CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

by Tom Purdom

The author tells us that “some Philadelphia SF readers have recently formed a Tom Purdom Reading Club, which means they read something I’ve written and then discuss it with me over dinner. I’m not sure how it will turn out, but I feel about the same way Isaac Asimov did when he discovered universities were scheduling courses in The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov.” After reading the next story, the club may want to join him in a discussion about the perilous lengths a NIMBY protest could take in the not too distant future.

It was a perfect launch. Perfect. I slowed the car to five miles an hour. I opened the window. And out went the bird. Right at the moment the screen said we were crossing launch zero. The car didn’t run slow more than twenty seconds.

Bud Weldon’s floppypet had gone berserk while he was eating dinner. First it made two random dashes across the dining room. Then it connected with the shelves that held Bud’s ceramics. The big ceramic elephant he had shaped during his thirty-second year in prison hit the floor along with four other pieces. Bud had stood up yelling orders—incoherent orders, probably, but he said they were orders—and his faithful, never-failing source of affection had zeroed in on him. First at his ankles. Then for his face.

Bud’s pacification implant reacted seconds after he started yelling and his prison reflexes apparently kicked in with it. He picked up a chair. He backed out of the house. He called for help. And now his house was a mess. And his floppypet had a police bullet hole in its processor.

Floppypets were machines but people didn’t think of them that way. Bud had bonded with his just like he was supposed to. It had responded to him in ways no dog or cat could have and he had responded right back. You might know a floppypet was only a collection of circuits and programmed responses, in the same way you might suspect an animal was just offering you a routine that only looked like affection, but you did what humans had always done. And let your emotions take over.

Van Levanti understood Bud’s feelings but he didn’t think the police sergeant did. The sergeant was a muscular young guy, probably only a little over forty, almost certainly unmarried. The only cuddly things the sergeant was interested in, Van was confident, were human and female. He’d probably be surprised to learn some of their responses didn’t mean what he thought they did.

“You’d think a guy like that would be tougher,” the cop said.

“You don’t get a lot of affection in prison,” Van said.

“Sixty-six years.”

“From the time he was twenty-four.”

“That’s a long time to go without it.”

The cop was sitting in his three-wheeler on Bud’s lawn. Most of the bystanders were staying on the other side of the street. Van figured the crowd totaled fifty so far. A dozen bolder souls had crossed the street and lodged themselves in front of a barrier patrolled by two police robies. The robies had blocked two boys who had tried to slip through the barrier, but they were still using their female voices.

Van had a picture of Bud’s dining room window superimposed on the lower right corner of his visual field. Van’s wife was doing her half of the job back at their house and she had turned her attention to the information recorded on Bud’s security system. She had found what she was looking for as soon as she zeroed in on the five minutes just before the floppypet went psycho. She ordered a rerun of the recording and Van watched a bird dart into the scene and scratch at the window with its wings flapping like overcharged machines.

“That’s got to be it,” Rosa said. “A virus like that had to be transmitted close range. You can transmit it long range if you’ve got a really powerful transmitter but close range with an organic carrier fits the pattern better. Tell the sergeant he should look for a dead bird. I checked the species and the energy requirements. If we assume the bird came in from outside the development, a rig like that would probably die before it got half a mile from its delivery point. I’m looking at a search zone for the road, too.”

Van kept the connection open so Rosa could hear him talking to the sergeant. He had connected with Rosa as soon as they heard about Bud’s problem. They would probably stay connected for the next few hours. They only connected, normally, when they had something, to share but a situation like this obviously called for a deviation from their standard arrangements.

Van knew couples who stayed connected round the clock but he and Rosa had decided that was a bad idea two hours after they had acquired their first communication implants. He had never met a constantly connected couple who had been married seventy-three years. He didn’t think he ever would.

The sergeant shook his head. “You want me to make that kind of effort over this?”

Van wasn’t surprised. It was the way most cops reacted to mischief incidents. Mischief geeks counted on it. They could drive somebody crazy for months knowing nobody in the power structure would listen to the victim’s pleas. It was only mischief. It wasn’t something serious.

“It happened to Bud,” Van said.

“We’re supposed to treat him the same way we’d treat anybody else. What do we do if we find the bird? Scan it for fingerprints?”

“I’ll hire somebody to do it,” Rosa said. “The budget can take it.”

The caseworker had arrived while Van had been talking to the sergeant. Bud was sitting on a chair somebody had brought out of the house and the caseworker was standing in front of him. Van blipped her a connection request and the caseworker let him listen in while she asked Bud all the standard questions.

Bud still wasn’t convinced the cops had to shoot his pet. He brought the subject up every time he answered a question and the caseworker let him run on. Van noted that she didn’t try to comfort Bud by reminding him the floppypet had a complete memory backup in storage. Rosa had tried the equivalent of that approach when their daughter’s cat had died many years ago. We’ll get you another one, Rosa had said in her rational way. Van had realized that was a blunder as soon as Rosa said it.

Bud claimed he felt fine and Van had to admit he looked like he always did—a big, soft guy with a round open face, a bland ambling type who would never launch a blow at anyone, much less kill a cop. He just needed to straighten things up, Bud told the caseworker. He just needed help straightening things up.

“I’ve contracted a search tech,” Rosa said. “He’ll be there in twenty minutes with three birds. I told him to report directly to you.”

I rode around for three hours after the launch and I didn’t log in once. I watched the news, I even made myself watch a movie. If anybody ever checked the car’s black box, the only unusual thing on it would be that little multi-second slow down.

I didn’t look at the reaction until I was sitting in my own bedroom. And then I just browsed. I didn’t need to say anything. They were discussing the Bud Experiment on fifty different sites by then. My little escapade was Topic Number One on every one of them.

The caseworker felt Bud was staying calm because of the pacifier. Underneath it, he was seething with rage.

“I’ve arranged for a cleaning crew,” the caseworker said. “That’s standard practice. There’s no special treatment involved. We should get Bud inside as soon as they get the place straightened up. We should keep him there until he’s had time to settle down.”

Bud had his own opinion. He had been taking a bicycle ride every evening after dinner and he didn’t want to miss it. The exercise would actually make him feel better, in his opinion.

They had connected with the psychiatrist the state Board of Prisons had assigned to the project and the psychiatrist supported the caseworker. “You shouldn’t let yourself be misled by Bud’s outward affect,” the psychiatrist said. “It isn’t just the pacifier. You could talk to him for days in normal social settings and never see a trace of the emotions he’s containing.”

The chatterheads were already having their say, too, as always. Van had added a sample monitor to his display while he was talking to the sergeant and the program was feeding him statistics and sample quotes. The Bud Experiment had attracted over three hundred thousand commentators at last count, with 38 percent pro, 41 percent violently anti.

We’re all supposed to sink into depression just because poor Buddy lost his cuddle machine?

Officer Roskovich died. A seven-year-old kid died. That’s all there is to it. There isn’t anything else.

Most of the antis, as usual, underlined their vehemence by appending pictures of Mark Allen and Mary Roskovich—the kid Bud had killed when he had played his own little prank and the police officer he had stabbed with a kitchen knife when he had assaulted the cops who had visited his apartment. And what anti could resist crowing over the justice of it? Hadn’t sweet old Bud been a mischief himself ?

Do we have to remind all you forgiveness addicts his idea of fun was a wee bit nastier than a machine that broke a few dishes? The wasps Buddy put together in his little biohack lab weren’t some kind of Halloween trick.

To which the pros answered with the same catalog their side always used. Bud’s wasps were only supposed to kill a dog. Bud hadn’t known the woman who snubbed him on the river bicycle path had a kid who visited her every two weeks. Bud couldn’t have known the kid liked to sleep in the patio in October. He didn’t know Mark was going to pet the dog when he designed the wasps so they would zero in on dog scent. It had been an accident, unintended homicide. Etc. Etc.

