” said Preston soothingly. “We’re all on the same side. You can’t blame the Doc for taking a keen interest—he wants his data back.”

“Once data’s leaked, it’s gone,” Pasco said, positively. “All we can do is kick ass, to encourage any other weasels in the works to keep their sticky fingers in their pockets. If the Doc wants me to do anything different, I guess he can make his wishes count—but he’ll have to take the responsibility if anything goes wrong.” He avoided the temptation to wink at the camera whose eye was recording his performance. The corridor mikes would have picked up every word.

They reached Zarathustra’s office then, and Preston opened the door for him. Zarathustra was sitting at his desk, looking impatient. Pasco stuck out his hand and said: “I’m Ray Pasco,” watching all the while to see how the bioscientist reacted to the sight of his face.

Zarathustra extended his own hand to be shaken, and looked back at him perfectly calmly. Though the blond man had all of his face and wasn’t overly tall, he was obviously well-used to intimidating people himself; his blue eyes radiated iciness.

“Thank you for coming to see me, Mr Pasco,” said Zarathustra, with false mildness. “I hope Carl has explained to you how I want this matter handled.”

“He has,” said Pasco, taking a seat—though Preston continued to stand. “Unfortunately, I have to disagree. In my judgment, we need more strength in the field, and we need to be ready to lay down some heavy fire. We need to alert all our men in the field immediately to keep an eye out for the Kid. We also need to alert all our websters immediately, to look out for any sign of anyone trying to trade or transmit the data from the disc.”

“We may be forced to those extremes,” said Zarathustra, grudgingly. “But not immediately. What I’ve read in this person’s file suggests that we may be able to pick him up quietly before he finds out what he has. Do you know a place called the Underground?”

“Yes I do,” said Pasco, controlling his annoyance at the fact that the blond man was treating him like a stupe. “We’ve got men in there, including a first-rate wire-tapper called Carey Castle. If you hadn’t insisted that we do nothing until this briefing I’d already have sent him instructions to look out for the Kid. With your permission, I’ll do it as soon as possible, and alert our other field agents too. Then, I’ll put three platoons on stand-by and move three more out to various points in the field. That way, we can move quickly if and when Castle—or anyone else—reports any sign of the Kid. The Underground is a difficult nut to crack, though—it’ll take some heavy firepower to clean it out, if the Kid does go there.”

Pasco spoke rapidly, in order to get it all on record. In a way, he figured, it might be best to be over-ruled on every point—that way, no one could ever say for sure that his own plan wouldn’t have worked.

“Is it really necessary—or desirable—to think in terms of open warfare?” asked Zarathustra silkily. “I understand that we have a controlling interest in the establishment—that we effectively own it.”

Pasco scowled, but the bioscientist didn’t even blink. “Not exactly, sir,” he said, stressing the sir to make it clear that he didn’t mean it. “We have some control over the part of it that’s run as a recstop for truckers, but it’s a big place. It’s an old Air Force installation—not strike force, just bunkers and storage. It’s a real labyrinth. The recreational facilities are run by a gang called the Trapdoor Spiders, who buy liquor, food and a few other things from us—but they get most of their machinery from Mitsu-Makema and Chromicon, so no one really owns them. We have half a dozen undercover men in the place, but the info-flow there is low-grade.”

“If we have men already in there,” said Zarathustra, “shouldn’t they be able to handle Kid Zero quietly and efficiently? He’s on his own, after all.”

Pasco laughed derisively.

“Not quite,” he said. “He’s got the Atlas Boys in there, and what’s left of the Low Numbers. They’ll pitch in if anyone tries to go up against him, and even if the Spiders weighed in with our boys, there’d be an unholy mess. I really think you ought to trust my judgment, Dr Zarathustra. And we don’t even know for sure that he’ll go there.”

“Where do you think he’ll go, Mr Pasco?” asked the scientist bluntly.

Pasco shrugged. “The Underground has to be the favourite,” he conceded. “But…”

“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to go there yourself?” said Zarathustra quickly. “That way, if your Mr Castle reports his presence, you’d already be on the road. Don’t you think that you could handle this matter discreetly and efficiently, if you could only contrive to be in the right place? It’s said that you’re a highly efficient operative who knows the territory well—aren’t you capable of taking on Kid Zero without a legion of armed men at your side?”

Pasco could see well enough what the bioscientist was trying to do, but he wasn’t about to start making guarantees while he was on the record. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to confess incompetence.

“Maybe,” he said guardedly. “But Security Division policy in the event of a leak is to deploy such force as is needed to ensure that the leak is sealed. It would be risky to go into the Underground without adequate backup—and doubly risky to do so in the company of an untrained and inexperienced operative.”

“Carl is a good man,” said Zarathustra. “He has my complete confidence.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Pasco countered. “But you’ll forgive me if I say that I’d prefer to take men who have my complete confidence when the time comes for me to go out on the road. In the meantime, I’d rather put every man we have on the alert, so that we can spot the Kid wherever he chooses to go.”

“I don’t want you to do it that way,” said Zarathustra forthrightly. “If you alert all our people, you’ll alert everyone else in the world as well—there’s too much danger that our quarry would be seen and picked up by our rivals. So far, neither he nor our rivals know that he’s carrying anything valuable.”

“We can’t be certain of that,” said Pasco.

“It’s an acceptable risk,” insisted the blond man. “I want you to go quietly, at least for a little while. Eventually, I accept, we may have to throw in everything we have—but in the meantime, while there’s a slim chance of quietly capturing the boy and retrieving the disc, I think we should try for it.”

“I can’t agree, Dr Zarathustra,” said Pasco. “This is SecDiv business, and I have to handle it my own way.”

“I’m afraid that you’re wrong about that,” the scientist said smoothly. “Your division chief has assured me that I will have your full co-operation in this matter, and I must insist that you try to keep the matter secret for a little while longer. I’d like Carl to go with you, when you go to the Underground.”

Pasco looked at his adversary as though he were studying a centipede that had just crawled out of his sandwich. It was not the first time in his career with GenTech that he had found himself up the creek without a paddle, but it was a sensation he was never going to get used to. He had anticipated and planned for this, but he still didn’t like it.

“I’ll have to check that out,” said Pasco tautly—knowing as he said it that there wasn’t any point except to demonstrate what a pro he was. “And I’d like to put it on record that you’re acting against my advice.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” said Zarathustra smoothly. “I understand your reservations—but in this particular matter you’re answerable to me as well as to your division chief. I want that disc back, and if it’s humanly possible I want Kid Zero and his pet snake alive. I’ll take them dead if there’s absolutely no other way, but this mission will not be counted a success unless they’re alive and healthy. Nor will it be counted a success unless we can achieve this end quickly and quietly.”

“I understand,” was all that Pasco said in reply. He wished, fervently, that his scowl might begin to disconcert the other man, but Zarathustra met his unmatched eyes with perfect equanimity, and countered their baleful gaze with a uniquely disturbing stare of his own. Pasco felt suddenly very uncomfortable, and the memory of his disappointing experiment with the Mark XIII horrorshow came back into his mind, trailing its legacy of terror. No wonder there were guys who swore blind that Zarathustra was kin to the Devil.

“I know you do,” said Zarathustra, smiling thinly. “And I know that you don’t approve. But I have confidence in you, Mr Pasco. Your division chief assures me that you’re a very capable man, and that if anyone can save this unfortunate situation from becoming a full-scale disaster it’s you. If only our rival corporations can be kept in the dark about this, we may yet escape unscathed. It really is necessary to be discreet, I assure you.”

Pasco glanced at Preston, who still looked extremely uncomfortable. Pasco judged that the scientist’s minder knew as well as he did that Zarathustra’s primary concern was for his own position. This hopeless insistence on secrecy had nothing to do with operational efficiency, and everything to do with Zarathustra’s possible loss of face.

“The word will get out anyway,” said Pasco grimly. “And if we miss Kid Zero because we don’t have enough back-up, things could get much worse than they already are. But I can carry out orders as well as the next man.”

“Carry out these,” said the bioscientist, “and I’ll fix your face for free. I’ll throw in a new body, too if you like.”

That, thought Pasco, was adding insult to injury. “I’ll carry out my orders,” he said, quietly. He dared not add anything more aloud, but silently he said: And if you have any complaints about the way I do it, maybe I can fix your face. I can throw in just as many bodies as you like, Dr Frankenstein.

“Please get them for me, Mr Pasco,” said Zarathustra. “The Kid, the snake, the disc—I want them all, very badly. If you and Carl set out for the Underground right away, there may be a chance that you can close the whole affair down before it gets worse. You can alert Mr Castle, if you wish—but do so discreetly, without alerting our competitors.”

Pasco was touched by the fact that the Doc had finally seen his way clear to saying please, but he wasn’t about to feel grateful. He was still the poor sap who had to carry the hot potato.

“Okay,” he said, philosophically. “We’ll play it your way. I only hope you’re right.”

And if you aren’t, he added silently, hope that it isn’t me who has to carry the can for you.

4

Harriet the Hooker was busy dreaming when the knock on her door woke her up.

Harriet spent a lot of time dreaming, these days. She had never been able to work out exactly what function dreaming served, in terms of wetware maintenance, but she was content to let her brain get on with its own housekeeping, secure in the faith that the machine as a whole was a good deal cleverer than that absurdly arrogant subroutine which was her consciousness, her mind and her soul.

It was a key article of Harriet’s faith that the brain had its reasons of which reason knew nothing. There were people who thought she was crazy, but she didn’t give a damn about that—she figured that hookless people were a bunch of no-good know-nothings who couldn’t see past the limitations of their own narcissistic software.

She was different. She had her hooks.

Once upon a time—though she had difficulty believing it when she looked in a mirror nowadays—Harriet had been a hooker in the old sense of the word. That was twenty years earlier, when she was in her thirties and still had ninety-nine per cent of the flesh that her human heritage had given her. She was in her fifties now, and was down to seventy-five per cent tops. Nowadays, no one who knew her was in any doubt that she was only called “the Hooker” because of her hooks.

She had fourteen hooks in all—seven finger hooks of the male/plug variety, eight neck-hooks of the female/socket variety.

Every one of Harriet’s hooks was different in terms of its info-flow facilities—but that wasn’t quite as impressive as it sounded because the more hooks hackers tooled themselves up with the more hardware defences the machine-makers worked out. With fourteen hooks Harriet could do some interesting fishing in the net, but she still needed a houseful of supplementary equipment to catch anything more than tiddlers. Her room was so full of supplementaries that there was hardly any space to move around, but she was still smalltime. That didn’t matter; what mattered was that she was free, independent, and answerable to nobody. There weren’t many people who could say that, in today’s world. She was free to live her own life; free to dream her own dreams.

She dreamed ordinary people-type dreams sometimes—the kind of dreams an aging lump of wetware probably needed in order to keep its failing memory-banks in some sort of order.

Sometimes, though, she dreamed better dreams than that—dreams which came from the other aspects of her being: dreams of infinite cyberspace within the web-of-all-webs, and the ecstatic life of the disembodied programme.

It was a item of Harriet’s faith that there was a special afterlife reserved for the elect—the elect being those who sacrificed enough of their flesh in the interests of acquiring better hooks—which would be lived in that earthly paradise which men called the datanet, as a FLIP: a free-living intelligent programme. She believed with all her heart that she could glimpse that afterlife in the best of her dreams, and she was therefore content to dream as long and as often as her body would permit.

Nowadays, when she wasn’t actually working—and she counted all her hooked-in time as “working”—she tended to be zonked out on downers. She was an addict, in at least two distinct senses of the word, but didn’t think anything less of herself for that. She thought of her addictions as aids to freedom rather than oppressions. In any case, no matter how zonked out she was, she was always capable of responding to incoming information—even when said incoming information was as crude and ugly as a knock on her door.

She didn’t get many knocks on her door—there weren’t many people who actually knew how to find her door, because it was in the Dead Zone of the Underground, where even the sandrats didn’t often go any more, since they had caught and eaten all the real rats. These days, it was strictly creepy-crawly territory, except for deliverymen—who usually called to warn her that they were on their way. There were other hackers in the vicinity, of course, but they would never come knocking on her door.

When she had woken up completely, she listened. If the knocker was serious, he or she would knock again; if not, she could get back to her dream.

The knock came again. Three, one, one, three. All low numbers, but all odd. That was Kid Zero’s signal.

Harriet forced herself to become more fully awake, and more sensibly alert. The Kid had been a good friend to her in times past—a good supplier. But he usually called first. He was a very polite boy.

She checked the spyhole, and was glad to see that the Kid had a gun in his hand. That meant that he was alone, and in control. She got to work on the locks. It took time to get the door open, but she knew that he wouldn’t mind. The Kid liked his friends to be careful. Those who weren’t always ended up dead.

As soon as he was inside, he said: “Is this place secure?”

“Sure,” she told him. “The burrowers put a couple of new wires into my equipment last month, but I’m too smart for them. I just feed ’em garbage.”

“What about ordinary bugs? Micromikes and fibre-eyes?”

Her little eyes couldn’t take a lot of narrowing, but she squinted at him suspiciously. Her head wasn’t quite straight, because of the fuzz which the last downer had left. “This is a low-level operation I run here, Kid,” she said, “and I don’t turn the kind of tricks anyone would want to watch. Nobody would bother. What’s the matter, Kid—you hotter than usual?”

“I’m not sure,” he told her. “Maybe not, but it pays to be careful. Lady Venom’s picking up bad vibes.”

Harriet looked around when he said that, just in case Lady Venom had sneaked in while she wasn’t looking. She knew that the rattler could be trusted while the Kid was around, but she still didn’t like the snake. Nobody did, except the Kid—who was presumably a very special person.

Harriet cleared a space for the Kid on one of her dusty old armchairs, and he sat down. Then she cleared one of her hotrings and switched it on so that she could make coffee.

“Hungry?” she asked.

The Kid nodded, and she started looking round, wondering where she might have buried the food. Kid Zero was entitled to four-star hospitality; he had brought her a healthy percentage of her recently-acquired supplementaries, and though she’d paid him for all of them, she still figured that she owed him in the subtler currency of favours and goodwill.

“You need anything else,” she asked casually, while she was rooting around, “or is this a social call?”

“I had to come to you first,” he said cryptically. “I’m not quite sure where else I need to go. Maybe you can help me decide.”

“You want me to go fishing for you?” she asked.

“That might be too dangerous,” he said. “GenTech’s involved, and they have a lot of weasels.”

She sniffed derisively. “You think I’m stupid or something?” she asked sharply.

“I know you’re the best,” said the Kid. “But that’s not the point. I have to minimize the risk, or we could both be in trouble. Dead trouble.”

The coffee was hot by now—it was ersatz, of course, but it was hot and sharp. Harriet didn’t like to use anything stronger for upward boosts if she could help it; she got her heavy kicks electronically, delivered straight into the brain.

“I don’t want you to link up to the net,” the Kid continued. “Just play some games with a PC for me—and give me some names.”

“What games?” she asked warily.

He drank thirstily from his cup, and didn’t hesitate when she passed him some broken hi-pro biscuits that looked unappetizing even to her. She figured that she must have had them squirrelled away for years, but didn’t bother to wonder how they’d come to light now. It was just one of those happy accidents.

“I just need you to copy a disc for me,” the Kid told her. “You can keep a copy if you want. But you better watch out when you try to read it or sell it on. It’s hot, and it might just be red hot. If you bank it in your thigh they won’t hesitate to cut your leg off at the waist to make sure you can’t access it.”

He took the disc out of his pocket and showed it to her. He didn’t bother to warn her to be careful, but she knew that he was only being polite. She knew well enough that if the disc carried anything interesting it would probably be bristling with safeguards. One wrong move would probably trash the whole thing.

Harriet was always extra-careful to avoid wrong moves.

“Any idea what’s on it?” she asked.

“Not the slightest,” he said. “But it’s GenTech, and some guy got himself killed trying to do a runner with it. According to his ID he wasn’t weaselling for a rival corp, but you know ID. Can’t trust anyone to tell you his real name.”

“Real names is real power,” she quoted, softly. “Okay Kid, let’s take baby to the hospital.”

She stuck the three middle plugs on her left hand into the sockets of a personally-tailored PC. She didn’t need a keyboard with that kind of intimate engagement, and the screen came immediately to life. She slid the disc into the machine, and began to feel around for the locks and traps gathered about its loading codes. She didn’t need to go into deep trance, but after half a minute’s silence she emitted a low whistle.

She could feel the locks and traps protecting the data on the disc, and she could smell the data. It was densely-packed, highly organized and very sweet. The configurations of the data’s armour were beautiful, and very challenging. It had been stacked by a real craftsman, and the rip-off artist who’d managed to get it out in one huge piece had been a very clever boy.

“Not child’s play,” she said to her visitor. “Not child’s play at all. Very interesting.”

“Don’t try to read it,” said the Kid. “I just want to know—can you copy it?”

“Sure,” she said. “It’s already been copied. Anything the thief could do, I can do too. Are you sure you want that? If you have the only saleable copy, you’ll get a better price—unless you’re planning to deal exclusively with GenTech on a blackmailing basis.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” said the Kid. “If the guy who ripped it off had honest ID, he was a government plant—probably put in way back in President Heston’s time.”

“Shit,” said Harriet, with a brief laugh, “if I was a Heston mole I sure as hell wouldn’t poke my nose out now—not until Awfullie’s out of the White House, and probably not ever. But what difference does that make to the price of beans?”

“Maybe none,” admitted the Kid. “But there’s a possibility this isn’t just another corpwar steal. It’s just possible that I could do GenTech some real damage, for once. Everything I’ve done to them so far has just been a series of fleabites, because their pockets are virtually bottomless. But if this guy was what he seemed, he wouldn’t have tried a suicide run without somewhere to go. Somewhere out there, whatever remains of the FBI or the CIA or Army Intelligence might still have ambitions to be a power in the land. Maybe—just maybe—they can hurt GenTech far worse than any blackmail or industrial espionage ever could.”

Harriet shrugged. She understood the nature of the Kid’s vendetta against GenTech better than most, because she had known Snake Eyes and had seen what had happened to her in consequence of BioDiv’s failed experiment in biological engineering, but she still thought he was crazy. “Wishful thinking, Kid,” she opined. “If the CIA still had teeth they’d be just one more outfit fighting their corner—except that since we all stopped paying our taxes they couldn’t possibly pay you as much as Mitsu-Makema might. So why d’you want the disc copied?”

“Because it might be more important than one more goodie to hawk to the highest bidder,” said the Kid insistently. “It might be important enough to land GenTech in really deep shit. The corps think they own the world now, but if they ever became vulnerable, the former owners might just be able to get it back again. If there’s a chance that GenTech might take a big fall, that means more to me than a big score I’d probably never live to spend. Copy the disc, for me, Harriet, and you can keep a copy to crack at your leisure—and you can sell anything you winkle out to anyone you like, for as much as you can get. Then tell me, if you can, what I ought to do next if I’m to get this stuff to people who can use it.”

Harriet licked her withered lips, and muttered:

“Fantasyland.” But she was already going into light trance as her nervous system melded with the wiring of the PC. She knew she had to do as she’d been asked, if only for the challenge. An extra-tough disc was meat and drink to her. One of the addictions she counted to her credit was a compulsion to wrestle with the traps and snares which the other players used in order to keep people like her away from their precious data.

“How many copies do you want?” she asked dreamily.

“Four,” said the Kid promptly. “One to stash, one for you, and two to deliver to other interested parties.”

That wrenched her back from her communion with the data. “What other interested parties?” she asked, sharply.

“It’s okay, Harriet,” he said soothingly. “I’m not thinking of passing it on to another hacker. Maybe you can tell me who can do the most damage with it—if not, I have one idea of my own.”

Harriet shook her head, impatient with the Kid’s craziness—but her fingers were still engaged and she was floating off again. She let loose the sort of giggle which always came with a light electronic high. “I’m copying,” she told him. “First rule of espionage: always duplicate before you try to read. Dupe, dupe and dupe again. You want extras, you got ’em. But you be careful what you do with ’em, Kid. If this stuff can do GenTech some real damage, the copies might easily turn into so many death-warrants. I ain’t got much to lose, but there’s a lot of people far fonder of their frail freakin’ flesh than I am.”

“I know,” said the Kid grimly. “I may not act the part, but I’m one of them.”

Then the hooks pulled her into the machinery, and she was in Heaven for real. It was a very tiny heaven, to be sure, but even inside a PC there could be ecstasy. She contemplated the awful magnificence of the Gordian knot which extended itself before, around and within her; then, firmly resisting the temptation to start unravelling, she began to to coax it into self-division and reproduction.

It was almost like bestowing the gift of life; almost like playing God. Almost.

5

Carl guided the sneaker around the canyon bends without slowing down too much. The vehicle was a very smooth rider, considering the amount of armour it was carrying. Not that it was a real battle-wagon; it was built for speed and designed for discretion. From the outside, it looked like a standard slug; inside, it was an electronic wonderland, state-of-the-art in all its systems.

Pasco was still giving him the silent treatment, but he didn’t mind—it meant that he didn’t have to look at the guy. It also meant that he could really luxuriate in the experience of driving the limo.

He luxuriated a little too much, as it turned out. He was thoroughly relaxed as he steered round the next bend—and that reduced his capacity to react when he saw the flamer blocking both right-hand lanes.

Ray Pasco gasped with alarm, but when Carl had got a grip on himself he just set his jaw tightly. This was one situation he knew, and one he could deal with.

Fifty per cent of drivers would have braked, and most of the rest would have swerved to the left to go past the wreck on the wrong side of the road, but Carl’s reflexes were wired up differently because of the years he and Bro had spent riding shotgun on the wrappers. To him, a burning wreck on his own side of the road meant only one thing: a trap. He instantly assumed that the other side of the road was mined, and that the wind-scoured rocks rising steeply to either side of the road were likely to be thick with gunmen.

He went for the gap between the flamer and the canyon wall, knowing full well that it was too narrow.

He took some satisfaction from hearing Pasco gasp in alarm for a second time and begin an angry curse which he had no time to finish. Then the sneaker hit the gap, and hit the flamer too. The GenTech vehicle was armoured to take the impact, and the thick black smoke which smothered the windscreen for a second or two couldn’t hurt anyone, but it still took nerve to go through.

Carl saw that he wouldn’t have to draw a diagram for Pasco to explain what he’d done, because the flamer had been lying on its side and the impact not only spun it but made it tumble. The spin took it over the white line and on to the other side of the highway, and when it toppled over—seeming to fall in slow-motion as he watched it through the mirror, with his foot hard down on the accelerator—it fell on top of one of the mines.

The charges went off in series; one, two, three.

On three it looked as if the entire canyon was going to blow, but that was only an optical illusion. Those rock-faces had been there for millions of years, and it would take more than a few road-mines to make them crack a smile. It was just billowing dust and sand which were filling the air so turbulently: man-made dust and sand.

“Sweet freakin Jesus!” whispered Pasco. “How’d you….?”

He didn’t get a chance to complete the sentence—as Carl had known he wouldn’t. Most of the would-be wreckers were up on the heights diving for cover but there were a couple of point-men up ahead on bikes. The bikes had been positioned sideways on, and when the riders saw that the sneaker had come through the trap unscathed they hesitated, wondering whether this was one of those occasions when discretion was the better part of valour.

The hesitation was stupid, because there was no way they could run from an avenging angel which already had one-twenty kph on the clock while they were on a standing start. Carl knew that they should have left the bikes and dived for the gutter, but he also knew that if bikers had brains they probably wouldn’t be bikers in the first place. These two stayed in the saddle and reached for their guns—but their guns were light machine guns firing four-point-twos and they might as well have been pea-shooters.

Carl decided that he ought to set a good example and abide by the rule of the road, so he swung back to the right and hit the guy on that side instead of the easier target. The sneaker’s armoured hood hurled the bike out of the way while the biker followed an uncomfortable trajectory over the auto’s hood and roof before tumbling off the back end in obvious distress.

Carl didn’t even bother to shoot back at the second biker. He wasn’t a vindictive man by nature. On the simulator display which was in the centre of the dashboard the whole situation looked innocuous: the flamer was a neat red rectangle emitting little blue lines, while the two bikes were blue arrows, one of them symbolically broken.

There had been a time when Carl hadn’t approved of simulators, except for night-vision when human eyes were no good, but he had to admit that their representations had a certain delicate propriety.

There wasn’t any noticeable pursuit. The guys up top had been forced to leave their bikes some distance away, and Carl knew that by the time they’d got down to them they wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of catching a souped-up vehicle like the one he was driving. If the mines had been able to blow a hole in the chassis, or cause Carl to crash into the canyon wall, it would have been a different story—but when that ploy had failed so had the whole operation.

“How’d you know?” said Pasco, finally managing to finish his question.

“Maniax,” said Carl laconically. “No imagination at all. They tried exactly the same trick in exactly the same spot three years back. It worked then—the road was blocked and we had six wrappers stuck in a shoot-out for four hours. Lost eight men and three loads, and had to scramble the birdboys to get us out of trouble. Thing like that sticks in a man’s mind.”

“Shit,” said Pasco, in a tone which suggested that Carl had just gone up a notch in his estimation. “Maniax, you say?”

“The guy I hit was wearing their colours,” said Carl.. “But the question isn’t who they were—the question is, who hired them?”

Pasco frowned. He had a very ugly frown, thanks to his wrecked face. He didn’t bother to wonder aloud whether they might just have had bad luck, running into a random trap—he was as healthily paranoid as the next man, and he picked up Carl’s train of thought immediately.

“The Maniax don’t usually do mercenary work,” he mused. “You think they were laying for us?”

“Maybe not,” Carl conceded. “But they were laying for someone, and we’re the ones who nearly got caught.”

“No one’s supposed to know we’re on the case, let alone which way we’re headed,” Pasco pointed out. “So much for freakin’ secrecy.”

“If those guys were paid to stop any GenTech vehicle headed for the Underground,” Carl pointed out, “somebody else must have reasoned things out the same way we did. Unless we have weasels deep inside our own operation, the only people who could have done that are the people who were waiting to collect from Blay. They might have got to the wreck before your guys did—they may even have seen the Kid ride off.”

“In that case,” said Pasco tautly, “I have to call up some real support. Your secret ain’t a secret any more.”

Carl knew that he was on the spot, so he thought fast. Maybe Pasco was right—but there was another way to look at it.

“Maybe there’s still a clever way to play it,” he said speculatively. “So far, it may be still between us and Blay’s people—and if they’re paying off scum like the Maniax to lay traps for us, it’s obvious that their own resources are limited. They must figure that they can’t get to the Underground ahead of us—not in strength, anyhow. The odds are that there are only a handful of them. If we can lure them out into the open, we can find out what this is all about—but if we start a big panic, they’ll just fade away into the confusion when everybody and his cousin starts taking an interest in what Kid Zero has.”

He was surprised to hear Pasco laugh shortly. “The vehicle ain’t bugged,” he said. “You can cut the crap. If you want to carry on doing it the Doc’s way, that’s your business. I have to ask myself what’s best for me. I’m the guy whose ass is on the line here.”

“Zarathustra can do us both a lot of damage,” Carl pointed out uncomfortably. “I have to do things his way—and I have to do my level best to persuade you to do things his way, too. We both have our asses on the line—but ask yourself, are you really so keen to start overruling your orders this early in the operation?”

He glanced sideways when he’d made the point, expecting to see Pasco scowl again—but Pasco was only looking at him, with as much respect as resentment.

“For a shotgun guard,” observed Pasco sourly, “you’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”

“We’re in the same boat, Ray,” said Carl quietly, “riding the same frail hope. If it fouls up, you can at least go back to the Doc and say I told you so. In the meantime, let’s give ourselves a chance to hit the jackpot, okay?”

Pasco still didn’t scowl. He didn’t say “okay” either, but he didn’t scowl. Carl was prepared to take that as a good sign.

“Anyway,” said Carl, trying to sound laconic, “I guess you could say that we won the first round. They tried to stop us, and they failed. Next stop, the Underground. I guess they know you there—though we couldn’t really pretend to be anything we aren’t, could we?”

He hoped that the reference to Pasco’s limited capacity for disguise was subtle enough not to cause offence. It seemed that it was.

“Yeah,” said Pasco off-handedly. “They know my face. But that has advantages as well as disadvantages.”

“What happened to your face, anyhow?” asked Carl, deciding that it was time to take the chance. He breathed a little more easily when Pasco didn’t react in a hostile manner.

“It was way back when I started as an Op,” said the big man drily. “I went to pick up some guy. It was a shit job anyhow—freaker was only worth two grand, and he surrendered like a lamb. I was playing it strictly by the book, taking him in alive, when up pops some crazy dame with some kind of miniature fire-extinguisher which turns out to be loaded with freakin’ nitric acid.”

“You never thought of getting it fixed?”

“No. Every time I look in a mirror, it reminds me to be careful. I’ve been careful, ever since. People who bury their mistakes make ’em over and over again. And it seems to make it easier to scare the shit out of the punks. It makes it just that little bit easier to get information out of people who’d normally be reluctant—makes it clear that I’m a guy who doesn’t like to be delayed. Psychological thing—maybe you’ll get to see it real soon.”

Carl nodded. “Did you ice the dame?” he asked, casually.

“Naw,” said Pasco. “Took her in alive. Bumped into her once, after she got out—it was on a Missouri ferry in the Kansas City PZ. Said hello, real polite, but she couldn’t wait to get off the boat—I thought she was going to jump over the side in mid-stream.”

Carl chuckled. “That’s shipboard romances for you,” he said. “They never last.”

Pasco even condescended to laugh at that one. Maybe, Carl thought, he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

Maybe.

They hit the Underground before nightfall and sealed the sneaker. Its sensors were smart enough to take care of anyone who even tried to approach it without first-class ID, so Carl had no worries about leaving it. Pasco judged that it was best to have a drink and take a look around before they started making connections with the GenTech weasels, so they went into the main bar and suggested to a couple of slummers that the table they were occupying ought to have had a RESERVED sign on it.

Pasco seemed to be well-known in the Underground, and when he said hello to people they said hello back, in a nervous sort of fashion which Carl had never observed before. Carl began to see some of the advantages of looking the way Pasco did. He would have been recognized whatever he looked like, but this way the recognition always carried with it just that hint of intimidation.

As they sipped their liquor Pasco pointed out some of the people with whom Kid Zero had previously been associated.

“The Atlas Boys are hanging out by the pool tables,” he said. “And over by the entrance to the arcade there’s one of the Low Numbers with his old lady—Mike Quin and Two-tone Tess. No sign of Ace the Ace—but he’s a has-been anyhow, too old for the gang game. I’ll lay odds that the sams in the comer are Yakuza, but whether they’re M-M affiliates I don’t know.”

Carl looked around. The Atlas Boys were impossible to miss, owing to the fact that the least of them had twice as much muscle as anyone else in the room, but the two Japanese guys looked deceptively harmless. “Is it always this crowded?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Pasco. “Nearest thing to a PZ there is this far out in No-Man’s-Land. The Spiders run a tidy joint and everybody likes it that way. But it’s what you might call a precarious balance of power. Once tipped, the whole place could go up in a shooting war. It’s usually safe to ice the minor actors, if you do it in a reasonable manner, but if the Kid does show, we’ll have to be careful.”

One of the Spiders had drifted over to their table. He had the falsely casual air of one paying a duty call.

“Mr Pasco,” he said politely. “Good to see you back again. You quit the org to go freelance again?”

“Naw,” said Pasco lazily. “I’m too old for all that—I like the quiet life now. Just brought in a pal to show him some of the sights. This is Carl Preston. Carl, meet Romeo Carmona.” Pasco pronounced the name Ro-Mi-o instead of Ro-MAY-o, but the Spider didn’t correct him.

As Carl shook hands with the Spider Pasco added: “With a name like that he should be in the mafia, but his ancestors came from the wrong part of Italy, ain’t that so, Romeo?”

“That’s so,” confirmed the Spider politely. “But we’re too far west, anyhow. The families are strictly east coast these days. Any friend of Mr Pasco’s is welcome here, Mr Preston. You staying long?”

“Not long,” said Carl amiably. “We just dropped in to take a look, on our way to somewheres else.”

“Just got time to look up a couple of old friends,” added Pasco, leaning across to offer his own hand to be shaken, passing on a big bill as he did so. “Purely private—nobody’s business but our own.”

The Spider nodded, and strolled away. Pasco finished his drink unhurriedly, and watched Carmona pass the message on; then he stood up, and said: “Let’s go.”

They walked through the arcade where the electronic gaming machines were. Carl saw that Pasco looked at the horrorshow booths as they went past, but he didn’t pause at all. In the darker corridors beyond the arcades the big man quickened his pace, and checked back a couple of times to see whether they were being followed. There was no sign of anything amiss.

“Pity,” muttered Pasco. “Would be nice if someone’d tip his hand, but I guess if there’s anyone here who knows what we’re about he’d keep his head down.”

Eventually, they came to a heavily-armoured door in a shadowed alcove. Pasco showed some ID to a camera-eye, but some time passed before they were admitted into the apartments beyond. There were four rooms in all but three of them—the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen—were hardly more than closets. The main room was lined with a profusion of consoles and screens which would not have seemed out of place at the heart of a GenTech research station.

The man inside was small and wizened, with unnaturally pale skin and colourless eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t seen the sunlight for twenty years.

“Carey Castle,” he said by way of introduction. “Pest control. The scavengers raid the net, I raid the scavengers. We have a very convoluted web here, though some of the websters don’t realize quite how convoluted it is. I put out a few new feelers when your call came through, but you said to be discreet. Nothing’s come through yet.”

“Nothing’ll come over the net,” said Carl, looking round. “The Kid’s not stupid enough to feed the disc into a system terminal.”

“Never overestimate the capacity which the human mind has for stupidity,” said Castle scornfully. “I’m monitoring as much traffic as I can, looking for anything interesting. You can bet your life that a dozen other stations monitored the signal which was sent to me, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that one or two have decoded it by now. We need to know who else is interested and who’s passing information on regarding this affair. I don’t have anything yet, but I’ll get it, given time. Everybody has to use the net.”

“Never mind that,” said Pasco. “What about the local hackers? Any of them acting suspiciously?”

Castle shrugged. “I put new fibre-eyes through the walls to take a look at the real screwballs,” he said. “They soon spot them and black out the tips, but I can usually get an hour or two of good tape. Nobody doing anything they shouldn’t be.”

“Show me,” said Pasco.

Castle punched in a few command codes and pointed to a row of screens. Four were active but only two showed an image.

“Pawlak’s got the lights out—it’s his bedtime,” said Castle. “Zagorski probably found the eye and blacked it out already. He’s very sharp, and he often tries to take a bit out of us—the Kid’s traded with him in the past, so he might be our best bet.”

“Who’s that one?” asked Pasco, pointing to one of the live-action shots, which showed an Oriental busy in front of a screen.

“Yam On Wan. He’s M-M—has a dish and decoder for their sats. He’s watching data-flow way down in the Argentine. Routine, for him.”

“And the other?” Carl saw a little old lady, extensively cyborgized, similarly hunched over a screen—but her fingers were plugged in instead of playing with a keyboard.

“Harriet the Hooker. She’s out on Cloud Nine, just coasting. She’s strictly a small-time pickpocket—credit fraud, transaction raider. If you want my tip, go for Zagorski. He obviously has something to hide. You want me to run the tape I took before he blacked me out?”

“No,” said Pasco. “I don’t think so. How often does Harriet use her armchairs?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m not a voyeur, you know—I don’t run these fibres through the walls for the fun of it. I have business to do, and all the scanning programmes in the world are useless unless somebody’s paying attention.”

Carl saw what Pasco was getting at. The armchair in Harriet’s cosy little cave was empty. Its seat was the only bit of vacant space on view. No one was there now—but it was just possible that someone had been there not so long ago—and had already gone again. The hooker was behaving normally—maybe expecting that someone might try to have a peek at her—but for a hooker, carelessness of the physical environment was entirely normal. An empty space was just the kind of thing she might have forgotten to cover up.

“Call Carmona and have him send out a wrecking crew,” said Pasco grimly. “I want a word with Harriet, and I don’t think she’ll be opening her door to strangers just now.”

6

The moment Harriet heard the drills get to work on her lock she knew the game was up. There was no use taking time out to wonder how that scuzzbag Carey Castle had rumbled her—though she was convinced that she’d been acting absolutely normally since he ran his newest thread through her wall. By the time he’d opened up the spyhole she’d already stowed her copy of Kid Zero’s disc, and it had seemed easy enough to simulate business as usual, but something had obviously gone wrong.

She had no illusions about her ability to hold out under interrogation. She had too much flesh left on her, and all of it could be hurt. She pulled all her connections loose immediately, trying to ignore the headache it left her with.

There was only one thing she could try, so she tried it. She dialled the number of the phone by the pool table, hoping that one of the Atlas Boys would answer it. She had some credit with the Atlas Boys, and they were big fans of Kid Zero—maybe his biggest, in more ways than one.

When the connection was made she recognized Cyril’s voice, even though he only said: “Yeah?” That was good—Cyril was a nice boy.

“It’s Harriet the Hooker,” she told him. “Something big’s going down between GenTech and Kid Zero. The Kid left me something for safe-keeping and the Spiders are battering the door down to get hold of it. I don’t know how many there are or who they’re working for—can you help?”

She heard Cyril relaying the message, and prayed that Big Charlie wouldn’t be in the middle of a break. The door was already creaking on its reinforced hinges, and she knew that the locks and bolts couldn’t hold it against the kind of brute force which the cutting crew could muster.

“We’ll be there, Harriet,” said Cyril briefly. Harriet hung up before he could hear her sob of relief.

The door held out for another twenty seconds, and then her nest was wide open to all comers. The first man through had only half a face, and she somehow knew that his manners would be as ugly as his mug. He came over to her and turned her chair half-round so that it faced him. He towered over her. A second man came in behind him—younger, handsome in a way, but very solid. They both had “hard man” written all over them. She didn’t know them, but they obviously weren’t gangmen. She hoped they were only Ops, but she knew how desperate that hope was.

“Harriet,” said the man with the ruined face gently, “we haven’t time to be civil about this. We know Kid Zero was here—we want to know what you did for him, where he went and how long ago.”

“Ain’t seen the Kid in over a year,” she said valiantly. “I heard he was in New Mexico.”