Van had seen a thousand changes in his lifetime, but one thing seemed to remain constant. People had an infinite capacity for repeating the same arguments over and over.

You don’t keep people in prison for hundreds of years for an unintended homicide.

He killed a cop.

Anybody could have lost control in that situation.

He’s a creep who got mad at a woman who snubbed him.

He spent sixty-six years in prison. How long are we supposed to keep him there?

Let him spend a thousand.

Let him die.

Van marked the cyclist in the red jacket sixteen minutes after he and Rosa started following Bud down the bike path. Van and Rosa were staying twenty-five yards behind Bud and the red jacket had settled in a hundred yards behind them. It wasn’t the color Van would have chosen if he had been planning to shadow someone but the red jacket was maintaining the position as if they were all rolling down the pavement in formation.

Rosa was monitoring the search tech as she pedaled. The search tech had released his birds ten minutes after he had arrived on the scene. He and Van had slipped into the shrubbery corner in Bud’s back yard and the tech had plotted a low-level search pattern that would carry his birds over the yards and fences within half a mile of Bud’s dining room window. The cops would have needed a search warrant for something like that. A private busybody just did it.

The bike path was part of a bike and cartway network that ran through the entire development. In another year, three thousand “higher income” people would be living here in well-maintained isolation, eighty-two miles from the nearest metropolitan center, with a state park for their northern border and a single road to their south. The people who were living here now were enjoying a level of luxury most of them would never experience again.

Van still had trouble believing several million adults could make their living guinea pigging in sociological simulations. Rosa claimed it was the kind of thing people should have expected, but he still shook his head when he thought of it. Rosa’s first Ph.D. had been a degree in economics and she could roll out the figures. Only 5 percent of the population now worked in agriculture and manufacturing—in jobs where you actually produced something you could hold in your hand. That was all it took to produce every man-made thing he could see around them. Everybody else worked at something else. And most of them were doing things nobody had ever thought of. It had been going on ever since the industrial revolution had hit the textile industry in eighteenth century England, Rosa had told him at least once a year over the course of their marriage. And somehow we keep coming up with new kinds of work.

Every person he saw around him, on a bicycle, on a bench, stepping into a restaurant, was living here at the expense of the state government, on salary, just so they could react to Bud’s presence. What did you do with prisoners like Bud when a life sentence without parole could mean they could still be sitting in their cells two hundred years after they were sentenced? Or a thousand, the way things were going? How would the populace react? Would people really accept all the testimonies the psychiatrists signed? And the safeguards they claimed they had embedded?

Van slipped into alert mode as soon as he saw the two cyclists coming up on his left. He zoomed in on them with the rear view camera built into his helmet and resisted the urge to relax when he noted they were a couple. They whipped past him like a pair of standard issue maximum-exercise types, heads low, legs working like pistons.

They stopped acting like stereotypes when they rolled even with Bud. The man gave Bud a mocking little wave. The woman said something Van couldn’t make out. They shifted to the right, directly in front of Bud, and slowed to a crawl.

Van speeded up. Bud tried to go around the couple and they shifted left and blocked his way. The woman looked back and laughed.

“You need to slow down, granddad. You’re going to strain yourself.”

Van pulled up beside Bud. A quick scan verified that Bud’s cheeks were tinged with pink. His back had acquired a noticeable droop. The caseworker and the psychiatrist had made the right call. The pink tinge and the hangdog slouch were clear signs Bud’s pacification implant had been activated—and that only happened when Bud was becoming dangerous. The implant was the last defense against the homicidal rage that had overwhelmed Bud’s self-control, all those decades ago, when the police had told him he was facing a murder charge.

It was one of those moments when Van could have used a little help dealing with his feelings about the bureaucrats who had written his job description. In theory, he and Rosa were supposed to let things happen. That was the whole point of the experiment, after all. On the other hand, the “responsible officials” were well aware “certain outcomes” could have a serious effect on their job security. His immediate supervisors would not be at all happy, for example, if the experiment had to be terminated because someone had killed the principal subject. Or vice versa.

The woman’s use of the word “granddad” indicated this might mostly be an age thing. There were a lot of young people who were beginning to realize their elders were going to be dominating the scene for as far ahead as anyone could see. If that was all it was … if it was just impulsive harassment….

“Behind me,” Rosa said. “On my left.”

Van activated his helmet camera and saw the red jacket charging past Rosa like a racer making a break from the rear. The rider had even lowered the kind of plastic windscreen racers fitted over their faces so they could gain that extra bit of streamlining that cut another millisecond off their time.

He had about three seconds to react, at the speed the rider was going, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been given three hours. He didn’t have any firm evidence they were being attacked until he saw the oncoming hotshot stop pedaling and straighten up.

He caught a brief glimpse of a wide-eyed face gaping at him through the windscreen. A red jacketed arm stretched across his chest. A spray of orange mist shot toward Bud. A thin orange cloud surrounded Bud’s face.

Bud let out a yell. His bicycle lurched forward. He crashed into the female harasser and grabbed at her clothes as the two bicycles tilted over.

Van swerved to the left, to avoid hitting the pileup. He squeezed his brake levers as if he was trying to wring the water out of the metal and let his bike clatter to the pavement between his legs. The rider in the red jacket was standing up on the pedals and bouncing across the grass beside the bike path.

Bud had broken his own fall by putting his foot down. He was swinging his arms toward the back of the woman bicylist’s skull with his big hands locked into a club. His bland Bud face had been replaced by a red mask that looked like it had been etched into his skin by all the bile he had accumulated over sixty-six years of confinement.

Van twisted out of his bicycle frame. Bud was six-two, Van was five-eight, and Bud had sixty pounds of bulk on him. But Van had been grunting and heaving one hour a day, four days a week, since he had turned fifty. His shoulder slammed into a soft stomach and the two of them stumbled away from the bike pileup in exactly the way Van had assumed they would when he had sized Bud up before he accepted the job.

He hopped back and fell into an unarmed on guard position. He had seen that kind of mask before. You couldn’t stop somebody in that condition with a few blocks. You couldn’t even assume a broken leg would stop them. The spray that had enveloped Bud’s head had obviously neutralized the pacifier and uncaged all the demons the pacifier had been restraining.

Bud’s face changed. His shoulders slumped. The pacifier chemical kicked in again and the bright red faded to the pink induced by the chemical’s side effects.

Rosa stopped her bike on Van’s right. She gave Van a quick appraisal and turned her attention to the mess behind his back.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” Rosa said. “You’d better get Bud out of here.”

Van checked out the scene in his rear view camera. Bud’s swing had apparently connected. The woman was sprawled over her bicycle on her hands and knees. Her boyfriend was crouching beside her with his eyes fixed on Bud.

Four bikers had already pulled up behind Rosa. More people were hurrying toward them from the benches along the bikeway.

I realized I was being used as soon as I heard about it, of course. It’s one of the risks you run when you become a mischief. You get some good escapades behind you and people offer you money and really good gear. Mostly it’s the gear. And the chance to do something you could never do on your own. So I can’t make excuses. I went into it knowing I was joining forces with people who had their own program. But I didn’t know they were that serious. My escapade was just a setup as far as they were concerned. Just something to build up a lot of pressure in Bud’s head. So he’d be all primed when they sprayed him with the antidote to the pacification molecule. He could have killed that woman.

The governor’s point man for the Bud Experiment was a wispy close-to-the-chest political operator named Jerry Steinman. He had been given the job, Van had decided, because there was no danger he would forget that the governor’s political career merited a higher priority than the results of the experiment. The governor had been willing to give the experiment a try. He would look very good if it worked. It would save the taxpayers a mountain of money. The governor would add a little more weight to his image as the kind of leader who was willing to try new things. But he could also show people he was the kind of leader who could drop an experiment that didn’t work.