The man with half a face sighed, and said: “You’re under arrest, Harriet. We’ll make up the charge sheet later, but you now as well as I do how much we have on you, and how much more we can get. If you don’t help us, we’re going to disconnect you, implant by implant—and we aren’t going to be very particular about how we rip the implants out. You have ten seconds, Harriet, and I want you took look into my eyes, so that you’ll know I mean exactly what I say.”

As he spoke, he picked up one of her hands, and pinched the plug on her ring-finger between his thumb and forefinger. He pressed just hard enough to let her feel the force of his grip—so that she could anticipate what it might feel like when he tore the plug away from the artificial synapse which linked it directly to her nervous system.

She looked into his eyes, as he had asked her to, comparing the one which was natural with the one which didn’t.

He began counting: “Ten, nine, eight…” It was obvious that the man had a real flair for melodrama.

Harriet thought about the afterlife, and about the pain that might have to be suffered before she got there—and she prayed that Cyril and the boys would soon arrive.

When the count had reached three there were the first sounds of a scuffle outside, and a Spider lurched into the room, collapsing into the armchair she’d cleared for Kid Zero. He was followed by another, who came in without his feet touching the floor—he was being held that way by Cyril Atlas. Big Charlie Atlas—Charlemagne, as Homer Hegarty called him and as he naturally preferred to be known—was just behind him, filling the entire doorway with his bulk. The remainder of the cutting crew was still outside, hopefully accompanied by the rest of the Atlas Boys.

Neither of the Atlas Boys had guns in their hands—they didn’t want any trouble with the Spiders which would lose them a home base, and theirs was a delicate mission, diplomatically speaking.

“Two,” said the man with half a face, hauling out a pistol as he said it. That was as far as he went, for the time being. He eyed Cyril and Charlie with open disdain.

“Can I help you boys?” said his companion smoothly, moving to stand in front of Cyril Atlas. Cyril looked around for somewhere to put the Spider down, but the room was now too crowded. He turned around and passed his captive to Charlie, who stepped back in order to let him out. Then Cyril turned back to loom over the man who’d had the temerity to confront him.

“That’s my mother your friend’s messin’ with,” lied Cyril, without much conviction. “Why is your friend messin’ with my mother?”

“We’re from the Welfare Department,” said the hard man. “We just want to make sure that she collects all the benefits she’s entitled to.”

“Call him off, Charlie,” said the Spider in the armchair. “You don’t want any part of this. It’s corp business. You remember Ray Pasco, don’t you? Butt out, or your next home-from-home will be Sandrat City.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” said Charlie Atlas, in his slow basso profundo. “Peace Through Strength is our motto. We don’t believe in violence—just Dynamic Tension. Seems to me, though, that this here is a tense situation.”

“I’m warning you, Charlie,” said the Spider, “you’re losing a lot of moral credit here. We’re the guys who run this joint, and we decide who can do what. Mr Pasco won’t hurt Harriet, if she tells him what he wants to know.”

“Do you know what he wants to know, Ma?” asked Cyril, loudly—and when Cyril was loud he was very loud indeed.

“No, son,” said Harriet, “I don’t know anything. He’s asking about someone called Kid Zero, but I didn’t ever have a Kid named Zero, did I?”

“I don’t have time for this sort of pantomime,” said Pasco wearily, and shot Cyril Atlas clean through the right eye.

While the exit wound was spewing out a mess of red cloud and grey matter Cyril’s face took on a surprised expression. Then he fell backwards into Charlie Atlas’s arms. Charlie had no alternative but to catch him, because there was no space for him to fall over, and the fact that he had both his arms around Cyril meant that he had no chance at all to get out of the firing-line.

The man with half a face sighted along the barrel of his gun at Charlie Atlas’s forehead, and said: “You got two choices, fat man. You can take your freakin’ gang back to the bar, and go back to your game of pool, or I’ll turn your brain to the same kind of cold porridge you got all over your shirt-front. And if your friends out in the corridor vote that you got to be a hero, every freakin’ one of them will be dead before morning. That’s not the Spiders talking, it’s GenTech. Okay?”

Harriet could tell that it wasn’t okay. In fact, she could tell that the man with half a face had just made himself an extra enemy. Charlie didn’t like to see his boys maltreated, and he didn’t think Cyril had been anywhere near provocative enough to deserve what he’d got. On the other hand, Charlie was no fool. He could tell when he was out of his depth. He knew—and Harriet knew too—that there was nothing Charlie could do but back off. She knew that Charlie and the Boys would feel pretty sick about it, but there it was. She felt pretty sick about it herself.

“You’d better not hurt Harriet,” said Charlie, in the most menacing tone he could muster. “Harriet has a lot of friends.”

It was news to Harriet. She appreciated the gesture, impotent though it was.

“It’s okay, Charlie,” she said softly. “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have called. I didn’t mean to get Cyril killed—I’m really sorry.”

“That’s better,” said Pasco, who still hadn’t lowered his gun. “The tension’s going out of the situation already, you see? Harriet’s a businesswoman, and we’re just here to do a little business—that’s all.”

The doorway looked very big and very empty once Charlie Atlas was no longer filling it. In fact, the room seemed very much larger, because he had dragged Cyril’s body out with him.

“That wasn’t very sensible, Harriet,” said Pasco grimly. “The Kid should have warned you that we’d mean business this time. He hasn’t done you any favours by dragging you in, and you don’t owe him any in return. He’s overstepped the mark, this time. He’s already dead—just living on borrowed time. Like the Atlas Boys, you have only two choices, Harriet. You can be on Kid Zero’s side, or you can be on our side. There aren’t any neutrals any more. Which is it to be, Harriet?”

“I’ll get you the disc,” said Harriet faintly. Pasco let her go while she rummaged around for it. She wondered briefly whether she ought to have made more copies, but realized that she was too deep in the shit to think about pulling flankers.

She handed the disc to Pasco, who glanced a it briefly before passing it on to his friend.

“How many are there?” he asked.

“Four,” said Harriet tonelessly. “The Kid took the other three. One to stash, he said—the rest he’s going to try to get to the CIA. The guy who gave it to him was a government agent of some kind. The Kid wants to complete the delivery.”

The man with the ruined face looked at his friend, who looked back stonily.

“Where’d he go?” asked Pasco silkily.

“I don’t know,” said Harriet truthfully—but this was one of those time when the truth just wasn’t enough.

Ray Pasco broke the implant from her left ring-finger. She heard the snap before the pain caught up with her, because sound travels faster through the air than electrical impulses travel through the nerves.

She fainted. Old age was on her side, and it wasn’t going to let her take much suffering. She’d have been only too pleased to fall into a dream, but she didn’t. She fell into some dark pool of pain, where she was out of touch with the world but hurting through and through. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be, so she struggled to get back again.

When she came round, she found that she was curled up on the floor with a close-up view of Ray Pasco’s boot. The man with the ruined face was talking to a Spider who’d just come in—not the one who’d headed the cutting crew. The cutting crew had gone.

“…heading north-west,” the Spider was saying. “Five hours ago. If you step on it, you might just catch him.”

“It’s good,” Pasco’s companion said. “We can concentrate the search. Maybe we can put the word out without attracting too much attention.”

Harriet gave out an unearthly groan, trying to sound as if she was about to die, and rolled over. Then she pretended that she was unconscious again. Pasco nudged her in the ribs with his toecap, but he was too preoccupied to take a closer look. That was good.

Her right hand was now shielded by her body, and there was a low-lying connect-point from which she could control some of her supplementaries. She couldn’t interface with the net, but she could open up some outside lines. She switched on half a dozen voice-mikes, then opened up an old wire Zagorski had run into her equipment. She was certain that Yam On Wan had a good tap into Zagorski’s machinery—and that meant that anything else which was said would be half way around the world within minutes.

“Why north-west?” asked Pasco. “He’s doubling back—that doesn’t sound to me like he’s trying to get to the government. There’s nothing out there but sand and ghost towns.”

Harriet withdrew the connection, and groaned again. This time, Pasco bent down to pick her up. He wasn’t as wide as an Atlas Boy but he was every bit as tall, and he held her up as easily as if she’d been a rag doll.

“What did he tell you, Harriet?” he asked—but she could tell that the menacing manner was all bluff. He thought that if he hurt her, she’d only faint again.

“He told me that what he had was really big,” she said, trying to sound terrified. “He told me that it was worth millions—but the Kid don’t care about money. He just wants to give it away, to anyone who’ll use it to hurt GenTech. He wants to crack your org wide open.”

Are you listening, boys? she added silently, offering up a prayer that this wasn’t just going on to some stupid tape that Zagorski wouldn’t play back until Christmas.

Pasco set her down in the vacant chair, then looked around.

Too late! she cried in the empty reaches of her head, hoping that she was right.

“Burn it out,” said the man with the ruined face to the Spider. “Turn it all to slag. Take the woman out by the back way, and pass her on to our people when they can get down here. They can use drugs to find out whether she really knows any more or not, but we don’t have time to play right now. Preston and I had better go out the same way, in case we get held up by more moronic giants. So far, our luck’s held—we know when the Kid left and which way he went—it’s only a matter of time before we pick up the trail. With luck, we might nail him today or tomorrow—but either way, he’s finished. There’s nowhere at all he can go.”

“You got it,” said the Spider shortly.

“And you have a big pay-off coming right down the line,” said Pasco. “If you can keep your mouth shut. Carey Castle will monitor every signal that goes out of this place, and if one word of what you just overheard gets broadcast, you’re dead.”

Harriet was trying hard to be convinced that Ray Pasco was locking the stable door after the horse had already bolted. Ten to one she was right, but there were no certainties in life, alas.

She wanted to say something brave and defiant, like “You’ll never get the Kid,” but she didn’t have the strength, let alone the certainty. She could only hope that GenTech’s drugs would give her pleasant dreams—and that when Kid Zero’s reckoning finally came, Lady Venom would get in a bite or two in order to even up the score.

7

There were times when Homer Hegarty hated his job.

He loved being a TV star—not only because the pay was ten times better than he’d ever made teaching college but also because he was a bit of a sucker for the line of patter which he fed the punters, about being the only man in America who could see the writing on the wall—but being a TV star was only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of it was travelling the country with a fleet of copters and cameras, on the road six days a week, living in crappy motels and trailer-parks. It was the sick and schticky business of trying to weave epic stories—or mock-epic stories, anyhow—out of the petty squabbles of brainless assholes, most of whom had as much real backbone as the average jellyfish.

Homer hated his job most when it took him to the parts of America which had been shitholes even in the good old days. The worst of all those shitholes, in Homer’s anything-but-humble opinion, was Texas. He firmly believed the old joke about God having made a real mess of landscaping Texas but worming his way out of trouble by creating a bunch of potential settlers so mind-bogglingly stupid as to like it just the way it was: flat, infertile, and ugly as hell.

The trailer-camp where he and his team were presently lodged was out on the edge of the Staked Plains. It was technically only semi-desert, but that “technically” covered a multitude of sins. It was the back of beyond, where even sandrats and scavengers had a hard time making out.

The trailer-park had only one advantage: it was secure. In fact, its owners claimed that it was every bit as secure as the older PZs—which Homer was prepared to believe, having recently visited New York and Chicago. The security men called themselves the Delta Force and claimed to have belonged to a crack regiment of the U.S. Army in the days before privatization, but Homer didn’t believe that—these guys were too bright ever to have been real soldiers; some of them could even read. He figured that they were ex-juvie gangculters who’d survived long enough in the NoGos to know how to move upmarket.

Homer figured that he needed an outfit like Delta Force to watch his rear, even though most of the gangsters thought he was the next best thing to God. There were always crazies out there, who might figure that the quickest way to become a celebrity was to knock off the guy who was the nation’s number one celebrity-broker.

Tonight, Homer had retired early to his trailer. He always had a trailer to himself, and rarely entertained people there. He liked his own company, and talking to himself was the only chance he ever got to hold a conversation on a reasonable intellectual level. Also, he liked to have time to read; it was a habit he’d never shaken off, even though his years teaching college were long-gone, and he treasured it all the more during those times when the job made him sick. Tonight, not for the first time, he was reading Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. He found it utterly engrossing, as he did any opportunity to escape into the abstract realms of philosophical thought, where he need not be bothered by the stink of the shitheap that the modern world had become.

He was so engrossed in the book, in fact, that he didn’t even notice the door of the trailer open and close. It wasn’t until the reek of sweat and dirt told him that someone else was present that he looked up—and by that time, the party in question had sat down on the spare bunk, opposite to the one in which Homer was lying.

For one awful moment, Homer thought that he was a dead man. He looked into the anonymous, characterless face of a juvie panzer boy: gaunt, hollow-eyed, inhuman. It seemed like the contemporary mask of the Grim Reaper, come to carry him off to some mysterious Underworld where all the dead, unwanted children of the world played games of murder and destruction.

But then he saw that the face wasn’t characterless. He saw that there was intelligence and curiosity in those pale blue eyes, and that a kind of smile played around the thin lips. He realized that it wasn’t anonymous, either. He was face-to-face with one of those unlucky souls whose sordidly violent exploits he had—with great difficulty and even greater irony—transmuted into the stuff of legend.

He was glad to see that the Kid wasn’t pointing a gun at him. He was so glad to see it that he didn’t even try to reach for the alarm bell that would have brought half-a-dozen Delta Force heavies racing to his aid.

“Hi Kid,” he said, trying with all his might to sound as if this sort of thing happened all the time. “You wanna beer?”

Kid Zero nodded.

Homer got up lazily—but his eyes were busy, searching the shadowed corners just in case the Kid had brought that big rattler with him. There was no sign of it. He opened the fridge and pulled out a couple of cans. He tossed one casually to the Kid, who caught it effortlessly.

“How long since you last ate?” Homer asked.

“Twenty-four hours or so,” said the Kid laconically. “Had a few hi-pro biscuits. Been on the road all day.”

Homer dug a packet of corn chips out of the cupboard and threw them after the beer. “Only got a microwave,” he said. “I live on packet stuff, mostly. You tried these new ready meals with tissue-culture beef in ’em?”

“Sure,” said the Kid, between corn chips. “Anythin’ll do—nothin’ too spicy, though. I don’t like my food to bite back.”

Homer riffled through the packets, found a beef stew that didn’t wear too heavy a disguise, and poured the contents into a plastic dish. He added water from the cooler, fastened the lid, and shoved it into the microwave. When he turned round again the Kid was staring at the cooler.

“Rich living, hey?” Homer observed gently. “The next best thing to real meat and all the water I can drink. You can take a shower later, if you want.”

The Kid’s eyes clouded over briefly, as if the thought of taking all his clothes off was instinctively off-limits.

“Hey,” said Homer. “You already took a hell of a risk coming in here. If you can trust me this far, you can trust me the last few inches. Why would I turn you in when you’re one of my best meal tickets?”

“Later,” said the Kid. “This isn’t a social call.”

“I didn’t figure it was,” Homer admitted. “Something going down that you want me to know about?” He felt uneasy as he said it. He often got tips over the phone about where and when there was going to be action, but never from Kid Zero. That was one of the things he had always respected in the Kid—there weren’t many people around who weren’t hungry for publicity, but the Kid had always seemed to be one of them.

“Yep,” said the Kid. “I don’t know what it is, but I know I ain’t big enough to handle it on my own. I figured you might know what to do—and might be the one man in the world able to do it.”

Homer realized that his former feeling of uneasiness had just been a tease. It was displaced by something an order of magnitude worse. The microwave beeped at him and he gave the stew a quick stir with a fork before shoving it back again. Then he took a long swig from the beercan.

“Look, Kid,” he said. “There’s one thing you have to realize before we go any further. We aren’t on the same side, you and me. What I say on my show is a line. I’m not saying that it’s all bullshit, because it isn’t. But it’s patter for the punters, to make a story out of a sequence of incidents. All that stuff about the outlaws being the inheritors of the real America, the true champions of freedom …it may not mean exactly what you think it means. I’m not an outlaw, Kid. I’m not even a historian. I’m just a guy trying to make a living. I got nothing at all against GenTech—I’m not in their pocket, but they run ZBC and ZBC runs me. The water in that cooler is GenTech water; the ice in the fridge is GenTech ice; the meat in your stew is GenTech meat. I can’t help you fight your crusade, Kid—I can’t even pretend to understand or sympathize with what you do, in spite of what I say on screen. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear,” said the Kid. “But you’re all I have. You’re the only person I know who might—just might—be able to help me.”

There was a pause while Homer watched the microwave’s timer counting down towards zero. Ask not for whom the beeper beeps, Homer, he said to himself. It beeps for thee.

The beeper beeped, and Homer took out the stew. He gave it one more stir for luck, then passed it to the Kid along with the fork. The Kid got stuck in, but without any particular impatience or inelegance. Not for the first time, Homer Hegarty wondered who Kid Zero could possibly have been before he became Kid Zero. Nothing showed on his record, despite GenTech-aided enquiries made by various Ops who had tried to get an inside line on him. If the Kid had any loved ones, he was careful never to go near them lest he expose them to danger. Homer liked that—it was just like the old comic book superheroes, jealously protecting their secret identities.

By the time the Kid had finished the stew, cleanly and efficiently, Homer figured he was ready to hear the bad news.

“Okay Kid,” he said. “Give me the story.”

The Kid told him a long story about shooting down a GenTech helicopter, and about a government agent who’d staggered out of the burning car, and about taking a PC disc to the Underground.

“I stashed one of the copies Harriet made me,” said the Kid, when he finally wound down. “One’s still with the bike—Lady Venom’s looking after it for the moment. This one’s for you.”

Homer looked at the little packet which the Kid was holding out to him. It was in a plain wrapper, but to his imaginative eye it had POISONED CHALICE written on it in big red letters, just above the invisible skull and crossbones. He reached out and took it anyway.

“What do you expect me to do with it?” he asked hoarsely.

“That’s up to you,” said the Kid. “It’s yours—do whatever you want. Send it to the president, or some big wheel in Chromicon. What I’d like you to do is to find someone who can read it for you discreetly, and then make your mind up what ought to be done—but if you can’t do that, it’s okay. You can trash it, if you want to. Stick it in the microwave and switch on, if you’d rather not know.”

Homer knew that he’d just received some very good advice. Sticking it in the microwave and switching on was the clever man’s way to health and riches. But he did take leave to wonder whether the Kid might have read him right. Was Homer Hegarty really a man who would rather not know?

Faced with the choice of being Socrates or a happy cabbage, Homer thought, a man ought to choose Socrates every time—but only if he didn’t have to drink the hemlock. Damn you. Kid Zero, he said to himself. Damn you to Hell and back again. Get thee behind me, Satan, and stay off my case. I’m a ZBC clown, not freakin’ Faust.

He gritted his teeth, and tried to be sensible. Was it too late to press the alarm button? Yes, he decided, it was. He’d touched the accused object, and was tainted. The only question which mattered now was how much GenTech cared.

“Anyone know you were coming here?” he asked casually.

“Nope,” said the Kid promptly. “And no one will know after I’ve gone. They won’t take me alive—not while I have Lady Venom.”

Homer sat down on the bed again and looked at the cover of The Twilight of the Idols. That was what clinched it. He succumbed to the temptation to ask questions.

“Why do you do it, Kid?” he asked tiredly. “Why do you want to take bites out of GenTech’s ass until they get so annoyed that they’ll turn around and stamp you underfoot like a bug? That’s what’ll happen, you know, in the end. They used to say that you couldn’t fight city hall, but the old city halls were pansies compared with today’s multinational corps. You’re no fool—you might actually find a way of making a living in this sick and crazy world if you’d put your mind to it. Why commit suicide in a war you not only can’t win, but can’t even begin to fight?”

“You know why,” said Kid Zero.

“Because of that bar-room story they tell? Because you fell in love with a whore who died because she’d been part of a GenTech experiment? Kid, this ain’t the Middle Ages and Don Quixote was a holy fool even then. That isn’t an explanation, and you know it.”

“So you tell me,” said the Kid amiably. “You’re the only guy in America who really understands what’s going on—or so you say. You tell me what the score is, and why.”

It was a challenge, and Homer had never been able to resist a challenge. An intellectual challenge, anyway. In physical terms he was yellow through and through and proud of it.

He sighed, and fetched two more beers from the fridge. Then he sat down again, and put his feet up.

“The way I see it,” he said, realizing as he said it that it was true—that this really was the way he saw it—“you and me and everyone else, we’re just ghost dancers. Most of us don’t know it, but that’s what we are. You know who the ghost dancers were, Kid? You ever hear of Wovoka?”

“No,” said the Kid.

“Wovoka was an Indian. A Paiute from Nevada. He started a Millenarian cult in 1889, which spread through the Indian tribes like wildfire, and was taken up by the Sioux at the time of their last desperate attempt to fight back against the white men who had stolen their land, destroyed their culture and all-but-exterminated their people.”

“What’s a Millenarian cult?” asked Kid Zero.

“Millenarians are Christians who think that the world we live in is just a temporary thing, and that Christ will return to put an end to it, hold a Day of Judgement, and then reign over the Earth-made-Heaven for a thousand years. Anthropologists have broadened out the term to refer to all cults which preach the message that the end of the world is nigh. There have been lots of times in history when particular groups of people have been thrown into such a state of crisis that they come to believe—usually rightly—that they and their entire way of life are finished, and can’t be continued. When that happens—when all their traditions are devastated and there seems to be no hope of carrying on in the way they know, people tend to go a little bit crazy. They put all their eggs into one basket and conjure up as much hope as they can for a supernatural redemption of their otherwise-hopeless situation.

“The white invaders put the Indians in that kind of situation in the last century, and when the breaking-point came there was nothing for the Indians to do but put all their trust in their gods. Wovoka played Christ for the Paiutes, promising that if only they’d perform this new dance he’d invented, they’d be okay. Before they went into that last battle the Sioux warriors were encouraged by Wovoka to make ‘ghost shirts’ which were supposed to be invulnerable to the white men’s bullets, and they rode into the fight believing—or hoping, at least—that their gods would give them the power to win. But the shirts didn’t work and the gods didn’t come through. The Sioux were massacred at Wounded Knee, and that was the end of their world. Their last and most desperate bid for salvation had failed.

“Now it’s our turn, Kid. The world has come full circle and the end of our way of life is just over the horizon. There’re a lot of people around who believe that the year 2000—the numerical Millennium—will see the actual end of the world, but it doesn’t really matter whether or not the planet blows up, or whether or not Christ returns to judge us all, or whether or not all the freakin’ devils in Hell are let loose to do what they will; the fact remains that our way of doing things has already come apart at the seams.

“Everything which is going on around us—the desert that’s eating out the heart of America; the attempt to save a few favoured enclaves of the old urban sprawls by building walls around the PZs; the attempt by the corps to make a new industrial revolution—is part and parcel of the material decay of our whole way of life. The American Dream is now the American Nightmare. And those of us who are standing on the sidelines looking on—those of us who’ve already given up the fight for lost—are just dancing our way through the steps of empty rituals which give us the illusion of purpose and the illusion of hope. That’s you and me, Kid: just ghost dancers. There isn’t any sensible explanation of what you do, any more than there’s a sensible explanation of what I do, because there aren’t any sensible explanations left for anything. Am I right, or am I right?”

For a moment or two he thought that it had gone right over the top of the Kid’s head—that the little freak was too stupid to understand. But then the boy laughed, and picked at the weathered surface of his old leather jacket.

“My ghost shirt,” said the Kid. “Invulnerable to GenTech bullets. I like it, Homer. Best of all I like the Day of Judgement. That’s me, you see—I’m GenTech’s Day of Judgement. For Snake Eyes and the whole freakin’ world. David and Goliath; Perseus and the sea-monster; Kid Zero and Doc Zarathustra. I like it, Homer, I really do.”

From which Homer Hegarty gathered that the mysterious Kid Zero was by no means totally uneducated, but was nevertheless a complete and wholehearted holy fool.

And he also realized that whatever he said by way of patter, Homer Hegarty wasn’t. Not quite. At least, not yet.

When the Kid had gone Homer got himself another beer, optimistically hoping that it might help him to think. He had put the disc which the Kid had given him on top of the microwave, propped up against a plastic bowl.

To fry or not to fry, he thought, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to…

He didn’t need to go on. It was obvious what the nobler course was; the real question was whether he wanted to take it.

He picked up the telephone and dialled his information service. It wasn’t a secure line; none of the lines to his information service were secure, despite the promises of confidentiality which he gave out over the air. One of the reasons that he was actively encouraged by all the honest and upstanding citizens who had a finger in the great bloated pie that was ZBC was that all his tipoffs were common property.

He knew that he had to be careful.

“Hi Homer,” said the night-man. “Why ain’t you tucked up in bed catching up on your beauty sleep?”

“Too hot,” said Homer tersely. “What kind of news do you have coming in about gang-ac?”

“Not much—it’s been a pretty quiet couple of days. One freaky thing, though—someone phoned to say that the Low Numbers and the Atlas Boys rode out of the Underground en masse, on some kind of revenge kick. Looks like someone iced Cyril Atlas.”

Homer swallowed, and reminded himself that he had to be laid back about this. He had to let the night-man put the twos together in order to come up with the fours.

“What’s that got to do with the Numbers?” he asked.

“I dunno—that’s what’s odd. Could be a Kid Zero connection, do you think? He was thick with both gangs once.”

“Could be,” said Homer, very casually. “What’s the Kid been up to lately?”

“Nothing that anyone’s seen fit to tell us about. We have had one or two enquiries, though—asking if we have any information.”

“Who from?”

“Couple of Ops. The big boys would know already whether we have any information or not. You want me to chase it up, ask some questions of my own?”

“Don’t know whether it’s worth it. Was it anyone interesting that iced Cyril Atlas?”

“Informant didn’t say. He said that there was only one car, though. Can’t have been an Op—contract killer, maybe, though it’s hard to imagine that anyone would put out a contract on a pussycat like Cyril. Shall I call the Spiders and ask them what’s going down?”

“No,” said Homer. “Don’t bother. It’s not important enough.”

He hung up, and lay back on the bunk.

It was something and nothing, he knew—but if the Numbers had gone out with the Atlas Boys to chase down some assassin it had to involve the Kid. That implied that whoever had iced Cyril had gone to the Underground looking for the Kid, and that they’d found something—presumably the hacker who’d duped the disc for him. The big question was: could they possibly track the Kid here? Could they possibly figure out that the Kid had come to see him? He knew that if they did, and he had kept quiet about it, he’d be up to his neck in shit.

On the other hand, he’d already kept quiet about it for an hour and more—and by now, the Kid would be well away from the trailer park. If he kept on keeping quiet, maybe—just maybe—he could get someone to crack the data on the disc for him. And then, just maybe, he might have something big enough to give him a hand to play in whatever game had started up.

Did he want to play a hand, though, in a game where fifty per cent of the players could easily end up dead?

Ghost dancers, he thought. At the end of the day, we’re all just ghost dancers, trying to fight the end of the world with magic.

He picked up the phone again, and asked information for the number of GenTech’s Security Division.

Sorry, Kid, he said silently, before he punched it out. Now and always, you’re on your own.

Part Two: The Unspeakable in Hot Pursuit

1

While Pasco was putting the message through the decoder and reading it off the screen the good side of his face seemed to get greyer—or so it seemed to Carl, who kept track with a series of sidelong glances.

“Aw, shit,” said Pasco softly, while the unscrambled text was still scrolling up the screen.

“Bad news?” prompted Carl, when Pasco said nothing.

“It’s from Carey Castle,” he said. “The cat’s out of the bag. We’re so freakin’ close—but now every greedy eye in the territory will be looking out for the Kid.”

“Carmona crossed us?” Carl guessed.

“We crossed ourselves,” Pasco replied disgustedly. “Zagorski had some kind of wire into Harriet’s hidey-hole, and when we shot our mouths off in there he got the lot. Carey sent the Spiders in to shut him up, but he’d already started making contacts. It’ll spread like wildfire.”

“We’re still the closest,” said Carl, trying desperately to find a bright side. “It shouldn’t matter that the word’s out. By coming down personally we got one step ahead. We’re still better off than if we’d followed your original plan.”

Pasco didn’t thank him for this particular reassurance, but his face was clearing as he realized the validity of the general point. “It’s not all bad,” he admitted. “Carey says the Kid’s been sighted up near Amarillo. That means we are close—and it also means that we can redeploy our birds into positions where we can call them up. Carey’s taken care of it. If we can just get lucky….”

“Amarillo’s on the edge of the worst part of the desert,” Carl pointed out. “It doesn’t have much of a population, and he sure as hell can’t expect to make contacts there. He might swing west again towards Denver.”

“No,” said Pasco. “He’s running scared—and at heart, he’s a sandrat. He’ll keep going north. We’re sending copter units to Dodge City as well as Amarillo, and we already have a hundred birds in Albuquerque. He can’t get away—and if we’re on his tail, anyone else who grabs him will have to deal with us. As long as we stay clear of the bikers…”

“What bikers?” asked Carl sharply.

“Nothing to worry about,” Pasco assured him. “Carey says that the Atlas Boys got a belated attack of bravery after we left, and they’re coming after us. The Low Numbers are with them. Maybe sixty bikes in all—but our interceptors will take them out before daybreak. We’re free and clear, Carl—it doesn’t matter a damn what’s behind us.”

No sooner were these optimistic words out of his companion’s mouth than Carl saw the headlights up ahead: three pairs, side by side, filling the road. For a moment he was dazzled by the light, and thought it might be six bikes pretending to be three cars, but one glance at the simulator which was co-ordinating information from the vehicle’s sensors told him otherwise. On the screen they were three bright blue rectangles, like targets in an arcade game. That was what they were in essence—and he didn’t dare to wait for them to fire the first shot. He keyed in an instruction to the computer telling it that they were hostile, then he okayed the programme to use the missiles from the roof-pod as well as the six-millimetre guns. Then he veered off the road and on to the dirt.

“Check the machine-guns,” he said to Pasco. “Take one on to manual if you want, but forget the mayday—there isn’t time.”

He knew immediately that the other vehicles must have pretty good equipment, because they swerved around the rocket which the computer released, and they hit the dirt as soon as Carl had taken the sneaker off the road. These weren’t Maniax out for fun; they were serious. The computer was still trying to work out exactly what they were and what they were carrying, but they had to be taken seriously.

The opposition opened up while Carl was still broadside-on, and he knew by the layered sound of the gunfire that they had at least one 15mm autocannon. It wasn’t a rapid-fire weapon, but it had the weight to put their armour under a lot of pressure if he couldn’t get out of the way. The computer was trying to tell him the same thing, but he couldn’t wait for advice.

Because there were three of them Carl didn’t dare swing back to face them, so he kept going away from the road, lurching over the stony ground. A couple of bullets pinged off the wing, but the range was too great and the angles of impact too shallow to damage them greatly.

He knew that it was no good putting down smoke because the opposition obviously had good radar, and until he could get them settled in behind him there was no point in laying down pattern-mines either, so Carl concentrated on fancy driving, zig-zagging out into the unknown. The simulator would tell him about anything tall and solid, but it didn’t register the gullies and low-lying ridges, so the ride was uncomfortably bumpy—but that helped to throw out the gunfire, and while the bad hats had three sets of weapons to Carl’s one he was happy enough have the random factor on his side.

Pasco took manual control of one of the machine guns—presumably feeling that the computer was too conservative in picking its shots—but when he started spraying bullets around it was obvious that it was sheer optimism making him do it—he couldn’t aim at all, and the sim wasn’t registering any hits.

Carl had little option but to bring the nose of the sneaker gradually around, so that it was following the arc of a circle, first west, then south. He was glad to see that as the pursuers tried to follow him they were getting strung out, so that they were now almost in single file. That reduced the flak that was screaming out in their direction, as well as bringing them slowly in towards a line which would make it worth his while to lay the mines.

The headlights picked out a narrow gulch between two ribbons of rock, and he headed into it gratefully, judging that once he was in it the walls would be high enough to provide some cover. There was a danger that he might corner himself, but for the time being he was far more anxious about what was behind him than what he might meet up front.

He dumped a few mines in the mouth of the gully but two of the bandits swung sideways to run a parallel course without actually descending into the gulch, while the third turned its guns on the ground and blew the mines prematurely. Their vehicles obviously had good sensors and competent simulators—which meant that they were almost in the same class as his own. The blaze of light which accompanied the explosion of the mines was spectacular, but the sim told him that it was all futile so far as disabling the enemy was concerned.

Pasco was firing at the vehicle behind, cursing his failure to hit it. No doubt the gunner in the vehicle was cursing in very similar fashion.

“Who are these guys’?” Pasco complained.

“Certainly not gangkids,” Carl muttered. “This is enemy action in no uncertain terms. Has to be corp men.”

“How come they got between us and the Kid?”

“Just lucky—unless the opposition have interceptors scattered all over the western semi-desert. Unless…”

He had to stop in order to squeeze around a tight bend, lurching horribly. One of the vehicles on a parallel track had found better ground and was gaining—if it got level its crew or its computer would be sure to start tossing grenades into his path, and that was the last thing he wanted.

What he’d been going to say, though—as Pasco surely had worked out for himself—was that these guys might have been out here for two days and more, since before the disc had even gone missing. They might have been part of the contact squad which was supposed to collect the disc from the thief and run it on to wherever it was supposed to go.

The gully was much shallower now, and Carl had the option to climb out of it. He checked the positions of the other three vehicles in the sim and was pleased to see that they were now quite widely separated. He had only a couple of seconds to weigh up the alternatives, but it looked most sensible to swerve to the right and try to close with the vehicle that was almost level—that way, he could at least stop worrying about grenades.

He hauled the wheel over, and began climbing the slope to his left. There was a lot of loose dirt on the slope and for a moment he thought the wheels might lose their purchase, but they carried him up and over and he heard Pasco whoop as the six-millimetre levelled up and gave him a clear shot. No doubt the computer would have whooped too, if it had had a voice.

“Rat-a-ta-ta-tat!” carolled Pasco, to signify that he’d scored hits—and Carl watched them register on the sim’s counter. But the other vehicles weren’t souped-up production models armoured with kitchen-foil; they were the real thing. The bullets had bounced off and the other guy was still coming, autocannon blazing.

Carl swung right around in order to line up the missile-launcher. It was a do-or-die kind of manoeuvre, but there was no way he could play narrow percentages with three bad boys on his tail. The sim showed him that he and the other vehicle were now so close that the other guy had no chance at all to duck and weave, and the missile went home—but in the meantime, the sneaker had to weather a hail of shot which wasn’t all bouncing off. The sim racked up the shots taken with as much verve as it racked up the ones scored, and the news looked bad. Carl knew that his armour was good, but it couldn’t take much more

Pasco had ducked, cursing Carl for a crazy fool—but Carl knew that the big man didn’t really mean it by the way that he yelled when the warhead went up. Neither of them needed to check the windscreen to know that the target was a flamer.

In fact, it was far better than that: the flamer was a rolling bomb, and it was heading straight for the guy who’d been down in the gully with Carl, and who was doing his level best to get back on Carl’s tail.

The threatened vehicle had time to take evasive action, so that the flamer went past him, but the evasive action turned him side-on to Pasco’s six-millimetre, and Pasco let him have it full-blast. The driver tried to turn again, too fast, and his near-side front wheel must have hit a boulder. It couldn’t have been a very big boulder because it didn’t show on the sim, but the guy was trying to drive every which way at once, and the impact was enough to flip him over on to his side.

Carl swerved back, joyously, knowing that he only had make a single pass while Pasco and the computer combined forces to shoot up the naked chassis and the wheels at point-blank range—while the other car was on its side it couldn’t fire back at all.

The third pursuer had seen what had happened too, though, and he wasn’t about to give Carl a clear run. The driver was already zooming down into the gulch and he gunned the engine hard as he came to the second slope, intending to come up it like a bat out of hell. Fortunately for Carl, his good intentions paved him a road in the opposite direction, and his tyres suddenly lost their grip on the loose stuff.

Carl came around to make his pass without any real opposition, and Pasco blasted the target long and hard in the naked underbelly. Nothing exploded—the tank was too well-shielded—but Carl was pretty certain that no more flak was going to come from that direction.

He was able to turn back towards the third pursuer before the other driver had quite got out of trouble, and he felt another missile being loosed off by the computer—but the angle changed too fast and the rocket soared away into the desert before blasting all hell out of a few rocks which had never done anyone any harm.

Carl thanked his lucky stars that the three bandits didn’t have any missiles of their own. If they had had equal firepower, he would have been a dead duck.

The other guy finally managed to get up and over, and he came straight at Carl. It was another do-or-die move, but the driver must have figured that two down and one to go put him at the disadvantage. The autocannon was rattling away, and there was no way Carl could get out of the line of fire. The windscreen was as unbreakable as glass could be, but glass was only glass; it imploded.

Carl ducked, but didn’t swerve until the computer had had time to line up and fire the fourth missile from its pod. When he felt it go he pulled the wheel over as hard and as far as he could, and prayed that nothing got in their way. The other vehicle went up like a Roman Candle, but the shock-wave hit the sneaker hard, and sprayed it with shrapnel and burning fuel. Without a windscreen there was no way of keeping it all out, but Carl had turned the car so far that only a tiny fraction of it got through to the cabin.

The sim, impartially recording the hits, told him that the armour was taking a hell of a battering, and the engine was beginning to squeal. Carl felt a knot of fear tighten about his heart while he was half-convinced that they were going to lose power, but the vehicle ploughed on.

The sneaker survived the series of blows which followed on the heels of the explosion—but only just. One of its tyres was completely shredded and it lost two of its guns. The vehicle stayed right way up, but by the way its axle-housing ground upon the rocks Carl knew that it had been a damnably close-run thing…and when he slowly let the vehicle come to rest, he knew full well that it wouldn’t be going anywhere for some considerable time to come.

He and Pasco were alive and fighting fit—but they were stranded in the middle of nowhere, and Kid Zero was getting further away from them with every second that passed. And just to cap it all, somewhere behind them were sixty bikers thirsting for their blood.

“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, when they had come to a stop.

It seemed as apt a comment as any Carl could think of, so he made no observation of his own, but was content for the moment just to let the night air flow in and out of his lungs.