“You’re bucking a very strong negative,” Steinman said.

They had all looked at the stuff on the chatter screens. The antis were hammering at the obvious argument—an argument that was as old as the first years of the digital era.

You can’t change the facts. Whatever you do, somebody will get to him eventually.

It’s only been a month. Thirty-three days. And look what they’ve done.

What happens if there’s nobody there to stop him? Are we supposed to pay for a permanent bodyguard?

“They attack him,” Rosa said. “And then they use the attack to prove the experiment won’t work.”

Van and Rosa were stretched out in deck chairs in the back yard of the house they had been assigned. They had arranged the house camera system so Steinman could only see their faces and they could feel free to hold hands—a habit that seemed to fascinate younger people who knew they had been married over seven decades.

“We can’t be dealing with a typical mischief,” Van said. “They had an antidote for the pacification drug. They know what the pacification drug is. And they’ve got the ability to create an antidote.”

“I did a search,” Rosa said. “There’s almost no information on pacification molecules in the mischief networks.”

“It’s not the kind of thing mischiefs do,” Van said. “Bud could have killed that woman if I hadn’t pushed him away from her. Have you considered the possibility someone might be trying to get at your boss?”

“I’m planning to look into it.”

“It seems to me that would undermine a lot of the anti argument if it turned out to be true.”

“It could.”

The search tech had found the dead bird and collected it with a big owl he used when his flock had to pick something up. The dead bird had been lying on a front lawn, in plain sight of two floors of windows, but nobody seemed to notice the pickup. In spite of all the uproar in the electronic section of reality, most of the people in the development seemed to be concentrating on the kind of things people normally did. For every person who was all hyped up about Bud’s activities, there were probably fifteen who were playing games, watching videos, and indulging in the traditional biological pleasures.

Rosa had passed the dead bird to a bird geek who was examining its arrangements to see if he could help them locate its creator. Bird geeks, like bomb makers, tended to have signature techniques that could be used to identify them.

The two bicyclists who had triggered the incident seemed to be innocent. “We were just playing around,” the man claimed. “We would have speeded up in another minute.”

The man had already appeared on two news sites. His partner was lying in a hospital room thirty miles from the development and he wasn’t paying any attention to people who told him she was just there for observation.

“They told us they had that guy under control. I saw what he looked like. He was all set to kill somebody—just like he killed that cop seventy years ago. He hasn’t changed. He’s still a killer.”

Van and Rosa had two grown children and they had responded in their standard, predictable fashion when Rosa had passed them a summary with links and attachments. Jessica had given the package a thorough, systematic study, even though she was currently based in Stockholm, working on an analysis of the drop in homicide rates and surrounded by distractions that ranged from ski treks to box seats at the ballet. Wally was maintaining the information system on a research ship that was transiting the remains of the Argentine fishing grounds, with lots of empty time on his schedule, so he had obviously settled for a quick skim and ignored most of the links and attachments.

Wally kept the camera focused on his head and shoulders, but Van could tell he was lounging on his bunk—probably with a beer can somewhere in reach. For Wally, it was an open and shut case. “The antis have it. Whatever you do, the mischiefs are going to get to him. It’s the way it’s always been. You’ve got thousands of people out there looking for some way to break through any kind of security you set up.”

“So we’re living in a world where the lawbreakers get to make the rules,” Rosa said.

Wally smiled. “That’s about it, Mom.”

Jessica was sitting at a table drinking her morning coffee. She was fully dressed, complete with dangling earrings, and ready to start her day’s work.

“I wouldn’t classify it as quite that hopeless,” Jessica said. “The poll numbers aren’t that bad. You still have a majority with you. I recommend that you concentrate on identifying the troublemakers. Identify and prosecute. Show people you can make the perpetrators sorry they did it. Assure the majority you can punish, even if you can’t prevent.”

Van nodded. He had been afraid Jessica would be just as negative as Wally. I can understand why this makes sense, Jessica had said when he and Rosa had taken the job. But I have to tell you, I wouldn’t mind if they kept that bug locked up for another century. He killed a kid. He killed a woman who was just doing her job. Who cares what happens to him?

Jessica had become interested in political analysis when she had read Machiavelli in her fifteenth year. She had become a specialist in the study of violent behavior and her contacts with the people who engaged in that behavior hadn’t softened the hardnosed assessment of human relations that had attracted her to Machiavelli.

The centenarians caged in the state’s prisons included mass murderers and serial rapists. The selection committee had picked Bud because he had seemed like one of the less controversial prospects. He would have been paroled years ago if he hadn’t killed a police officer.

“So what if you do nab this mischief character?” Wally said. “There’s a thousand other guys out there just like him.”

“The critical factor is public opinion,” Jessica said. “People may be willing to accept the risk if they know you can catch the perpetrators. You shouldn’t underestimate the deterrent factor either. Mischiefs tend to avoid activities that can get them into serious trouble. Their whole lifestyle is based on the fact that mischiefs rarely encounter serious legal problems.”

Wally offered his sister the same tolerant smile he had bestowed on his mother. “It’s in the literature, right?”

Jessica winked. She and her brother had been kidding each other about their differences since they had been preteens. It was one of the little blessings that made their parents feel they had done something right.

“It is indeed, my good brother.”

I had nothing against this Bud joker. He shouldn’t have been playing around with the kind of hyper-dangerous gear he was working with when he got into trouble, but he hadn’t done it to kill the kid. You don’t have to be a head doctor to know he killed that cop because they triggered off years of deep-filed rage. That and he saw his whole life blowing up in his face. He should have been treated. He would have been treated if the victim had been a civilian.

And what about me? Suppose Bud had killed that bicyclist? Because of something I set in motion? This was not a good association. It didn’t matter what they were willing to give me. This was not a true mischief escapade. These people were taking the whole business way too seriously.

The geek who had constructed the bird lived in a low-energy apartment complex that had grown up around a shopping mall in the Detroit area. The geek Rosa had hired recognized the style as soon as he finished deconstructing the bird—a job that took him about six hours. He claimed he could have given her an identity when he was halfway through the job but he liked to be sure.

The alleged malefactor opened up as soon as Van contacted him. He had merely installed a device in one of his standard models, he claimed. He did that for people all the time.

It was a transparently silly statement, of course. You couldn’t do what he did without knowing the difference between a device that transmitted and a device that merely received. But he also knew he could cover himself with a minimum of effort.

“Nobody ever prosecutes these guys,” Rosa had said. “They’re a useful source of information. They always tell the cops everything they know if the cops manage to trace them.”

Van wasn’t a cop but the bird geek didn’t seem to think the distinction mattered. The geek had even made sure he had something to offer if anybody started questioning him. His customer had arranged a late night transfer in a craft bazaar parking lot and the bird geek had followed the customer’s instructions. He had stopped at the specified place, at the specified time, and exchanged the box with the bird for a box with his specified payment. But he had also released one of his black-feathered, long distance camera carriers when he was a mile from the transfer point. He could give Van an overhead video of the customer and the license number of the customer’s car.

The customer hadn’t rented the car himself, of course. He had been sharing the car with a go-between—an unemployed woman who supplemented her income with the contacts she attracted sitting in the local bars. She was just as cooperative as the bird geek once Rosa got her located and Van connected with her and negotiated a fee.

“Just tell us anything you can remember about him,” Van said.

“He said his name was Kirk. That’s all I got in that department.”

“Did he give you any kind of cover story? Why he was doing this?”

“He said he did favors for friends.”