2

While Carl Preston was sending out a mayday Pasco took a flashlight and a crowbar from the storage unit behind the seats and made his way over to the limo which lay on its side. It was black, with no corporation markings, but it was a top grade fighting-machine, only marginally less capable than SecDiv’s finest. He went carefully, because there was a reasonable chance that someone was still alive in there, and in a condition to retaliate. He came up on the blind side and switched the flashlight on abruptly, in order to blind anyone who might be lying in wait.

There were two men in the vehicle. One was dead; the other, though still alive and conscious, wasn’t in a shooting mood. His legs had been shot up by machine-gun bullets fired through the chassis, and he was evidently in a great deal of pain.

Pasco signalled to the guy to release the lock on the door, and after a moment’s hesitation he obeyed. There was no point at all in staying inside, and he knew it. Pasco managed to lever the door open and unclipped the stricken man’s belt. He removed the piece from the wounded man’s shoulder-holster; then—as gently as he could—he lifted the other clear of the wreck. He wasn’t a small man, but he wasn’t big enough to be much of a problem for Pasco.

After depositing his burden on the nearest convenient patch of bare ground Pasco went back to the car and took a good look round the cab; then he went through the driver’s pockets, removing everything. By the time he got back to the living man he had the ID sorted out. The driver’s name was Enrico Zucchi, and he supposedly worked for a small independent trucking company—except, of course, that there weren’t any small independent trucking companies any more. In the modern world, everybody had to be dependent—the big boys saw to that. The question was: who did Mr Zucchi’s trucking company depend on?

Pasco knew that he could radio through to home base and get a full check run on Mr Zucchi, but that would take time. He figured that he could put two and two together as well as any computer—besides which, he had an equally reliable source of information stretched out on the dirt at his feet.

Pasco took the wounded man’s wallet from his inside pocket, and swiftly checked the ID. He wasn’t in the least surprised to find out that the survivor was also called Zucchi. The wounded man was Bernardo of that ilk; the younger brother.

Bernardo Zucchi was watching Pasco from behind half-lowered eyelids, and Pasco knew that he was paying attention.

Pasco squatted down, so that he wouldn’t have to speak so loudly.

“Okay, Bernardo,” he said gently. “You and I both know the score. You’re the head of the family now, and that means the family honour rests with you. That probably means that when I start twisting your shattered legs you aren’t allowed to tell me a damn thing, and that you have to die in agony. But that would be futile, wouldn’t it? Much better if we could play a little game, in which I could make guesses and you could just nod if I happened to get them right. That way, you wouldn’t be telling me anything at all. Shall we try it?”

There was no response, so Pasco tried twisting the wounded man’s leg a little. Bernardo tried to hold out, but in the end he nodded.

“That’s what I thought,” said Pasco softly. “But this doesn’t quite add up, docs it? I have to admit that I’m puzzled. All the evidence points one way, but it’s a crazy way—even the fact that you don’t want to talk. That’s omerta, right? You’re a family man.”

He stopped, and waited for Bernardo to nod. Bernardo didn’t, so Pasco gave him a little more encouragement. In the end, Bernardo nodded.

“That’s what I thought,” said Pasco again. “But what I don’t understand is what the freakin’ hell three mafia mobmobiles are doing this far west—and I certainly don’t understand why you were trying to get between GenTech Security and its target. I mean, I’m really puzzled about that. If you were M-M or Chromicon, or even the freakin’ CIA, I wouldn’t have batted my one good eyelid, but the one party in all America with whom GenTech don’t have any quarrel whatsoever is the Mob.”

Bernardo was listening—hanging on every word. Pasco liked that. It showed an intelligent interest in what was going on. It was always easier to get information out of an intelligent and imaginative man; the ones who wouldn’t co-operate tended to be the dumb ones who didn’t know any better.

“One thing I am sure of,” said Pasco pensively, “is that our Mr Blay was not of Sicilian descent, or anything resembling it. He was Anglo-Saxon through and through. He was not one of yours. Nor have your old men any reason in the world to think that what he took was of any interest to you. Nor—to dispose also of the absurd hypotheses—have you any conceivable reason for wanting to protect Kid Zero. Ergo, Bernardo, you are working for someone else. This is odd, because if mafiosi did not have a horror of working for anyone else, there wouldn’t be a mafia in this day and age—it would have been swallowed up by one or other of the corps. Am I right, Bernardo?”

Bernardo didn’t move a muscle, though the question was entirely innocuous. Pasco wanted Bernardo to answer a few innocuous questions first, just to get him in the habit.

“Come on, Bernardo,” he said tiredly. “You don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to tell me anything. Your lips are sealed. But if you don’t nod your freakin head I’m going to start dismantling your kneecaps, piece by bloody piece. You don’t have to tell me anything, because I’m smart enough to guess it all, but you have to let me know how warm I am, okay? I have my honour too, right? Now—it’s odd, isn’t it, that the mob have become involved in this.”

Bernardo didn’t move a muscle until Pasco gave him a little encouragement, but he was only playing by the rules. As soon as Pasco hit the agony switch, Bernardo nodded.

“Right,” said Pasco amiably. “Right answer. Easy when you try, isn’t it? So let’s you and me go for the harder ones, now. There’s something else odd about your being here, isn’t there? This is far enough west to be Yakuza territory. Ever since the families lost their toehold in Hollywood and their power-base in Las Vegas they’ve been an east coast operation—Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington D. C. That’s where your old men live, rubbing shoulders with all the other old money. Funny, ain’t it, how they used to be old money when you were still new, but now you’ve crossed the fence into their part of the pasture? I said, Bernardo, it’s funny, ain’t it?”

Bernardo nodded.

“And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Nobody hired you, because you ain’t that kind of outfit. They came to your old men cap in hand and they asked for help. They spoke of brotherhood and marriage, of class and the club, and your old men lapped it up—because that was the one thing they’d always craved and never had: social acceptance by the true aristocracy. Am I right, Bernardo?”

Bernardo seemed to be a real stickler for the rules, because he wouldn’t nod his head, and Pasco had to do some substantial damage to his right leg—without getting any further results—before he was finally satisfied that the reason Bernardo wouldn’t nod was that Bernardo couldn’t. Pasco knew that he probably didn’t know in any case. Bernardo was only a soldier, following orders.

“Aw, shit,” said Pasco, and shot Bernardo in the head. Then he went back to see how Carl Preston was getting on with the wheel.

Preston had changed the tyre, and the sneaker was roadworthy again, but it was by no means in tiptop condition.

“We have to get back on the road and make what speed we can,” said Preston. “It’ll be three hours before they can get someone out to us. With luck, we might just stay ahead of the Atlas Boys—with luck.”

“Yeah,” said Pasco unenthusiastically. “And we have to stay as close to Kid Zero as we can. We don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance now of getting to him before Bernardo’s friends do, but the Kid may not be any more anxious to talk to the Mob than he is to talk to us. If he can duck and dive long enough, he might be able to save himself until we get to him. With luck.”

“Mob?” queried Zarathustra’s man.

“The freakin’ mafia. We’re only up against the freakin’ mafia.”

“Way out here?” said Preston sceptically.

Pasco didn’t like to have his word doubted, but he knew that the other man was only expressing surprise, so he merely echoed him. “Way out here,” he said.

They both got back into the sneaker, and Preston put it into gear. They moved off slowly, heading for the road.

“You think the dons have made a deal with one of the other corps?” asked the BioDiv man warily.

“Nope,” said Pasco. “I think they’ve made a deal with the American Dream. They’ve thrown in with the dinosaurs. Question is, what exactly are the dinosaurs playing at? They’re not interested in trading industrial secrets; they’re interested in recovering a slice of the power and influence that they used to have, and which they still regard as theirs.”

“Which dinosaurs are we talking about here?” Preston asked. “Congress?”

“Not exactly,” said Pasco. “The people behind Congress—the people for whom the federal government used to front. The old plutocrats—the ancien regime—the dinosaurs. When the mafia began to plough their money back into legitimate concerns in the fifties and sixties they made the first tentative steps towards joining the establishment, but the establishment didn’t want to let them in. Now, faced with the power of the corps, the old guard arc ready and willing to take their allies where they can find them. They probably think they’re only using the mob, but they’re fooling themselves.”

“It’s a nice story,” said Preston, “but it’s all conjecture.”

“Sure it is. But in a world everything anybody tells you straight out is a lie, conjecture is the only chance a guy ever stands of getting to the truth, right?”

“Maybe,” the other conceded cautiously.

Pasco looked at his companion in disgust. It was bad enough that Zarathustra had used his weight to intrude his pet poodle into SecDiv business, without the guy coming over all steadfastly unimaginative.

“I don’t suppose,” said Pasco acidly, “that you have the least idea what’s on this freakin’ disc we’re chasing.”

“The Doc’s data,” said Preston amiably.

“Data about what?”

“Can’t say for sure. Stuff about his body-rebuilding techniques—maybe some other stuff too.”

“Listen, Preston,” said Pasco impatiently. “Are we on the same side or not? I don’t give a damn, one way or the other, but I’d like to know. If this is one of those cases where Gen Tech’s left hand ain’t supposed to know what the right hand is doing, just tell me straight out, and Zarathustra can go whistle for his lousy data. If I’m putting my life on the line here, I want to know, okay?”

Preston seemed to understand and sympathize. He wasn’t such a bad guy, after all, Pasco thought—and he could certainly drive.

“All I know,” he replied, “is that we were out in the field collecting mutants—weird kids, some weird animals. Any kind of freak we could find, in fact. Standard thinking about the increase in their numbers is that it’s the result of mutagens pumped out into the rivers or used as fertilizers before the land went sour on us, but the Doc seems to think there’s something more than that going on—maybe something worse.”

“Enemy action?”

“Whose enemy? Hell, Ray, I don’t know. You think anybody tells me anything? You got all I got to give, and that’s all conjecture. You tell me where it points to.”

“It sure as hell doesn’t point to your everyday industrial espionage,” said Pasco in a low tone, as much to himself as to his companion. “This is political with a big P. Your runner was going to the Mob, not M-M or Chromicon, and if the mob were running interference for the dinosaurs…who know what kind of shit is going to hit the fan? You and me, Carl, we got to be careful here. Our asses are in a sling.”

“You’re right,” said Carl Preston, softly. “Look at the sim—then check the rear-view mirror.”

According to the simulator, there was a cloud of blue gnats on the road behind them. According to the rear view mirror, the gnats were fireflies. Pasco didn’t need much in the way of powers of conjecture to be pretty damn certain that the fireflies were the headlights of the Atlas Boys.

“Aw, shit!” he said. “Can we keep ahead of them until the interceptors arrive?”

“Who knows?” said Preston. “But with two guns disabled and holes in our armour you could stick your fist through, we’d sure as hell better hope that we can. They may only be toting pea-shooters, but if they get their hands on us—those boys are big.”

“Yeah,” said Pasco unenthusiastically. “I noticed.” He put the word “politics” out of his mind, and reached for his gun.

3

The only phone in Melendez, New Mexico was in the diner, so that was where Sammy Ulinski headed for as soon as he came into town. It was virtually a ghost town now, though some traffic still came through on the railroad. The railroad had been famous in its day—when it was part of the Acheson-Topeka-Santa Fe—and Melendez had been quite a town, but all that was long gone. Now it was home to scabs and sandrats, and the only reason the diner hadn’t closed down was that every time somebody shot the owner there was another fool in line desperate enough to take his place.

The current owner called himself Geronimo, though he had no more Indian blood in him than Sammy Ulinski. He didn’t look much but he was as mean as they came. When Sammy came in Geronimo fixed him with the particular kind of stony stare which he reserved for people who owed him money. Sammy figured that he didn’t really deserve such treatment, because it was only a few lousy bucks—though it would probably have been more had Geronimo been willing to extend his credit.

He glanced round at the other customers before sidling over to the bar. They were all regulars except for one character who was wearing silly mirrorshades in spite of the fact that it was dark outside and the lights in the diner were hardly garish. Sammy favoured the oddball with a doubletake, but he was a little guy in an absurd white linen suit and he was drinking something disgusting which looked like orangeade—he had “tourist” written all over him.

“Ron,” said Sammy, “I gotta use your phone.”

“The phone is for customers only,” said Geronimo lazily. The phone was visible behind the counter but Geronimo didn’t even look towards it, let alone reach for it “Are you a customer, Sammy?”

“Sure I’m a customer,” said Sammy.

“Paying customers, that is,” Geronimo said, thoughtfully adding the qualification.

“I can pay for the freakin call!” Sammy complained.

“If you got coins in your pocket,” said Geronimo, “you can pay off some of your slate. When you’ve paid it all, and bought a drink—with cash—you can use the phone.”

“It’s a matter of life and death,” said Sammy, with conviction.

“Ain’t my life or death,” observed Geronimo. “Whose is it?”

“Hell, Ron,” said Sammy, “it’s urgent. Just let me use the phone, and I’ll be able to pay off what I owe, and buy a drink, and then some.”

“The horse won’t win, Sammy,” said Geronimo patiently. “They never do.”

“The horse is sittin’ in its freakin’ stable takin’ a freakin’ nap,” said Sammy. “I gotta make the freakin’ call before the freakin’ thing wakes up. Let me use the phone, Ron—please!”

Geronimo seemed to be considering it, but he never had to come to a decision. Sammy became suddenly aware of the fact that the guy with the mirrorshades was standing at his elbow, though he hadn’t heard him cross the floor. The oddball laid a bill down on the counter, where Sammy and Geronimo could both see it. It wasn’t a very big bill, but the guy in the shades, now he was in close-up, didn’t look like a very generous man.

“You don’t have to call anyone, Sammy,” he said, softly. “Today, we’re buying information right here. Cash on the nail.”

Sammy looked hard at his own distorted reflection, and said: “What I got is worth more than that, asshole. Don’t waste my time.”

Almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth he regretted having said them—the reason being that just as he reached the period at the end of the sentence he found himself looking down the barrel of a forty-five Magnum. He had to concede that the guy was very slick as well as very quiet.

“That’s the trouble with information,” said the gunman softly. “It’s market price fluctuates so quickly. What you knew was worth money until ten seconds ago, but now you’ve told me exactly what information you have, it isn’t worth a dime. Life and death, yes, but not money. Not any more. We’re going to take a hike, Sammy, and you’re going to show me exactly where this horse of yours is stabled.”

Sammy looked away from the gun barrel, first at Geronimo and then at the other customers. His arithmetic wasn’t too good but he made the count six. He knew them all, and they knew him, but he didn’t know whether that was an advantage or not.

“I’ll cut you in, Ron,” he said, with sudden desperation. “I’ll cut you all in, if you’ll get this freakin asshole off my back.”

“No way,” said Geronimo, just before the man with the mirrorshades shot him right between the eyes.

Nobody moved a muscle.

“He wasn’t going to help you,” said the man in mirrorshades amiably. “I didn’t have anything against him whatsoever, and I’m not a violent man by nature. Now, if that’s how a non-violent man can be driven by these kinds of circumstances to treat guys about whom he is utterly indifferent, what do you think said same circumstances might lead him to do to a guy like you if you piss him off, asshole?”

Sammy opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“Of course,” said the man in the white suit evenly, “it’s just possible that the information which you have isn’t the information I happen to be looking for. But you’d better pray that it is, Sammy, because if it isn’t, I could become very annoyed with you. You wouldn’t like that.”

Sammy managed a faint cough. The little guy grinned, and lifted up the bar-hatch in order to let himself through. He stepped over Geronimo’s body and took hold of the phone, wrenching the connection from the wall. Then he threw the instrument hard against the wall. Sammy watched it come apart, and coughed again.

“That’s a fair comment, Sammy,” said the man in mirrorshades. “You’re absolutely right—it’s a very hot day, even without taking the unusual circumstances into account. Now, start walking. Go swiftly, and go silently to where you left the party whose whereabouts you were just about to disclose to certain other parties—possibly even including mine.”

Sammy looked around again, but the five guys who were left—if five was the right number—were concentrating very hard on being unobtrusive. Sammy knew that as soon as the guy in the dark suit was gone they’d start arguing about which one of them should inherit the diner, but for the moment they were being as good as gold.

“This ain’t fair,” said Sammy, very faintly.

“All’s fair in love and war,” said the other, mildly. “And I love my work. Move .”

Sammy moved. He suspected, deep down, that there wasn’t much point in moving, but he moved anyway. It was funny, in a way. He’d more than once been watching TV in this very diner, with some of those very guys who were watching him now, when some stupid old cop show would come on, and you’d see some shark taking a sap for a ride, and the shark would tell the sap to move and the sap would move; and Sammy had always thought—and often said out loud—what a freakin’ stupid thing it was for the guy who’d been told to move actually to move, when he had to know, deep down, that he was going to get it anyway. He’d never understood why the stupes did what they were told, when they knew they were going to get it anyway.

Funnily enough, he still didn’t.

It did cross his mind to stop again, and to say: “You’re going to kill me anyhow, so it might as well be now.” But cross his mind was all it did. Somehow, he couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to turn it into an intention. The only thought he could actually cling on to was the ridiculously hopeful one that somewhere between the diner that was under new management and the place where Kid Zero had holed out in order to catch up on his beauty sleep, some miracle would occur which would turn things right around. He knew how stupid it was to think that, but he just couldn’t kill the hope, and while he couldn’t kill the hope he couldn’t do the brave and noble thing which his intelligence—such as it was—told him he might as well do anyway.

So he walked, as quickly and as quietly as he could, towards the place where he’d made the mistake of thinking he’d got lucky, when in fact he’d got very, very unlucky.

He wondered whether he might pass the time by suggesting to his captor that Kid Zero was one hell of a fighter, and would kill him as sure as eggs were eggs, but he didn’t think the guy in the mirrorshades would take this advice very seriously. He had become very wary of upsetting the guy in the mirrorshades any more than he had already upset him, although he knew that matters of degree were unlikely to be important.

Had he been a philosopher, or even a psychologist, Sammy Ulinski might have been very interested by the peculiar state of mind in which he found himself, now that he was staring death in the face, but he wasn’t. He was only a guy who couldn’t count to six with any certainty, and he was scared shitless.

On the way in, the distance between Kid Zero’s hideout and the diner hadn’t seemed so very far. It was way out on the edge of town, but Melendez wasn’t a very big town. On the way back, though, the trek seemed endless, exhausting and extremely stressful. The night was dark but it was still hot, and to Sammy it seemed that it was hotter by far than the place which lay at the further end of the road paved with good intentions. When he glanced behind him he saw that the little guy’s mirrorshades were now glowing green, like a cat’s eyes—which told him that they weren’t really shades at all, but some kind of gizmo.

Sammy didn’t even know why the Kid was wanted; he was going to die without even knowing why. Absurdly, he couldn’t even remember where he’d heard the buzz that the Kid was wanted. It had gone out on the wind, taking wing the way rumours always did. Melendez was the back end of nowhere, but rumours had no trouble getting there. If there was a sandrat between Amarillo and Albuquerque who hadn’t heard that the Kid was in the territory and was wanted bad, he was probably deaf.

“As a matter of interest,” said the gunman softly, as they walked through the empty streets, “Who were you going to phone?”

“I got contacts,” said Sammy. “Honest brokers, who’d have seen me right.”

“Some two-bit Op,” said the guy in mirrorshades. “Not the heroic kind, I presume—he’d just run the message on, to anybody and everybody.”

“He’ll get it anyhow,” Sammy pointed out “Those guys in the diner can put two and two together just like you can.”

“Yeah,” said the gunman, with a throaty chuckle, “but they can’t mend a cable as easily as I can break one. Anyway, my friend will keep an eye on them, to make sure they don’t get hurt by running around in the dark.”

“What friend?” asked Sammy. “I never saw no friend.”

“You think I came out here without a driver, Sammy? You think I’m some kind of comedian? The family is strung out all over the freakin’ plains, but we don’t spread out that thin. You saw nothing because your eyes were still bugged out by the sight of Kid Zero’s bike homing in on one of his little rest stops. What a freakin’ hole this is, hey? Now I understand why we gave Nevada back to the aborigines and retired east of the Mississippi.”

It was Sammy’s homeland that the guy in mirrorshades was insulting, but Sammy wasn’t patriotic enough to leap to its defence. Privately, he thought that it was a bit of a dump himself, and he’d have moved out long ago if he’d had anywhere to go.

“It better be the Kid,” muttered the sweating gunman, when they’d gone a couple of blocks further. “If you’ve dragged me out here for some punk biker who’s lost his gang I’ll be annoyed with you.”

“I know what Kid Zero looks like,” Sammy assured him. “I watch Homer Hegarty all the time.”

“A real public servant, Mr Hegarty,” said the man in mirrorshades. “If I ever find his freakin’ cameras zooming in on my face I’ll blow the sucker away. But it’s nice that everyone can recognize the Kid. Even in the desert, he can’t hide.”

Sammy realized that the Kid must know that. He must know that everybody was on his tail, and that he couldn’t hide. He must know that his hours were numbered and there was no way in the world he could get away.

You and me both, Kid, thought Sammy. You and me both.

He came to a junction, and stopped. He pointed down a street which went all the way to the wilderness.

“Number thirty-three,” he muttered. “The Kid is hiding out in number thirty-three. I saw him. You can see the numbers, can’t you? Those trick glasses…”

“Keep going,” said the gunman, impatiently interrupting him. “Quick and quiet.”

“If you shoot me now,” Sammy pointed out, having suffered a sudden and highly unusual attack of rationality, “you’ll wake the Kid. Let me go, and you have a clear run at him.”

“Keep going,” said the gunman, raising the Magnum in order to stick it in Sammy’s face. “Or else I’ll have to take time out to be very unpleasant to you.”

“From here,” Sammy said, in a stubbornly logical way that was altogether foreign to his nature, “the Kid can hear my screams.”

The little man in the mirrorshades kneed Sammy in the groin and smacked him just below the diaphragm with the stiffened fingers of his free hand.

As Sammy went down he tried as hard as he could to scream, but there was no breath left in his lungs—and when he finally felt able to suck in a little more air he found that there was already a hand at his throat, squeezing gently. The whole world turned upside-down, so that when he fell he seemed to be falling up rather than down—but he hit the ground just as hard.

While Sammy was writhing on the ground, somewhat disoriented by his many discomforts, the guy stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth, and then sealed it in with thick black tape. This made it very difficult for Sammy to sob while he wept, but he did the best he could.

Several minutes passed before Sammy could stand up again, and the man in green-glowing mirrorshades seemed to feel that his patience was being unjustly tried. Sammy couldn’t muster the least hint of resistance when he was finally hauled up out of the dirt.

“Number thirty-three,” said the man in mirrorshades. “You’d better be telling me the truth, Sammy, because you are right out of moral credit with this particular bank. Move!”

Sammy moved. Even though it made no sense to do so, he moved. Even though he knew full well that he was going to get it anyway, he moved. He moved to the door of number thirty-three, and he went inside. The man in the funny looking mirrorshades came in behind him.

As they went in, Sammy found—much to his own amazement—that his thoughts were still chock-a-block with hope. He could find room in his tiny mind for only one idea—the idea that the Kid might somehow be up and about, ready to ambush the man who had come to get him.

He knew, even while he retained this brief and temporary obsession, how absurd that hope must be—but even so, he was mortally offended by the appalling injustice of it all when the Kid’s pet rattler sank its teeth into his leg.

4

When the last of the pattern mines had been laid down and the smoke-cylinders were empty, Carl did a quick count of their remaining pursuers. He made it forty-three. With the sneaker in its current beat-up condition that was about thirty too many. Most of them were still running beside the road rather than on it, just in case he’d cleverly saved a little surprise package for them, but they were being too complimentary. “How long?” he asked Pasco.

“Thirty minutes,” Pasco told him. That was the ETA of the monoplane—the whirlybirds carrying the heavy artillery would be a further twenty minutes behind.

Something under the hood was making ominous noises, as though the engine were grinding its teeth in chagrin. Carl couldn’t blame it; his own jaws were set very tightly.

“We got enough guts for one pass,” said Carl grimly, “but with the shield out we’re going to have to duck down real low, and we’re going to have to shoot off everything we can from the remaining fixtures. Then we have to make a run with the portable four-point-twos and all the ammo we can carry. But we have to find a hidey-hole, or they’ll ride us down.”

“It’s as flat as a freakin’ pancake out there,” muttered Pasco. “We should have brought a freakin’ tank.”

Neither observation was particularly helpful. They had brought a vehicle built for speed rather than siege because they wanted to move quickly; they hadn’t anticipated that they would have to fight a running war. Carl refrained from pointing out that they might still be okay if Pasco hadn’t taken it into his head to drive the Atlas Boys into a frenzy.

Carl screwed up his eyes, trying to see some place that might be defensible, but the darkness was too deep. The absence of a windshield made it a little easier to see, and the stars were as bright and clear as they always were out here on the desert’s edge, but the moon was as thin as a cutting from a fingernail, and it wasn’t easy to guess what might be set back from the road. The sim was a better guide, though it wasn’t easy to read its off-road signals while they were travelling at speed.

“Near side,” said Pasco suddenly. “Abandoned gas-station.”

Carl looked across as swiftly as he could, and saw the headlights sweep past the edge of the old forecourt. There was no way to know whether the shadowed buildings were wood or stone, but the engine was telling him loudly mid clearly that they had to take the chance. He went past and started counting off the distance.

He checked the radar and saw to his relief that the bikers were beginning to bunch again, and had come back on to the blacktop in order to make up distance. He steadied himself, knowing that he mustn’t turn too soon, and switched off the lights.

“Coming up,” he said to Pasco, when the moment approached. “Hang on tight.”

They were both tightly-belted but Carl saw Pasco put out a hand lo brace himself against the dashboard. He hauled the wheel over to the left as hard as it would go, and stamped the brake-pedal. He knew that if the U was too tight the sneaker might turn over, but if it was too shallow they would be off the road and maybe skidding in dust. He gritted his teeth as the vehicle lurched, the engine’s sullen mutter of pain becoming a screech of agony—but then they were round, and heading back towards the pursuing shoal of bikes.

Without the evidence of his headlights the bikers couldn’t know for sure that he’d turned, but the seasoned fighters among them weren’t fools. The shoal was already thinning again, spreading out across a much broader front. Carl punched the buttons controlling the unfired missile-pods as fast as he could, then brought both hands back to the wheel while Pasco started the last of the functional machine-guns firing. There was no time for aiming—the objective was simply to loose off as much ammunition as possible during the pass, hoping to take out as many of the bikes and riders as chance might permit.

The enemy four-point-twos opened up too, but their fire was far from being concentrated, and Carl didn’t duck so low that he couldn’t look over the jagged rim which the imploded windshield had left in its slot.

Carl went off the road long before they were due to hit the gas-station again, and switched his lights back on momentarily to check the position of the buildings. The lights showed him a couple of dark-riding bikes; he managed to side-swipe one of them, though the other sent half a dozen bullets into the cab which embedded themselves in the doors of the storage-lockers.

A glance at the simulator showed him that all was confusion. He was through the shoal again, and the bikers were scattered—only half were turning as yet, and it would take several minutes for their general to get them organized into any sort of attack-force.

Carl brought the sneaker to a halt in front of the gas-station’s main building, unclipped his belt, and snatched the light machine-gun which Pasco was holding out to him. He kicked the door and dived out, keeping low as he scuttled around the car, then through the empty doorway and into the dark interior of the abandoned building. Pasco, who had been on the more convenient side, had paused to hurl some other objects into the darkness, and Carl was inside ahead of him.

“Cover the door,” said the ex-Op tersely, as he followed. “I’ll check the place out.” One of the objects Pasco had salvaged was a big flashlight, which he now took up and played around the room. The place was a mess, having long ago been pulverized by vandals, but the walls were brick.

Carl remained by the doorway, peering out over the roof of the sneaker, looking northwards. That was the direction from which the bikes would come, if they came precipitately. But they didn’t come; indeed, the distant roar of their engines became gradually more muted as they rallied to their point man, who was still showing his lights. The Atlas Boys sure as hell weren’t intellectual giants, but they knew enough to take a break when they had their enemy cornered.

Carl checked his watch; the illuminated display told him that they had twenty minutes and more to hold out before the monoplane arrived. Even then, the siege wouldn’t be lifted. The plane’s guns might take some of the heat off, but the fight wouldn’t be winnable until the birds arrived with their chainguns and heavy lasers, and their cargo of mercy boys.

There was a sudden chatter of machine-gun fire—not from outside but from the back of the building. Carl tensed anxiously, knowing that it was almost certainly Pasco who had fired, but knowing that almost wasn’t quite good enough. As soon as the gun was quiet he yelled: “Ray!”

“Okay, Carl,” shouted Pasco. “Just a couple of sandrats making free with the facilities. Better get out here—downstairs is too full of holes, but there’s a way up to the roof. Once we’re up we’re in Fort Apache.”

Carl immediately did as he was told. He’d already observed that there were too many empty windows, and too much darkness outside—but the station had a flat roof and might also have a parapet. That was the place to be, in order to fight off bikers.

Pasco’s way up wasn’t exactly a staircase, but that was all to the good. He crouched down so the big man could stand on his back and batter a way through the trapdoor; it only took a few seconds, but Pasco’s weight left him sore anyhow. Pasco had no difficulty pulling himself up and through once the breach was made, and then Carl began handing up to him the weapons and other equipment he’d brought from the sneaker. Apart from the flashlights and the cases of ammunition there was a radio with which he could talk to the pilots when help finally arrived.

The most difficult bit was getting Carl up once everything else had been passed through, but Pasco lay down flat and lowered his long arms. Not many men could have lifted a person of Carl’s size that way—not even the lousy eighteen inches which separated the extremity of Carl’s reach from the edge of the trap—but Pasco was strong enough to do it. Once Carl had a secure grip, though, the Sec Div man left him to scramble up as best he could. Once Carl was through he looked around for something he could use to plug up the hole, but there was nothing solid enough to make a real barricade. It was just one more potential source of danger.

But the flat roof did have a low parapet, at least on three sides, and there was no easy way up the outside of the building.

The bikes were silent now, and there was not a single headlight to be seen. Carl checked his watch again. There was still more than fifteen minutes to go before the plane arrived.

“Must be thirty or thirty-five of them,” said Carl, “unless we got very lucky. They’ll surround us, I guess. Some of the bikes will have twenty millimetre grenade-throwers—a few will have RAGs. We don’t want them to get too close.”

“You take the front and the north side,” said Pasco hoarsely. “I’ll take the back and the south. Shoot at anything that moves. Even in this light they can’t get too close without being heard or seen.”

Carl didn’t dispute the posting. It would mean that he’d be facing the direction from which the enemy would initially be coming, but that was offset by the fact that Pasco had to defend the rear edge of the roof, which had no parapet at all to hide behind. He took up his machine-gun, and Pasco divided up the ammunition. Carl’s share was more than could be comfortably carried, but he knew that it wouldn’t last long once he started blazing away. The four-point-two was a very greedy beast indeed.

He took up a position in the corner, lying prone and resting on his elbows. That allowed him to peep over the parapet readily enough, but he knew that he couldn’t fire properly from that position. He hoped that the bikers would take their time, thinking that they had all night to plan their action, but this hope was quickly dashed. Charlie Atlas knew the score, and knew that Pasco had enough seniority to call out a full squadron of gangbusters.

It was next to impossible to see anything out in the darkness, but the dismounted bikers were wearing heavy boots, and were unable to tread too carefully while carrying the weapons they’d unbolted from their bikes. The sounds of their approach were confusing, but Carl was able to judge that they were already too close for comfort. He came up into a crouch and began firing, drawing the barrel of the gun in a slow, wide arc. The moment he began shooting the muzzle-flashes from his gun gave his position away, so he moved quickly to the right, then jinked back to the left. He would have ducked back down again, but the returning fire gave him the same opportunity to spot his enemies and aim at their positions. He compromised, trying to fix their positions in his memory as he dived for cover, then coming up to the edge of the parapet very briefly to squeeze off a few hopeful bullets before scrambling to a new position and trying again.

He repeated this manoeuvre half a dozen times before the first grenade landed on the roof seven feet away, giving him just time to flatten out before it discharged. He heard Pasco cursing volubly just before the explosion, but the bang was loud enough to leave his ears numb and ringing, so that he heard no more for several seconds—and when his hearing cleared again, Pasco had stopped swearing and was shouting urgent demands into the radio. Carl didn’t dare look at his watch, but he knew that there were still ten minutes to go until the plane could sow a little panic among the enemy ranks.

He moved well away from the corner before popping up again, and this time was able to see the sparking of a machine-gun quite clearly before he aimed his own weapon. He knew that the bikers had little or no cover, and was sure that he had hit the man—but it wasn’t the machine-gunners who were the dangerous ones. More grenades were hitting the roof now, and though the launchers were almost as unreliable when firing from the ground as they were when firing from a bike there really wasn’t much of a problem for the firers to solve. Anything which landed on the roof was a hit of sorts, and it was only a matter of time before Carl or Pasco was hurt. The grenades weren’t very big, and the bikers probably had no more than four of five each, but they posed one hell of a problem while the minutes were laboriously ticking away.

Carl knew that he had to take a risk. He got as close to the parapet as he could, then came up into a squat and launched off a long, sustained burst of fire, raking the area where—according to logic—the grenadiers should have positioned themselves. Even when the returning fire began to rattle off the parapet he stayed up, and he didn’t flatten himself until the clip ran out. He had to wriggle along snakewise then, in order to get a replacement clip, and it was lucky that he did, because the next grenade had perfect direction even if it didn’t have the range—it landed no more than three feet away from where he’d been only seconds before, and he felt the shockwave plucking at his jacket while he pressed himself into the comforting fabric of the roof. Mercifully, the grenades were designed to send most of their fire and force upwards, on the assumption that they’d be lying in the road and spitting death at enemies riding over them; had they spread their shrapnel out sideways Carl and Pasco would have been more imperilled than they were.

Carl came up again as soon as he had the new clip fitted, and again he took the risk of sending forth a long, sustained burst of fire, only ducking down again when he felt a bullet pluck at his sleeve. The wound bled and stung, but it wasn’t deep and it didn’t stop him holding the juddering gun steady. He’d almost exhausted the clip in the one burst, and he took up another before popping up to empty it. Again he had to wriggle away, and again the grenade which might have killed him arrived a couple of seconds too late to catch him on the spot.

Then it went quiet.

Carl hoped desperately, but couldn’t bring himself to believe, that they’d run out of grenades, or confidence, or both. What he and Pasco needed was for Charlie Atlas—or, even better, some newly-elevated stand-in—to call a long council-of-war, during which there would be much careful argument as to what to do next.

He checked his watch. Seven minutes to go. He couldn’t believe it. It was as if time had decided to put in an extra second in every five, just to prolong his agony.

He looked across the roof, trying to see where Pasco was. It was too dark, and the big man was lying too close to the parapet on the south-facing wall.

“I think their lead men are inside,” he said, keeping his voice as low as he could while still being certain that he was audible. “We have to cover the trapdoor as well as the sand.”

“Just pray they ain’t carrying plastic,” Pasco whispered back, “or one of these walls will be disappearing.”

Carl wasn’t the praying kind, but he knew all too soon how futile a prayer would have been. They were carrying plastic, and it was one of his walls which suddenly developed a bad case of pulverization. The only good thing was that it was not the wall beside whose parapet he was currently lying.

For a moment he thought that the charge had been too small, and that the arch which was left around the hole would hold, but the building was too old and too frail to support that kind of hope. The wall crumbled, and the parapet cracked—and half the roof, which had been weakened already by the grenades, collapsed into the belly of the gas-station.

Carl knew that Pasco must be cursing again, but he couldn’t hear a damn thing.

If the windows had still been glazed the entire station might have come down, but they had let enough of the shockwave out to keep the three walls standing. Unfortunately, more grenades were coming over now, aimed at the parts of the roof which had survived. Carl knew that the bikers couldn’t have many more to fire, but the ones which were coming over were likely to be enough.

There wasn’t time for any tactical discussion. Carl jumped, with the fully-charged four-by-two in his right hand and the last spare clip of ammunition in his left. He knew that he could fire the gun one-handed if he had to, and knew that he had to.

His landing wasn’t soft, but he knew how to roll, and did so, spreading the burden of the bruising so that he didn’t put too much strain on his ankles. Then he came to his feet and ran, firing left and right as he went. The darkness was now his chief ally; once he was away from the building no one would know whether he was friend or foe. That would include Pasco—and the mercy boys, if and when they ever got here—but Pasco was only one while the bikers were many, and when the mercy boys came the remaining Atlas Boys would probably scatter in every direction.

Even so, he drew some fire before he let his own weapon go quiet—and when he finally gave all his attention to the problem of flight he could hear booted feet moving towards him.

He ran, as quickly and as lightly as he could, paying no real heed to the matter of direction. The sounds of pursuit soon dwindled, and he found reason to be earnestly glad that the Atlas boys were such steroid-freaks. Not only did it make them bigger targets; it also gave them the delicacy and discretion of bull elephants. They were slow and they were noisy—he evaded them without undue difficulty. Nor did he fall over anything, until he ran slap bang into the parked bike—and even then he was clever enough not to damage himself more than he was already damaged.

Carl was quick to move around the bike and crouch down. It had been stripped of its weapons, but that didn’t matter. It was cover, of sorts. If and when daylight came it would be as useful as a cotton-plated breastshield, but the mercy boys would be here long before sunrise. He replaced the ammunition-clip in the gun, for the last time. Its barrel was hot enough to scorch his hand.

The grenades were no longer going off, and after one brief flutter of gunfire silence fell again. In the distance, he could hear the engine of the approaching monoplane. Pasco would undoubtedly order it in on a strafing run, but that would have only psychological value—the Atlas Boys would know as well as he did that the serious heat wouldn’t come down until the birds caught up, and if their arithmetic was serviceable they could work out that there would be a gap of at least twenty minutes before that happened.

Carl wondered whether he ought to get aboard the sickle and try to ride out, but he decided against it. The machine probably had a smart sensor anyhow, and wouldn’t start for anyone but its owner. He was as safe here as he would be further away, and he didn’t want to be lost in the desert when the rescue squad arrived. He stayed where he was, and listened to the beating of his heart.

The plane came in for its first strafing run, and sprayed a lot of fire around. It was impressive enough, in its way, but Carl doubted whether it had hit anything. In fact, from his own personal point of view the main effect of the run was to cover up the sounds of someone approaching the bike. By the time Carl was able to realize that he had company the company was almost on top of him—and it was very bad company indeed.

Even by the feeble light of the stars, Carl could see the outline of one of the most massive of the Atlas Boys—and although he could not see the others, he knew that the giant was not alone.

He came up from hiding without delay, and blazed away as liberally as his weapon would allow, throwing himself sideways as he did so in order to avoid being caught by any reflex-launched return fire. He fired his last shots from the ground, behind the bike’s rear tyre.

There must have been three of them, in all. The man-mountain whose shadow had eclipsed the stars caught at least a dozen bullets, and he went down without a peep—but he was so big and so slow to fall that he must have shielded his buddies, because both of them were able to fire back. The bike, fortunately, had a heavily-armoured fuel tank that wasn’t about to blow up because of a mild bombardment by four-by-twos, but the machine fell over, and its exhaust pipe trapped Carl’s foot, immobilizing him as he tried to squirm further away.

As the gunfire ceased, Carl thought for one delirious moment that he had done enough. It seemed inconceivable that either of the giants had survived the withering hail of his fire—but then a shadow descended upon him out of the sky.

Unable to roll out of the way he could only tense himself against the crushing weight. Unfortunately, it transpired that tensing himself was not enough.

The Atlas Boy collapsed on top of him. He felt that he had been stomped by a dinosaur, and the wind was knocked out of him so comprehensively that although he fought hard during a second or two of blinding dizziness he simply could not slay conscious.

He knew that it had to be an auditory hallucination, but he thought he heard Pasco’s voice say: “Aw, shit!” just as he passed out.

5

Rico Andriano was not a coward.

Indeed, had he been asked, Rico would have asserted that he had not even the capacity for cowardice. He liked to think of himself as a man utterly without feelings, as untouched by fear as he was by love. He would have admitted that he valued his life, to be sure, but would have argued that he did so in a fashion that was entirely cerebral and entirely rational. He sincerely believed that he had no instinct for survival whose recklessness might betray him, but was instead possessed of a cold determination to survive. His regard for the family, he would have said, was equally level-headed; he did not love his father, his mother or his Don, but he knew that there was no life or future outside society for any being which could be considered human.

These various assertions and arguments were mostly bullshit, but they had a kernel of truth in them. Rico was not a coward; and he was not a man to back down in the face of danger. Nevertheless, while he shielded his nightsights from the glare of Kid Zero’s flashlight, and without even bothering to glance sideways at Lady Venom, he unhesitatingly threw away his gun and said, “Take it easy, Kid.”

Rico might, if asked, have said that his reasons for doing this were based in generosity and morality, but that would have been bullshit too. Rico thought of himself as a human being, but sandrats like Sammy Ulinski and Kid Zero belonged, in his estimation, to some other category entirely. Neither of them, in his view, was worth an atom of moral consideration—but he had strict orders to refrain from killing the Kid if it was humanly possible, and he took that command almost as seriously as his determination not to be killed by the Kid.

Thus, it was neither cowardice nor morality which made Rico throw away the Magnum but a mixture of professional pride and cold common sense.

Rico had been unsighted and greatly inconvenienced while Sammy Ulinski was falling and squirming after being bitten by the snake, but he had had his chance to get a clean shot at the Kid before he awoke, and had not taken it. Instead, he had allowed the Kid to snatch up the flashlight and switch it on.

Now, Sammy was silent and still—not so much because of the snakebite per se but because of the tape which Rico had used to stop up his mouth and because he was rigid with fear—and the Kid had his own pistol levelled. Rico knew that the Kid was a marksman, and that he was risking his own life by not killing him, but he look the risk.

He consoled himself, as he looked down the barrel of the Kid’s weapon, that in addition to the Kid, there had been the snake to take into account. Rico didn’t know enough about rattlers to know whether they had enough poison in reserve to deliver a second fatal bite, but he wasn’t anxious to experiment. Rico told himself that even if he had succeeded in plugging the Kid before the Kid could fire off a return shot, the snake would have got him for sure. By the same token, he knew that if he had moved the pistol in order to shoot the snake, Kid Zero would probably have put him away forever.

He said again: “Take it easy, Kid—I’m with the good guys.” Then he waited, to see whether he would get shot, or bitten, or both. He tried to stay as still as possible. Only his eyes moved, his gaze flicking back and forth between the boy and the rattler.

The boy didn’t shoot—but he didn’t seem anxious to open the conversation, either.

“I hope the rumours are right about you being able to control that thing,” Rico said, when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to get shot. He tried to sound friendly.

“How did you find me?” inquired the Kid, without bothering to give him an answer.

“I didn’t,” said Rico. “The sandrat saw you ride in. GenTech gave us a little breathing-space, but the word’s well and truly out, now. I stopped this guy’s friends from using the phone, but the jungle drums and smoke signals are carrying the news right now. We both got troubles, Kid, and we both have to make tracks if we’re going to get away from here before the heavy mobs arrive. But we have to talk first.”

The Kid disentangled himself from his bedroll.

“I don’t have to talk to anyone,” he said.

“Yes you do,” said Rico swiftly. “Because you can’t imagine what kind of heat is coming down, and I can. This is important Kid—not just a matter of life and death but the whole threatened-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it bit. If some friends of mine hadn’t stopped GenTech’s point men they’d have been here before dawn; now they’ll be lucky to arrive before the competition. We bought you that time, Kid, and we can take some of the heat away, too—if you give us one of the discs you’re carrying. Only one—you can keep the copies. We’re entitled to it, believe me.”

“Who are you?” asked Kid Zero, pulling on his boots. The nightsights had adapted now and Rico could see everything in the room with remarkable clarity. He was glad to see that the snake was quite motionless, though its stare was unwavering.

“Our people were waiting for Haycraft,” said Rico. “When they saw what happened to him they called up all the reinforcements they could, including me. We got word that you were heading up this way, and we were told to intercept—but we had to spread ourselves a little thin, with having to take care of the GenTech security men too. We were all given instructions to the effect that if we found you we were to play fair—but also to make you an offer you couldn’t refuse. The ball’s in your court, Kid. You can name your own price, and we’ll do what we can to deliver—but the real issue is that if you want to hurt GenTech, you only have to give us the disc. We’re the ones who can use the big secret. Another corp would only steal it, but we’ll use it.”

“Are you telling me that you’re a government agent?” asked the Kid sceptically.

“Not exactly,” Rico answered. “The front-line government is in GenTech’s pocket. Every senator and senior official is bought and paid for by G-T, and a healthy proportion of them are selling their favours to the opposition as well. We represent the former owners—the people who used to own the government before we were outbid. You could think of us as the third hand.”

“The third hand?” countered the Kid, obviously perplexed. Rico suppressed a grin. It seemed to him that his adversary was going for all the narrative hooks, and could be reeled in—if only he didn’t run out of time.

“The government’s right hand never knew what its left was doing,” said Rico. “And neither of them knew that they weren’t the only two hands the organization had. You could call us the inner circle, if you

prefer –the circle of people who didn’t have to be accountable to the public.”

“The CIA?”

“Some of the old guys used to be in the CIA, but they had fingers in a lot of other pies too. None of that matters to you, Kid. All that matters is that we aren’t in with the corps. In fact, we’re the last effective org that hasn’t been absorbed by the corps, and we’re all that stands in the way of the asset-stripping of America. If we lose, the whole damn country will be carved up between GenTech, M-M and the rest—but what’s on that disc gives us a chance to fight back…a chance to neutralize GenTech’s ultimate weapon.”

“Why should I care whether your people or the corps run things?” asked the Kid. He sounded neither bitter nor sarcastic, as if the question really needed an answer.

“I don’t know,” answered Rico truthfully. “I don’t have a clue how you decide what to care about. But if what’s said about you is true, you’re no friend of GenTech’s. If you don’t give the disc to me, they’re the hot favourites to get it back again.”

Rico paused, but the Kid didn’t say anything, so he continued to spin out the yarn. “You were dumb to trust a scuzzbag like Homer Hegarty, Kid. The heavy mob had to force Harriet the Hooker to tell you how many copies she made, but Homer ratted on you voluntarily. That’s how come they’re so close. While you’re carrying that disc you’re like a dose of poison to everyone you meet. We’re the only ones who can share the heat with you—and if you want to cut a deal with one of the rival corps you’ll still have the other copy, provided that the search parties don’t find out where you stashed it.”

“They won’t,” said the Kid confidently.

“Maybe not,” Rico came back, “but I don’t think you realize just how hard they’re trying. GenTech couldn’t keep the lid on their bad news, and now everybody and his cousin wants a slice of the action. I can’t pretend to be your friend, Kid, but I’m your enemy’s enemy—and if you want to have any friends left when this business is over, you’d better stay well away from them. The only people who can help you are people like us, who dislike GenTech’s ambitions every bit as much as you do. Help us, and maybe—just maybe—we can get you out of this in one piece.”

Privately, of course, Rico didn’t think that Kid Zero had a cat in hell’s chance of getting out of this alive, but he wasn’t about to say so to the Kid. He wanted the sucker to think that there was just a tiny ray of hope—provided that he played ball with Rico. On the other hand, the longer it took to convince him, the less chance Rico had of making a run for it himself, even though his back-up was scheduled to arrive in advance of the opposition.

Kid Zero was looking down at the unconscious sandrat, who might or might not be dead by now. The Kid was probably thinking about the tape that Rico had used to shut him up, wondering what that said about the quality of Rico’s character.

“He tried to sell you, Kid,” said Rico softly. “Not to me—to GenTech. Don’t waste your sympathy, or your time. You can ride away if you want to, with the disc still in your pocket, but that would mean that you’ll still have everybody on your tail. Give it to me, and my people will be off your back and heading back east—taking at least half the chasers with us. I ain’t pretending it’s a great deal, but you can have some promises too if you’re prepared to believe me. Anything you want—money, a job, a life. The other way is certain death.”

“What’s on the disc?” asked the Kid. He had gathered up his stuff now and was ready to hit the road. “If Haycraft is yours, you must know.”

“Not me,” said Rico. “I’m only a soldier. But they told us in no uncertain terms it’s something really big—something which presently gives GenTech a big edge in the corp war. If you give it to another corp, that might even up the war…but if we don’t have it too, the corps are invincible. You trusted Homer Hegarty with a copy, and he gave it straight back to GenTech. I won’t do that—so whatever reason you had for giving it to him should make you hand it to me. I may not be much, but I’m all there is, Kid. I’m all you’ve got.”

“You might be lying through your teeth,” the Kid pointed out, without undue rancour. “You might even be GenTech.”

“If I were GenTech,” said Rico, “the game would already be over. And I might be telling the truth. Figure the odds yourself, Kid. You have nothing to lose but a copy of the disc which they’ll take off your dead body when they catch you—and if you’re dead, it won’t matter a damn whether they Find the other copy or not. What you have to gain is a chance to get away. Weigh it up, Kid, and tell me how it feels.”

The Kid bent down to pick up the snake. It curled itself around his neck, dangling from his shoulders. It held its head up, and its eyes were still fixed on Rico’s face. Rico stared back at it for a moment before transferring his gaze back to the Kid.

The Kid put his gun away, and pulled a small package out of his pants pocket.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll buy it. Pity about Homer—I thought the guy had guts.”

“If he had guts of his own,” Rico observed, as he took the disc and put it away in his jacket, “he wouldn’t have to make a living out of other people’s. Good luck, Kid.”

“Same to you,” said the Kid equably, and disappeared into the dark corridor, taking his flashlight with him.

Rico gave him a minute or two to get clear, while his nightsights adjusted again. Then he went to pick up the forty-five. As he slid it into its holster the heard the Kid’s bike start up.

Give the bastards a good run, Kid, he said, silently. He needed the Kid to give them a good run, in order to maximize his own chances of getting clear. He didn’t want to deflect any more of the heat in his own direction than was strictly necessary.

Because he wasn’t a coward, it didn’t even cross Rico’s mind that he was now in a position to cut his own deal. The thought of going against the family in favour of a possible payoff from GenTech was simply not on the list of possibilities. There were other benefits to not being a coward, but not being tempted by stupidity was probably the most important, and he knew it. He judged that Kid Zero was no coward either, but he didn’t really care one way or the other about that; he had no lime for the kind of hero-worship which was Homer Hegarty’s stock-in-trade. The Kid’s role in this, as far as Rico was concerned, was just to do and die—and by the manner of his dying, to buy time for Rico and those whose soldier he was.

Rico honestly believed that the men whose soldier he was were the last true dreamers of the glorious American Dream. He wasn’t a coward, but in his heart of hearts he was a bit of a sucker.

6

At first Pasco thought that Carl Preston was dead, but it turned out that all the blood had belonged to the Atlas Boy who’d fallen on top of him. Once the mercy boys had hauled the huge corpse away the paramedics had no trouble bringing him round.

Meanwhile, Pasco watched the sun rise from the cradle of the Great Western Desert. It was a sight which had urged lesser men to poetic description, but to Pasco—who had just had a long radio conversation with his Division Head—it was just the beginning of another bad day.

The paramedics gave Preston a cup of water, advising him to sip it slowly and give himself time to collect his scattered wits. Pasco waited patiently while this advice was followed—over-scrupulously, he thought—and didn’t speak until he was spoken to.

Finally, Carl squinted up at him, and said: “Did we get them all?”

“Not all,” Pasco told him. “Enough. Seven or eight hightailed it into the desert when the birds swooped. Charlie Atlas got his but Ace the Ace is still out there. It isn’t the first time the Low Numbers have been reduced to low numbers, and as long as there are supersteroids on the black market there’ll be Atlas Boys to lap them up, but for the time being the two gangs are extinct. We have to get going, Carl—we’re late, and even with the birds to carry us we might not be early enough to get to the worm.”

Preston came slowly to his feet, looking disgustedly at his blood-caked jacket and pants.

“I need a change of clothes,” he observed.

Privately, Pasco thought that they hadn’t time to waste in stating the obvious, but he felt that he had to make allowances; he knew only too well what a difficult night Preston had had.

“In the bird,” he said tersely, and pointed to where they had to go. The copter’s blades were already whirling, ready for lift-off.

“Do you know where Kid Zero is?” asked Preston, raising his voice as they approached the roaring blades.

“Not exactly,” Pasco shouted back. “But everybody and his cousin seems to be heading for a place called Melendez in New Mexico. That’s where the mobmobiles are going, dragging half a dozen independent Ops and other assorted chancers in their wake.”

It wasn’t possible to add any more until they were loaded up and the doors were closed, so Pasco shut up. It was, he knew, conceivable that the Melendez run was a red herring, but every GenTech ear in five states was glued to the ground, and if anything better came in the bird would be ready to change tack.

Once the bird was in the air Preston went out back to change and tool up, while Pasco sat beside the pilot, taking up the radio-mike.

“I want everything up in the air,” he said, broadcasting on an open channel. “Never mind collecting heads—I’ll make sure that your bounty bonuses are made good. We have to cover all the exits from this freakin’ ghost town as best we can.”

The squad-leader in charge of the mercy boys leaned over his shoulder, and said: “When we get there, how much iron hand do we use and how much velvet glove?”

“We use just enough iron hand to get in ahead of the competition,” said Pasco grimly. “But remind the boys that they aren’t chasing motorpsychos now. It ain’t good for public relations to start shooting indiscriminately at decent citizens like Ops and the mafia. We don’t hurt anyone unless we have to—but until we have our discs back, nobody gets out of that town without being put through a scrambler. If necessary, we put every damn vehicle through an electromagnetic field strong enough to wipe everything they’re carrying—we can always apologize for the mistake later.”

“What if we run into mercy boys from the other corps?”

“Same rules. This isn’t a shooting war—yet. Just make sure that if the opposition shoot first, we shoot last. Any sign of Chromicon or M-M presence in the area?”

The squad-leader shook his head. “No birds in the air yet,” he said. “If they’re going in, they’re doing it under cover.”

Pasco felt a brief and belated pang of regret about shooting Cyril Atlas. He knew only too well that he and Preston ought to have been going in under cover, swiftly and silently. He tried to tell himself that it was okay, because the cat was out of the bag now, and come the end of the day it might be handy to have half a hundred mercy boys to help him mop up, but he couldn’t convince himself. His Division Head had not been openly hostile or angry when the two of them had talked, but Pasco had got the impression that his boss was apprehensive about something. Being a buckpasser from way back, of course, he was always apprehensive about something—but Pasco had the impression that news of this sad affair had now reached the upper echelons of GenTech’s command structure, and that someone Way Up There was very upset.

“Keep me informed,” he said to the bird’s radio-man brusquely, and went in back, where it was a little quieter. Carl Preston was cleaned up now, and though he was dressed as an ordinary mercy boy he looked better than Pasco felt.

“Okay Carl?” he said.

“Sure,” said Zarathustra’s man, not too enthusiastically. “You think the Kid will make a run for it when the heat comes down, or will he try to hide out?”

“If he’s still in town,” said Pasco, “he’ll hole up until nightfall. What we really have to worry about is whether he got any kind of advance warning. If he did, he’ll be way out of town already, holed up somewhere that the heat won’t reach—in which case we’ll have to wait for another sighting.”

Preston laughed shortly. “And when we go after him,” he observed, “We’ll have a freakin’ circus trailing in our wake.”

“Either that or we launch our own decoy operation,” Pasco confirmed. “I told your boss it wouldn’t be easy, didn’t I?”

“You did,” admitted Preston dolefully. “But it won’t be you that has to explain to him how it all went wrong.”

Pasco actually felt a slight pang of sympathy, but he managed to scowl anyway. “We’ll all have to do our fair share of explaining,” he said sourly, “Including Doc freakin’ Zarathustra. I get the feeling that there’s more to this than a little bit of mislaid data. My boss just handed me a line about desperate necessity—and though he talks like that all the time, this time I think he means it. We could be in big trouble, if we can’t pull the chestnuts out of the fire. Are you sure you don’t have any idea what all the panic and double-dealing is about?”

“Dead sure,” said Preston. Pasco couldn’t make out whether he meant it or not.

The squad-leader put his head through the cabin door and shouted: “Pasco! Message incoming—scrambled with virgin code. Looks hot!”

Pasco grinned. “See,” he said to Carl Preston. “Sometimes we get the breaks.”

He went forward again to decant the message from the radio into a portable digitizer, which he carefully detached from the bird’s systems before breaking out the previously-unused code-disc. As soon as the code-disc was snapped into the machine the unscrambled message began to come up on the screen. He went right to the back in order to read it, and the mercy boys knew enough to give him a wide berth. Only Carl Preston came to hear the news.

“Someone’s bailing us out,” he muttered, as the letters swirled past, strutting their brief lives across the screen. “Someone with real clout. They’ve only requisitioned a freakin’ skyball with IR-visual capacity. Something with a bike-profile engine did cut out of Melendez an hour or so before dawn. It’s stationary now, and we have the co-ordinates correct to the nearest thirty feet. He’s on this side of town, and we’re the only ones who know where. You a gambling man, Carl?”

“You mean,” said Preston, laboriously demonstrating how quick on the uptake he was, “am I prepared to work on the assumption that it’s Kid Zero?”

“If it is,” said Pasco, “it’s our one chance to gel ahead of the opposition again. Whatever the freakin’ mafia do have, the one thing we can be pretty sure they don’t have is a spyball. The mercy boys have to go to Melendez anyhow, to put the mobsters through the scrambler—but we can get off quietly, and have the Kid to ourselves. Only thing is…”

“We have to jump down, and then we’re on foot,” Preston finished for him, demonstrating that he was quick enough on the uptake when the chips were all on the table.

“That’s right,” said Pasco. “No wheels, no armour, no heavy weapons. Just us and what we can carry against Kid Zero. Two against one.”

“Two against two,” said Preston drily. “Let’s not forget the snake.”

“You can take the snake,” said Pasco. “Leave the Kid to me. Or would you prefer it the other way around?” When Preston didn’t reply he added: “You feel up to making the drop?”

“Sure,” said Zarathustra’s man. “Why would I have jumped off the gas-station roof if I hadn’t needed the practice?”

“So let’s get ready,” said Pasco, feeling a peculiar tautness winding him up inside. His feelings were oddly mixed, because his exultation about the possibility that they were back in first place in the race to grab the Kid was underlaid by a certain anxiety about how they had got there. The kind of people who had seniority enough to requisition skyballs were the kind of people who didn’t normally interest themselves in the routines of SecDiv counter-espionage. There was something freaky about this whole operation, and it was getting freakier.

A strange echo of feeling which sometimes returned to the left side of his face was there again, dull and warm. He tried to ignore it, and went to give his orders to the pilot.

The drop wasn’t easy. They had no time to scout around for somewhere soft to come down, and they daren’t cut the bird’s air-speed to zero for long without attracting attention. Nor did they dare to get too close to the place where the Kid—if it was the Kid—was hiding out, lest they warn him that trouble was coming. That meant that they couldn’t get a visual scan of the place—but that didn’t seem to matter much, because the map reference told them that it was an old railroad tunnel, about five hundred metres long.

In the end, they had to jump down eight or ten feet on to an apron of baked clay shielded by a stand of dead trees; they jumped together so that the bird could accelerate away, having hovered for no more than a few seconds. They threw down their packs first so that they could make the drop unencumbered by equipment.

Pasco had some experience in skydiving, and he knew enough to make himself relax as he fell. He rolled as soon as he touched the ground, trying to absorb the shock of the impact as gradually as possible. He scraped the side of his left hand, but that was all. He was up again almost immediately, and ran to help Preston, who had too many bruises already to have come down comfortably.

Preston was okay; shaken, but not stirred.

Pasco picked up his pack and checked the weapons. Before putting the pack on his back he took out both the 4.2 millimetre machine-gun and the automatic pistol, slinging the strap of the first over his shoulder and stowing the second in his belt-holster. Then he went to look out over the ground which they had to cover.

They were about three miles from the nearer mouth of the tunnel; if they went quickly they could be there in forty minutes or so. The territory was arid, but there was enough scrub to provide reasonable cover. The sun wasn’t so high as to be desperately uncomfortable.

In a way, the walk was relaxing. Pasco wasn’t used to walking out of doors—it was something nobody did any more, even in the PZs—but he still managed to find some kind of natural rhythm in it. It wasn’t too surprising, he supposed; the human species had a history going back eight hundred thousand years, and for seven hundred and ninety-five thousand of them there had been nothing to ride at all—not even horses. The human body was designed for walking, no matter what kind of training it got in a world full of motorized transport.

Needless to say, there was no sign at all of Kid Zero. If he was around, he was presumably in the tunnel—but not too far in, because he would want to keep an eye and an ear open for visitors. Because the tunnel had two ends, they had to split up. Pasco gave the nearer end to Carl Preston and went over the top of the hill so that he could come at the second entrance from the other side, without ever having crossed the line of sight of anyone within.

The branchline tracks were still there, though no train had run on them for some years now. Despite the dryness of the semi-desert the rails were well and truly rusted up, but the sleepers didn’t seem to have rotted at all. There were no wagons or flatcars anywhere to be seen—which was a pity, because one such vehicle might have made a big difference to their chances of getting to the Kid quickly and easily.

When he got to his position beside the tunnel entrance Pasco checked his watch, then took a pair of goggles, a light breathing-mask and a couple of smoke grenades out of his pack. He didn’t make any attempt to put his head around the rim; he knew that he wouldn’t be able to see anything at all in the darkness within, while his own head would be clearly visible in silhouette. There was no need at all to take senseless risks.

When the right moment came, he quickly pulled the pins on the grenades, and tossed them as far as he could into the tunnel, still without exposing his head. He heard them fall, and then he heard the hissing sound of the smoke escaping, but he was still in no hurry. He just moved a short distance away from the tunnel entrance, so that he could cover it from above, and waited. The smoke began to drift out of the tunnel entrance, but nothing else came with it.

Pasco wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed. Half a kilometre was a lot of tunnel—there’d be plenty of space for the Kid to retreat into. When he was sure that he couldn’t possibly be seen through the smoke, though, he took out two more grenades, and moved casually down onto the tracks. This time he threw them as hard and as far as he possibly could.

Despite the mask he had to cover up his own face because of the stuff that was drifting out, but he had a lot of open air around him. The smoke was acrid as well as thick, and it could be pretty nasty even in small quantities, if exposure were sustained for any length of time. Half a kilometre wasn’t that much tunnel, once both its ends were corked with this kind of cloud. Even if the Kid retreated all the way into the middle the drifting smoke would get to him eventually, and in a confined space it would only need a few minutes to set him weeping and retching. It wouldn’t knock him unconscious, but it would render him utterly helpless.

Pasco was quite prepared to go in and gel the Kid if he had to; he wasn’t optimistic enough to believe that the Kid would make it easy by coming staggering out into his waiting arms. Just in case, though, he went back up the slope a little way, so that he could keep the entrance covered while he waited until it was time to throw in the last two grenades.

He watched the entrance intently, because he knew that if Kid Zero did come out, he would probably come out firing at random.

In fact, Pasco was so intent on watching the tunnel’s entrance that he was absolutely astounded when he heard the click of a revolver’s hammer being drawn back, quickly followed by a command to drop his gun. Every judgment he could make of tone and distance suggested to him that he should do exactly as he was told, so he did.

The Kid hit him anyway, and as his senses left him he seemed to hear words echoing in the dark recesses of his skull. The words in question were: “Aw, shit!”

7

Carl began to have a bad feeling about the trap even before he had reached the half-way point of the tunnel, where he found Kid Zero’s bike, unattended.

Having passed it, he continued to run impatiently along the track, shining his flashlight on the tracks ahead, determined not to stay in the tunnel too long. The mask he was wearing was too light to keep out all the effects of the smoke; even the tiny amount of leakage he was suffering was making his eyes water, and the supposedly clean air he was dragging into his nostrils through the filter-plate tasted like some kind of cleaning-fluid.

There was no particular reason to be worried because he hadn’t found the Kid in his half of the tunnel, and even when he was past half-way it remained entirely possible that the only reason he hadn’t met up with Pasco was that the Kid had used the other exit and Pasco had grabbed him; in spite of all this, Carl’s paranoia was screaming at him that things had all fouled up again. Before he got to the far end of the tunnel, and despite the fact that he was direly uncomfortable inside his mask, he slowed down and began to move forward as cautiously as he could.

There was still just enough smoke in the tunnel to hide him from view as he came out—or, at worst, to reduce him to a blur. He figured that he would see better looking out than anyone outside would be able to see looking in.

He decided on a quick dash round to the right—the likelihood was that Pasco had stationed himself on the left, with his machine-gun at the ready. But when he’d made the move, he just felt stupid. There was nothing and nobody to be seen. No Kid; no Pasco. He ducked back into the tunnel-mouth, wishing fervently that he could get rid of the mask.

He knew that it had to be enemy action. Pasco had obviously reached his station, and had had time to throw in at least some of his grenades. If he had failed to follow through, that could only be because he was prevented from so doing.

It didn’t need a genius to work out what had gone wrong. The Kid hadn’t been in the tunnel when they’d arrived. Maybe he expected someone to come after him, and didn’t want to be caught in a trap. Maybe he just didn’t like the dark. Either way, he had found some other hidey-hole, and must have rubbed his hands in glee when he saw that his two adversaries had obligingly split up.

Carl thought that he’d have heard a shot even in the depths of the tunnel, but he wasn’t prepared to conclude from the fact that he hadn’t that Pasco was still alive. The snake hadn’t been in the tunnel either.

Thought of the snake made Carl tense up inside. He wasn’t particularly frightened by the thought of facing a maniac marksman, but the snake was something else.

The logic of strategy told him to stick with what cover he had, but the logic of strategy didn’t take account of the imperfections of his mask. He felt that he was about to vomit, and he couldn’t stand it any longer. He came out of the tunnel again, hurrying to get far enough away from the poisonous smoke to rip off the protective apparatus and suck in a lungful of real air. He threw the mask away.

Not until he’d done that did the power of caution reassert itself. He looked furtively around, but there were too many bushes nearby from which the Kid might be watching him, and he knew that he was in deep trouble. He edged his way up out of the cutting, heading uphill in order to get a better look around as soon as the way was clear. He looked around for some cover of his own, but he was too late—he’d already blown it.

A voice from behind him—not very far behind him—told him to drop his gun. He was quick to obey, realizing that he had no chance at all of making a fair fight of it. He waited until he received an order to do so before he turned around. The Kid collected the four-point-two and then removed the automatic from his shoulder-holster before taking him around a dense patch of bushes to a sheltered covert whose surrounding trees were still alive and richly clad in dark green foliage.

Pasco, divested of his mask, pack and guns, was laid out face downwards on the bare ground. He had been hit hard but he was still breathing; his things were in a pile ten or twelve feet away; a six-foot rattlesnake was coiled up on top of them. The Kid added Carl’s guns to the heap.

Carl was surprised by how young Kid Zero looked. He had seen photographs of the outlaw’s face before, and had seen him in longshot astride his bike half a dozen times on the Homer Hegarty show, but the camera was a selective reporter from which it was difficult to get an impression of the live being. The Kid, legendary though he was, looked like nothing at all—he was only five-three or five-four in his booted feet, and very scrawny—but he held himself as if he meant business. Which, presumably, he did

“Sit down,” said the Kid evenly. “I don’t intend to kill you if I don’t have to—I know you’re only doing your job.”

Carl realized that because he was wearing a mercy boy’s uniform Kid Zero had mistaken him for run-of-the-mill hired help. He couldn’t see any way, though, that the mistake could be turned to his advantage. He did as he was told, quietly grateful that the Kid wanted to talk. The spot where the Kid had told him to sit was a long way from the guns, but that meant that it was also a long way from the rattler. That was just fine by Carl.

“The other guy’s Ray Pasco, right?” said the Kid to his prisoner.

“That’s right,” Carl admitted. He remembered what the SecDiv man had said about he and the Kid having acquaintances in common. The Kid’s brow was furrowed, as though he couldn’t for the life of him think what to do next. Carl didn’t envy him, though he was only too well aware that his own situation was—for the time being—the more perilous.

“You know how I feel about your employers,” said the Kid uneasily. “And you know I won’t have much compunction about adding you to my score if I have to. But I know you’re just trying to make a living, and I figure it hurts more to hit GenTech in the pocket than to rub out their expendable operatives. I know how easily expendable people are, in GenTech’s way of thinking.”

“I understand,” Carl assured him. “I’m not about to play hero—I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“How did Pasco find me?” asked the Kid, abruptly. “This time, nobody saw me.”

“There’s no privacy, even in the wilderness,” Carl told him. “The bosses put a spyball on you. By day it can read the maker’s name on your sickle, by night it just switches to IR, and your bike’s engine is lit up like a flare.”

Kid Zero glanced up into the moistureless blue sky which arched from horizon to horizon. If he was hoping to see some heavy cloud-cover on the horizon he was out of luck. There would be none this week—or even this century.

“I’m impressed,” said the Kid, putting on a tough-guy act. “I must really have hit a big pocket, this time. I wonder if M-M and Chromicon know that you’re looking the other way for once.”

Carl didn’t bother to speculate about that. He had more urgent concerns on his mind. “It may not be too late to make a deal, Kid,” he said, hoping that the lie didn’t sound too transparent. “While you have the discs, you have something to trade.”

The Kid wasn’t about to be suckered into that kind of discussion. “How long will it be before the bird comes back for you?” he asked.

“You have a couple of hours,” Carl assured him. “There are too many people watching to see what it does. But you can’t get away, Kid—not with the eye in the sky staring down at you. Try to make a deal—it’s your only hope.”

“Sure,” said the Kid unhappily. Carl couldn’t blame him for being unhappy, with only that kind of hope to keep him going. Fearing for his own life, he cast about for something to distract his captor from contemplation of the hopelessness of his plight, and his roaming eye caught the steady stare of the rattler. He shivered.

“How’d you come to pal up with that, Kid?” he asked. “I heard about you having a pet snake on the Homer Hegarty show, but I never really believed it until now. How’d you make friends with him?”

“It’s a her,” said the Kid off-handedly. “We met when she bit me—but she was only scared. I got better from the bite. Afterwards, our relationship got friendlier. Did Pasco happen to mention to you why the disc’s so important?”

“No,” said Carl. “They never tell guys like me things like that? All they tell me is to get out on the road and fetch it.”

“But it’s something to do with Doc Zarathustra, isn’t it?” said the Kid, insistently. “I’d like to talk to Zarathustra, one day. He and I have a little score to settle.”

“No you don’t,” said Carl, before he could stop himself. “The Doc didn’t have anything to do with that Snake Eyes character—he doesn’t work on cosmetics.”

The Kid gave him a curious look, but didn’t manage to jump to any unfortunate conclusions. “What happened to Harriet?” he asked.

“She’s still alive and well,” Carl told him. “Once you’re all wrapped up and we have the other two copies of the disc back, she’ll be as free as a bird.”

“So you got her copy back,” said the Kid. “And Homer Hegarty turned his in. But you know that there are two more.”

“That’s right,” admitted Carl. “Who was the other copy for, as a matter of interest?”

“Haycraft’s people. I figured that if GenTech wanted to stop him delivering it, it was worth doing it for him—whoever they might be. Do you know who he was working for?”

“Who’s Haycraft?” asked Carl disingenuously.

“Alias Blay,” said the Kid, tiredly.

The Kid sat down. He kept his pistol trained on Carl’s midriff, but the barrel was dipping carelessly. Carl realized that the Kid must be dead beat—he was obviously exhausted, and probably very confused. For a moment, Carl saw his enemy in a new light: as a teenager who was way out of his depth, caught up by fate in something he couldn’t begin to comprehend. Carl felt suddenly sure that the one and only reason why the Kid had captured him instead of simply blowing him away was because he was at the end of his tether, and needed somebody to talk to.

“Where are the discs, Kid?” he asked, in as gentle a tone as he could manage.

“In a safe place,” the Kid replied. “Maybe too safe. Still, once I’m dead, you never know who might find them, do you?”

“That might not be such a good situation,” said Carl tentatively. “My bosses aren’t going to stop looking until they find it. They’re bound to talk to all your friends about it.”

“I don’t have any friends,” said the Kid flatly.

“That’s not true,” said Carl softly. “Charlie Atlas and Ace the Ace tried to take us out to get us off your tail—and it wasn’t just that Pasco had killed Cyril and made him look cheap. There’s not much left of the Atlas Boys now, or the Low Numbers, but Ace the Ace is still alive. The old lady is safe enough once we get the discs back—but if we don’t, anyone who might be able to give us a lead on their whereabouts is likely to be tested to destruction. Better to tell me where the other two copies are.”

“None of them know where I stashed it,” said the Kid.

“That won’t keep them alive,” Carl insisted. “As long as there’s a chance of getting a lead, they’ll have to keep trying.”

“So it’s true,” said the Kid, half to himself. “It is more important than a mere matter of life and death. The whole threatened-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it bit.”

“Our strict instructions are to take you alive if we can,” Carl went on, thinking that he might just have a chance of pulling the situation out of the fire. “That needn’t be painful, if you tell us where you stashed the discs.”

The Kid laughed shortly. Carl couldn’t blame him for not believing it.

“What option have you got, Kid?” he asked, wishing that his heartbeat would calm down a little. “Nothing short of a miracle can save you.”

“I’ve got Pasco,” the Kid pointed out, “And I’ve got you. How much are you worth, do you think? Could I trade you in as hostages for a chance to run?”

It was lunatic optimism and the Kid had to know it, but in Carl’s estimation no hope was too feeble to be fed while his life was on the line.

“Maybe,” he said. “Is that what you have planned—using us as hostages to buy yourself a copter when our back-up gets here?”

“It wouldn’t work,” said the Kid dispiritedly. “Better to run now, or stand and shoot it out.”

“Run,” advised Carl. “No point in going out in a hail of bullets for the sake of giving Homer Hegarty a two-minute story. What did he ever do for you?”

“Not much,” admitted the Kid, with a wry smile. “My instinct says that I should ice the pair of you, but there wouldn’t be any point, would there?”

“Like you say,” said Carl, uneasily aware of the tackiness of his duplicity. “I’m only doing my job. I’ve nothing personal against you—nothing at all.”

“The only thing is,” said the Kid, “I can’t get to my bike while the tunnel’s full of poisonous smoke, can I?”

“Use Pasco’s mask,” said Carl, wishing with all his heart that this stupid pantomime would stop. Soon, he thought, he would be willing Kid Zero to pull the trigger, just to get it over with.

Pasco, still unconscious, let loose a hollow groan.

“Bad dreams,” commented the Kid.

“Yeah,” said Carl dully. “He likes to play the horrorshows.”

“I’d play them myself,” said the Kid, “if I didn’t have to live in one.”

There was another sound then, which began as a throaty thrum but which grew very rapidly into a high-pitched whine. It sounded like some kind of an engine, but what it might be Carl didn’t have a clue. To judge by the way the Kid looked up in feverish alarm, neither did he.

As the Kid came swiftly to his feet, Carl saw that something was zooming along the ridge of the hill, low and fast. It looked like a model airplane, but he knew that it had to be something far more sinister than that. In fact, he had a sudden irrational suspicion that this might the the miracle which he had told the Kid he needed.

He heard the Kid say: “What the–?” before the explosion cut him off in mid-sentence.

There was just a brief interval after the explosion, when the one idea which possessed Carl’s mind was an overwhelming urge to dive after the mask which he’d told the Kid to put on. He knew that if only he’d been able to keep his own on, he’d have been okay—because what flooded out of the little guided missile as its tiny warhead exploded was some kind of narcotic gas, which was very, very powerful….

Part Three: Kid Zero in Wonderland

1

You’re walking in that Garden of Eden which once—very briefly, from the viewpoint of Ecological Time—was North America.

Here again is the trackless forest which decked the mountain-slopes for hundreds of thousands of years before men came out of Asia, across that unfortunate land-bridge which the swelling of the oceans belatedly drowned with the Bering Straits.

Here again is the great plain which was the land of the bison for hundreds of thousands of years before the first repeating rifles became the instruments of their slaughter.

Here again are the life-filled rivers which were the bloodstream of the continent for hundreds of thousands of years before the first cities were built upon their banks, in order to fatten them with the wastes and excrements of civilization.

Once, very briefly, these slopes were denuded of trees, when the timber was stripped away to feed the world’s hunger for paper: paper on which to write lies; paper in which to wrap the holy objects of worshipful trade.