“That’s it? Favors for friends?”

“Like it was something mysterious. You know.”

“Like it was a big deal?”

“Right.”

“Did he have any identifying marks? Tattoos? Physical characteristics?”

“I think he’d done something to his face. To make himself look tanned.”

“For disguise?”

“Maybe. He didn’t look like the type that would spend a lot of time outdoors.”

“Can you tell me something about his height? Body type?”

“He was one of those skinny hunched over types. Stiff. You could tell he didn’t spend a lot of time doing physical things.”

“Did he tell you anything about himself ? Work? Where he was from?”

“He didn’t talk much.”

“So I gather.”

“He was very cautious. You could tell he was nervous.”

“But you did know he was picking up a bird?”

“It was in a cage. It was only open on one side. But you didn’t have to knock yourself out to see it.”

“Did he say anything about it?”

“He said it was for hunting. He put it in the back seat and told me he got it for hunting.”

“For hunting?”

“To find animals. For some kind of hunting. So he can shoot arrows at them.”

“Bow hunting?”

“With those things that look like guns.”

“Crossbows?”

“Right.”

Van frowned. “Did he say anything more about that?”

“He said he was a good shot—a very good shot. Just like that. ‘I’m a good shot—a very good shot.’”

“Like he had to impress you?”

“Right.”

“Did he say anything else? What kind of animals? Where?”

“That was pretty much the last thing he said. ‘A good shot—a very good shot.’”

“Like he decided he was talking too much.”

“Probably.”

She had left “Kirk” at a mall parking lot. There was a hotel in the mall they could check out. A skinny man with a birdcage might mean something if he had given the clerk on duty any reason to notice him. But the odds were he hadn’t. Given the mischief’s overall caution, he had probably slipped in and out without a single interaction with another human being. And checked out of the hotel long before he picked up the bird.

The crossbow thing looked more interesting. Rosa had started working on it before Van finished the interview.

“You got two bits of information,” Rosa said, “and they both fit the profile. First he had to give her the impression he was doing something special. Then he couldn’t resist telling her he was a good shot. He may be older than the norm but it apparently hasn’t affected his behavior.”

There were, it seemed, about a million and a quarter crossbow enthusiasts in the United States—an estimate the National Association of Target Sports based on sales figures, memberships, and participation in organized tournaments. The number had peaked about thirty years ago and fluctuated with the changes in population that had occurred since then. Crossbow shooting seemed to appeal to people who wanted to shoot at things but didn’t want to go through the legal hassles associated with firearms. It also attracted medieval romantics, military history fans, and its share of the legions of people who drifted from hobby to hobby. A small percentage did, indeed, train their sights on various kinds of animals and birds during the prescribed hunting seasons.

“It doesn’t sound like the kind of story you would make up out of nothing,” Van said. “Regular bow hunting maybe. But you probably wouldn’t think of crossbows unless you had some real contact with them.”

Jessica had given them the standard profile for mischiefs. Jessica usually specialized in murderers and rapists but she had worked on a study of mischiefs during an outbreak that had threatened the Tanzanian tourist industry. The typical mischief was a fifteen-to twenty-year-old male, unathletic, above average intelligence, with an “avid interest” in new technologies, simulated-violence games, and various kinds of role playing, including historical reenactments. Twenty-eight percent were women and they tended to be older. Both sexes were socially inhibited and easily scared off, with a strong need to brag about their “escapades”—a need that created exploitable conflicts with their fear of exposure.

“If you do get him identified,” Jessica had said, “you’ll find a full description of his activities hidden in his files. You can consider that a certainty.”

So they were looking for a skinny tallish male, fifteen to twenty, probably two or three years older in this case, who went in for action games and new gadgets, probably didn’t have a female friend of any importance, and might have some interest in crossbows. Which narrowed the possibilities, Van figured, to a mob that would keep all the detectives in America checking out suspects for the next couple of decades.

“It’s not quite as bad as it looks,” Rosa comforted him. “With the decline in the birth rate over the last three decades, the number of males in that age range is down to about five million. The number over six feet two is about forty percent of that, and I think that’s a good height to work with, judging by the video and taking into account the minimum height that would look tall to our witness. If the crossbow reference is a valid lead, we can probably narrow the list to about twenty thousand, assuming the age cohort we’re looking for is proportionately represented in the crossbow community.”

“Personally, I’d think they’d be under-represented,” Van said. “It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I would have gotten excited about at that age. Have you got a statistic?”

“Hold on … 3 percent. You’re right.”

“So, my good wife, we have now narrowed our search to fifteen thousand suspects. Assuming the crossbow doesn’t attract a disproportionate number of male adolescents over six feet two.”

“And assuming the crossbow lead is valid.”

“I think you should go with it.”

“So do I.”

So that was it. I was out. I’m a mischief, not a terrorist. I know when to stop. I know where the line is.

I would have stopped, too. It was settled. I like being a mischief but it’s not some kind of addiction. I can walk away from it when I have to. I dropped the whole game for three full years. And I could drop it again.

There had been a time when Van, like most young men, had wondered if he really could live with one person for the rest of his life. Rosa had felt the same way, though he hadn’t realized it until she had mentioned it one night just before their eleventh anniversary.

A friend of his had given him a warning a few days before the weekend he and Rosa got married. On Tuesday, the friend had assured him, you’re going to look around and see a world full of incredibly attractive women. And wonder what you’ve done.

It had been one of the best pieces of advice Van had ever received. Because it had happened. Over lunch in a sidewalk cafe in Oslo. And he had smiled and shrugged it off, forewarned it was a normal reaction.

They had even taken a twelve month break in their forty-first year together. They had emerged from their first full rollover with every organ in their bodies tweaked and rehabbed. So why not see just how new they really were?

Van had stuck it out for the agreed-upon year but he had been ready to go home before he’d partied through six months. He and Rosa had been growing together for four decades. They had raised two children, battled with career changes and economic storms, shared friends, parties, calamities. They had formed bonds that were so basic they didn’t know they were there until they felt the wrench when they tried to separate.

His worries about sex had been just as silly as the other stuff he had fretted about. You were always told variety was stimulating. His own youthful adventures had convinced him that was true. But the associations that attached themselves to a particular face and body could become even more galvanizing.

Still, in spite of all the things they had in common, he was constantly fascinated by the differences in their personalities. She was the rational desk-oriented type, he was the people-oriented field worker. He had started out as a manager, riding herd on the geeks in three different industries, and she had put in thirty years as a brokerage house macro-economist. He had switched to temporary troubleshooting when full time jobs dried up and she had become a freelance general researcher when she found she couldn’t compete with the young gunslingers in her original profession. He had talked her into trying their present ill-defined assignment largely because it felt like the right way to jump. She had agreed to go along with it mostly because he had promised her he would handle the people stuff.

“We’ll make a perfect team,” Van had insisted. “Outside and Inside. It’s just what they need.”

Rosa was not, however, a neurotic introvert. She liked to party and hang around with people more than Van did. She just didn’t like working with people. When she was working, she just wanted to sit in a quiet place all by herself and manipulate numbers and circuits.

There was one big exception to her aversion to workplace contacts. Rosa had discovered she could work with the human networks that monitored the eworld. They were one of the most important tools a researcher could pick up, and they attracted people who preferred relationships that were limited to electronic exchanges.

Mischiefs, like everyone else, had their online communities. Escapades were chronicled in anonymous safety. Tips were exchanged. Ethical issues debated. And some of the people who hung around the mischief sites made their living collecting information on behalf of employers who catered to the whims of the information market.

As with all search systems, a lot depended on the searcher’s ability to frame the right questions. “We’ll start with the mischief networks,” Rosa decided. “We could look for a crossbow enthusiast who’s hinted that he’s a mischief but I suspect we’ll have better luck looking for a mischief who’s indicated he’s a crossbow sharpshooter.”