Once, very briefly, these great plains became deserts, when the soil was murdered by slow and tortuous degrees: first exhausted by the intensive cultivation of monocultured crops; then sustained for a while by exotic medication; finally abandoned to rot into red dust and yellow ash and blanched bone.

Once, very briefly, these rivers were fountains of poison, when factories had been raised beside them to destroy them by lethal injection, in the name of cleanliness; for whatever men could not tolerate about themselves they washed away and gave to the earth, so that it might be spoiled while they were saved.

But in the end, men could not be saved, and the earth could not be spoiled; the empire of men came rapidly to its inevitable decline and fall, and the scars which it left upon the face of the earth soon faded and were gone.

You don’t know how much time has passed, but you know that it would be futile to ask. A great deal of time, in terms of human minutes and hours and histories; only the briefest of intervals, in terms of the evolution of species and the languorous changing of Gaea’s great seasons. Ice Ages have come and gone; the glaciers have scoured clean the continent which once was turned into that running sore which men called the United States of America; normality is restored.

If men survive at all they live as hunter-gatherers upon the plains and in the forests; they do not plant crops and they do not herd cattle. Perhaps, if men do survive, those twin sicknesses of civilization—agriculture and animal husbandry—will come again to plague them and sow the seeds of fiery destruction; but if they do, the course of theepidemic will again be brief. The sins of men extend from one generation to another, but not forever; their heritage spoils five hundred lifetimes, each one worse than the last, but in the end men are called to account for those sins, which are cancelled out by a Day of Judgement, and Eden is restored.

You’re walking now in the forest, naked and unafraid. You have no purpose save to be there, and to be a part of Eden.

You’re not hungry and you’re not thirsty, nor can you hunger or thirst while the forest has fruit and the streams run pure.

It’s not the excitement of the hunt that you crave while you walk here now, but the peace of solitude: that calmness of mind which is the reflection of the forest’s great and quiet being in your own small and patient mind.

Although the sun is hidden by the forest canopy you don’t feel cold, because your skin hasn’t lost its adaptability of comfort by virtue of having been swathed in clothing. Just as your sight is keen, because you have not been born into a lightless world, so also your body is strong, because circumstance has prevented the cultivation of that special innocence, tenderness and vulnerability which is the legacy of civilization. You’re a whole man, not a cripple made by swaddling and coddling.

There is no trace in your heart of envy or avarice or sloth or wrath or pride or gluttony or lust. In a world without inequality, envy is impossible; in a world without property, avarice is impossible; in a world without labour, sloth is impossible; in a world without frustration, wrath is impossible; in a world without status, pride is impossible; in a world without anxiety, gluttony is impossible; in a world without marriage, lust is impossible. In Eden, there is no inequality; no property; no labour; no frustration; no status; no anxiety; and no marriage. If there are men here, they are free of sin; they have not eaten from that deadly tree of technical knowledge which would urge them to plant and to keep, to cultivate and to own, to build and to destroy.

(But are there men here at all, if you must always think in terms of ifs? And if there are not, who are you? Who are you?)

You don’t know who you are; in Eden there are no names. You were conceived and birthed, but you have no mother; your creation was initiated in a human womb, but you have no father. In your turn, you too will be a creator, but you will know no sons or daughters. You will love—most certainly you will love—but your love will not be bound and confined, restricted by rule or bond of obligation. You will love as freely as you live.

(But who will you most certainly love, if you don’t even know whether there are men here at all? How were you spawned and birthed, if there are none here like yourself? Or are you not a man at all? Are you an echo or a ghost? Are you an angel or a god? Are you only a dreamer?)

You’re trying to remember—and you find, to your astonishment, that it hurts.

It hurts when you catch your finger on a thorn; it hurts when you trip and bruise your knee; it hurts when you run too hard and too far; it hurts when you stare into the sun…but this is not that kind of hurt. Maybe memory too is a kind of disease, a kind of sin. Maybe, if there arc men here, they have no memories….

As well suppose that the men of Eden have feathers and wings, or that their womenfolk have eyes in their nipples, or that they are giants as tall and strong as ancient trees.

(But why not? Why not? Why should men not be what they desire to be? Why teach the man when you might teach the superman? Why create out of virgin clay such a shabby, brutal, paradoxical being as a man, when you might make a glorious embodiment of beauty, grace and reason?

Why?)

To the burden of trying to remember is added the extra burden of trying to think. Dissent is easy, thought is hard; renunciation is the cheapest form of virtue; to wish the world away is the easiest way of coping with it; to make a myth of the womb is to deny the legacy of birth; every Golden Age is blind and stupid….

(Why are the proverbs of Hell lurking beneath the surface of the vision of Eden? What is this poison which pollutes my dream?

My dream?)

You’ve done it now. You’ve said a forbidden word, and it will all be taken away from you. You’ve lost it all, and it serves you right. You’ve broken it, and it can’t be mended. You had your chance.

You had your chance, but you said a forbidden word. (Or thought it. What difference does it make?)

The forbidden word was “my”, because “my” implies “me” and “me” implies “I” and “I” implies “am”, all of which are forbidden.

You’ve murdered the world.

You’ve murdered Eden.

Are you proud of yourself?

Two pairs of hands helped the Kid out of the sensurround booth. He was completely disoriented, and for a moment or two he couldn’t bring his vision into focus. He was lost in a maze of returning sensations, whose chaotic jumble would not be resolved.

Hearing came back before sight, and he heard the man speaking before he saw him.

“It is strange,” said the voice, “that even when one gives a man a chance to be a god, he remains stubborn in his resolve to be a man. The dream will not take hold—it simply is not allowed to displace reality. I wish I knew whether to consider this a hopeful sign or not; it is not what we expected. Perhaps the simulation of experience is still not good enough; perhaps it has not quite reached that threshold of essential plausibility which will allow the brain to adapt to it wholeheartedly.”

Sight came back, and Kid Zero saw the face of the man who was speaking to him. He was a small man, old but graceful in the manner of his aging, Oriental in the cast of his features. He was dressed in a fashion which seemed to the Kid to be both exotic and antiquated, like something out of an old samurai movie.

When the Kid had taken in the sight of the man he turned to look at what was behind him. He ignored the two girls who had helped him out of it.

“A horrorshow booth,” he said hoarsely. “I was in a horrorshow booth.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” admitted the small man. “That is how we have marketed the most primitive versions of the sensurround—as devices of entertainment. They seem so innocent in such a guise, do they not? All the more innocent, of course, because they pretend to be terrifying. There is nothing which make us feel more secure, more unthreatened, than something which reduces fear itself to a cheap and manageable thrill. That is why children love toys made in the image of carnivorous beasts or instruments of mass destruction. If a man makes something which can truly change the world—which might alter the whole nature of human life—he must first make a toy of it, or else he will be destroyed by those whose world he tries to change. Metals were first worked in order to make jewellery, paper was first used to make lanterns, gunpowder to make fireworks…we do not even know their inventors’ names, which is an infallible sign of the fact that they lived happy and undistinguished lives. There is nothing quite as lethal as fame, Zero-san, as you have recently discovered. It is my most devout hope that I will never be famous.”

“Who are you?” asked the Kid helplessly, while he looked around for clues as to where they might be. The room had no windows; it looked like a storeroom. There were no beds, tables chairs, desks, TV sets or computer consoles; there were only horrorshow booths—four of them.

“My name is Sasumu Yokoi, Zero-san,” the old man answered, with a slight bow. “I am one of many labourers whose task it is to carry forward the development of devices such as the one in which you were confined. I must apologize for my little…experiment. Curiosity is a congenital disease of all scientists, and we have only recently begun to explore he true potential of this technology. Almost all of our subjects go consciously into their dreams—I could not resist the opportunity to record the experiences of one who could not know where he was.”

The Kid felt weak at the knees, but there was nowhere to sit down. “Curiosity?” he queried, almost absent-mindedly. “Record? You can record my dreams?”

“Not exactly,” Yokoi replied. “But this is a more advanced model of the sensurround than any you might encounter in an American amusement arcade. The cruder models are built only for one-way transmission, introducing information into the brain via the sensorium. This one can carry information either way; it is built for feedback, so that you may—with elaborate assistance from the machine’s own intelligence—create and orchestrate your own illusion. It is most interesting to see what people do when they have that opportunity. Our people in America had to place you in the booth anyhow, in order to smuggle you out of the country, and the opportunity was too good to miss. I must apologize again.”

The Kid shivered, though it wasn’t cold inside the room. His weakness didn’t seem to be abating—if anything, he was feeling worse.

“You were eavesdropping on my dream?” he said, squinting with the effort of maintaining his concentration. “A dream I was creating for myself?” One of the two girls who had helped him out of the booth had moved back to his side, and now she reached out to steady him. Yokoi signalled to her with his hand, and she began to lead the Kid towards the door. Yokoi kept pace with them, answering the question while they walked.

“You must not misunderstand,” he said. “The machine cannot read minds—it cannot tell us what a man is dreaming while he is asleep. While you remained unconscious, the machine was impotent. But what you experienced just now was not a dream or a daydream. It was a sensurround simulation, like a horrorshow tape, but it was a malleable experience, over which you had a certain power of control. There is nothing supernatural about the way such control is exercised—it is astonishing how rapidly the brain learns, without any conscious intervention at all, how to emit the signals which intervene with the machine’s programming. It is almost as if the ability has always been latent in the human brain, dormantly awaiting the day when the sensurround would be invented. It is very remarkable, Zero-san, very remarkable indeed. But even so, all that we could put on tape—all that we could share of your waking dream—was a sequence of sounds and pictures. Your private thoughts remain inviolate.”

By now they had come through a short stretch of corridor to the threshold of a different kind of room. It was an office of sorts, with computer screens and keyboards, but it had no chairs. Instead it had a thickly-cushioned carpet on which one might squat in order to use the machines. Yokoi removed his shoes before entering. The Kid had bare feet already—all he was wearing was a light robe which the girls had presumably put on him when they brought him out of the sensurround.

The girl unrolled a kind of huge cushion, and helped the Kid to lower himself on to it. Once there, supported on one elbow, he felt a lot better.

“Tea,” said Yokoi to the girl, abruptly. She bowed—far more deeply than Yokoi had bowed to Kid Zero, and left the room.

The Kid’s thoughts were just beginning to catch up with him, now that he didn’t feel quite so bad.

“You smuggled me out of America?” he asked, not quite able to believe what he had heard.

“Certainly,” said Yokoi, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “There was no safety for you within its borders. GenTech is powerful everywhere, including my own homeland, but it is most powerful of all in America.”

“Where are we now, then?” asked the Kid, not entirely convinced that he wasn’t being fed a pack of lies.

“Antarctica,” Yokoi informed him lightly.

Oddly enough, the absurdity of it made it more believable. If Yokoi had been lying, he’d never have expected the Kid to swallow a whopper like that.

“I’ve never been south of Brownsville,” said the Kid—and then, just to show that he still had some of his wits about him, he said: “This is Mitsu-Makema’s doing, isn’t it?” The Kid knew that horrorshows were M-M products, and only a corp of that size would have the organization or the motivation to snatch him out of the jaws of GenTech’s trap.

“I have the honour to serve Mitsu-Makema,” Yokoi confirmed. “I hope that you too will soon have that honour.”

The Kid made no immediate response to the job offer. His mind was on other matters.

“Did you leave Lady Venom behind?” he said, in response to a sudden pang of anxiety.

“Indeed not,” answered Yokoi. “Our agents are very efficient. They were careful to leave nothing behind to indicate what might have become of you.”

The Kid blinked at the implications of that. “They brought Pasco and the mercy boy along too?” he queried.

“Mr Pasco and Mr Preston are here—they must be awakened soon, for the sake of their health, but they will be securely imprisoned. In the meantime, we are conducting some experiments of the same kind as the one in which you have recently participated. Mr Pasco is a very interesting subject—he obviously has an extensive knowledge of horrorshow tapes. I fear that we must take careful precautions with respect to the rattlesnake, Zero-san. I must apologize.”

The Kid had noticed that Yokoi did a lot of apologizing. He had also noticed that the politeness didn’t extend as far as not doing the things for which he would later have to apologize.

The girl returned, bearing a tray. There was tea, but no biscuits.

“I don’t have the disc,” said the Kid, while he watched Yokoi pour. He wondered why the liquid looked so pale and anemic. “But I guess you know that,” he added.

“We know that you hid one copy,” said Yokoi evenly. “We know also that two others were recovered by GenTech, and that the fourth was given by you to Enrico Andriano. Andriano escaped, by the way. The vehicles which were sent by his friends to Melendez were decoys—he made his way on foot to a more distant point of rendezvous. His masters now have the disc in their secure possession—I do not know whether they will succeed in unlocking the data without triggering its destruction, but I think they might.”

“Do you know who those masters are?” asked the Kid, sipping the hot tea from his cup. He didn’t like the taste much, but he liked the feeling of it sliding down his throat.

“Oh yes,” said Yokoi, but did not elaborate.

“And you want me to tell you where I hid the fourth copy, so you can have a crack at it yourselves?”

“Certainly,” said the old man, who was sipping his own tea in a seemingly reverent fashion. “But there is no hurry—no hurry at all.”

That, after all that he’d been through, seemed the greatest absurdity of all. Kid Zero couldn’t help but laugh—and though he didn’t like the way his laughter sounded any more than he liked the taste of Dr Yokoi’s tea, he loved the way it fell in his guts

2

There was nothing to be seen from the viewing-tower but mountains of ice overlaid by snow. There were no buildings, no chimneys, no oil-rigs, and no penguins. The sky was an even shade of grey, lightened in the north by the light of an invisible, low-lying sun.

“When you can see that mountain top over there,” said Junichi Tanagawa. pointing to the highest of the ice-peaks, “it means that it will snow very soon.”

The Kid fell for it. “And what if you can’t?” he asked.

“Then it’s snowing already.” The Japanese didn’t bother to laugh at his own joke—not, at least, with his mouth; it was impossible to figure out what his wrinkle-surrounded eyes were doing.

Tanagawa was even older than Yokoi. He was far more wizened and far more westernized. He wore a very severe grey business-suit and a neat blue tie, and he sat in a leather-clad reclining-chair, behind a beautifully-polished desk. Kid Zero had often heard the expression “boardroom suits”, but it had been meaningless noise until now. Now he knew what a director of a multinational corp actually looked like—one such director of one such corp, anyhow. He couldn’t help but feel flattered to be in the same room as a man like Tanagawa; that the room was in a secret establishment less than forty miles from the south pole and that Tanagawa was being nice to him added further dimensions to his sense of privilege—and to his awkward suspicion that it was all too good to last.

He’d been given a nice room with a private can and a shower—not to mention a PC he didn’t know how to use and a TV set which didn’t seem capable of tuning in ZBC—and the three meals he had eaten there since the previous evening had all seemed to his untutored palate like ambrosia washed down with nectar. He’d tried hard not to let his enjoyment of it all be spoiled by the suspicion that someone would eventually turn up with the bill, but he hadn’t quite succeeded.

“Of course,” said Tanagawa, in a regretful tone which sounded honest, “the time may soon come when the peak will no longer be there, and we will have to change the saying to refer to rain. Sixty per cent of the ice-cap has already melted into the sea. This is the last of the world’s unspoiled wildernesses, Mr Zero. Dr Yokoi tells me that you have a certain affinity with the idea of unspoiled wilderness.”

“This is a little too wild for me,” said the Kid, coming away from the viewport in order to take a seat opposite his host. “Forests are more my style. This is more like the Great Western Desert—peace bought with hostility. Isn’t the Antarctic Argentinian territory?”

“Not all of it, by any means. The Argentinians have expanded from their Weddell Sea bases to annexe the old Queen Maud Land and the Victoria Land Coast, but this particular spot is still technically part of the Australian Territories, and it is too far into the ice sheet to interest even the hardiest of Latin American adventurers. Not that it would matter if this were Argentinian territory, of course—Mitsu-Makema has an interest in the affairs of every nation on earth.”

It was all Greek to the Kid, whose knowledge of geography was rather limited, but he wasn’t about to admit as much. “Why build an installation way out here?” he asked, trying to put on a show of being clever. “The heating bills must be pretty high.”

“Social responsibility,” said Tanagawa mildly. “All the corporations conduct scientific research of a potentially hazardous nature, and all of them locate their most sensitive establishments in places where the environment is relatively hostile to life. That is why GenTech has recently taken to locating the establishments responsible for its most adventurous biotechnological research in the North American desert and the high Andes. Chromicon has similar stations in the Sahara and Siberia; we have others in the Australian outback. We are particularly proud of this establishment—and the problem of heating it is not so very awkward. Our nuclear reactor is readily supplied with fuel by local uranium, and ice is a very efficient insulator.”

“This is where your BioDiv does its hairiest work, then? And where Dr Yokoi and his friends are trying to upgrade horrorshow booths into fully-fledged dream-machines.”

“Dr Yokoi is a visionary,” said Tanagawa smoothly. “We are very proud of him—as proud as GenTech are of the legendary Dr Zarathustra. We are realists, and must admit that GenTech are our superiors, for the moment, in advanced biotechnological research—but we feel that this disadvantage is compensated by our superiority in cybernetics and its associated technologies.”

The Kid had no particular difficulty with the long words. He was an intelligent person, and although he had only the vaguest idea what cybernetics might be he reasoned that it had to refer to Yokoi and the horrorshows. “And you want me to offer you further compensation, in the shape of Zarathustra’s data-disc?” he said—not because he was in any rush to get to the point, but simply because he hoped it would show how clued-up he was.

Tanagawa smiled, but didn’t jump at the offer. Yokoi obviously wasn’t the only one who thought that these matters needn’t be hurried. The Kid had heard from guys who had regular dealings with the yakuza that the Japanese were positively addicted to beating all around the bush before getting down to the nitty-gritty, so he wasn’t to perplexed by it.

Tanagawa sat forward in his chair. “Strange as it may seem,” he said, “we have had the utmost difficulty in discovering who you really are—or who you were, if you prefer to think of it that way, before you assumed the name Kid Zero. America’s record-keeping has suffered an unfortunate decline, of course, since the Policed Zones were sealed and the areas outside excluded from many of the privileges of bureaucratic regulation, but it is strange, nevertheless.”

“Does it matter?” asked the Kid.

“It might. Everything which interests GenTech matters to us. Anyone whose interests are opposed to GenTech’s are at least partly aligned with ours—which includes Mr Haycraft and his masters as well as yourself. We know and understand what Mr Haycraft’s masters are trying to do—but you, quite frankly, are more of a puzzle.”

“You ought to understand me well enough,” replied the Kid, with a slight coldness in his tone, “after that trick you pulled with the horrorshow. I was surprised myself when I tried to figure out how much of that little hallucination was fed to me and how much was my own input.”

“Alas,” said Tanagawa unrepentantly, “Dr Yokoi has not yet given us a perfect psychoanalytical tool. Perhaps he will, one day—but for the time being, his devices can do little more than play interesting games. Will you tell me what name you had when you were a child, and where you were born?”

“I don’t see that it would be any use to you,” the Kid countered, stubbornly.

Tanagawa didn’t frown, or make any other sign of annoyance. “Would you like to work for us?” he asked.

“As what? A hired killer, like Pasco? Or a spy, like Haycraft?” The Kid’s tone was calculated to imply that he didn’t favour either prospect.

Tanagawa didn’t reply immediately, but looked steadily at the Kid for several seconds from the depths of his dark, birdlike eyes. Then he said: “Can you not understand and sympathize with the motives which led Mr Pasco to become a GenTech employee? His present post offered him—until his present assignment, at least—the careful protection of a large organization, with all the benefits that can provide. And the previous position which he gave up in order to pursue a career with GenTech was surely preferable to your own status as a hunted criminal. Why should you not leap at the chance of a similar role within Mitsu-Makema?”

“If I were an Op,” replied the Kid soberly. “A job with a corp SecDiv would probably look pretty good. But I’m not an Op, and I never would be. I’m an outlaw.”

“By which you mean to imply,” said Tanagawa, “that you subscribe to the image of your activities which has been so carefully built up by Mr Hegarty. Do you really see yourself as a free man, Mr Zero? Can you sincerely represent yourself as some kind of mythical hero, embodying the reincarnated spirit of the American pioneer?”

The Kid laughed. “I’m just a ghost dancer, Mr Tanagawa,” he said. “Just a ghost dancer. I have it on the word of Homer himself.” For a fleeting moment he nursed the hope that Tanagawa might ask him to explain, so he could show off all that Homer Hegarty had told him about Wovoka and the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, passing it off as his own wisdom. But Tanagawa already knew what a ghost dancer was.

“And is that what you want for yourself?” the director asked. “Are you content to be a celebrant of hopelessness, committing yourself to meaningless rituals of bravado and revenge, in order to serve some half-formed and half-baked quasi-religious faith?”

“It’s the American way,” said the Kid cheerfully. “You heard about what they’re doing in Deseret these days?”

“Is that what you want for, yourself?” asked Tanagawa, quietly refusing to let his question be ignored. It was a good question.

“I’ll tell you where I stashed the disc,” said the Kid uncomfortably. “You’re welcome to it. I owe you that much, for pulling me out. As for the rest—I honestly don’t know what I want, Mr Tanagawa.”

“Perhaps we can help you to decide,” said the M-M man, with what seemed to the Kid to be unwarranted smugness. “I really am interested in your previous history, you know. Won’t you tell me something about it?”

The Kid shrugged. “I had a mis-spent youth,” he said. “I seemed to spend most of it watching TV. Not the networks—the educational stuff that schools used to subscribe to. That was what passed for looking after us in the place where I was. It was a kind of orphanage in the Houston NoGo—I guess the whole outfit lived on the survival margin. It doesn’t matter what name they called me by—it wasn’t really mine. I was a foundling, left on the steps by persons unknown. I left the name behind when they threw me out to fend for myself, and became plain ‘Kid’.

“I was taken in by the Low Numbers because Ace the Ace knew me—he was an old boy of the Institution—but that went wrong; his buddies gave me the zero when Pete Quint got killed and the Trip brothers convinced themselves that I was lousing up their luck. They meant it to hurt, but I always liked it—no half-measures, you see. All and nothing are better than not so much, and I wanted it both ways: Kid Zero, all out to put the bite on GenTech; Kid Zero stops at nothing. Once I started the vendetta, it was absolute. That make any sense to you, Mr Tanagawa?”

“You can make a fresh start now,” the man in the suit pointed out.

“Sure,” said the Kid, in a low tone. “Back in the cradle, in the garden of Eden. But what can I do for you, except be Ray Pasco in miniature?”

“You might be worth much more to us than that, Mr Zero,” said Tanagawa, quietly. “We belong to a subtler species than the men who run GenTech, and we have little interest in recruiting men like Mr Pasco.”

The Kid was unconvinced. He couldn’t see why he might be useful to an org like M-M. But then he guessed what the suit might be referring to.

“You’re interested in Lady Venom, aren’t you?” he said. “You want to figure out how I get along so well with a rattler.”

“That is so,” admitted Tanagawa. “That—in addition to the simpler reasons of security—is why you were brought here, and why you have been placed in Dr Yokoi’s hands. My role is simply to persuade you to co-operate with him. And, of course, to receive from you the location of Dr Zarathustra’s data disc.”

“Do I get paid?” asked the Kid, for the sake of curiosity.

“Of course,” said Tanagawa serenely. “I am authorized to offer you a fee of forty million yen—convertible, of course, to any other currency you care to name—plus a wage of two hundred thousand yen per day until such time as you or I decide that our association is at an end. Are those terms agreeable to you, Mr Zero?”

The Kid had only an approximate idea of what a hundred thousand yen was worth in dollars and cents, but the numbers were undeniably impressive. Oddly enough, it was the daily rate rather than the forty million which seemed astonishing to Kid Zero. He tried to imagine how much that might be in real terms—in terms of gallons of water or gasoline; in terms of what whores charged their clients or what the dealers charged for ammunition; in terms of the dead-or-alive bounty currently on offer to the man who could bring his head in or the prizes on the average ZBC game-show. He couldn’t help but wonder how much a boardroom suit got paid, and whether they reckoned it by the hour or the minute.

“It’ll do,” he said, trying to sound laconic. “Leastways, it’ll do for now.”

“Thank you, Mr Zero,” said Tanagawa, standing up and extending his hand to be shaken. “Thank you very much indeed.”

Because of what he was it was impossible to be certain whether Mr Tanagawa was being sincere, but he certainly sounded it. In fact, he sounded so sincere that the Kid wondered whether he mightn’t have got twice as much, if he had only bothered to haggle. He recalled that the mafia still owed him a payoff too, if he could ever contrive to collect it.

He was rich—but he hadn’t a cent in his pocket.

“Well,” he said, in an attempt to be witty, “I sure hope that Homer Hegarty and the mafia are wrong about the end of the world being just around the corner. I’d like to clock up an awful lot of two-hundred-thousand-yen days.”

“If the threatened end of civilization were not every bit as imminent as Mr Hegarty and Mr Andriano implied,” Tanagawa observed, in a curiously scrupulous manner, “nobody’s days would be worth two hundred thousand yen. As things are, alas, we may well have far more money than time on our hands—and as Confucius once observed, we can’t take it with us if and when we go.”

It was a joke of sorts, but the Kid couldn’t quite bring himself to laugh. He had, after all, just been obliquely informed that he wasn’t overly likely to have the opportunity to spend what he earned.

“Just what is on that disc?” he asked, in a tone which sounded more exasperated than he had intended. “And why does everyone think that the end of the world is just around he corner?”

“There will be time enough for explanations,” Tanagawa assured him, apparently unworried by his own inconsistency. “First, Mr Zero, we have a deal to complete. Will you tell me now exactly where you hid the fourth copy of Dr Zarathustra’s disc?”

The Kid buried his exasperation, and told the M-M man what he wanted to know. He told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He was, after all, an honourable man.

3

The city streets are damp with recent rain, glistening redly wherever the light of the setting sun can penetrate the crevices between the huddled tenements. The streets are crowded with hurrying pedestrians of both sexes, whose heads are—without exception—bowed and hooded. The sun seems unnaturally large and the clouded sky is tinted vivid orange, as though the entire western horizon were aflame.

You have a gun in your right hand; it looks like a forty-five Magnum but there is no sensation of weight to back up the visual evidence and you don’t waste much time in looking down at the weapon anyway, because your gaze is flicking avidly back and forth over the crowds.

(You’re probably looking for someone—but what chance can you possibly have of finding them, when there is not a naked face to be seen?)

You step out into the path of one of the hurrying figures—it seems to be a smartly-dressed young woman, clicking along on high heels. She takes half a step backwards, obviously alarmed, but you can’t see anything within the folds of her hood.

You reach out with the hand which holds the Magnum, and use the barrel of the gun to push the hood back. You keep pushing until it falls.

Perhaps it is a young woman, but perhaps not. The hair is grey and wispy; the cheeks are mottled, as though covered in yellowing bruises; the lips are blackened, chapped and cracked and the teeth behind them are as yellow as the mottled skin. Most remarkable of all are the eyes: their “whites” are silvered like a polished ball-bearing; the irises are blood-red; the pupils are mere-pinpricks.

(How is it possible to read expression into such a face? Is that stare malevolent, or is no other appearance of emotion available to such features as these?)

You step back again, lowering the gun and clearing the way so that the other may proceed. She pulls up the hood again, carefully obscuring her hideous visage, and hurries on her way, head bowed.

You begin the search again, your eyes flickering from hood to hood—but while you watch, you begin to move along the street, skulking in the shadows cast by the tall buildings, whose windows are all shuttered and whose doors are all sealed.

(Can you have the slightest doubt that all the hooded faces are as frightful as the one which you exposed? This world has surely been the victim of some dire plague which transfigures without killing—some mutant micro-organism spawned in the polluted rivers, or some engineered virus escaped from a secret laboratory—and all human beauty has been banished from it. You can’t help but wonder what the consequences of that fact might be, for human relationships.

For now, it seems, the people are content to hide themselves for fear of offending one another’s eyes, but for how long? Will there not come a time when the hoods are thrown back, so that God may look upon the faces of His people, and none will be ashamed to be seen as they are? Will there not come a time when these Brave New Men will obliterate the cultural heritage which preserves images of another kind, destroying all the paintings, all the books, all the films, all the photographs—until no evidence remains to remind the people of the world that they have not always been as they are? And when that has been done, will not people come to think themselves fine and handsome again, and will they not learn to cherish the stigmata of their affliction?)

You move from the sunlit street into a shadowed alleyway—a deep crevice carved in the body of the city, from which the fiery sky is visible only as a high and narrow slit. There are fewer people here, but there are some, hurrying in both directions. Your gaze selects them one by one: checking, judging, appraising.

Here comes another of much the same height and build as the last, and again you move out to block her way. This one does not step back, but merely stops, and when you reach up with the gun-barrel she turns it aside with a gnarled and mottled hand. She also tries to block your other hand as it comes up to perform the task instead, but the hand—which is not discoloured—brushes her much smaller one aside, and hauls back the hood.

It is the same face as the other—or so similar that it cannot be told apart. This time, though, the spoiled lips move. They emit a hissing sound, and then the woman—if it is a woman—spits in your face.

You see the spittle coming at you, but there is no sensation of being hit by it. You don’t recoil, nor do you retaliate. You simply step back, and allow the other to cover herself up again.

She goes on her way.

(And in time, no doubt, these people will come to consider that they are made in the image of God, and will redesign their icons. Should any baby be born miraculously immune to the ravages of the disease, it will be promptly killed for its deformity. If the disease is a virus, made of the same stuff as the genes which are the carriers of human nature, it will be accepted and adopted into that human nature; if it is something other, it will become a second system of heredity, its own future evolution being part and parcel of the evolution of the race. That is the fate of universal diseases—to become commensals instead of competitors.

Perhaps men were once gods, before they were weakened by plague after plague after plague, so that they became only men…and perhaps, in time, they will degenerate even further, until they are no more than ugly beasts…and in the end, completing the devolutionary process, no more than gory blobs of protoplasm. Disease to disease, slime to slime.)

You move again, into an alley narrower than the other, so that the illuminating sky is no more than a striplight; but you can still see the people who go by, in both directions. You can still examine them one by one, dismissing all those who stand too tall or too broad, and all those who wear male attire.

Only the women attract your eye, drawing your attention like magnets; only the women who might be young.

Clearly, you do not expect your adversary to wear a disguise, save for the hood with which she will hide her face.

Again, one comes who might be the one you’re looking for. Again you step out to block her path.

She doesn’t step back; she doesn’t even stop. She cannons into you, but you’re so tall and solid and she’s so small and frail that she rebounds—and then she cowers and quivers in evident fear, and clutches with both hands at the black velvet hood which hides her shame. When you reach out with your free hand to seize the cloth and tear it away she resists, but not strongly—panic makes her impotent.

You yank the hood back, brutally, to display the ridiculous wisps of hair upon the scabby head, and the cheeks and chin the colour of pus, and the shattered lips smeared with something as black and sticky as tar. But the eyes—the eyes the colour of blood—are staring at you as though you are the hideous monster.

She begins to retreat, in spite of the fact that you’re holding her. She begins to move backwards, into the shadowed building, which seems to be coming to meet her and merge with her. She fades into its substance, so that her body becomes blackened brick and her face, denuded of its hood, becomes the one unshuttered window in the whole world. Her face is just glass, which you can’t see through at all, and her repulsive features are only a reflection.

Your reflection.

Then the window shatters, and from within there emerges a cataract of liquid which cascades over your face and body. But you can’t feel it as it douses you…you can’t feel anything at all….

Because it is, after all, only an illusion…only a horrorshow…only a trick.

“Holy shit,” said the Kid, when he emerged. His heart was hammering and his palms were sweaty. “That’s pretty weird stuff. Are you telling me that Pasco chose to see that?”

Dr Yokoi made a slightly dismissive gesture with his hand. “The script which we fed in was gradually modified by the signals with which his own brain reacted to it—but chose is too strong a word. When a subject knows that he is in a sensurround his consciousness can at least act as a censor, but all these tapes were made before the two men were fully revived. The process of modification in this case—as in your own dream of the trackless forest—was entirely subconscious.”

“Pasco must be a pretty screwed-up guy,” observed the Kid.

“We all have our fears,” said Yokoi. “A man who has sight in only one eye may be entitled to deeper fears than those who have two.”

“I didn’t feel that I was only seeing with one eye,” said the Kid. “Anyhow, he has an artificial one in place of the one he lost.”

“Your experience cannot be the same as his,” Yokoi pointed out. “When the tape is played back, you see as if with your own eyes. And yes, it is true that Pasco has an artificial eye to compensate for his lack—but there is a level at which his fears are still very much aware of his loss. Of course, we can only attempt to deduce what psychological processes lie behind the modifications which his brain activity made to the script—all that is on the tape is the programme’s visual presentation after modification by his responses. When the tape is played back, you see what is on the tape and hear what is on the tape as though you were the protagonist. Your own responses—associations, interpretations, chains of thought and speculation—may not resemble Pasco’s at all.”

The Kid struggled with the implications of all this, trying to sort out in his memory of Pasco’s dream just what had been visual image and what had been his own interpretation. Some of it could be bracketed as his and set aside quite easily, but it wasn’t easy to draw the line—it wasn’t easy at all. He wondered what Yokoi had seen and felt and thought when he reviewed the tape.

In the meantime, the Kid adjusted his sitting position, rather awkwardly, and sipped tea from his cup. He was beginning to get used to the tea, but his muscles were still having trouble adapting to the business of squatting on a rug instead of sitting on a chair.

“Even if it’s subconscious, though,” he said thoughtfully, “he’s still choosing it.”

“I cannot agree,” said Yokoi reprovingly. “The word choice implies too much and too little. Must we be said to choose our natural dreams and nightmares because they come from the subconscious? It is the brain and not that aspect of it which we call the mind which learns so rapidly to emit directive signals into the encephalograph. My machine has no self-conscious mind at all—it is simply a computer designed to simulate in the manner of its internal wiring the configurations of the human brain. What we are seeing as a result of the two-way flow of information is a mutual reprogramming which is only peripherally concerned, if at all, with that particular brain-phenomenon we call consciousness. It calls into question the very concept of choice, and it may be that we will have to think again about what we can mean by the word. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Not really,” the Kid admitted. “But where’s it all leading? If your machines can put people’s dreams and nightmares on tape, does that mean you can use it to straighten people out? On the other hand, if it can make those nightmares worse, can it be developed into a means of torture? Or can you have it both ways?.”

“You have a remarkably vivid imagination,” observed Yokoi shrewdly, “for a person with such a limited education.”

“I may have had a limited education,” retorted the Kid, “but I’m not as screwed up as Pasco, am I? I had a nice dream, didn’t I—and I also talked myself out of believing that it was a dream, even though I didn’t know where the hell I was? Pasco couldn’t even figure that out, could he?”

“It might be too harsh a judgment to conclude that he could not,” said the scientist, carefully. “Mr Pasco has used our horrorshow booths quite extensively, and people who do that tend to become willing collaborators in the illusion. In order to partake of a horrorshow fully, users of the booths must learn to overlook the evidence that their experience is not real—Mr Pasco may have put a good deal of hard work into learning to ignore the signs of falseness and incompleteness in order that he might subject himself to an authentic test of his courage.”

The Kid sipped more tea.

“You’ve woken Pasco up now?” he asked.

“Yes,” Yokoi agreed. “We could not keep him too long in a virtual state of suspended animation, lest his muscles begin to waste. I would have liked to extend the series of experiments further, but it would have been wrong to endanger his health.”

“He tried very hard to endanger my health,” muttered the Kid. “Arc you going to let me see some more of Pasco’s tapes? It might be interesting to eavesdrop on the other guy, too.”

“I am sure that you would find it so,” agreed Yokoi. “Mr Preston has been closely associated with Dr Zarathustra for some time now, and I could not resist the temptation to see if we could elicit some interesting reactions to some well-chosen cues.”

The Kid looked up sharply from his cup. “How come the mercy boy knows Zarathustra?” he asked.

“Mr Preston was dressed in a borrowed uniform,” Yokoi told him, off-handedly. “Until he was sent after you he was, in effect, Dr Zarathustra’s personal bodyguard.”

The Kid nodded slowly, wondering whether he’d have handled things any differently back at the tunnel if he’d known that. “In that case,” he said, “I’d certainly like to scan the tape that you made.”

“In time,” said Yokoi non-committally. “But we must remember, Zero-san, that you are here in order that you may be investigated, rather than that you may investigate others.”

The Kid shrugged. “You can put me back in any time you like, Doc,” he said. “For what you’re paying me, I’ll dream as much as you want me to.”

Yokoi permitted himself a tiny smile. “If only it were as easy as that,” he said, with a sigh. “If only I could put you in the booth and run a programme which would tell me everything I need to know. Perhaps one day…who can tell what rewards this avenue of research will yield? In the meantime, alas, my research produces far more questions than answers; the path which leads from exploration to explanation is always difficult to follow. You will forgive me, I hope, if I proceed in a much more pedestrian manner, by asking you some very ordinary questions.”

“Fire away,” said the Kid.

“How did you first encounter Lady Venom?”

“I was looking for a hidey-hole. So was she. We met, and she bit me. I was sick for two days, but I got better. She was still around.”

“You didn’t attempt to destroy her after she bit you?”

“No. She was only doing what came naturally. It was her hidey-hole and I was the invader. I was glad when she finally decided to let me stay—I figured it would be no bad thing to have an extra disincentive to callers. I heard that people could build up an immunity to snakebite, and it seemed like a neat idea to be able to hide out with the rattlers—there are quite a few of them about on the edges of the desert. I’d been bitten before, by a little one, and I figured that might be what helped me get over the Lady’s bite. So I stopped being scared of them, and let myself get bitten two or three times more—though not by the Lady. I tried to let the Lady bite me, but she wouldn’t. She was too well-used to me by then, I suppose. After the fifth bite I was hardly sick at all. I don’t think I need to worry about rattlers any more.”

“Can you control Lady Venom?”

“After a fashion. I don’t think she understands English or anything stupid like that, but when I tell her to do something she usually does it. Maybe she’s telepathic, or something. Maybe I read too much into it—maybe she just likes being around me. Not that she needs me at all—she can do her own hunting well enough.”

“Can you control other snakes?”

“Not so’s you’d notice. Lady Venom’s the only one I ever met who isn’t shy.”

“You know, of course, that she’s presumably a mutant?”

The Kid shrugged. “I heard people talking about mutants,” he admitted. “Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s the next step up the evolutionary ladder for serpentkind. Maybe, when we’re gone, it’ll be the snakes instead of the rats and the cockroaches who inherit the earth.” The Kid grinned, to show that it was a joke, but Yokoi didn’t even crack the kind of polite smile he gave out on a regular basis.

“Do you really think that the human empire is coming to an end?” asked the scientist softly. “Did you choose your dream?”

“Don’t you think we’re doomed?” countered the Kid amiably. “Homer Hegarty does—and so does your boss, Tanagawa, if I can take him at his word. Everybody knows that the deserts are spreading, and that the sea level’s rising. The rivers are already dead, and they say the seas are dying too. Ecocatastrophe, isn’t that what they call it?”

“The term is freely used,” Yokoi conceded, in his customary over-scrupulous fashion, “but its meaning is rather vague. I doubt, though, that Director Tanagawa’s anxieties have much to do with an impending ecocatastrophe. He is much more concerned about the war.”

“Which war?”

“The war, Zero-san. The war between the corporations—GenTech’s war.”

“I thought that was just hype—just a way of talking about the way the corps compete for the workingman’s dollar.”

“So it should be,” said Yokoi soberly. “But Tanagawa-san fears that GenTech may have lost sight of its true objectives.”

“What objectives does a corp have, apart from making money?” asked he Kid, cynically.

“Dollars are only symbols of true wealth,” said the scientist. “True wealth is property: land, materials, machinery. True wealth is power. For most of human history, it would have made no sense to speak of people owning even the tracts of land on which they lived, but as soon as it became sensible to talk in those terms there was set in train a process whose inevitable end would be the ownership of the entire earth. That process has nearly reached its end, Zero-san. But the end is supposed to be ownership and control, not destruction. Competition between corporations should be a matter of products, not bullets. The corporation which obliterates its markets obliterates itself.”

“And you think GenTech’s directors don’t know that?” The Kid was frankly incredulous.

Yokoi spread his hands, as if to say that the incredibility of it was not his fault. “GenTech’s masters, whoever they may be—and the fact that even our own Directors do not know is itself ominous—seem to be in danger of losing sight of it. GenTech’s business is being conducted in an increasingly aggressive manner, and the manner of its threats and postures is giving us concern. In particular, we are anxious about the arsenal of biotechnological weapons which it appear to be building.”

“Is that what this affair with the disc is all about? You think the disc has information relating to plague warfare? And you’re worried that if you can’t defend yourselves against what GenTech have, they might actually set out to wipe you out—literally?”

Yokoi nodded. “Those are some of our Tanagawa-san’s anxieties,” he conceded.

“Some?” The Kid fought an impulse to laugh. “That isn’t enough?”

“It is only the beginning of our real fears,” said Yokoi regretfully. “Only the beginning.”

4

You’re sitting in a chair in a windowless office, looking into the intimidating eyes of a blond man with ice-blue eyes. The expression on his face is difficult to read, but it might be amused contempt.

“I’m trying to make human beings better than nature makes them,” the blond man is saying. “I’m trying to get one step ahead of the clumsy process of mutation and natural selection. I’m trying to create the next stage in our evolution—Homo superior, as the old science fiction writers used to call it. Do you read science fiction, Carl?”

“Sure,” you say.

“Then maybe you can understand what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make us better—better able to repair ourselves…more resistant to disease…immortal.”

“But it doesn’t always work, does it, Doc?” you say. “It didn’t work on Bro, did it? It made him into a freak—a poisonous freak.”

(It didn’t work on Snake Eyes either. It just made her into a freak—and she didn’t even gel to be poison, did she?)

For a moment or two Zarathustra’s face blurs, and superimposed upon it you see another: darker, coarser, wild-eyed. The image is fleeting, and is soon gone. Zarathustra raises his thick blond eyebrows, as if astonished to have been displaced from centre-stage, if only for a moment.

“There are casualties,” says Zarathustra evenly. “But the casualties of genetic engineering research can be counted in their hundreds, Carl. The casualties of trial by mutation have to be counted in billions. How many creatures died, do you think, while natural selection was shaping mankind out of the clay of common apes? People die, Carl, and people suffer—but that was the situation I inherited, and I don’t have to take responsibility for it. I’m trying to ameliorate that suffering, and in the end I hope to eliminate the necessity of death itself; in the meantime, I make errors. I add a small measure to the quota of suffering which falls upon the victims of my errors—but anything I inflict on anyone here is trivial compared to what goes on outside these walls.

“You know what the world is like, Carl—you’ve ridden the convoys long enough to know all the kinds of human vermin which swarm about the roads and the towns. Was what I did to Mary anything like as bad as what Satan’s Stormtroopers did to her before you brought her back? And what I did, I did because I was trying to make the world better—what they did, they did because they’re trying to tear the world apart with their vacuous rage. Do you think your brother is in Hell, Carl? Do you honestly think that he has a worse life now than he would have had if he’d still have been on the road? He was a disaster looking for somewhere to happen, and you know it—and you know, too, that if things had been different you’d have been in that disaster with him, at ground zero. Don’t come crying to me about casualties, Carl—but for me, you’d be one.”

You hear yourself beginning another question (which is odd, in a way, because you don’t remember forming any intention to speak, and you haven’t the slightest idea what it is that you’re going to say).

As it turns out, what you say is: “Where do the mutants fit in, Dr Zarathustra? Why have you interrupted your programmes in order to study the mutants?”

The blond man opens his mouth to reply, but he too seems confused. No words come out immediately, and when they finally do, they’re peculiarly slurred.

“That’s none of your business, Carl,” he says.

“I’ve a right to know,” your voice insists—except that it doesn’t seem to be your voice any more. Does it even sound the same? Nor does Dr Zarathustra seem to be Dr Zarathustra any more—again that other face is briefly superimposed, but then there’s a more general blurring, as though the whole room is slipping out of focus. It lasts longer than last time, but eventually the image firms up again.

“If I knew what I thought,” says the bioscientist, “I’d tell you. But I don’t.

“There’s been some talk about the laws of nature breaking down,” you say—and once again your voice sounds normal, as though they really are your words. “You think there’s something new going on—something more sinister than chemical and radioactive wastes?”

“That would make a lot of people feel better,” says Zarathustra wearily. “If what’s happening to the world is just a symptom of some ongoing catastrophe, we don’t have to take the blame for it. But I don’t know what is meant—or could be meant—by the laws of nature breaking down. If it only means that some of the things we thought we knew for sure aren’t true after all, that’s okay—that I can take aboard. But if you mean all this Millenarian stuff about evil’s empire bidding to take over the world before the messiah comes again, forget it—you know how I feel about that kind of stuff. You shouldn’t watch so much TV, Carl.”

“But what about the mutants,” you hear yourself saying. “What do you think they are?”

Again the blond man slips out of focus, as though a sheet of glass is somehow materializing to shield his face.

“I don’t know, Carl,” he says—though his voice sounds funny, like a bad tape-recording. “I don’t know…I don’t….”

The image snaps back into focus again, and you see that Zarathustra is leaning forward now, his expression far more intense.

“Carl,” he says, with contrived softness “there is no such thing as a tame and loyal rattlesnake—unless it is a very peculiar mutant. I want that snake, Carl. I need it. I want you to bring me that snake, dead or alive but preferably alive. Just get them for me, Mr Pasco: the Kid, the snake, the disc—I want them all, very badly.”

(You shiver suddenly, but it’s not a physical shudder—it’s an internal shiver, a ripple of sensation… as though someone just walked over your grave.)

“Why?” The word comes from nowhere, cracking like a pistol shot. But the question goes unanswered. The image blurs again, as if it’s stubbornly trying to fade out.

(But you don’t want it to fade. You want answers.)

“What’s on the disc, Doc?” says that voice, again—the voice which ought to be yours but isn’t. “Why did the guys upstairs panic when they found out it was missing? Why did you try to keep it quiet, so that they wouldn’t ever have to know it was missing? What’s going on, Doc?”

Zarathustra’s face is oddly contorted now, and you can’t quite fathom out what’s happening to it. But the thin lips open, and the answer comes out, grotesquely inflected. (Mocking? Derisive? Sarcastic?)

“You know why, Carl,” says Doc Zarathustra. “You’ve worked it out all by yourself. You know why, don’t you?”

“No,” you say. “No—I don’t know why.”

“Yes you do,” insists the Doc, his face twisted into an evil grin. “You know. Admit it, Carl, you know.”

(Obviously, you don’t want to know. You wish that you didn’t know. Obviously, you don’t want anyone else to know that you know—but it’s too late now, because it’s on tape. You’ve made your own horrorshow, and now you have to star in it. You have to say it. Please, please say it!)

You hear your voice again, and you struggle to catch the word that it’s trying to pronounce..but it’s not easy, because the word isn’t a real word at all, just a syllable…just a meaningless syllable…

“Bro,” you say.

“Speak up,” says the hideous caricature of Dr Zarathustra, grinning in an appalling manner, as though it were the face of the Devil incarnate. “What did you say?”

“Bro,” you say, again. And then, mercifully, you black out.

You black it all out. You sleep; you die; you refuse to exist.

(But when all else is silenced, you can still hear the soft humming of a machine. You know—you know—that the tape is still running.

In the horrorshow, you can’t even die.)

They were both waiting for the Kid—Yokoi and Tanagawa. At least that meant that there were chairs to sit on, and a table on which to rest his elbows. The Kid could see that they were interested in his response to Preston’s tape, and he felt sick as a pig that he didn’t understand it at all.

He knew, though, that they understood it. How else could they seem so smug?

“One lousy syllable?” he said, in an unreasonably bad-tempered fashion. “You go digging around in the deep recesses of the guy’s mind, and all you come up with is one lousy syllable?”

“It was enough,” said Tanagawa softly. “Given what we already know, it was enough.”

“Do I get an explanation?” asked the Kid.

Tanagawa just smiled—but Dr Yokoi stepped into the breach. “Mr Preston has a younger brother,” he said. “Bro is short for brother—it’s what Preston always called him. The younger brother was unfortunately and accidentally involved in one of Dr Zarathustra’s experiments, which went wrong—it was that experiment which the early part of the remembered dialogue refers to. Zarathustra transformed a girl’s red blood cells, hoping to increase their resistance to disease, but there was an unforeseen side-effect. She became…poisonous. Her bodily secretions are fatal to anyone who come into contact with them, unless they too have similarly-transformed blood cells. Mr Preston’s brother was subsequently infected with the same condition.”

The Kid thought about Snake-Eyes, who had always joked about becoming poisonous, but had never succeeded.

“Plague warfare,” he said bleakly. “GenTech can manufacture an army of poisonous soldiers, capable of wiping out everyone who isn’t like them. That’s what’s on Zarathustra’s disc. That’s why everyone’s so desperate to have it. Anyone who has a copy of the disc has the power to destroy the whole freak in’ world.”

“That information is on the disc,” agreed Tanagawa serenely. “Among many other things, some of which might be equally important.”

“And now the mafia have it too—and Mitsu-Makema. You can all wipe out the outsiders. You can all destroy the world.”

“No one wants to,” said Tanagawa. “No one—except, perhaps, the Temple.”

“The Temple? What the freakin’ hell is the Temple?”

“We are not entirely sure,” said Tanagawa. “We believe that it may be a Millenarian cult; we also believe that it may be very influential within the higher echelons of GenTech. There is a possibility that the Temple may even control GenTech. If that is true, then the Temple may be the first Millenarian cult in history ever to acquire the power to bring about the end of the world. It is a paradox, we know—Millenarianism is supposed to be an expression of powerlessness…a producer of doomed ghost dancers; it is not supposed to involve powerful men in powerful corporations. But we live in a paradoxical world, Mr Zero.”

The Kid thought back to the tape of Preston’s command performance dream. “Even Zarathustra doesn’t want it,” he said. “He really does mean what he says about trying to make things better. He was trying to keep the secret—even from his own bosses…because he’s afraid, too.”

“It was not the real Dr Zarathustra on the tape,” Yokoi reminded him. “It was Carl Preston’s image of him. But it may well be accurate. You may have done the world a service, Zero-san. Once we have the disc in our possession, the particular weapon in question will be much reduced in value. Its worth is halved because we have it too, and halved again because we have the opportunity to devise a defence—a cure for the poisoning.”

“This weapon,” said the Kid, who was smart enough to see all the implications of the phrase. There would be other weapons. If Tanagawa’s paranoid anxiety about secret societies running GenTech had any real basis, this would be a temporary victory.

Then he remembered a couple of other things. He remembered that whoever had been feeding the questions into Preston’s dream hadn’t only asked about why GenTech’s bosses were so annoyed about the leak—he had also asked about the mutants. He had asked about the mutants first. And the Kid remembered that Dr Yokoi had said that fears about the possibility of plague war were only the beginning of Mitsu-Makema’s anxieties.

The Kid was getting used to making convoluted deductions. “You think that GenTech might be making the mutants themselves, don’t you?” he said, jumping boldly to the conclusion. “You think it might be part of some plan; but if it is, Preston sure as hell knows nothing about it.”

“The possibility that the mutants are being deliberately created was not one we felt able to discount,” Tanagawa replied, obviously choosing his words very carefully.

“Why would anyone do that?” asked the Kid exasperatedly

“You heard what Dr Zarathustra said about his own objectives, Zero-san,” Yokoi put in. “His objective is to control the genes which determine what we are—to conquer change itself. He has produced monsters.”

It wasn’t really an answer, but the Kid stirred uneasily in his seat as he thought of something else. “You aren’t going to hurt Lady Venom, are you?” he said, sharply.

“No, Zero-san,” said Yokoi reassuringly. “We are not.”

“Where is she? You woke up Pasco and Preston because it wasn’t safe for them to stay asleep any longer—how come it’s safe for the Lady?”

“It is safe,” said Yokoi. “Reptiles are more resilient than human beings in many respects. They are metabolically-capable of hibernation or estivation for months on end. There is, if you will permit it, one more experiment with the sensurround booths which we would like to try.”

“What experiment?”

“We would like you to undertake another interactive sitting—and we would like to complicate the interaction by running two computers in parallel. One of them will be linked to your brain, the other to Lady Venom’s.”

Kid Zero looked at Tanagawa briefly, then turned back to face Dr Yokoi again. “Why?” he asked.

“We would like to observe your processes of communication, if such a thing is possible. There is no reason to think that there is any risk involved—you have monitored the tapes which we made of Ray Pasco and Carl Preston, and you have some idea of the capabilities and limitations of the machine.”

The Kid furrowed his brow, but he knew that he would have to go along with it. He had become curious himself, and it was an interesting idea—but he knew that it didn’t interest his hosts for the same reasons that it interested him. “What do you think the mutants are, Dr Yokoi?” he asked. “Why do you think they’re so important?”

Yokoi and Tanagawa exchanged a glance. Then Yokoi said: “I honestly do not know, Zero-san. It is not my field, and I have been asked to investigate the matter now only because of the fortunate coincidence of your being brought here, and because there is a slim possibility that my machines could be useful.”

The glance had told the Kid what he needed to know, and he switched his gaze to Tanagawa without hesitation. “What do you think, Mr Tanagawa? You seem to be the guesser-in-chief around here?”

Tanagawa smiled. “A man must have imagination, Mr Zero, or he is nothing. I, too, could say honestly that I do not know, but it would not be entirely fair to do so. I am not a scientist, whose work is to establish the truth of matters; I am a director of a multinational corporation, whose duty it is to deal in anxiety on the one hand, and hope on the other. I hope that the mutants are exactly what they seem, Mr Zero; but I am anxious that they may be something sinister—something dangerous.”

“How sinister? How dangerous?”

“If you care to use your own imagination, Mr Zero,” said Tanagawa evenly, “you might make up fantasies of your own. But I will offer you one, for your patient consideration.

“The universe may be full of life, Mr Zero; the earth may only be one arena of evolution among many. We have come to a threshold in our own affairs which may—if we can overcome our present difficulties—allow us to cross the wilderness of space which isolates our world, and carry earthly life to other planets. But we have recently crossed another technological threshold, which may have given advance warning of this impending expansion to other interested parties. The electromagnetic leakage of our radio broadcasts has been travelling outwards in all directions for some seventy years now—which means that the presence on earth of a technologically-sophisticated race might be known to every other technologically-sophisticated species within seventy light-years.

“During those same seventy years our imaginative writers have produced countless lurid accounts of the invasion of our world by alien life—but they have almost always assumed that the invaders would be beings like ourselves, who have crossed space in mighty armadas of starships. Suppose, Mr Zero, that the invasion did not come like that—suppose the would-be conquerors and colonists of earth did not send armies bearing guns and bombs, but only tiny packages of DNA, whose task is to work from within—to invade the bodies of all living creatures on earth, not simply as destroyers but as changers, whose task is to transform our biosphere into an alien Eden, ready and waiting for a new Adam and Eve. Would that not be the method of a truly sophisticated race of invaders, Mr Zero? And would not the first evidence of such an invasion be the emergence of a new and multifarious race of mutants?”

The Kid was stunned. He knew that a tape had been made of the interactive hallucination which he had produced before being woken up after his journey from America, but he also knew from having viewed Pasco’s and Preston’s tapes that such a transcription was very limited. As Yokoi had pointed out, the visuals could be taped, but not the interpretations. His reflections on the substance of his own dream were as private as his reflections on the provocative content of Pasco’s. There was no way that Tanagawa could know about his emotional responses to the images of a reborn earth which he had dreamed up in collaboration with Yokoi’s computers, and no way he could know about the trains of thought which Pasco’s nightmare had triggered off. How come, therefore, this bizarre hypothesis of Tanagawa’s could mesh so easily with his own fantasies?

I have a remarkably vivid imagination, thought the Kid, remembering what Yokoi had said to him before, considering my limited education. The lousy bastards think I’m one too! They think I’m the freaking mutant, not Lady Venom. They think I’m carrying some alien disease—that’s why I’m worth two hundred thousand a day to them.

He didn’t say a word of that out loud, though. After all, he might be wrong—and he certainly didn’t want to put the idea into their heads if it wasn’t already there.

“You believe the earth is being invaded by alien life-forms?” he said, trying as hard as he could to sound sarcastic and incredulous.

Tanagawa spread his hands wide to disclaim any such belief. “It is a fantasy,” he insisted, very politely. “Mere hypothesis, and nothing more. A nightmare, if you will—a mere horrorshow. But until we know the truth, how can we conquer our nightmares, and overcome our horrors?”

The Kid remembered something else that Tanagawa had said earlier, about how worrying it was that the directors of Mitsu-Makema didn’t know who their opposite numbers in GenTech actually were. Did Tanagawa, he wondered, also have nightmares about who, or what, might be behind the org which might be on the verge of owning the entire earth? Was that why it mattered, even to sandrats and panzer boys, who might win the war between the corps?

“You’re crazy,” said the Kid, who was still a long way from mastery of Japanese etiquette.

“We are living in crazy times, Zero-san,” said Yokoi gently. “Do you not have a saying in America, to the effect that anyone who isn’t a little crazy these days has to be completely insane?”

“We do,” admitted the Kid, more soberly than he would have liked. “We surely do.”

And as he said it, he asked himself the question whose answer would hit his own personal jackpot, which was: What if they’re right? What the freaking hell am I going to do if the bastards are right? What if I am a freaking alien?

He knew that it would probably tax his vivid imagination to the full to figure out an answer.

5

You’re moving through a red world, which blazes here and there into incandescent yellows and whites, and fades in its shadowed regions to burgundy and black. It’s difficult to make out shapes, because nothing is in sharp focus, and even the shape of the world itself is wrong; it’s as though you’re looking up through a piece of bottle-glass at a jumbled panorama which sometimes seems impossibly wide and at others impossibly narrow.

Your field of vision alters as you move, rhythmically canting from side to side. You’re hugging the ground, but you can’t be crawling because there’s no sensation of lurching. You wish that you could feel the pressure of your body against the rock, but you can’t. Nor can you hear the sound which you make when you move—though there ought to be a sound, which you could surely pick up if your hearing weren’t impaired.

(There are probably other senses which are guiding your host, though, which are unavailable to you.)

You pause, basking beneath the brilliant sky, spreading yourself out to soak up its energy.

Time changes, as if it were folding in on itself; the world fades and flickers.

(You struggle for some kind of description which you can offer yourself in order to help you understand what is happening. It’s as though your consciousness is fading—not into a dream, because you know that you’re dreaming already—but from sharp attentiveness into distant reverie. You wish that you knew what sensations ought to accompany such a drift, if any should. It might be like drug-induced euphoria, but there’s no way to know.)

Nothing happens until you begin to move again, sliding away from the bright-lit surface into the burgundy shadows—but you still don’t really feel the force of the passing moments; you still can’t recapture the state of full attentiveness. You bury yourself in shadow, reducing the bright world to a crevice which cuts slantwise across your field of vision, blurring to become an undifferentiated river of light.

Time passes; you can’t tell how much.

You’re on the move again now, coming out of the shadows again, into a world very different from the one you left. The sky, which was a field of fire, has now become a pit of darkness. The shadows are softened now, though the surfaces over which you move have not yet faded from dark red to black. You move swiftly, with a sureness which suggests purpose and competence.

Suddenly, there’s something in your field of vision which burns with an oddly frail and fugitive brightness as it moves among the shadows. Its radiance cannot compare with the brighter lights which surrounded you before, but in this darkened world it stands out like a candle-flame.

(You wonder what attitude your host has to this curious dancing blur. Is it perceived as the epitome of beauty? Is there any luscious anticipation of pleasure in the sight of it, or the following of it? How does the magnet of instinctive necessity feel to the hunting snake which is thus drawn along? What can it possibly be like to live in an inner world of feelings unpolluted by thoughts?)

The end, when it comes, is unexpectedly swift. You move with astonishing rapidity, and the candle-flame which was a mouse or a frog is suddenly gone—engulfed, you must presume.

(Your host, no doubt, can feel the shape and taste of it as it passes back from mouth to throat, but you have only borrowed the Lady’s sight; your feelings are your own, and they are alien to this mode of experience. You cannot truly be a man dreaming that he is a snake; you are a much stranger hybrid than that—a man eavesdropping on that insufficient fraction of a snake’s dream which can be captured by a cunning machine.)

You’re moving again, but once again your attentiveness is slipping. Once the purposes of instinct are served, your senses slide into that more quiescent mode which is not sleep but which nevertheless detaches you from time. You can’t judge the passing of the minutes or the hours, and the world becomes so dark and empty that you can’t follow its subtle changes, despite the fact that you aren’t still.

Nothing changes until your eye is caught again by a flicker of fire, at which point your consciousness is sparked again and made to rejoin the stream of time.

This time, the fire is much greater in extent, though no brighter—indeed, its brightness is patchy, greater at the extremities of its enormous being than at the connective core.

(As you struggle to make sense of the second-hand vision you’re suddenly reminded of the effort of trying to perceive a human figure in that pattern of stars which early astronomers dubbed Orion; that analogy provides you with the clue which you shouldn’t have needed. Once you’ve realized that it’s a giant at which you’re looking, with face and hands illuminated more brightly than those parts of the body which are obscured by clothing, it becomes easier to make sense of the movements of the blur.

You realize, with an odd sense of wonderment, that you’re probably looking at yourself as seen through the eyes of your closest companion—that you’re peering into a peculiar distorting mirror. You wish, briefly, that you had seen yourself through Pasco’s eyes, or Carl Preston’s, for the sake of comparison, because the alienness of your appearance now would seem less troublesome and less threatening if you’d already undergone transmutation by the eyes of human beings.

You try to figure out what you’re doing, but it isn’t easy. The movements of your limbs and body have to be inferred, and the fact that the image remains stubbornly unfocused means that three dimensions of movement are effectively reduced to two. If you were running or leaping it would be easier, but you seem to be doing something much more ordinary—and you’re already beginning to fade into the folds and confusions of collapsed time, because you’re too familiar to warrant the attention of the Lady—too much a part of her strange, private and thought-free world….)

Time passes, and…

The Kid tried as best he could to explain what it was like being inside Lady Venom’s being looking out, but it was difficult. Dr Yokoi tried to help him by asking questions—but when they had finished, the Kid couldn’t believe that they had got much out of it. All that Yokoi’s two-way linkages could pick up were visual images, and it was impossible to judge whether such images contained any evidence of alienness or not. There was no hint of any explanation for the special rapport which existed between the snake and the man.

That explanatory void worried the Kid now, though it never had before. He had asked himself for the first time whether the talent which sealed the special relationship was really the Lady’s, or whether it was his own. If it was his own it seemed to be operating independently of any conscious direction, but that might be only one more facet of his alienness, if he was an alien.

If.

He still didn’t believe that he was—but ever since Junichi Tanagawa had obliquely raised the possibility, it had preyed on his mind. When Yokoi finally stopped asking questions about his impressions of the Lady Venom tape, the Kid was quick enough to dive in with a few of his own.

“Do you believe what Tanagawa said about the possibility of earth having been invaded by alien life?” he asked—though he realized even as he said it that the question was wrongly phrased.

“It is not a matter for belief,” said Yokoi contentedly. “It is conjecture only.”

“But you think it’s a strong enough possibility to be worth checking?”

“All possibilities must be checked. The facts are very disturbing, and we must leave no hypothetical stone unturned in searching for an explanation.”

“Which particular facts are were talking about?” asked the Kid.

“The changes in the earth’s climate and the increasing rate of mutation are the fundamental observations which cause us to be anxious. There are other observations too which might be unconnected, or which might be secondary effects. There are evident changes in patterns of human behaviour, which tempt some to refer to a plague of madness—but we know that human behaviour can and does become very peculiar in response to extreme situations.”

“Ghost dancing,” said the Kid, in a low tone. “It’s all just ghost dancing.”

“Perhaps,” said Yokoi. “This is not the first time in history when environmental changes have stimulated an explosive growth in Millenarian fervour. The Roman Empire was extended during a phase of global warming, and contracted again when the climate began to get colder. The initial growth and rapid spread of Christianity may itself have been connected with that brief environmental destabilization—but in its early phase Christianity, like all the other great religions, was essentially defensive; faith and hope were effective mainly at a personal level. Collective actions on behalf of the faith were necessarily

small-scale –the Crusades and the Inquisition resulted in the deaths of thousands of individuals, but could not harm the planet itself. Now…things are different.”

“I don’t know,” said the Kid dubiously. “I’ve run into a few followers of these weird cults on the road, and I hear the horror stories that get bandied about—the human sacrifices and that sort of thing. It’s all small-scale…except maybe the Josephites in Deseret.”

“That is not the only exception,” Yokoi told him. “The Catholic Church has undergone considerable changes lately, in the style of its operations. But what causes our directors most anxiety is the secret organization known as the Temple. How numerous its members are we cannot tell, and it certainly does not follow the ancient pattern of the great religions in trying to win converts among the poorest and least powerful members of society. For this reason, its growth is very unobtrusive. But it differs from the old religions in the power which is already at its disposal—technological and economic power out of all proportion to its membership.

“The Sioux ghost dancers who were slaughtered at Wounded Knee had only imaginary armour, Zero-san, and their guns were inferior. But what would the history of the world be like if their ghost-shirts really had been invulnerable, and their bullets unstoppable? The Temple may have a very considerable arsenal to add to its armour of invisibility.”

“I never heard of the Temple,” said the Kid warily. “It can’t be that big.”

“Nor have the two men who were captured along with you. Nor, I suspect, has the famous Dr Zarathustra. Nevertheless, there is a possibility that the Temple are the true owners of GenTech. We have only the vaguest notion of what GenTech’s ultimate aims and ambitions may be, but another of the hypotheses which must be considered if we are to account for the rapid deterioration of the world’s environments is that their pollution is being deliberately engineered.”

“By GenTech?”

“Ultimately, yes,” Yokoi asserted.

“But Mitsu-Makema is, no doubt, utterly innocent. Its directors are all good and humane men who would make the earth into a paradise if only they could. None of its industries produce poisonous wastes, none of its workers are exploited, and none of its PR men would dream of manufacturing black propaganda in the hope of convincing its loyal employees that the rival corps are run by the Devil himself.”

Dr Yokoi shrugged his shoulders in an oddly delicate fashion.

“Yeah,” said the Kid disgustedly. “It ain’t a matter for belief, but all possibilities must be considered. It’s bullshit, Dr Yokoi. If a sandrat like me can see it, why can’t you? Are you so sure your own bosses have clean hands? Maybe they’re the inner enclave of the Sons of Okhotsk, or the Blood Banner Society.”

“Mitsu-Makema is a multinational corporation, not a Japanese company,” Yokoi reminded him. “GenTech is more powerful, even in Japan, than we are. This has nothing to do with nationalism, Zero-san—it has to do with the survival of all life on earth.”

“And what exactly are M-M doing to fight the good fight,” asked the Kid sarcastically, “apart from improving horrorshow technology?”

“We have what we call the Ark project,” Yokoi informed him. “We are hollowing out vast underground caverns in several remote parts of the world—there is one beneath us here—where we hope to establish closed ecological systems. We hope to preserve independent biospheres there no matter what happens on the surface. If alien life has indeed invaded the earth, we will have a redoubt to which we can retreat—and if there really are men who have the power and the will to visit an apocalyptic catastrophe upon their fellow men, we may be able to ensure that they are not the sole survivors.”

“Are you offering me a ticket for one of these underground Arks?” asked the Kid.

“You have a chance to earn one,” countered Yokoi.

“I bet you’ve already earned yours.”

“That hardly matters,” Yokoi observed. “I am old and you are young. My interest in the farther reaches of the future is personally disinterested, although I must confess to a strong desire to serve the needs of my children and my grandchildren. You, on the other hand, may have the chance to witness the coming apocalypse—no matter what form it may take.”

“I’ve been living on borrowed time since I blew up my first GenTech wrapper,” said the Kid sourly. “Ever since that disc came into my hands the debt-collectors have been out in force. I didn’t have much of a future even before I went up against GenTech—even before I first joined the Low Numbers. People like me don’t think about the future, Dr Yokoi. We can’t afford to.”

“You can now,” said Yokoi insistently. “You can and you must.”

The Kid had hardly opened his mouth to reply—without knowing exactly what he was going to say—when alarm bells started ringing. Yokoi leapt to his feet and ran to the computer consoles which ran along one side of the wall. The Kid could see that half a dozen red lights were blinking, and he didn’t have to be told that whatever was wrong was nothing trivial.

Suddenly, the immediate future seemed to be something worth worrying about.

“What is it?” he asked. “Is the reactor going to blow?”

“We are under attack,” said Yokoi, in an incongruously soft tone.

“Attack?” said the Kid, totally fed up with being made to sound like a stupe, always incredulous.

“Not by aeroplanes and men with guns,” the scientist added. “But the attack is no less deadly for all that—the attack is coming through the datanet, blasting the webs which connect us informationally with the outer world. We have been invaded by hostile software. We have severed all our communications links with the outside world, but it may be too late. Our systems are going crazy, and we cannot shut them down.” While he said all this he was just standing there, looking on—an innocent bystander in a crazy costume.

“Is this the latest battle in the corp war?” asked the Kid, licking his lips.

“Yes it is,” answered Yokoi. “Whether it is because you are here, I do not know, but there can be no doubt that we have a major problem on our hands. If we cannot recover control of the systems, the reactor may blow—and if it does, we are all dead. The temperature outside is forty degrees below zero, and there is nowhere to run to. Please go to your room—I will be needed.”

The Kid didn’t move until Yokoi had gone, and even then he lingered, watching the play of red light across the consoles and the signals flickering over the screens. None of it meant anything to him—it wasn’t his world. It all looked absurdly like some arcade game, gleefully telling its player that he had lost.

The Kid wondered where Lady Venom was, and whether she’d be affected by the sudden influx of chaos into the base’s hardware; but there wasn’t anything he could do. It wasn’t his game and he didn’t have a coin to put in the slot to set it all up again.

As he went back along the corridor to his own room he was reminded of the way that Lady Venom’s senses had occasionally slipped into neutral gear, out of synch with the passage of time. It might, he thought, be a useful trick to have at one’s disposal.

The lights were off inside his room, though the corridor was still lit. He thumbed the switch as he moved in, cursing when nothing happened in response.

He didn’t want to be left in the dark, and would have gone back out again immediately, but he felt himself grabbed by two strong arms and pulled inside. Something sharp was pressed into the side of his throat, hard enough to let him know that he would be cut if he resisted.

“Hi, Kid,” said a guttural voice, which he recognized readily enough as Ray Pasco’s. “Guess what?”

The Kid didn’t have to guess; he knew.

He was back in the real world.

Part Four: No Sin Except Stupidity

1

While Pasco strapped himself into the co-pilot’s seat Carl shoved the Kid into the narrow space behind it. The Kid’s hands were tied but his legs were free, and he managed to get through, leaving the way clear for Carl—who had occupied himself in the meantime by stripping the goggles from his face and pushing back the hood of the parka.

He could hardly believe what had happened, but he had to admire the way Pasco had taken advantage of it all. That was a handy little tool-kit the SecDiv surgeons had stashed away in the big man’s thigh, all ready to pop out at the bidding of the smart sensor

The VTOL lifted into the air with what seemed like painful slowness, and hung there hovering while the pilot swung the nose around. Carl watched in fascination from behind the seats.

The radar-synthesizer display on the console in front of Pasco told them both that there were three missiles coming after them—the sim turned them into little red arrows, as though by a mere trick of representation it could render them impotent, but they seemed to Carl to be closing in with relentless swiftness. M-M hadn’t liked being attacked, and they didn’t like their prisoners taking a hike across the icefield under cover of all the confusion.

Carl couldn’t believe that they cared much about Kid Zero, who was only an insignificant pawn in the game now that the disc was anybody’s and everybody’s, but the Kid had become a symbol, and possession of him was a point on the score of whichever side could gain it.

Carl saw that Pasco was clenching his fingers and looking anxiously around, probably wondering what the little plane had to shoot back at the Mitsu-Makema men on the ground.

The black cross which was the plane never moved from the centre of the sim screen, but the background suddenly scrolled over to one side, and the red arrows were swimming against its tide. Carl felt the force of their acceleration pushing him backwards, and he had to cling hard to the back of Pasco’s seat. His ears were filled with the appalling roar of the jet engine, but he kept his eyes on the screen. A cloud of little blue needles exploded from the black cross, expanding into the gap which separated it from the red arrows. When the arrows reached the cloud they popped out of existence one by one. It was as easy at that! As simple as the most basic of arcade games!

“Microthermites,” drawled the pilot laconically. “Gets the heat-seekers every time, even when the arse end’s belching hellfire. That lot’ll melt a hell of a lot of ice when it goes down.”

Carl let out his breath very carefully.

“Have they got anything to give us trouble on the way out?” asked Pasco.

“Naw. Once we’re away from the fortress we’re free and clear. Our worms disabled most of the firepower in the base. You okay?”

“I will be soon,” Pasco replied. Carl could tell that the SecDiv man was as high as a kite on his own adrenalin, exultant with the thrill of their incredible escape. Personally, he didn’t feel nearly so good.

“Where are we going,” Carl asked, “and how soon do we get there?”

“Tierra del Fuego,” the pilot told him. “They’ll transfer you to a cargo-transporter there—it’ll be a bit more comfortable than this little thing, and it’ll have range enough to get you back to the States. What’s the bundle you fetched out of Arkville?”

“Kid Zero,” said Pasco.

“That so? We launched a major web assault on Mitsu-Makema just to snatch some two-bit motorpsycho?”

“Not exactly,” said Pasco gloatingly. “We launched a major web assault on Mitsu-Makema in order to teach the freakers a lesson. They interfered in a little police action we had going, and they probably managed to steal something which belonged to us. It was a matter of principle.”

“It was nearly World War freaking Three,” muttered the pilot, scanning his instruments. “We never hit anyone like that before. If their freaking reactor had blown we’d never have got out. I thought this year’s policy was softly softly.”

“I don’t make policy,” growled Pasco. “I just carry it out—and I’m freakin’ glad they backed me up for once. Jesus I’m stiff—those M-M bastards shipped us down there inside some kind of glorified horrorshow booth. I hope we hit the suckers where it hurts most.”

“We did that all right,” said the pilot tersely. “Now all we have to do is wait for them to hit us back—and take it from there.”

The space behind the cockpit was narrow, but there was room for Carl to sit down. He decided that he ought to face Kid Zero, as he was supposedly covering him with the gun—though he was pretty sure that the Kid wouldn’t be going anywhere. Pasco had advised him to belt the Kid and make sure that he didn’t wake up until they were back in the States, but Carl was reluctant to do that. Doc Zarathustra wanted the Kid alive, and Carl was firmly resolved to fulfil that part of his mission, now that there seemed to be no possibility whatsoever of getting his hands on the disc or the rattlesnake. Besides which, the Kid had treated him decently enough when the tables had been turned.

In his heart of hearts, Carl was glad that they hadn’t had a chance to snatch the snake along with the Kid—that was a prize he was happy to leave to Mitsu-Makema.

The Kid looked him full in the face and said: “You’re Carl Preston, right?”

Carl was a little taken aback, because he hadn’t realized that the Kid knew his name, but he just nodded. “Don’t try anything silly, Kid,” he advised sincerely. “If you do, I’ll have to hit you. Neither of us wants you to end up with a busted skull.”

The Kid looked down at the cord binding his wrists, as if he were wondering whether he could wriggle out of them. “You’re too late,” he said levelly. “I told M-M where I stashed the disc—and the other copy got away too. The secrets your boss had stashed away aren’t secrets any more. I’m no use to you now.”

“Usefulness isn’t the issue any more,” said Carl tiredly. “You really started something this time, Kid. Pasco reckons that the honour of the company is at stake. When you were nothing but a flea biting our ass, you could be ignored, but as soon as M-M decided to take you in you became a target of a different kind. I hope it was worth it, Kid.”

“Why are you taking me back alive?” the Kid asked. “It’s Lady Venom that Zarathustra really wants, isn’t it? Your orders were to get her—I was only an added extra.”

Carl set his lips to avoid showing his surprise that the Kid knew so much about his orders.