Rosa had built up permanent relationships with three search companies. One of them specialized in big national and international surveys. The other two had spun webs that spanned thousands of microcommunities. They both advised her they had sources in the mischief community, so Rosa followed her personal preferences and opted for the account executive she liked best.

“She’s a real all-business, no-nonsense type,” Rosa said. “They both know their trade, but Harriet doesn’t waste time on chitchat.”

Nobody knows who you are when you work alone. You just have to maintain your own personal security. But everything changes when you start working with other people. Somebody knows your identity.

I knew that was an issue when I decided to take their offer. I knew I was giving in to temptation. But I figured it worked both ways. They knew who I was but I knew who they were.

I knew they had lawyers. And PR hacks. And buddies in important, influential nodes. But I didn’t think it through. They held out the money and the gear and I went for it. I figured they knew I could unmask them anytime they unmasked me. I thought we were equals.

“What else are you doing?” Steinman said.

It was about the response Van had expected. Van had described the crossbow lead and Steinman had listened with his usual uninformative intentness. He hadn’t even grunted.

“She’s doing what the police do,” Van said, “She’s looking at his modus operandi. A lot of mischief incidents never make it into the police records but some of them get into the media. She tried several possibilities. Floppypet malfunctions. Viruses delivered by birds. Viruses delivered by animals. Virus attacks followed by second attacks. Viruses delivered by birds and animals produced three positives she’s passed on to the search agency she’s using.”

“Three out of how many?”

“She got sixty-six positives altogether. She liked these three because she felt they had some other similarities. One of them included two attacks on floppypets. The other two it was more intuitive—the kind of pattern she finds it hard to explain.”

“What about the spray gun marksman on the bike?”

“The surveillance cameras lost him after he ditched the bike.”

“And there’s no indication he left the community. He’s either a resident or somebody smuggled him in and out.”

“I just had a glimpse of his face,” Van said. “I’m not even sure he really was a he. I’m pretty sure it was a young face. But it could have been a young woman.”

“The governor said to tell you he watched the replay from the bike path cameras,” Steinman said. “He thinks you handled the situation as well as anyone could have.”

“Thanks,” Van said. “Tell him I appreciate that. Have you found any evidence we’re dealing with a plot to undermine him?”

“The consensus here is that you should bear down hard on your end. Find the mischief. Then we’ll decide what we want to do next.”

Van wasn’t supposed to be a full time bodyguard but he had decided he should post himself in Bud’s house for a while. Some of the chatterheads were arguing the local residents “had a duty” to hang around the street and keep an eye on Bud.

We’ve already had one near miss. What’s going to happen if Mr. Van Levanti feels a little sleepy the next time somebody gives Bud a whiff of murder gas?

It seems to me they’ve already admitted their little “humane experiment” is a total failure. Buddy boy was supposed to live in the community all by himself, if I understood the original sales pitch correctly.

Bud had deposited himself in the main recliner in the living room and become engrossed in whatever he was watching on his display. A king-size set of earphones isolated him from his surroundings. He had gotten used to the earphones in prison, Bud said. You couldn’t escape from the noise even when you didn’t have cellmates.

So far the area outside the house seemed reasonably quiet. Two young swaggerboy types had hung around the other side of the street for a couple of hours. The number of carts and bicycles rolling past the house probably exceeded the norm by three or four times, but that wasn’t saying much when the norm was only one or two every few minutes.

Right now Van could see half a dozen people clustering under a pair of trees on the extreme left of the area he could watch from the front windows. Adults of indeterminate age and background, as a real cop might report it. So far there was no indication he had to worry about mobs armed with pitchforks and flaming torches. But the reports from the observers loitering in the public spaces indicated Bud had finally become the main subject of conversation.

I’m hearing a lot of talk from people who think the project should be terminated, one of the real-world lurkers had reported. It’s the same kind of thing you’re hearing in the eworld—he’s a bigger danger than the hiring agency claimed, there’s no way anybody can guarantee he won’t be attacked the same way again and hurt somebody else.

The guinea pigs had all been guaranteed a one-year residency in the development, with salary. If the state terminated the Bud Experiment, it could rent the setup to one of the organizations that had already paid to be listed as possible alternates.

The twelve-month guarantee was supposed to eliminate a major bias. The “sample participants” knew they would have a job even if their employers terminated the experiment.

In practice, the employment bias was one more subject the professional analysts could use to see they stayed employed. Most of their studies indicated the participants reacted to events without worrying about their job security. Other studies, conducted with greater depth according to their authors, indicated there was a residual effect which had to be discounted by some unknown factor. Both sides agreed more studies were needed.

Van had come to a slightly different conclusion. On all matters of public policy, the politicians made the only assessments that counted. Their techniques tended to be crude and unmathematical but they had a solid, objective basis for evaluating the results. The politicians who made the right judgments got to stay in office.

One of the “intuitive” possibilities on Rosa’s list involved three attacks that had taken place over a two-year period just over three years ago. One of the attacks had included a berserk floppypet. Two had been committed with birds. The common thread, in Rosa’s opinion, was an assault that involved something that had a lot of emotional value to the victims. In addition to the assault on the floppypet, the mischief had turned the fruit of a thirty-year-old apple tree into a mild psychedelic and infected a front yard garden with a virus that altered the colors of all the flowers. The attacks on the garden and the apple tree had both generated news stories that indicated the two items had a special meaning to their owners. The gardener had even offered a reward to anyone who could identify the vandal.

The locations of the three incidents formed a triangle centered on Bridgeport, Connecticut. There were no crossbow clubs in Bridgeport, but Rosa decided to check the membership lists of clubs in New Haven, Hartford, and the New York metropolitan area.

“The guy our witness chauffeured could have been just about the right age three years ago,” Rosa said. “Judging by her description. And the images we have.”

Van frowned. She would have to buy the membership lists, in the same way marketers did. “That could get expensive. Do we have any figures on the probability a mischief will drop out for three years and start up again?”

“I asked Jessica about that. She says it’s a tossup. The number of known mischiefs who keep it up past twenty is too small to make any kind of generalization. Some quit and come back, some never stop.”

“And, of course, if this really is part of a plot against the governor, somebody could have offered him money….”

“Our daughter the crime queen says paid work violates the ethics of the mischief community. They’re supposed to torment people just for the sake of doing it. But she doesn’t think you can rule out an elder statesman yielding to temptation and turning mercenary.”

“What are you doing with the other two possibilities? What are they doing to our expense account?”

“This is the only one that gives me something solid to work with like the location. I’m still looking for a handle on the other two.”

As it turned out, the list check didn’t cost that much. The agency she was using merely asked for the names of members who lived within ten miles of Bridgeport. With some of the customary data on sex, age, etc.

Twenty-three names landed on Rosa’s display. Fourteen, interestingly, were women—a higher percentage than she and Van would have expected, even in this enlightened age. Six of the men were too old, one had just reached his twelfth birthday.

“Curt Damil,” Rosa reported. “Twenty-four. Occupation—crossbow instructor. Started playing with the things three years ago. Won two tournaments in his first fifteen months. The other guy’s the right age but the pictures on his site indicate he’s at least thirty pounds overweight. And he just lists crossbow shooting among his interests.”

“And Curt sounds a lot like Kirk.”

“That did pass through my head, husband.”

Van connected with their witness and she accepted another payment and studied the pictures and videos on Curt Damil’s site.

“My guy didn’t have a mustache.”

Van copied the main picture on the site and eliminated the mustache. “How’s that?”

“That was a pretty thick mustache. Would a guy shave something like that off after he’d gone to all the trouble of growing it?”