“Don’t push me, Kid,” he said tiredly. “It’s been a heavy day. I’ve had nothing but heavy days recently. I’m grateful that you didn’t blow me away before that stupid toy plane gassed us, but I’m not sure I can guarantee that I’ll be so restrained.”

“No,” said the Kid, without any particular animosity. “I don’t suppose you can. What do you suppose they’ll do to me now they’ve got me? Bearing in mind, that is, that it’s not your boss you have to answer to any more.”

“I don’t know,” said Carl, truthfully.

“And you don’t care,” the Kid added for him. “Can’t blame you, really. You have problems of your own, don’t you? But you don’t have to worry, because now that everybody and his cousin will soon know what’s on the disc, the fact that you worked it out doesn’t signify. That little bit of knowledge isn’t a dangerous thing any more.”

Carl felt coldly uncomfortable. He knew that it was impossible for the Kid to know what he was talking about, but that didn’t make what he was saying any easier to listen to.

“Forget it, Kid,” he said, tautly. “Playing guessing games will get you nowhere. It’s over.”

“It’s only just begun,” said the Kid. “You think M-M will take this lying down? GenTech just issued a declaration of war—of real war. They could have blown the reactor and blasted the entire base into radioactive dust. Even GenTech can’t do things like that without inviting retaliation. Like the guy said, this could be World War freaking Three.”

Carl shook his head vehemently. “The reactor was never going to blow,” he said, hoping that he was getting it right. “M-M’s defences aren’t that lousy. Their main systems got badly scrambled but their back-ups stopped any serious damage being done. It was all sound and fury—but it gave us a chance to get into a snow-cat and out on to the glacier. Nobody was expecting a break—whoever had us hadn’t bothered to brief M-M’s SecDiv properly—but a break is all it was. If M-M have any sense, they won’t start anything heavy. They’ll want to wind this thing down just as much as we do. Nobody wants the whole damn world to go up in flames over one lousy data-disc and one stupid sandrat.”

“Nobody,” agreed the Kid. “Except perhaps the Temple. You’re right about M-M; they will want to wind it down instead of up—but that might not stop them retaliating. Men like Junichi Tanagawa care about saving face.”

Carl found that he really did feel a bit sorry for the Kid, who’d been home and free until GenTech decided that the time had come to make their displeasure very plain to all those who might in future be tempted to meddle in their affairs. Unlike Pasco, he had nothing personal against the Kid, and he had to admit that he was a bit of a sucker for Homer Hegarty’s line of blather about people like the Kid being the last free men in the world.

On the other hand, he reminded himself, the Kid was on the other side. But for the grace of God, Carl might have been riding shotgun on one of the wrappers the Kid had blown up.

“You ever hear of the Temple?” the Kid asked him.

He hadn’t, and he said so.

“Ask Zarathustra,” said the Kid evenly. “Ask him if he knows who really runs GenTech. Ask him about the Temple. And while you’re at it, ask him if the mutants may be the forefront of an alien invasion.”

Carl frowned. “Is that what the M-M people told you?” he asked. “Don’t you know a sucker-story when you hear it? They’re losers, y’know. All the other corps are losing ground to GenTech. You know what they’re doing down here in Antarctica? Digging a freaking great hole in the ground, that’s what. Making themselves a little private world for their managers, where they can hide out for a thousand years or so—as long as their supplies last, I guess, unless their recyclers break down. Mitsu-Makema gave up trying to solve the world’s problems years ago, but Doc Zarathustra and men like him are still in there fighting. Freakers like you don’t help, believe me. Why d’you do it, Kid? Explain to me how it makes things better to be blowing up our stuff all the time.”

“When you got nothing,” said the Kid off-handedly, “you got nothing to lose.”

“That’s no answer,” said Carl contemptuously. “Is it Hegarty’s fault? Do you do it just to make the headlines? I’d really like to know, Kid—just don’t give me any crap about GenTech raping the world and needing to be stopped, because I’ve heard all that before and I know it ain’t true.”

“It’s a personal matter,” said the Kid, in a low tone. “Leastways, it was.”

“Well it sure as hell ain’t personal any more,” Carl told him. “You got half the freaking world on the case now. And what if M-M do try to get you back again? You enjoy being a freaking football? You could take one hell of a pounding being booted back and forth—until somebody scores a goal and you end up underneath a gravestone.”

“You haven’t touched down yet,” the Kid pointed out.

“You can be glad of that,” Carl told him, but not vindictively now hat his sudden burst of bad temper was over. “Count your blessings, Kid, because they’re running out real fast. I’ll take you back alive if I can, but if I can’t, I’ll take you back dead. Maybe you should have blown us both away when you had the chance.”

“Maybe I should,” agreed the Kid. “You think Zarathustra will send you back for Lady Venom?”

Carl laughed shortly, and shook his head. “The Doc has a whole zoofull of mutants,” he said. “Every one of them more interesting than your freaking rattlesnake. M-M can keep it—if they really want it.”

“It’s not only mutants the Doc has in his zoo, is it?” said the Kid, his big eyes transfixing Carl with their curious intensity. “He has your brother in a tank, too.”

Carl couldn’t suppress a start of surprise. “What do you know about Bro?” he asked, sharply.

“It upsets you, doesn’t it?” said the Kid. “What happened to your brother, I mean. But it’s landed Zarathustra in the shit now, hasn’t it? He didn’t report it properly to his masters, did he? He didn’t explain its potential as a weapon—and now it’s too late, because the other side has it as well.”

Carl knew that the Kid was trying to rattle him. What else could it be? But the Kid was succeeding. Carl was genuinely frightened. The Kid was a spectacularly good guesser—but Carl was determined not to give anything away.

“Cut the crap, Kid,” he said, trying as hard as he could to sound careless.

“If I were you,” said the Kid, “I’d keep a careful eye on that partner of yours. I’ve heard that he was a psycho even in the days when he was an Op, but you wouldn’t believe what kind of a cesspit his mind is now. He’s dangerous, Carl—to you, and to himself.”

“I’d rather have him with me than against me,” Carl observed, trying to turn the tables.

“He isn’t with anybody,” the Kid informed him coldly. “He’s all alone. Don’t ever rely on his loyalty—to you, to GenTech, to anything.”

“You’re whistling in the dark, Kid,” Carl told him, hoping that it was true. “I told you before not to rile me. I’m not the trigger-happy kind, but I’ll kill for the sake of a quiet life, if it looks like a good idea. You don’t know me, Kid—you don’t know me at all.” He couldn’t help adding, for his own ears only, that it was certainly mutual. He couldn’t figure out the Kid at all—but then, who could figure out what made a motorpsycho tick?

“Ghost dancing,” murmured the Kid, seemingly to himself—but only seemingly, Carl guessed. “It’s all just ghost dancing. Neither of us has a freaking clue who we are, or what we’re doing, or where it might end. It doesn’t make any sense, and it never will.”

“You’re full of shit, Kid,” said Carl biliously. “I know what makes sense and what doesn’t. Three square meals a day and a comfortable bed at night make sense. GenTech makes sense, and Dr Zarathustra makes sense—and because I’ve been told to do it, even this makes sense. The only thing which doesn’t make sense around here is you: what you are, what you do and what you think. So why don’t you can it, Kid, and get some sleep before we hit the ground again?”

“Sure,” said the Kid, with a smile which seemed to Carl to be the ultimate in courageous defiance. “Why not? Take me to your leader, Carl—it might just be interesting to meet him.”

2

Ace the Ace peered morosely into the depths of his glass, at the last remaining inch of turbid, discoloured liquid. As cold beers went, it had been a pretty lousy experience. He could have forgiven the fact that the title “beer” was one to which it was definitely not entitled, if only it had lived up to the qualifying adjective, but it had not. Given that the average midday temperature in Oklahoma at this time of year was around forty degrees Centigrade, the last thing a man needed was a cold beer which wasn’t cold.

He could have wished for better, given that it was probably the last cold beer he would ever drink.

The Ace figured that his chances of making it back down to the Underground were pretty slim, given that he was on his own. His pockets were empty, his guns were empty, and his bike was too tempting a target.

He knew that he shouldn’t be in the bar at all. If he’d been cut from the same indomitable cloth as Kid Zero he’d have been out on the road, living on air, setting booby-traps for tourists—but he wasn’t Kid Zero. The Ace was a gangster through and through; he’d never operated alone. He didn’t like being alone, and he had no illusions about his capacity to enjoy, let alone sustain, a solo career.

When the last inch of not-very-cold not-beer had gone, he knew, he was going to have to start thinking very hard about the best way to commit suicide. He hadn’t much option about it. To be or not to be wasn’t the question—the question was whether to set himself up for some particular way out, or whether to let the grenades and machine-guns of outrageous fortune take care of it for him.

The thought of a hero’s death in battle was appealing, in a way, but Homer Hegarty was over in Amarillo and he sure as hell wouldn’t come this far east in order to film the last few minutes of a two-bit ex-gang leader who didn’t have the wherewithal to run a proper shooting-match.

Homer Hegarty had never liked him anyhow; the way Homer told it, Ace and the Low Numbers had never amounted to anything in the hierarchy of hell-for-leather leather boys.

On the other hand, he thought, maybe the quickest way to get it over and done with would be to go upstairs to the poker-game and pick a fight with some quick-tempered loser, who would probably shoot him down so slickly that no one would ever know that his own side-arm didn’t have any bullets in it. The thing which worried him most about that possibility was the thought that the loser might be sufficiently sour of temper to shoot him in the belly.

He looked around the bar, wondering if there was anyone there who could be trusted to shoot him dead cleanly, but the drinkers were all sandrats, mostly in worse condition than himself—the only reason most of them were still alive was that no one in the world could think of a good enough reason to put them out of their misery. The sight of them increased the Ace’s resolve to have himself put down.

Not for the first time, he regretted not having kept the last shot in his locker for himself. Now that he couldn’t actually do it, the thought of simply sticking his piece into his mouth and blowing away the back of his head seemed positively attractive.

He heard a vehicle draw up outside and turned his head to see what it was—in fact, he craned his neck just like all the old-timers, so eager for distraction from his misery that any excuse was good enough.

It was a jet black limo, solidly armoured and heavy with artillery—not the sort of vehicle one usually expected to sec cruising in the western desert. The sand had worn away some of its polish but it looked bright and clean and thoroughly citified. The window-ports were one-way only, so there was no way to tell how many people were inside it—but only one got out. It was a little guy with sleek black hair and cock-eyed mirrorshades. He was wearing a dazzling white linen suit that was cut just tightly enough to show off the line of his shoulder-holster.

The little guy walked into the place as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and marched up to the bar, where he took the seat next to Ace the Ace.

The Ace thought it looked promising. Nobody who looked as harmless as this guy did could possibly be less than absolutely deadly. He began to run through his catalogue of insults, trying to decide which one would be most certain drive the guy into an instantaneous fit of fury. His train of thought was interrupted, though, when the bartender came over and the guy asked for a coca-cola.

“Coke’s off,” observed the barman laconically. “Delivery truck got held up, ’bout five years back. I got orangeade.”

“Orangeade,” said the little man wearily, throwing a bill on the table which would have bought a round of “beers” for the whole bar. “Keep the change.”

“What change?” muttered the barman.

The man in mirrorshades turned to face the Ace, and said: “You’re Ace the Ace, aren’t you?”

The Ace’s catalogue of insults snapped shut inside his head, to be replaced by an attitude of wonderment and suspicion.

“Never heard of him,” he replied reflexively.

“I thought so,” said the little guy, exactly as if the Ace had said “Sure I am.” He would presumably have gone on, except that his orangeade had arrived. It wasn’t alone—just as the bartender was thumping it down on the bar the door to the staircase which led to the gambling joint was thrown open, and three men came through. Two of them were very big, but the one they were shadowing was only medium-sized; even so, he towered above the man in mirrorshades when he came to stand close to him.

The guy from upstairs had the top three buttons of his shirt undone, and through the gap the Ace could see a sliver of a gold-and-red tattoo. The workmanship was obviously first-class, and the Ace knew that this was no mere infantryman in the ranks of the yakuza. All three of the guys were white, but that didn’t signify these days—the Japanese yaks didn’t find the desert very congenial, so the local organization was as thoroughly American as the Klu Klux Klan.

“Aren’t you a little bit out of your territory?” said the yak—who was obviously not a man to waste time with social niceties.

“I got a passport,” said the man in mirrorshades—who had had the foresight to put said same passport in his breast pocket, so that no one could misread his action when he reached for it. He took it out delicately between thumb and forefinger and handed it over. It looked just like any other bit of coloured plastic to the Ace, but the yak obviously had advanced powers of recognition.

The yak raised an eyebrow to signify surprise—which was unusual, because the white yaks generally tried to be even more inscrutable than their overseas cousins, in the interests of maintaining an appropriate image. Then he passed the plastic back to one of the heavies, and said: “Check it out.” The heavy returned to the staircase, this time descending into the mysterious depths where the local hackers kept their smartware. In the meantime, the yak stared at the mirrorshades, and the little man presumably stared back. The Ace stared at both of them, wondering what the hell was going on.

After a couple of minutes had passed, during which nobody in the bar would have dared to drop an experimental pin, the heavy returned and passed the plastic back to his boss with a curt nod. The yak, in his turn, handed it to the man in mirrorshades.

“Okay, Mr Andriano,” said the yak. “You’re clear to operate. Have a nice day.”

“You can call me Rico,” said the man in mirrorshades placidly. “And the same to you.”

The yak and his escort went back upstairs to the game. Not one of them had bothered to spare Ace the Ace the merest glance.

“Some passport,” murmured the Ace admiringly.

“The world’s changing, Ace,” said the little man, sipping his orangeade. “It’s all a matter of philosophy. The families, the yaks and people like you have no friends at all outside their orgs, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t all get along just fine, as long as we know who our enemies are. We’re just beginning to wake up to who our real enemies are—and it seems like the families, the yaks and people like you all have one major enemy in common. That’s all we need, in order to negotiate passports, and alliances, and ways of getting what we want. The world’s looking up, Ace. There’s cause for hope. Can I buy you a beer?”

Just for a second the Ace was tempted to ask for an orangeade, but thoughts of suicide had quitted his mind sufficiently to encourage him to be discreet.

“Thanks,” he said.

The man in mirrorshades laid another bill on the bar, just as big as the first, but this time he didn’t tell the bartender to keep the change, and the bartender didn’t try to tell him that there wasn’t any.

“Your boys got cut up pretty badly by Pasco and Preston,” said the little guy amiably. “That’s a pity—we tried to soften them up for you, but we didn’t have the kind of vehicles required for the job. On the other hand, we did dent them badly enough to save your life, and you delayed Pasco and Preston long enough to let us get a little bit of business done. We helped one another, you see. We didn’t know we were doing it—we didn’t even know that we were on the same side—but that’s the way it worked out. Common enemies, you see.”

The Ace certainly wasn’t blind, but he had to admit to himself that he didn’t quite see.

“The families,” he said distantly. “That’s the mafia, right?”

“There’s no such thing as the mafia,” said the man in mirrorshades. “The mafia is a myth, invented by people who couldn’t understand the concepts of loyalty and reciprocal altruism which my forefathers imported into this lunatic dog-eat-dog country. But that’s not the point, Ace—the point is that you and I have something in common, and that we can keep on having something in common, if you want. You did us a favour—now I’ve come to do you one. We have a certain joint operation planned with some more enemies of our mutual enemies, but as our tattooed friend observed, we’re a little out of our territory. We need a little local expertise, and we thought you might have exactly the right kind of motivation to pull out all the stops on our behalf. We want to recruit you to the team.”

“You want me to join the mafia?” said the Ace, stupid with incredulity.

“There’s no such thing as the mafia,” said Rico Andriano, with a discontented sigh. “And if there were, we wouldn’t let you join it if you applied in triplicate. What’s on offer is a purely temporary arrangement, with a single limited objective.”

“What objective?” asked the Ace, feeling proud of himself for contriving his first semi-intelligent question.

“We want to spring Kid Zero.”

The Ace was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that his jaw had fallen open. He very nearly said: “The mafia want to spring Kid Zero?” but he managed to stop himself in time by filling his mouth with beer. This beer, oddly enough, was noticeably cooler than the last—which just went to show what benefits a man could enjoy if he was in the right company.

By the the time he’d savoured and swallowed the mouthful of beer the Ace had recovered sufficient presence of mind to rephrase his question more succinctly. “Why should you want to help Kid Zero?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” said the man in mirrorshades. “He did us a big favour, for one thing, and we like to preserve our traditions of reciprocal altruism. In addition to that, our associates are very annoyed with the way in which GenTech went about snatching him from their tender care. They feel that GenTech’s over-reaction is symptomatic of a kind of arrogance which needs to be discouraged, and they feel that the time is ripe for a little over-reaction of their own. You should understand that, Ace—weren’t the Low Numbers and the Atlas Boys over-reacting just a little when you elected to chase Ray Pasco?”

“Kid Zero was a friend of mine,” said the Ace sullenly. “I owed him one, from the time the guys made me freeze him out of the gang. I still owe him one.”

“Reciprocal altruism,” said Andriano. “I can relate to that. So are you with us, or what?”

The Ace shrugged uncomfortably. “I got no ammunition,” he confessed. “I ain’t goin’ to be much use in a scrap.”

“Ammunition,” said the man in mirrorshades breezily, “is not a problem. Not getting killed might be a problem, but ammunition isn’t. You supply the guts, and we’ll supply the fireworks. Okay?”

The little man stuck out his hand. The Ace took it.

The guy is right, thought the Ace. There’s hope in the world after all. If it ain’t a new beginning, at least I get to go out in style.

He took another gulp of beer as soon as his hand was free again, and wondered if anybody had tipped off Homer Hegarty about the impending action. He felt in his bones that this might be his big chance to become a hero at last. Homer really liked Kid Zero, and was sure to have something nice to say about anyone who helped to liberate him from the Big Bad Wolves.

Ace the Ace finished his drink and put the glass back on the bar. Then he gave the bartender the filthiest look he could conjure up, just to let the bastard know how stupid he’d been to give a warm beer to a mean hombre like Ace the Ace. Then he followed the little guy out of the bar, and into the newly hopeful future.

3

When the American coast came into sight on the far side of the Gulf of Mexico Pasco felt his stomach muscles tightening. His mouth was dry and he was sweating with anxiety. He was puzzled by this reaction, because he thought that it ought to have been the other way around: the sight of home should have made him relax. Nor was it just the knowledge that his mission had turned out to be a failure.

Something was wrong.

The excitement of hauling Kid Zero out of M-M’s maximum-security research establishment had worn off somewhere over Brazil, when a sober contemplation of his achievements had informed him that one motorpsycho, sans serpentine girl-friend, wasn’t much to show for all the trouble his bosses had been through. But this was more than just a feeling of let-down; it was a sense of impending disaster which was growing stronger by the minute.

Pasco was not fool enough to believe that he had a magical sixth sense, but he trusted the reflexes which had been honed by years of stressful experience. Something bad was about to happen, which would tax his strength and ingenuity to the limits. He was certain of it.

In order to distract himself from the uncomfortable feeling he went back to tell Carl Preston the news. Preston was sitting in back in a window-seat, with Kid Zero beside him. The Kid was conscious, but he was secured so firmly that he could barely twiddle his fingers.

“Any sign of trouble?” asked Carl.

Pasco scowled. “Not yet,” he said. “They’re trying to forestall the possibility by sending up a couple of fighters from Galveston to cover us. Anyway, nine-tenths of the heavy metal between here and Dallas is ours.”

“Are they putting us down in Dallas?”

“No—your boss still wants to talk to the Kid, so they’re taking us all directly to the strip at the labs. The runway’s a bit short, but we should get down easily enough. You’ll be able to visit your brother.”

Preston gave him a dirty look, but Pasco had worse things preying on his mind than anxiety about Preston’s hurt feelings. He stretched himself a bit, then looked down at the Kid. “You’d better think of some real neat answers for the Doc, Kid,” he said. “He’s going to be real mad at you, given that you managed to pass his data to every son of a bitch who wanted a look at it. If he wants a volunteer for some particularly hairy experiment, you’ll probably be it.”

“Maybe,” said the Kid calmly. “But with my luck, I might just end up being the superman the Doc’s trying to make. And whatever else he does, he won’t be throwing acid in my face—so I’m one up on you, anyhow.”

Pasco scowled again, and felt the numbness in the left side of his face as he did so. He clenched his fist and leaned forward, intending to remind the Kid that being brought back alive could still be painful—but he was interrupted by a shout from the cabin.

He went back, and leaned over the co-pilot’s shoulder to examine the synthesizer screens. The co-pilot stabbed one of the sim screens with a bony finger. A little flock of blue dots was making its way across a map which showed part of Arkansas. They were a long way away, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that they were on an interception course.

Pasco’s sick stomach jumped as though he’d been kicked—as though he’d somehow known that those dots would be waiting him; as though they were his own personal nemesis.

“What are they?” he asked. “Fighters?”

“No,” said the co-pilot. “They’re too small to be planes, and the computer can’t recognize them as any kind of missiles it knows about. I think they’re remote-controlled drones, like the one which sprayed you with knock-out gas before.”

“Where’d they come from?”

“Somewhere up in Kentucky. The technics must be M-M, but it may be the mob who launched them.”

“Why aren’t our people shooting them down?”

“They’re flying too low and swerving too often—our airborne scanners can barely pick them up. They show up clear enough on the simulator, but there’s a certain amount of guesswork in plotting their position moment-to-moment.”

“Are they going to cause us much of a problem when we come down?” asked Pasco, feeling certain that they were but not quite knowing how.

“Probably not. Almost all of their load must be fuel, or they wouldn’t be able to fly so far. They can’t pack more than a tiny warhead each—no real firepower at all.”

Pasco chewed his lower lip reflectively. If M-M were going to hit back in reprisal for what had been done to them down in Antarctica, they’d surely send out something more powerful than a couple of dozen fireworks. He turned to the radio-operator.

“Any intelligence about troop movements?” he asked. “Anything heavy in the vicinity of the base?”

“The mob pulled out,” the radio-man old him. “There’s no sign of M-M activity within fifty miles—not even bona fide wrappers. The only gunmen in the neighbourhood apart from our own are a couple of motorpsycho gangs.”

“Which motorpsycho gangs?” asked Pasco, quickly.

“The usual—Maniax, plus a few oddments.”

That settled the matter as far as Pasco was concerned—he already knew that the Maniax were in with the mob, and were probably still out to redeem themselves after the failure of their booby trap.

“Scramble the mercy boys with orders to send the bikers running,” said Pasco. “And warn the birdmen that they may be packing something heavier than the usual four-point-twos.” His heart was pumping faster as he scanned the screens. There had to be a third prong to the attack, and if it wasn’t yet evident, it had to be the deadliest one. It wouldn’t be the kind of software attack which GenTech had launched against the Antarctican base’s systems—the defences were up against that kind of sting, and the target wasn’t anywhere near as alarm-sensitive.

“What else have M-M got on the ground between the coast and the desert?” asked Pasco urgently.

“Not a thing,” the radio-man told him. “I told you—even their trucks are off the road.”

“Further north, then—Oklahoma, Kansas.”

“It’s not their territory,” the radio-man complained. “They run their technics in, with the co-operation of the yaks, but the only functioning operation they have is the microwave- receiver which picks up the beams from their spyballs.”

Pasco’s stomach lurched again, and the blood buzzed in his ears. It was as though all his bodily alarms were going off at once. He’d never had such a strong premonition of disaster. Underneath the sickness of his clamorous suspicions, though, he felt confident, because he knew exactly what was coming down and exactly what to do about it.

“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, still reeling under the blinding flash of inspiration. “The bastards are going to hit us from up top!”

“That’s crazy!” complained the co-pilot. “Ground-aimed sat weapons are strictly one-shot wonders—who’d waste a laser zapping a cargo-plane?”

“I don’t care how crazy it is,” Pasco retorted, angrily. “They’re going to do it!” To the radio-man he said: “Warn the guys at base to start whatever procedures they’ve got. I know what I’m talking about, believe me! They have to be ready.”

“You want me to divert to Dallas?” said the pilot. “No sense flying into a battlefield, if we don’t have to.”

“That may be what they want,” said the co-pilot quickly. “The remotes could be a feint, and the Maniax may not signify anything at all. Maybe they want us to go to Dallas—we haven’t time now to organize proper cover there.”

Pasco felt his stomach getting tighter and tighter. He knew that the co-pilot could be right, and maybe ought to be right. M-M had the disc already, and Kid Zero was nothing to them. Common sense said that they wouldn’t waste a satellite and risk an escalation of hostilities which would surely leave them at a big disadvantage. On the other hand, common sense also said that the only winners of an all-out two-handed conflict between GenTech and Mitsu-Makema would be the uninvolved corps, and that both sides ought to back off. Whatever the blue dots were, they weren’t evidence of M-M backing off.

“Tell the base to expect a sat attack,” he insisted. “Now!”

The radio-man shrugged, and put the call through. There was a pause while he listened to his opposite number. “The base won’t go to red alert,” he reported eventually. “Something about the danger of over-reaction. They want us to come in as planned.”

Pasco became suddenly very calm—unnaturally calm; he’d been over-ruled, and he knew that there was no point arguing about it. When the sky did fall in, someone else would have to carry the can for not passing the buck even further along—but that wasn’t his concern. His concern was to save his own life, in spite of the fact that his masters thought he was crazy. He had not the shadow of a doubt that his instincts were right. Common sense or no common sense, M-M were going to hit back and hit back hard, and he didn’t want to be in the firing-line.

In the meantime, the flock of coloured dots had moved a lot closer. The screen could now put the plane and the remotes on the same map-segment, and Pasco could watch them closing. His finger was aching to be on a FIRE button, real or pretend. At the end of the day, it was all arcade fun: dot against cross…zap, zap, zap! But the co-pilot had no FIRE button—he only had a computer, which was telling him that the targets were too small and too close to the ground.

The simulator wasn’t clever enough to display the third dimension but Pasco knew well enough that the pilot was starting his approach, and coming down. By the time they got down to the same near-ground level as the incoming flyers they’d be all together on the screen—but what that would entail he had no idea. He didn’t know what the remotes were carrying and he didn’t even know whether or not they were aimed at the plane.

The sense of being in danger without being able to act reminded him very strongly of being in a horrorshow booth—but this was for real and he was facing death as well as fear. There had to be something he could do, to get himself out of the frying-pan.

“Slow up,” he said to the pilot. “Don’t take us down yet. If you have fuel enough, circle. Those things don’t have time on their hands to hang about for us, and there’s no sense in flying into them.”

The pilot glanced at the radio-operator, who was already relaying the suggestion to the base. The radio-man listened to the reply, then nodded.

Then Pasco leaned forward to put his hand over the radioman’s mike. “For your ears only,” he said, as inspiration struck him. “The channel may not be secure. We’re going to jump—Preston, the Kid, and me. Whatever they have planned for a landing party, we aren’t going to play.”

The radio-man didn’t try to move the hand, but he was quick enough to say: “You’re crazy! You can’t just jump into the freakin’ desert!”

“We just scrambled the mercy boys to see off the Maniax. When they’ve done that, they can come out after us—but don’t tell them we’re down until we’re down. Sure it’s crazy, but it’s the one thing M-M can’t possibly expect—and I still think they’re going to hit us hard. I’ve skydived before—it’s no big deal.”

“I doubt that Preston has,” said the pilot drily, “and I’m certain that Kid Zero hasn’t.”

“Preston will take his chance with me,” said Pasco grimly. “And if Kid Zero breaks a few bones I won’t be crying for him.”

The radio-man was listening to this exchange, but only with half an ear. Something was coming up, and he had to uncover the mike to acknowledge it. “The Maniax are on the move,” he said. “Heading for the wire. They just shot down two birds and scattered the rest—they’ve got a whole battery of first rate target-seekers, just like the one the Kid had when this whole affair kicked off. They’re dug in better than we thought, but we’re deploying counterstrikers.”

“M-M bastards,” muttered the co-pilot. “Selling guns to the freakin’ indians!”

Pasco didn’t wait. It was all too obvious that things were going wrong. “I’m on my way,” he said, as he ducked back out of the cabin.

He already knew where the chutes were stored, and he pulled three out, hurling one at Carl Preston. “Get into that,” he ordered. “Then cut the Kid’s hands loose from the seat and get him into another. But don’t untie his feet, and when he’s rigged up, tie his wrists again.”

The expression of panic and alarm that crossed Kid Zero’s face did Pasco a power of good. There had been just a chance that the Kid might leap at the opportunity, thinking of it as a chance to escape, but he obviously wasn’t that ambitious.

“I’m going to have my gun on you the whole way down, Kid,” Pasco said, in a tone as menacing as he could contrive. “Remember that.”

“I’m not going to jump,” said the Kid, in a tight-lipped fashion which seemed pleasantly absurd to Pasco, given that the Kid didn’t have the slightest choice in the matter.

“You won’t have to,” he said maliciously. “Because I’m going to throw you out—and if you break your legs because you don’t know how to land, that’ll be just too bad. And if you open your smart mouth one more time, you’re going down without the chute, right?”

The Kid’s face was as white as a sheet, and Pasco knew that his inspiration had at last allowed him to find the weak spot in the Kid’s imperturbability. Kid Zero was finally afraid!

“Hell, Ray,” Carl Preston was saying, “I don’t know….”

But there was no way that Pasco was going to allow the BioDiv man to mess up his big scene. He turned on Preston wrathfully, giving the smaller man the full benefit of his intimidating face, and he said, in a tone which could not and would not be denied: “Do it!”

Preston got the message, and shut up—but he was frightened too. He’d jumped off the diner roof and he’d jumped from the copter, but this was different. Pasco didn’t mind; he wasn’t fond enough of Preston to want to save him from his own nerves—the chips were down now, and it was time for the tough guys to show just how tough they were.

When he’d finished buckling on his own chute Pasco helped Preston get the Kid into his. It wasn’t easy, but the Kid didn’t put up too much resistance—he clearly believed what Pasco said about dropping him without the chute if he wouldn’t put it on. But when they were all ready to go Preston was still getting paler.

“Whose orders are these?” whispered Preston, as Pasco tied the Kid’s wrists together behind his back.

“Does it matter?” countered Pasco. “I figure we have the easy end of it. There’ll be a far hotter reception at the base, if I’m right about what’s coming down.”

Neither of the others was in a hurry to move, so it was Pasco who picked his way along the cluttered fuselage towards the jumping-port. Preston picked up the Kid, who couldn’t walk because his legs were tied together.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” said Preston, arriving some seconds after Pasco had pulled the seal free and hauled the door inwards.

“Sure,” said Pasco, “haven’t you?” He knew full well that Preston hadn’t. Pasco had only done it a couple of times himself, but two-nil seemed like a very big advantage at this particular point in time, and any second thoughts he might have had were out of the question now. He suppressed his own giddiness as he looked down, and then looked at the others to see what expressions were on their faces.

The Kid’s eyes were averted—he couldn’t even look. Pasco grinned, savagely, as the tautness in his stomach-wall turned to exultation. “Welcome to the horrorshow, Kid,” he said happily.

Preston, who looked distinctly queasy, shrank back from the open hatch.

“Don’t just stand there,” said Pasco. “Throw the bastard out.”

But Preston didn’t throw Kid Zero out—his own muscles seemed to have frozen at the thought of what awaited them.

“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, and reached out to yank them both forward. Preston reacted reflexively, gripping the side of the hatchway to save himself, but Kid Zero had no choice but to fall. The Kid didn’t scream, but Pasco saw the expression on his face, and that was enough to make his day.

Pasco pulled again at Preston’s arm, much harder than before, and this time Zarathustra’s man accepted the pressure of the inevitable.

Before he jumped himself, Pasco drew his gun. He did it because he knew this had to be done properly, the hero’s way.

The rush of air which consumed him sent a stab of terror through him in spite of his resolve, but his horrorshow-trained reflexes took command, and by the time his chute opened he was sky-high on adrenalin, looking forward to a happy landing.

He knew that he had done the right thing, and was as proud of himself as he had ever been before, or ever hoped to be again.

4

For the first couple of seconds Carl felt utterly lost. His eyes were open but he could not make sense of what he saw; his mind was racing but his thoughts were jumbled and incoherent.

The most urgent, as well as the most hopeless, of his thoughts was the awareness that Pasco had not told him what to do. He had the vague notion that a parachute had something called a rip cord which the wearer was supposed to pull, but Pasco had not pointed out any such attachment or given him advice about its use. For this reason his hands were groping wildly about the straps of the chute, searching for something which—as things turned out—was not actually there.

The chute opened by itself, automatically, when he was clear of the plane. He had been tumbling in his fall until then, but the chute righted him, so that his feet were pointed to the ground and his head was in the right place to look down upon it.

Somehow he had expected to be able to see the entire southern U.S.A. spread out before him like a map, but he was much closer than that, and what was rushing up to meet him was more like a discoloured and wave-swept ocean than anything else he could think of. It was all sand and rust, speckled with fugitive flecks of green. In the middle-distance he could see the grey line of the Brazos river but the base for which the plane had been headed was surprisingly close to the horizon. He could make out plumes of sand which were being kicked up by vehicles of some kind—probably bikes—and by the whirling blades of ground-hugging birds. The machines themselves were difficult to pick out, and seemed quite unreal at this unaccustomed angle.

It all looked so odd and so unfamiliar that it might as well have been an image on a simulator screen. He seized upon that notion, and tried to tell himself that it was only a game, only a horrorshow.

That seemed to work, at least for a little while. The lie that it was all illusion was certainly preferable to the truth. In the distance, the clouds of sand began to dissipate and spread out, and though he still could not see the bike-riders clearly he readily deduced that they were scattering before the regrouped and vengeful birds, retreating in all directions in calculated disarray.

A poor excuse for a battle! he thought—but he knew that there had to be more to the situation than met the eye. Something had to be happening, or what was it all for?

He could see Kid Zero’s chute below him, not drifting far from the path which his own would take. The Kid, with his wrists and ankles tied, had no chance to alter the attitude of his body, and would have to hope for as soft a landing as chance could contrive for him. Alas, it looked like the landing might be anything but soft—the Kid was headed into the heart of a region of jagged rocks, full of sharp spurs and deep clefts.

Carl knew that he ought to have some degree of control over the direction of his slanting descent, if only he could figure out how to exercise it. He supposed that if he spread his arms and legs he could increase air-resistance and slow himself down a little, giving himself more time to drift—but he had no confidence at all in his ability to aim for a particular landing-spot. He looked up, trying to spot Pasco, but he felt a sudden lurch of vertigo and had to look quickly down again—the ground was his only perceptual anchorage, his nearness to it the only location he could judge.

He tried to take himself clear of the rocks so that he might land on open ground, but his unskilled efforts were hopelessly ineffectual.

It’s only a horrorshow! he told himself, lying with all the fervour he could muster. It’s only a game.

The ground rushed up to meet him, far more avidly than he could have wished.

He saw the Kid land and roll, the chute billowing gently down alongside him; he knew that he had to lake himself in hand for his own impact, and gritted his teeth against the instinct which told him—stupidly—that he ought to make himself rigid. He knew that the opposite was true—that he had to relax his muscles and get ready to curl up when he touched bottom, absorbing the shock into his whole body instead of his ankles and his knees.

His eyes wanted to close, but he kept them open. Absurdly, it was not until the last twenty feet or so that he had a real sense of falling, and felt the renewal of his vertigo in consequence. The impact hurt more than he had expected, and though he tried with all his might to distribute the shock as he knew he ought to do, his legs were nevertheless jarred. He had come down on bare rock, which was uneven enough to jolt and bruise all the parts of his body which came into contact with it as he rolled, and pain seemed to be rattling his entire being.

The chute came down on top of him, smothering him in artificial silk. For a few moments he was incapable of doing anything but lying there, enshrouded—but he knew that he wasn’t dead, and there was a certain relief and exhilaration to be found even in that simple fact.

When he was finally able to make the attempt to sit up, and then to stand, he did so very gingerly, not knowing which of his many aches might flare up when pressure was put on it. At first, it seemed that his elbows had taken the worst of it—but then he tried to transfer his weight from his right foot to his left and realized that he would not be walking properly for some time to come. His left ankle blazed with pain, and he knew that if it was not actually broken it was very badly sprained.

He cursed, but felt oddly unsurprised and resentful. It seemed somehow to be only fair that he should not have escaped from this lunatic adventure entirely unscathed.

He pulled the chute away and peered out, blinking against the glare of the late morning sun. The desert was not yet at its worst, but it soon would be. He limped to a rocky shelf and sat down, looking around for Kid Zero’s chute; but the ground was all ridges and spires and jagged outcrops of rock, and although he was high up—only just below the flat top of a curved ridge—he couldn’t see his erstwhile prisoner. He could see Pasco, though, floating down—apparently as lightly as a wind-borne feather—a couple of hundred yards away.

The SecDiv man obviously had skill enough to avoid the worst of the rocks. Carl churlishly expressed a private hope that Pasco might break his leg anyway, but he knew that his prayer had gone unanswered when the big man’s chute billowed, settled, and then was quickly swept aside as Pasco came swiftly to his feet. Although they were a long way apart Carl could see that the man with the ruined face already had his gun in his hand, and was looking furtively around for possible danger.

Carl didn’t move; he just watched as Pasco sprinted towards him.

“You okay?” the big man shouted up at him.

“No,” Carl shouted back sourly. “I’m not okay. Ankle’s gone.”

Pasco didn’t seem to be listening—he was looking round anxiously as he began to clamber up over the rocks.

“Where’s the Kid?” he demanded. “Which way?”

Carl shook his head. He didn’t know which way—he had lost his sense of direction while concentrating on his own troubles.

Pasco grimaced in irritation, but didn’t say anything. He moved away from the rock-face against which Carl was perched, looking one way and then the other before turning to crane his neck, peering at the top of the ridge behind him.

Carl saw the expression on Pasco’s face change even before he heard the engine of the bike, and he ducked as he guessed from the combination of signals that the machine was going to come straight over the top of him.

Pasco obviously thought that the leaping bike was going to crash right into him, because instead of standing his ground and firing he dived away to his left. Carl had never seen a bike-jump like it—the thing flew over him and soared into the air with unbelievable grace. Maybe it would have hit Pasco if he’d stayed where he was, but it would only have clipped his head, because it landed a full ten feet further on, bucking and bouncing over the rocks as the rider steadied it before bringing it around in a wide arc.