“I’ve known guys who can grow a mustache like that in three or four days. Does this look like him?”

“It could be. If you added the glasses. And darkened the skin.”

Van focused his own display on the woman’s face before he transmitted a new revised picture. A flicker of emotion crossed her face as soon as she saw it.

“It’s what I said. It could be.”

“What makes you think it isn’t him?”

“It could be him. That’s all I can tell you. It could be him.”

They had it all worked out. They were already laying the groundwork.

I understood the theory. Make something real big happen and it would be the only thing people would remember. It wouldn’t matter who had done it, the pros or the antis. Make it big enough and people would have just one response. That’s what happens when you try stuff like the Bud Experiment. You’re just going to get trouble. The whole project would end right then and there. And nobody would be interested in who caused the uproar.

The search agency posted a request for advice on crossbow instructors on the appropriate sites. I’d like somebody close to New Haven. But I want somebody really good. I just started and I want to get off to a good start.

Travel records were another possibility. Somewhere there had to be a record that proved Curt Damil had rented a car or boarded a plane when he traveled to Cleveland to pick up the bird. Or a hotel record if he had stayed in a hotel.

“Of course, the mischief we’re looking for could really be sitting on a beach in California,” Rosa said. “If he hadn’t made that slip about the crossbow—if it was a slip….”

“It’s the best lead you’ve got,” Van said. “We may as well follow it up.”

“And it’s the kind of thing mischiefs do. It’s a basic psychological conflict. They’re deathly afraid of being found out and they want people to know how clever they are.”

“So they resolve the conflict by bragging about something else….”

I hated turning down all the money they were offering. They weren’t being cheap. But I did it. I was through. It was over.

Then they told me Van Levanti had talked to the woman who’d rented the car for me. They’ve got your name, they said. They showed her your picture.

They showed me her recording of the interview. She recognized you, they said. She covered it up but you can see that flash crossing her face. He saw it, too. He can validate it when he looks at that section of his recording, still by still.

They blamed it all on me, of course. I shouldn’t have made that remark about the crossbow.

I tried to shrug it off. It was a weak link. It wouldn’t stand up in court. But I knew that was just talk. That’s only the start, they said. They’ve got feelers out all over the place—all over that little community of yours. They want you. They aren’t going to give up until they’ve got what they’re looking for.

There’s only one way you can protect yourself, they said. Nobody will come after you if we get the project terminated.

They had it all wrapped up in one big package. I would get a pile of money, I’d finish my mischief career with a legend, and I’d be sitting at home safe and secure as soon asthe governor and his operators realized they had to shut their daydream down.

I started to tell them anybody who got me got them. I should have. But it sounded too much like a threat—like I was claiming I would turn them in. But they could figure that out themselves, right? We were in this together.

So what could I say when they told me what they wanted me to do?

The pet population of the development matched the general distribution of pets in the American population. Three thousand humans shared their habitat with approximately two thousand animals, birds, and reptiles. And most of those organisms had been genetically “enhanced” in some way.

Van and Rosa had owned a succession of cats during the first thirty years of their marriage. They had bought the first one when Wally was three. The last one had died three years after Jessica left home for good. Van had always thought he liked cats, but he and Rosa had been tied down by the responsibilities of childrearing for over two decades.

Miniature rhinos looked cute. Three-foot elephants were even cuter. Van had happily advised several hosts that their flying creatures added color and poetry to their gardens. If he had been interested in non-human companionship, however, he would probably have settled for a floppypet. Robots didn’t have to be fed or cleaned. And you could turn them off when you went away for the weekend.

You could even argue that the cute little rhino was only an inefficient, more demanding version of the floppypet. All modern pets came equipped with implanted programmable molecules that controlled their behavior. The flying creatures and the placidly munching mammals observed their owner’s property lines because the lines were delineated by invisible programmed restrictions.

The safety measures built into the programmable molecules were a major topic on the mischief sites. There had only been three cases in which a mischief had managed to outflank the software engineers. All three had involved faults that had developed in the organisms. The mischiefs claimed the implant companies had repressed information about others but the companies had done a very successful job if they had.

The first indication the security software had been breached once again looked innocuous at first. The loungers in a parkside cafe spotted a lizard with a three-foot wingspan banking over the northwest section of the main park. The lizard had been given a reflective skin and it looked like a golden ornament in the glow cast by the park lights.

Then it dove. And warbled like a songbird as it sailed over the treetops with a plump, brain-enhanced beagle puppy clutched between its forelegs.

I was supposed to release thirty animals altogether. From squirrels up to Labrador retrievers. That meant I had to make three trips from the road to the launch point on the south side of the park. Three miles round trip each time. Five or six cages per trip, on a handcart.

I unloaded all the cages from the car and stashed them a hundred yards from the road. Then I sent the car off by itself, to a parking area ten miles away. I figured I would start toward the road when I was ready to make my exit. And call the car when I had about half a mile to go.

They had it all worked out. I had a special transmitter that kept the park surveillance birds a hundred yards away. The park security system operated six hundred birds, they’d told me, and they followed random search patterns. There would be no indication the birds were deviating from their normal behavior.

You’ll do fine, they told me. You release the animals. You stay there for about forty-five minutes operating the controls. And skip out. Free. And rich.

The news of the attack emerged in pieces. It took Rosa almost fifteen minutes to realize it was happening. The police didn’t start responding in an organized way for another five.

Elephants were roaming the streets. Rhinos were charging cars. A miniature T. Rex had entered a neighbor’s yard and gorged on a flock of ornamental chickens penned inside a wall of ornamental hedges. Dogs and cats of all descriptions raced over yards and streets as if they were being pursued by an army of inflamed animal haters.

“It’s the same thing he did with the floppypet,” Rosa said. “Only now he’s doing it with real animals. The police think it’s being spread by transmitters attached to ground animals. They’ve spotted three of the carriers—the transmitters are just attached to collars and harnesses.”

“So we’re dealing with people who can attack a pet’s software….”

“But the external attachments indicate they may have thrown things together without a lot of preparation. It’s spreading across an area that’s roughly fan-shaped.”

Rosa transferred a copy of her map display. Yellow dots marked the incident reports she was collecting from the police and the media cameras. The media rovers posted in the community had pounced on the first incidents merely because they fitted the profile for unusual, possibly newsworthy activities built into their programming. Now, like the police, the news merchants were starting to approach the turmoil as a large-scale event. Commentators had started yakking. The story had hopped from the local networks to the feeds that competed for wider audiences.

Rosa’s map display included a red line that marked the border of the area infested with the yellow dots. The overall pattern, as she had said, was a rough fan shape. With the base of the fan in the north of the community. On the edge of the state park. The fan was expanding as new reports came in but the base didn’t move.

“It looks like we can locate the release point with some precision,” Van said.

“The pattern I’m seeing indicates somebody could still be there. I can see two places where it looks like a carrier started maneuvering inside an area instead of just passing through it.”

“It’s about a two-mile walk from there to the nearest road. The mischief could still be in the forest even if he released and ran.”

“I’ve advised the police of that.”

“And?”

Rosa hesitated. “We don’t know how many people we’re dealing with, love. They could have an armed gang standing by the release point, for all we know.”

“Did you get a response from the police? Are they doing anything with the information?”

Van’s newsfeed inserted an image of the outside of Bud’s house in his visual display. A cat the size of a German shepherd was pacing across the front lawn. A large orange and red bird dangled from its mouth, wings half open.

He stepped up to the window and took a direct look at the scene. The clusters on the other side of the street were attracting new members. Two three-wheelers had stopped in front of the house and their passengers were gesturing at the cat as they talked to the people they were connected to.

He transmitted his personal visual to Rosa. Nobody seemed to be acting aggressive. Five teenage swaggerboys had taken over a patch on the opposite yard, with their hands on their bikes, but they looked like they were just gawking, too.

“You need to stay with Bud,” Rosa said. “We don’t know when the cops will get there.”

“The cops are concentrating on dealing with the animals, right? They aren’t going to do anything about the source of the problem.”

“You can’t leave Bud there alone. That’s got to be our first priority.”

“I’ll take him with me. I parked my cart in the rear. I’ll have to plough through some flower beds but we can get out and get moving before they see us on the news feeds.”

It was the highlight of my career. I had the news feeds on. I could get pickups from half the animals. The software was so good I could actually take close control of any piece of livestock I could connect with. I thought the thing with the cat and the bird was a stroke of genius. It was a real provoker. But nobody was going to cross that street while that cat was there. I figured they were just standing there looking at Bud’s house and getting angrier and angrier.

The flowerbed housed some kind of yellow autumn bloomers. Van drove across it without arousing any serious guilt feelings and pointed the front wheel toward the nearest segment of the cartway that would take him north.

The attack had started at the end of sunset. Van couldn’t see the news birds in the dark but he knew they were up there. The birds would have picked them up as soon as he and Bud started hurrying toward the cart.

Bud was so big they had decided he should sit by himself in the rear area that doubled as a cargo space and third seat. The oversize earphones were still plastered on his head.

“I’m posting the map,” Rosa said.

Van guided the cart around another flowerbed. It rolled onto the cartway and he took his thumb off the joystick and let the cart follow the route he had traced on the control screen. At the speed they were going, assuming they didn’t run into any serious traffic, they would come within three hundred yards of their destination in about ten minutes. Then he would have to resume control and guide them across the golf course that occupied the northern perimeter of the development.

Rosa’s voice sounded crisp and detached. She had stopped arguing with him when he had started moving but she was still convinced he was “blundering into something that could be totally unpredictable.”

She was transmitting the map to all the news feeds and news sites on her lists. The animal handler hiding in the woods would know he had been located, but he would understand that as soon as the news feeds showed him the cart heading north—as they probably already had. The news birds could get him on their cameras before Van could reach him, if the news managers decided to dispatch them that way.

It was a logical thing to do. Van had agreed as soon as Rosa suggested it. But he knew she wasn’t doing it because she thought it was a good tactical move. She had suggested it primarily because she was hoping they would get the mischief identified before her husband had to make physical contact.

I had understood the news birds might come after me. But I hadn’t realized that woman would get me located so soon. I knew what her husband could do. I knew she had pinned down my name. But I still didn’t understand just how good she was.

I’d mingled with people her age. I could see how ninety-something could beat twenty-five if the ninety-something had everything the twenty-five had and sixty extra years of developing, too. But I still underestimated her. I’m willing to admit it. I let myself underestimate her.

But I wasn’t totally unprepared, either. I had a nice bulky coat. I was carrying a hat with a brim that could have covered a car tire. I had two different live masks. They might get me on camera but they still wouldn’t have me ID’d.

I couldn’t call the car, of course. But I had an alternative to that, too. I wasn’t stupid. I might be a kid to them but I was a smart kid.

Van could see his cart on the news feeds, as he had expected. He was going too fast for the birds but somebody had obviously moved a mechanical media rover into position.

A cart rolled out of a driveway and took up a position about fifty yards back. The driver aimed a camera at him and his display presented him with a news feed that had opted for a view from the ground.

The driver had opted for a brush with celebrity. “Hi. This is Justin Devereaux. As you can see, I’m currently following the cart containing Bud Weldon and his intrepid caretaker. They sneaked out of Bud’s house about five minutes ago and our little corner of the chatterverse erupted in a big debate two minutes after we learned they’d hit the road. Are they trying to sneak Bud to a safe hideaway because they’re afraid we’re all going to turn nasty and violent? Are they heading for the spot Mr. Levanti’s wife has located on her map, so they can corner the joker who’s given us the big night we’re currently experiencing? My guess is it’s the second option, given the way Buddy’s babysitters have been acting so far. Message to Valiant Van: I’m not here to hurt you. But don’t think you can sneak away from me. You have attracted the attention of Justin the Implacable. Where you go, Justin goes.”

A second cart turned out of an intersection and fell in behind the first. The three passengers were all waving at the cameras as if they were campaigning for a particularly attractive political office.

Van Levanti had a regular parade following him. Carts. Bicycles. Scooters. People on riding animals. It probably wasn’t more than a hundred people. But it looked pretty impressive on the news feeds. And they weren’t going to be greeting me with big smiles, whatever they thought about Bud and the great experiment. I should have gotten out as soon as I knew they had me located.

I figured I could hang on until Van started across the golf course. I still hadn’t shown up on the news shots. I’d put on the hat and the first mask so I’d be ready when they did spot me. So why leave now? When I was still having fun? I could even try a few maneuvers that might prolong the party. I had kept one of my carriers in the area Van was going through. And I still had some creatures in the area I could play with.

The cow was about half the size of a typical unmodified representative of the species—the kind of animal you kept for a pet if you happened to like a family-size supply of fresh milk every day. It was standing broadside in the middle of a bridge that crossed one of the brooks that ran through the community.

Van honked and waved his arms but of course it didn’t move. He nudged its back haunches with the front of the cart and it went on staring into the darkness without budging.

Something big fluttered on the right side of his visual field. The cart rocked. A bird screamed and beat its wings in front of Bud’s face.

Van’s arms shot out. Feathers hammered against his face. His left hand closed around the bird’s neck. He was right-handed but his left hand had found an opening and he wasn’t going to stop and change hands.

The wing beats slowed. The bird twitched and struggled and he held on until it stopped moving.

He stared at the thing hanging from his hand. It was the first time he had ever killed anything. He had been slaughtering simulated adversaries since he had been five years old but this was the first time he had actually ended the life of a living organism bigger than a bug. He looked around for a moment, wondering what to do, and tossed the cadaver into the creek with the same hand he had used to kill it.

Bud had already slumped into his seat and lost himself in his electronic dream world. The cart belonging to Justin the Implacable had stopped about twenty-five yards away, with the rest of the procession halted behind it.

He pulled the manual control out of its slot. The brook was about fifteen feet wide. The bank had a steep slope near the bridge but he could roll down a grassy angle if he maneuvered a few yards to the right.

I already knew what I was going to do when Van backed off the bridge. I waited until he’d put some space between him and the bridge. Then I moved the cow off the bridge, just the right distance. If he tried to ford the brook, I could move the cow down the bank and block him when he tried to come out of the water. And I could still put the cow back on the bridge if he gave up on the ford. He would make it across sooner or later but I could have a little fun harassing him.

Except for Justin the Camera Hog. I hadn’t counted on him. He went rolling across the bridge with his arm raised, waving his fist at the cameras, and stopped his cart between the bridge and the cow. Van turned back to the bridge and I estimated the distance he still had to travel. And decided it was time I initiated my disengagement procedure.

Van turned off the cartway and started rolling across the golf course five minutes after the incident with the cow. Justin had given him a wave when he crossed the bridge and he had played along and flashed a grin and a thumbs up sign in return.

“They’ve got our opponent on camera,” Rosa said. “Here he is.”

Van opened a display in the lower left quarter of his visual field. The image looked like it was being transmitted from a source that was operating below tree level. He had a clear view of a figure in a coat and hat kneeling over a cluster of electronic components.

“He’s right about where we thought he would be,” Rosa said. “About a hundred yards west of the predicted zero point.”

“Is that maximum enhancement?”

“I ran it through an extra enhancement before I transmitted it to you. It didn’t get any better.”

“Do you know what the source is?”