Its tires screamed as it came about, but the rider didn’t want to waste any time at all—which was a wise decision, considering that Pasco still had his gun in his hand and was getting madder with every moment.

Again the big man had to dive as the bike came straight at him—but if he hadn’t time to fire, neither had the man on the bike, no matter how close his firing studs were to the right handgrip. The rider had to give one hundred per cent to steering the bike across the rough terrain, and his first-strike weapon had to be the bike itself.

This time, Pasco wasn’t quite quick enough. The bike caught him a glancing blow as he tried to evade its charge, and sent him tumbling down a slope into a gully. The bike couldn’t get down there without trapping its wheels, so it was as safe a retreat as Pasco could ask for, and the rider knew it. The bike swerved and ran down another slope, just as Carl finally managed to haul his own gun out of its holster.

Carl got off one shot as the biker disappeared from view, but he knew that he hadn’t hit the man. Ignoring the pain in his leg he stumbled over to the narrow fissure into which Pasco had fallen, and dropped down beside the other man. Their position was defensible, but it had the disadvantage of a very restricted view. They couldn’t see the biker and they couldn’t see Kid Zero.

Carl had the sensation of having been here before. Once again they were waiting for the birds to come and bail them out.

But Pasco wasn’t content with that. “Stay here!” he said to Carl, with an insistence which suggested that he hadn’t quite registered the fact that Carl was in no shape to run around. Then he was gone, hurrying along the gully in the direction opposite to the way the bike had gone. Within five seconds, he too was out of sight.

Carl crouched down, hugging the protective angle of the gully’s end. The roar of the bike’s engine had briefly overloaded his hearing, but now the engine had stopped altogether, and the silence seemed unnaturally deep. Carl judged that he would be safer a dozen feet further back, where the walls of the gully loomed higher and the shadows were deeper. Painfully, he began to inch his way along.

The silence was unbroken—until he heard the warning rattle.

Carl froze instantly, knowing exactly what he’d got himself into. There was a nearby crevice in the rock, nearly head high. Steeped in shadow as it was he hadn’t been able to see into it—but the snake inside could certainly see out, and was telling him in no uncertain terms that he was too damned close.

He could see the snake’s head now, jaws already agape.

Carl knew that the creature didn’t really want to strike at him—but he also knew that it was a prisoner of its instinct, and that if he moved again, in whatever direction, the striking reflex might be triggered.

He looked down at the hand which held his pistol, wondering if he could alter its attitude so that the barrel of the gun—which was currently pointed at the ground, could be focused on the snake. The angle would be very awkward, but he thought that he could fire from there—the question was, could he hit a target as small as the snake’s head? The range was no problem, but judging the angle of shot and taking the recoil were by no means easy. A more arrogant man might have brought his arm up gunfighter-style and tried to beat the snake’s strike, but Carl wasn’t that stupid. The snake was already coiled and ready—it had the drop on him.

Somewhere away to his right there was a burst of machine-gun fire. He heard both the stutter of the weapon and the sound of the bullets ricocheting off the rocks. Whether or not there was a pistol shot mixed in with the burst, he couldn’t tell.

He winced because he thought the sudden burst of noise was sure to make the snake strike, but the creature’s head didn’t move. Those eyes were still fixed on him, coldly and hypnotically.

Carl decided that trying to shoot the snake was too chancy. He decided that he might be able to move away instead, if he went very slowly. If the snake had any sense, it would let him go.

If.

But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t assert sufficient conscious control over his muscles. He willed himself to move, but his body wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t do anything except keep his eyes fixed on the snake’s head, as though he really were hypnotized.

It’s only a horrorshow, he told himself. It’s only a game. But he had told the lie too often and now it was impotent, even as mere ritual.

How long the impasse would have continued before he plucked up the nerve to break it Carl had no idea, and the matter remained unsettled because it was broken anyway—by the arrival of a third party.

Carl didn’t see the third party arrive, but when he heard the soft voice he didn’t have to turn round to know how close he was.

“Don’t move, Mr Preston,” said Kid Zero.

The command was so utterly absurd that Carl had to suppress an urge to giggle.

In fact, it was the Kid who laughed, very softly. He laughed because he could see what kind of double trouble Carl was in.

“With friends like yours, Mr Preston,” said the Kid gently, “you don’t really need enemies. Unfortunately, you have a lot of them. It isn’t going to be easy for GenTech to own the world, when there are so many people in it who are determined not to be owned.”

“Can you shoot the snake?” asked Carl, without moving his lips at all.

“Why should I shoot the snake?” asked the Kid silkily. “I like snakes. That might be Lady Venom’s little sister. I don’t like you, Mr Preston. If you weren’t who you are, you mightn’t be such a bad guy—but as things stand you’re GenTech’s man, and you’re Zarathustra’s man. I’m rooting for the snake.”

There was another burst of machine-gun fire—and this time, unmistakably, there was returned fire from Pasco’s magnum. But the sound came from quite some distance away.

Carl tried to suppress a tremble. Again, he felt certain that the snake would strike. But it didn’t. In fact, it relaxed its gaping jaw, and withdrew its head into the shadowed depths of the crevice. Then, with a long lazy scrape of scale against scale the coils of its body withdrew likewise into some deeper covert.

Carl staggered back from the position in which he had been frozen for what seemed like an eternity. He came to rest with his back against the other wall of the fissure and his ankle throbbing fearsomely. He turned his head to look at Kid Zero, who was covering him with a thirty-eight.

“Drop your gun, Mr Preston,” said the Kid.

Carl obeyed. “Who is that guy on the bike?” he asked, sourly.

“A friend of mine,” said the Kid. “Not just an enemy of my enemies, but an authentic twenty-two carat friend. Kick the gun over here.”

Again, Carl did as he was told. He knew that Kid Zero wasn’t going to shoot him now. The Kid and the snake had a great deal in common—they were unreasonably discreet with their deadliness. They struck only when they were forced by circumstance to strike; unpredictability was part of their individuality, but they were not indiscriminate in their lethals.

“The mercy boys are on their way,” said Carl, for no particular reason. They had both been here before, and they both knew the script.

“Story of my life,” said the Kid. “The mercy boys are always on their way. So far, they’ve always arrived too late.”

Carl heard the sound of a motorbike engine being jerked back to life. Then he heard the sound of the vehicle approaching—though he couldn’t see it at all. His eyes were fixed on Kid Zero’s eyes, as though held there by hypnotic command. It wasn’t until the Kid looked away that Carl felt free to turn around and look at the flat apron of rock where he had fallen out of the sky.

The distant thrum of copter engines was audible now, filling the air with muted vibration, but they were still half a mile away. As the Kid had prophesied, the mercy boys were too late.

The Kid leapt out of the gully, and ran lightly to the bike, which had swerved and paused with its back end pointed towards them. The Kid climbed on to the pillion, and the bike came to life again, hurtling away into the maze of canyons. Carl blinked as a stray bit of sand ended up in his eye. He heard Pasco’s gun go off three times, but he knew that the shots were a gesture of rage and disgust rather than a serious attempt to bring the bikers down—they were already out of range.

Carl concentrated on getting out of the crack in the rock as fast as he could, just in case there were other snakes nearby. He sat on the flat top on the sun-warmed stone, massaging his ankle, and he didn’t bother to look up until Pasco’s shadow fell across him.

As he’d expected, the big man’s ugly face was even uglier than usual. Of all the lop-sided scowls Carl had so far seen, this one was the most hideous.

“How did the freakin’ bastard know?” growled the SecDiv man. “How did he know to be here, waiting?”

Carl knew well enough that Pasco had been outguessed again. He didn’t know how, so he couldn’t answer the question, but in general terms it was obvious what had happened. Pasco hadn’t jumped out of that plane; he’d been pushed. Somehow, they had been set up. Somehow, they had been caused to deliver Kid Zero back into the tender care of his own kind.

“Ace the freakin’ Ace,” Pasco went on, spitting out the words as though they were poisonous. “It was Ace the Ace, without a single Low Number to back him up. The guy’s a geriatric has-been! It makes no sense—no freakin’ sense at all.”

While he spoke, Pasco was staring out at the northern horizon, and Carl realized that they had never heard any kind of explosion, or seen any great plume of smoke. Whatever holocaust Pasco had hoped to avoid by jumping had not happened.

As the helicopter came in to land, Carl realized that he’d be face to face with Dr Zarathustra very soon. He didn’t have the disc; he didn’t have the snake; and now he didn’t have Kid Zero—all he had to show for all his trouble was a busted ankle. It wasn’t going to do his career prospects any good at all.

The only comforting spark of brightness he could find to fasten on was the thought that this would probably be the very last time he would have to look at Ray Pasco’s acid-eaten face, and hear him say: “Aw, shit!”

5

When Homer Hegarty looked up from the pages of The World as Will and Idea and saw those pale blue eyes watching him from the spare bunk he was momentarily convinced that he was a dead man. He felt like a complete coward—not just because of what the Kid might have come to do to him, but because of what he’d earlier done to the Kid. But the Kid didn’t even have a gun in his hand.

“How do you do that?” asked Homer, a little hoarsely. “I’m half deaf, on account of spending too much time with earphones on and the sound of a copter’s engines howling up my ass, but those Delta Force boys are supposed to be good.”

“If they were any good,” the Kid pointed out, “they wouldn’t be guarding a trailer park in the middle of nowhere.”

Homer put the book down, and wondered if he dared to move. “You want a beer?” he said.

“Sure,” said the Kid.

Homer eased his legs off the bed and went to the ice-box. He wondered whether there was enough Dutch courage in a can of beer to help him to face the threat of violence without wincing, but decided that it didn’t matter. If the Kid had come to kill him, he probably wouldn’t get a chance to finish the can.

“I’m glad you got away, Kid,” he said, as he passed on the can. “I really am.”

“They wouldn’t have caught me in the first place,” the Kid pointed out. “If you hadn’t told GenTech that I’d been here.”

“You shouldn’t have given me the disc,” Homer told him. “It was too hot to hold. I’m a showman, Kid, not a hero. The kind of news I deal in isn’t the kind of news which changes anything. There was nothing I could do but cover my own ass. I’m sorry if I didn’t live up to your expectations, but my feet of clay go all the way up to my armpits. No balls, Kid—no balls at all.”

“I should have known,” said the Kid, sipping the cold beer. “I think I know better, now. How much do you know about what happened to me?”

“I heard that you paid a visit to the south pole—that Mitsu-Makema picked you up and then lost you again. The details are hazy, but I guess I got the gist. That software attack which Gen-Tech launched caused a lot of anxious talk—some people thought that M-M might reply in kind. We can all be glad that things went quiet again.”

“They may not stay that way,” said the Kid ominously.

“So why’d you come back?” asked Homer. “You want to settle the score?”

The Kid shook his head. “I came to hear the news,” he said. “The kind you don’t put out on the air. I figure that you probably get to hear things people don’t hear, and that you understand things better than most. I have a few little titbits for you, too—some for private use only.”

Homer sat back down on his own bunk, and looked at the Kid wearily.

“Quite frankly,” he said, “I’d just as soon you took it all to Lola Stechkin. Not that she could help you any, but I hate the bitch, and it might just give her a heart attack if you popped up in her apartment the way you keep popping up in here. If you want to do me a real big favour, you’ll make sure I never set eyes on you again.”

“It could be arranged,” said the Kid softly, “but it might cost you.”

Homer sighed. “Okay, Kid,” he said. “You’re mad, bad and dangerous to know—just promise me this is the last time, and I’ll tell you anything I can.”

“There are a couple of minor points,” said the Kid. “Firstly, this arrangement has got to be mutual. I don’t want to be a TV star any more. I don’t want to be the last of the true outlaws and the only free man in America. I want you to lay off me, Homer, after you tell one last story. In fact, I’d like you to announce my death.”

“They won’t believe it,” said Homer. “Not without a corpus delicate.”

“Just do your best,” said the Kid. “The story you can put it out is how Ace the Ace, the one-time leader of the Low Numbers, risked his life to pick me up after ugly Ray Pasco threw me out of an airplane with my hands and feet tied together. You make it clear that the Ace was a real hero, okay? You can put in as much fancy detail as you like—only you say that when I hoped on his pillion so that he could drive me off into the sunset I copped a bullet from Pasco’s magnum, and bled to death. The Ace is available for interview, and he’ll give you a real tear-jerking account of my last few minutes. You’ve never been fair to the Ace, Homer—Noe’s your chance to set the record straight and give him the break he deserves.”

Homer shook his head. “It ain’t going to convince the guys who care,” he said dolefully, “but I’ll do it if you want me too. I’ll look up the Ace tomorrow. What else?”

“I don’t want you to put it out on the air, but I’d like you to spread the whisper about the reason that Pasco threw me out of the plane and jumped after me.”

Homer cocked an eyebrow. “You got an explanation for that?” he said. “Whole world thinks the guy just went crazy with paranoia—thought that M-M was going to zap the plane with a sat-based laser.”

“That’s about it,” said the Kid. “But there’s one extra detail you might find amusing. I didn’t figure it out all at once, but I’m not so stupid I can’t put two and two together. You ever play the horrorshow booths?”

“Once or twice,” Homer admitted.

“You know the script where you’re on the plane that’s under attack from three sides at once and getting set to crash?”

“Sure,” said Homer. “It was a weak one, though—too much like all the other arcade games where you’re supposed to be in the cockpit guiding the plane in. The horrorshows didn’t really begin to get frightening until they started the streetstalker scenarios. What’s it got to do with Pasco?”

“Pasco is a horrorshow freak. He’s played them all. He’s even played them in his sleep—the ones which won’t be coining into the arcades…”

“Which ones are those?”

“The interactive ones, where the booths produce a top-quality illusion, backed up by a computer which can take in signals from your brain to modify its programme. Nothing supernatural—just picking up ordinary brain waves. It seems hat the brain is uncannily clever at forging a relationship with the machine. Pasco’s brain was even cleverer. M-M have a whole fleet of experimental booths wired up for this kind of two-way stuff, and Pasco was such a good subject they ran their entire battery of tapes by him while he was coming out of the deep sleep they put us all into when they hijacked us down to Antarctica. One of the scenarios they gave him was the plane coming in to land, with all kinds of data coming in about possible attacks. In the game scenario the plane eventually gets zapped by a laser from a skyball. M-M knew exactly how Pasco would react if they gave him a couple of cues at the right time—they knew far better than he did. They made him jump, and they tipped off the Ace to be waiting downstairs. Those guys don’t smile a lot, but they sure have a sense of humour.”

Homer nodded slowly. “That explains why the Maniax created a diversion for the birds,” he said. “I suppose you don’t know what the flock of model planes which overflew the base did? There were no explosions, and GenTech’s not saying.”

“Maybe they were only there to feed Pasco his cue,” said the Kid, with a shrug. “Maybe they were there to demonstrate to Gen-Tech that M-M could have paid them back for the raid on Antarctica, if they’d wanted to. That’s not important—just put the story about Pasco around. I want him bounced right out of GenTech, and SecDiv can’t afford to have him around if they think that M-M may be able to jerk his strings any time they please.”

“He’ll come after you,” Homer pointed out.

“But he’ll come on his own,” said the Kid. “On his own, he’s nothing—with GenTech behind him, he’d be dangerous.”

Homer shrugged. “Is that the lot?” he asked.

“Not quite,” said the Kid. “There’s still the news. I want to know the state of play between the corps. Where’s the war at, now that Mitsu-Makema have cooled things down again?”

“You think anyone takes the trouble to tell me?” asked Homer sarcastically. “Shit, Kid, their left hands don’t even tell their right hands what they’re doing.”

“A guy called Tanagawa told me that GenTech are getting close to owning the whole world—and that they’re going over the top in trying to push the other corps around. Is that true? An informed opinion will do.”

Homer pursed his lips. “Would that be Junichi Tanagawa?” he asked.

“That’s the one,” the Kid confirmed.

“You really talked to him?”

“Don’t stall me, Homer. You want me out of here, remember?”

Homer remembered. “There’s a rumour,” he said, slowly, “that Tanagawa is into some pretty heavy talks with Chromicon,” he said. “The word is hat GenTech are pretty pissed off about it. If I’d have to guess, I’d say that GenTech’s rivals are beginning to gang up against them. If they were looking to starting kicking the shit out of the other corps, I’d hazard a guess that they’ll have to back off a bit now. Partly because they lost whatever was on the disc, partly because they couldn’t administer a tough enough lesson to M-M. They have a lot to hold against you, Kid—I hope you can take the heat?”

The Kid nodded, slowly. “It’s a good question,” he admitted. “But I came out of his with new friends as well as angrier enemies. I figure that the stakes have got a lot higher, but the game’s still the same. You want to know what was on the disc that GenTech were desperate to keep to themselves?”

Homer finished off the beer and crushed the can in his fist. When it came to beer cans, he was a real strong man. “Not really” he said. “You’ve given me more than enough—knowing too much can get a guy iced. Like I said before, I’d be happy if you’d just stay away from me. You’re so hot I could easily get burned. I’m not a hero, Kid. I manufacture them, but I’m not stupid enough to be one. Heroes die young.”

“You already avoided that,” the Kid pointed out.

“And I want to keep on avoiding it,” Homer said. “I know I have to die one day, but I don’t want to do it for a long time yet.”

“Is GenTech trying to take over the whole world?” asked the Kid suddenly.

Homer shrugged, though he didn’t feel very care-free. “Aren’t they all?” he answered.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the name of the game,” Homer told him. “Power breeds power, success breeds ambition. It’s an old, old story. All empires expand, and the faster they expand the greedier they get. The corps are no different—it’s just that their version of Alexander the Great is a committee in dark suits. Whatever they have can never be enough—they want it all. But they can never have it, Kid, because there’s just too much of it. The iron law of oligarchy cuts both ways. Only a small number of people can actually run things, but what they can feasibly run is bounded too. You can own your back garden because you can see it, walk across it and work it in any way you want to. An org can own a whole city, maybe even a little nation—but the more anybody owns, the less control they have over it. Maybe GenTech could own the world, on paper—but it would still be the world, full of uncontrollable factors, and full of outlaws. For the likes of you and me, it doesn’t matter a damn who owns the world, Kid. Our lives will still be the same.”

“Tanagawa told me that GenTech might be heavily influenced, if not actually controlled, by a bunch of crazies called the Temple,” said the Kid, matter-of-factly. “He says that they’re fanatics who intend to wipe out the whole human race—to bring about the apocalypse.”

“Do you believe him?” asked Homer.

“Do you?” countered the Kid.

“I’m a TV man,” said Homer. “I don’t believe my own mother when she tells me it’s time for tea. But you might care to bear in mind that Mr Tanagawa is the one who’s building underground Arks, not GenTech. You want my advice, Kid, you’ll forget it. The world might end tomorrow, but the only way we can live our lives is to assume that it won’t. There’s nothing the likes of you and me can do about anything at all, Kid, except try to make sure that we have a stock of cold beer in the fridge. Go cultivate your garden, Kid, and try to get a few laughs along the way. That’s all there is and all there ever can be.”

The Kid looked across at the book which Homer had laid down on his pillow. “It doesn’t look like science fiction,” he said irrelevantly.

“I don’t like science fiction,” Homer told him. “It’s too damn realistic for my taste. Beneath this careworn exterior I have the heart of an old man. This is Schopenhauer. They used to call him the great pessimist, because he pointed out that anyone who looks at the world without rose-tinted glasses on has to recognize that opportunities for having a really lousy time far outnumber opportunities for enjoying yourself.”

“Did anybody ever doubt it?” asked the Kid.

“Not me,” Homer told him. “Schopenhauer reckoned that we wouldn’t be able to keep going at all if it wasn’t for some blind and stupid will to live which drives us on in spite of the odds being stacked against us. Trouble is, he said, once we become enlightened we begin to see what a dumb asshole that blind will to live really is—then, we have to use our brains to come up with some Idea that will keep us going regardless. You got an Idea, Kid, to keep you going?”

“Yes,” said the Kid. “I have.”

Homer sighed. “Well, Kid,” he said, “you’re one up on me. Good luck to you.”

“You’re not a ghost dancer at all,” observed the Kid. “You don’t have that much conviction.”

“No,” admitted Homer, without feeling any urge to congratulate himself about it. “I’m no ghost dancer. Nobody in his right mind is.”

“I am,” said the Kid.

“I know,” said Homer, not even certain in his own mind whether he should try to sound contemptuous or envious. “I know.”

6

Carl was astonished when Dr Zarathustra turned up at his quarters. It was not simply an unprecedented event but one hardly imaginable—as though the mountain had, for once, decided to come to the man. Carl couldn’t actually manage to stand up, but moved as though to put his feet on the floor instead of the couch. The scientist instructed him, by means of a cursory hand gesture, to remain as he was, so he contented himself with switching off the TV.

“I’ve read your report,” said Zarathustra, even before he had realigned the chair to his satisfaction and sat down upon it.

“Oh,” said Carl dolefully. “I let you down—I’m sorry.”

“It appears from all the evidence that the major fault was not yours,” said the bioscientist, calmly. “Mr Pasco’s tendency to rely on his impulses seems to have led him consistently astray. The Security Division were wise to dispense with his services.”

“He’ll go after Kid Zero,” Carl predicted, realizing as he said it that SecDiv probably knew that perfectly well. Firing Ray Pasco was like firing a missile—an effective way of getting things done, provided that the launcher was pointed in the right direction. But he felt forced to add: “He won’t get him. The Kid’s too slippery, even without the snake.”

“One more childish vendetta,” said the Doc, “will hardly make any difference to the way the world is going. The failure to recover my data might well make a difference, but when personal pride and vulgar commercial interests are set aside—as they must be, now—the consequences might be more benign than disastrous. There are times when I am not entirely certain that my loyalties to the cause of science are reconcilable with the loyalties which I owe to GenTech.”

Carl blinked, and couldn’t help looking round. If the room was bugged at all, the bug was probably feeding its signal to an automatic recorder which would never be inspected, but that didn’t mean that it was safe to indulge in careless talk.

Nevertheless, he said: “Are you in trouble with the boardroom suits, Doc?”

The Doc permitted himself an uncharacteristic wan smile. “We’re all out of favour just now,” he said. “But yes, I suppose you could say that I’m in trouble. You might be glad about that—the fact that Mr Pasco and I are taking the lion’s share of our masters’ displeasure may help to deflect attention from you.”

“Does that mean I get to keep my job?” asked Carl uncertainly. He had been on the brink of asking a much more delicate question, about Bro and the possibility of making whole armies of poisonous soldiers just like him, and whether Doc Zarathustra had really tried to hide that possibility from his own bosses by simply failing to call it to their attention until the secret was out and therefore useless. But there were some things which simply could not be said within the ear-filled walls of a GenTech establishment—and maybe oughtn’t to be said anywhere, by sane and sensible men.

“We both get to keep our jobs,” the Doc told him. “No matter how displeased my masters are, they know that I am indispensable—and I know that you are as trustworthy a man as I could hope to see in your position. We both have to pick up the pieces, and get on with our work.”

“Thanks,” said Carl, surprised by the depth of his own relief. “And thanks for coming to tell me.”

“There are a couple of points in your report which I wanted to check with you,” said Zarathustra, suddenly back in his usual businesslike groove.

“Fire away,” said Carl, confident now that he wouldn’t be taken too literally.

“According to Kid Zero,” said the scientist, “the scientists at Mitsu-Makema think that the rise in the mutation rate may be due to the arrival on earth of alien DNA.”

“That’s what he said,” Carl confirmed. “He didn’t elaborate.” He remembered clearly enough, though, that the Kid had added a few more comments, which he had thought it more diplomatic to exclude from his report.

“It’s possible, of course, that this is disinformation,” said Zarathustra. “Perhaps he was told this in order to pass it on to us, so that our attention would be deflected away from more profitable lines of conjecture.”

Carl initially assumed that the scientist was talking to himself, but the pregnant pause which followed soon made him aware that he was expected to respond to these speculations in some way.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I can’t believe that Mitsu-Makema expected us to spring the Kid the way we did. They may be subtle, but they’re not that subtle.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Zarathustra. “I think you’re probably right, but I also think that the Machiavellian minds of the directors may see things differently. It is conceivable, I suppose, that taking possession of my data was only one of the reasons why they seized the boy—it is conceivable that they actually wanted to provoke the attack which was subsequently launched against their Antarctic base.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Carl.

“Simply to test their defences, perhaps—but I think it more likely that they wanted an excuse to hit back at us. They wanted to hurt us, but they did not want to be seen to strike the first blow. I suspect that they wanted to injure GenTech’s reputation as well as its research—to make GenTech look like the villains of the piece, in order to encourage others to favour their cause over ours.”

“It’s too deep for me,” confessed Carl. “Anyway, they didn’t hit back, did they? I thought that was the whole point—their seeming attack on the base was just a trick, to help Kid Zero gel away.”

“Alas no,” said Zarathustra. “That, I fear, was the real subtlety. The attack was very real, and quite unexpected. The immediate inclination of our masters seems to be towards secrecy—they are reluctant to tell the world exactly what did happen in order to avoid further embarrassment.”

“What did they do?” asked Carl wonderingly.

Zarathustra reached into his pocket and produced a handful of objects which looked like lengths of twisted wire. They were about half an inch long and a tenth of an inch thick, and they had what looked like blobs of glass at either end.

“What are they?” asked Carl.

“Vermiform robots,” answered Zarathustra. “A remarkably sophisticated exercise in microminiaturization. They were dropped all over the base by those apparently-innocuous toy airplanes as they passed over the compound. They were programmed to burrow deep into the soil.”

“Bugs,” said Carl, catching the scientist’s drift. “They’re like the things that Carey Castle sent through the walls in the Underground—except that these don’t have to trail a wire all the way back to home base in order to get a signal back. They’ve got some kind of inbuilt transmitter—but that would mean that we’d be able to detect them as soon as they became active.”

“True,” said Zarathustra. “But we wouldn’t be able to stop the initial data-pulse being sent and received. We’ve located a few hundred of the things, but there must be hundreds more—possibly thousands—lying dormant under the base. One by one they can work their way back to the surface during the next few months—or years—and each one is potentially capable of giving M-M a glimpse of what we’re doing here. The chances of their getting anything substantial out are slim, but they’re not negligible. The danger is just sufficient to have considerable nuisance value. We may have to move the entire base to a new location if we can’t devise an adequate defence. We probably can, but it will take time, and time is a valuable commodity here. We have men working on it already—men who might be doing more constructive work.”

Carl thought about it for a moment or two, and added: “I bet we have other men working on our next play. I bet we have men trying to think up a practical joke which is just as underhanded, just as subtle and just as dirty.”

“I’m sure that we have,” said Zarathustra quietly.

“But not you,” said Carl. “You’re still working on the mutants, aren’t you?”

The scientist shook his head. “I’ve turned it over to someone else for now,” he said. “All my data on the subject is public property—it’s probably time for some fresh ideas. I’m going back to what I do best: human engineering. Whatever the mutants are, that’s the way to counter any threat they may pose. Control over the genetic process is the only way to protect ourselves against genetic damage, whether the damage is random disease or alien attack. If the war between the corporations is going to escalate, we’re going to need much better ways to protect our frail flesh against all the ways that modern science has to hurt it.”

“Is the war between the corps hotting up?” asked Carl, again anxious about what it might be safe to be heard to say or to be known to know. Silently, he cursed Kid Zero’s big mouth, and the curiosity which had been awakened in him by all that the Kid had told him while they were making their slow way back from Antarctica.

“Warmongers move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform,” said the Doc sourly. “Who would tell us, if it were so?”

Carl looked reflexively around again, as he always did when he was about to commit an unforgivable indiscretion. It didn’t help, but it still seemed somehow necessary.

“Doc,” he said, “who, exactly, are we working for?”

“Mankind,” Zarathustra told him. “Our children, and our children’s children. All the people of the future.”

“No,” said Carl unhappily. “That’s not what I mean. Who really pays our wages? The boardroom suits are just managers—employees like you and me. Who really pulls the strings, Doc? Who actually owns GenTech?” It was, he thought, a sufficiently hypothetical question not to cause too much alarm if anyone was listening—or, more likely, if anyone ever got around to playing back the tape.

Dr Zarathustra looked at him in a peculiar way, which spoke of suspicions too deep and complicated to fathom. “The shareholders,” said the Doc eventually. “Of whom, it is said, there are too many to count.”

“Which may be true, in theory,” Carl persisted. “Except that most of them don’t do anything at all except draw their dividends—but someone, somewhere, decides policy. Someone, somewhere, is running this war against Mitsu-Makema and Chromicon—not to mention the mafia, and I don’t know who else. Who decides, Doc? Whose war is it, and why do we let them use us to fight it?”

“I don’t know whose war it is,” said Zarathustra straightforwardly. “But I know why I let them use me to fight it—because I have a war of my own to fight, against ignorance and impotence, against the perishability of human life. GenTech creates the conditions in which I can fight my war, so I let them fight theirs. It’s not really a war, you know, Carl—it’s only commercial competition.”

Carl hesitated, wondering if he dared ask the next question—and, if so, how to phrase it. Finally, he said: “Sometimes I worry about the number of crazies there are in the world, Doc. People like the Josephites. Sometimes I ask myself whether there are so many people out there who can’t wait for the world to end that they might actually contrive to end it.”

It wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t even a real question—but it was as much as Carl dared to say. There was no way in the world he was going to mention the word “Temple”.

“There’s enough to be afraid of without conjuring up phantoms of the imagination,” Zarathustra told him. “If people like that had real power, the world might be in one hell of a mess, but people with power tend to become so intently interested in the affairs of this world that they forget all about the next—for which we should all be profoundly grateful. On the other hand it is much easier to maim people than improve them, and it’s much easier to make the material world into Hell than into Heaven. Unless the people who run things really want to make things better, things will get worse. That’s inevitable.”

Carl looked down at his hands, for no particular reason. “You’re right,” he admitted. “I know that. But I don’t know who’s running the world nowadays—and the way things are going, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to take it on trust that their main motive is to make things better, would you?”

“Mine is,” Zarathustra assured him. “They hire me to do it.”

“But sometimes,” said Carl, wishing that his ankle didn’t hurt so much, “things go wrong—like they did with Mary and Bro. Sometimes I wonder whether trying to figure out ways to make people better is a dangerous business, because whatever can be used to make people better can also be used destructively. Didn’t that guy who made the first atom bomb say something about scientists learning the meaning of sin?”

Zarathustra’s blue-eyed stare never wavered, It was much brighter and much steadier than Kid Zero’s stare, which seemed weak and mean by comparison.

“Carl,” said the Doc, “in science there is no sin except stupidity.”

Carl shivered suddenly, and was subject to a most remarkable momentary hallucination, in which it seemed that Zarathustra’s features became blurred because another face was superimposed upon his, like a translucent mask.

The other face was Bro’s face, as Carl had seen it in that desperate moment when Bro had figured out what had happened to him.

The image was gone in an instant, but it left Carl with an unreasonably creepy feeling of deja vu—almost as though, perhaps in some mysterious former incarnation, he had lived the moment before. He cast about for something else to say, in order to rescue himself from the shock and the misery.

“Did you know that Mitsu-Makema is building underground Arks?” he asked unhappily. “Hidey-holes secure enough to come through any imaginable catastrophe.”

“So I’ve heard,” said the scientist.

“But we’re not,” said Carl. “Are we?”

“Not as far as I know,” agreed Zarathustra. “But that might only mean that we don’t think we’ll need them.”

Carl nodded again, and let out a long and quiet sigh.

“You could quit,” Zarathustra pointed out. “Maybe you could get a job with M-M, if you want to know that there’s an Ark available come the day of the deluge.”

“Yeah,” said Carl sourly. “Maybe.”

“We do what we can, Carl,” said Zarathustra softly. “We all do what we can.”

“Sure,” said Carl, in a lacklustre fashion. He couldn’t disagree. Everyone did what he could, and what he thought was best. But even as he said it to himself, he couldn’t help thinking of Kid Zero, out there in the desert, plotting his next act of vengeful, meaningless destruction, with Ray Pasco on his trail.

We do what we can, he thought. The trouble with the world is that most of us can’t do anything at all—and the only way some of us can display the fact that we exist is to destroy what other people make and what other people have. That’s the last and least of all the kinds of freedom—and if the people who exercise it are really the only free men in America, what hope can there be for the Doc’s better world?

“Take your time, Carl,” said the Doc gently. “When your ankle’s healed, come back to work. We have a great deal to do—more than you can possibly imagine.”

Epilogue: The Last Laugh

Sasumu Yokoi looked out of the viewport at the all-white landscape beyond. Snow was falling in huge, gentle flakes which floated slowly to earth, undisturbed by any breath of wind. It was a peaceful sight, whose contemplation soothed his mind into a state of holy calm. He did not look away even when Junichi Tanagawa spoke to him—though the director’s tone left no doubt that his fullest attention was required. He did not need to see the two identical objects which lay on the polished desk, reunited after their very different journeys.

“The order of things is restored,” Tanagawa said. “A new balance has been struck, which has the ring of harmony in it.”

“I am glad,” said Yokoi, sincerely. “When matters of business go well, matters of science make progress. You are satisfied, I take it, that your deception has been completely successful—GenTech’s directors now believe that their takeover of the American government is incomplete, and that they still have an important enemy within.”

“I am satisfied,” Tanagawa confirmed. “The mafia families sincerely believe that they have been recruited to a patriotic project, and while the families believe it, GenTech will also believe it. One day, of course, they will see through our masquerade—but in the meantime, they have drawn in their horns; they dare not commit themselves to further aggressive expansion while there is any hint of rottenness at the core of their empire. And when, in the fullness of time, they realize what we have done, they will find us stronger, and better able to stand against their wrath. It will be necessary then to seek a new and better balance, but if fortune favours us, it will be possible to do it.”

“I congratulate you, Tanagawa-san,” said Yokoi dutifully. “The honour of the company is well served by the cleverness of your management.”

“Now it is your turn, Dr Yokoi,” replied the director. “Your matters of science must make progress, and very quickly. The true war is the war for empire over the minds of men, and yours is the battlefield to which Mitsu-Makema has undertaken to commit its greatest resources.”

“You will have the best of me, Tanagawa-san,” said Yokoi. “Be assured of it. All that I can do, I will do for Mitsu-Makema.”

“I am certain of it,” Tanagawa conceded. “Have you had time enough to reach a conclusion in the matter of the snake?”

“I have,” said Yokoi. “I have, alas, been forced to the conclusion that it is a perfectly ordinary snake. There is not the slightest trace of any genetic or neurophysiological abnormality.”

“Why alas?” asked Tanagawa, with a peculiarly grave levity. “It is an answer to the question which was posed. Its implication is perfectly clear.”

“But we no longer have the boy,” Yokoi pointed out. “We allowed him to be taken. If he, and not the snake, is the mutant…surely we should have held him here.”

“Not at all,” said Tanagawa, airily. “Had we done so, a new balance would have been so much harder to achieve, and there would have been little chance of harmony. The boy will come back to us, of his own free will—what else can he do?”

“If you say that it is so,” said Yokoi, “then I must believe it. And yet—he has a certain unpredictable quality which makes me less than confident in saying that I know him.”

“He has the best reason in the world for returning to us,” said Tanagawa serenely. “We owe him money.”

“Of course,” Yokoi admitted. “And yet…you do not think, I take it, that there is any possibility that he knows? You are certain that he does not suspect, even after we told him so much while putting on our careful show of honesty and generosity, that he might be the alien rather than his pet?”

“He cannot suspect it,” said Tanagawa, in a tone which forbade his companion to disbelieve it. “He is only a boy, after all, and what we told him was just so much dazzling light to the feeble eye of his intellect. He cannot have the remotest suspicion of what he might be—in his own eyes he is a blank, a mystery, a zero. He will return to us; logic and harmony demand it, and in the fullness of time, the ends of logic and harmony are always served by fate.”

Dr Yokoi watched the snowflakes falling, marvelling as he always did in the knowledge that every one was made up of thousands of smaller crystals, each one six-limbed, perfectly symmetrical, and yet unique. He composed a silent haiku to celebrate the astonishing ingenuity of nature, and wondered why it was that the same neatness and symmetry were nowhere to be found in the as-yet-accessible reaches of the human mind.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Painted Desert, Kid Zero squatted down in front of a cool hollow beneath a stony ledge. He extended his hand towards the watchful snake which waited there, ignoring the loud rattle which bade him urgently to beware. It was as though he were offering to shake hands, though the only things with which the snake could grip him were its poisoned fangs.

When he would not withdraw, the snake struck.

The Kid accepted the bite unflinchingly, bringing his hand unhurriedly back in order to examine the twin punctures on the flap of skin connecting his thumb and forefinger. He put his lips to the wound and licked away the beads of blood which oozed from the wounds. Already he was beginning to feel giddy, but he was not afraid. The snake’s venom was biodegradable, and his body had already learned how to break it down and render it harmless. It would hurt a little, but it would also be intoxicating. He would not die; he would not even sleep.

He fixed the snake with his hypnotic gaze, and watched it calmly while it got thoroughly used to the sight and reek of him.

“There we are, old lady,” he murmured, very quietly. “Now we’ve been properly introduced. We’re going to be friends, you and I—and this time, there won’t be just the two of us. This time, we’re going to be a gang… maybe even an org. We’re going to see exactly what might be made of us, with the aid of a lot of ambition and a little daring. You’re the first of many, and your job is to help me figure out just how invulnerable this ghost shirt of mine might be.”

The snake, needless to say, did not reply—but that didn’t bother the Kid. He wasn’t particularly keen on talkative types, and he could supply enough lines himself to keep the conversation going.

“It could be really interesting,” he said, with quiet confidence. “It could be the beginning of something very, very weird. Like I told Homer, I’ve got an Idea, and it’s a bigger Idea than he ever could have guessed. As yet, I don’t know what kind of mutant I am, or what I might be able to do—but I’m sure as hell going to find out. And you’re going to help me, aren’t you, old lady?”

He shook his head, because the poison which had been injected into his hand was making him deliciously drunk.

And then he laughed.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Boy and His Snake

Part One: Out of the Horrorshow, Into the Fire

Part Two: The Unspeakable in Hot Pursuit

Part Three: Kid Zero in Wonderland

Part Four: No Sin Except Stupidity

Epilogue: The Last Laugh