“It’s a bird. They’ve got a mechanical in the area but it’s too big to operate under the trees.”

Van altered the destination he had placed on the cart’s screen. His finger traced a route.

“Six minutes,” Van said. “Ten at the most.”

My co-conspirators had included a self-destruct system in the setup they’d given me. I hated to wreck equipment like that. I’d been hoping I could take it with me. So I probably delayed longer than I should have.

I kept the gadget that held off the park birds. The news cameras had me spotted but I could see they just had one bird in the forest.

This was the first time I’d operated in a wilderness environment. I’d done some serious skulking in my other escapades but I’d never made a trek through a forest. But I’d known it might happen when I made my plans. And it wasn’t like I’d never seen a patch of forest. I had never maneuvered through anything this big but I had shot my way across combat ranges that included acres of trees and cover.

*

“It looks like he’s not going directly to the road,” Rosa said.

“I’m not too surprised,” Van said. “He’s been too smart to ruin it all at the last minute and let us get a look at a license number.”

The cart topped a rise near the end of a sand trap and rolled down a long slope toward the edge of the forest. The lights on the cart were short-range units designed for the cartway but Van had switched from direct vision to a two-element display. The program enhanced the information provided by the available light and combined it with information from the maps and visual records stored in the data banks. The view beyond the headlights was a fabrication that had to be treated with care.

“They still don’t have any other cameras in the area?” Van asked.

“I’m working on a fallback. He’s obviously using something that keeps the park birds out of visual range. That means there has to be a recurring hole in the surveillance pattern wherever he is. It isn’t obvious because the park security system has a limited number of birds flying a random pattern. But I’m running an analysis now.”

The cart slipped under the branches of the first tree. He glanced over his shoulder and noted the situation in that direction hadn’t changed. Justin was still keeping station at twenty-five yards, with a dozen lights scattered over the grass behind him.

I thought I was in pretty good shape when the news bird fell behind. I zigzagged a little just to be on the safe side. Then I beelined straight for my objective. It didn’t occur to me Mrs. Van could be tracking the gap in the info from the park surveillance system. My patrons had given me a good pair of night vision glasses—so good I would have felt like I was walking along in broad daylight if I’d had color. I figured I’d slip into the mall at the west edge of the park, switch clothes, and disappear into the general population. They could prove I had been at the mall if they managed to track the car rental but that would be it. There would be no evidence I had actually done anything.

“Why don’t you let me out?” Bud said. “You’ll go faster without me.”

One of the most useful benefits of aging, in Van’s opinion, had been a measurable decrease in his overall flappability. Rosa had noticed that she, too, felt significantly more even-tempered. Even so, in spite of all his attainments in emotional growth and development, he still had to resist the impulse to jerk his head around when the voice from the back seat broke through his concentration on the ground in front of the cart.

“I can sit under a tree somewhere,” Bud said. “You don’t need the extra weight.”

Had Bud been paying attention all the time he had been lost in his eworld? Was that the kind of thing you learned to do in prison? Immerse yourself in something imaginary to make the whole thing bearable? While some part of you monitored the scene around you so you could survive?

“It’s not you, Bud. It’s the terrain. I could probably move faster if I just got out and ran after him.”

“Then why don’t you? You chase him down on foot and I’ll follow in the cart.”

Van frowned. Bud had been so passive and withdrawn he had started thinking of him as an inactive lump—a package carted from place to place.

Could Bud come out of that protective shell and take some control after sixty-six years in an environment in which things happened to him and he never made anything happen? Shouldn’t they give him the chance?

“Can you handle the cart? This isn’t like driving along the cartway. We can still use the light enhancement. But the map data can’t show you every little dip and tree root.”

“I can keep it moving in the right direction.”

Van opened his connection to Rosa and presented the change in plan as a settled decision.

“If the guy we’re chasing is the kind of guy he appears to be, I can probably just stay behind him until he collapses if he tries to run.”

“You just have to keep him in sight,” Rosa said. “Just keep that in mind—you just have to keep him in sight.”

Physically, it wasn’t any big deal. I had to cover five miles to reach the mall but I wasn’t stumbling around in the dark. And I was traveling light. I had a small shoulder bag with two clothes changes and a twelve-inch bow, plus the anti-bird gadget.

So I thought I was okay. And I would have been if that woman hadn’t been using all her brain cells. I didn’t know it, but Van was jogging through the woods looking at a map display with a gray oval. The oval was about two hundred yards long and half that wide. And I was somewhere inside it.

I wouldn’t have known he was anywhere near me if he hadn’t been using a light. It was a red light and it wasn’t very bright. But it moved as he ran. So I caught it when I looked back. I had been listening for motor noise but I was making visual checks of my back, too. Never underestimate the things you learn playing games.

Van ran with an easy lope he had acquired through decades of running, starting when he was still in his thirties, before he had realized the curve of medical progress might keep him alive for as long as he felt like hanging around. He had removed his camera pin from his sweater and pasted it on his cheek, just under his left eye, so he could observe his surroundings through the enhanced feed from the camera. It was a crude solution to the night vision problem but a handy thing to have around in emergencies—as long as you remembered you were looking at an image that was slightly skewed from the image you would see with your own eye.

The enhancement program was working with the fraction of starlight and skyglow that seeped through the trees. Mr. Mischief was only thirty yards ahead when Van spotted him.

“I’ve got a visual sighting. He’s running west and he’s about fifty yards this side of the center of your oval, to the left some. I’m reducing the gap a few strides.”

“Is that necessary?”

“I can barely see him, love. I might have gone right by him if he’d been standing still.”

I knew I couldn’t outrun him five minutes after he closed in behind me. I’ve been running into aerobic exercise fanatics ever since I got stuck in a kindergarten where a loony jock actually had us running relay races on tricycles. I’d be doubling over sucking in air in another twenty minutes and he’d still be gliding along like he was just getting started.

I had carried the bow with me just in case but I didn’t just stuff it in my gear bag. I’d given it some thought. I’d packed a self-defense load I kept in my apartment because I knew it was something I could actually use. I pulled the cocking lever while I was still running. And shoved the bolt into the groove as I turned around.

Van threw himself to the left, into the cold autumn smell of dirt and dead leaves. He raised his head and saw Curt Damil staring down at him—it had to be Curt Damil, that was a crossbow. Curt turned away and Van scrambled to his feet.

He tipped back his head and stared at the branches. There was something dangling from the side of his jacket. A bright star dominated a triangular patch of sky. Mars? Jupiter? Should he file a query?

A woman was saying something. In his ear. He couldn’t see a woman anywhere. But he could hear her.

“What’s going on? Are you all right?”

Trees. Branches. Forest. It all changed when you turned around. Everything changed.

“Can you see him, Bud? Can anybody see Van?”

The world shifted. He looked at the thing dangling from his jacket and realized it was an arrow—a bolt, when you were talking about crossbows. He pulled it out and stared at the needle on the end.

“I’m fine, Rosa. I’m all right.”

“I heard you grunt. And then I didn’t hear anything.”

He still had the gray oval on his display. He couldn’t see Curt but he knew which way to go. How long had it been? A minute?

“I’m okay. I lost sight of him. I’ll get him back.”

He wasn’t going to give up. I’d been told a lot of people just gave up once they’d experienced a couple of minutes of disorientation. But he obviously wasn’t the quitting type.

I could feel my heart knocking already. Five more minutes of this and I’d be the one who was wondering where he was. Only in my case I’d be running around in circles because I needed oxygen.

This time I yelled at him to stay put. “This one’s for real,” I said. “This time you aren’t getting up.”

He actually stopped. I thought he’d duck, like he did before, but he just stopped dead. His hands shot up.

I knew I had to act. I had never shot at a living target before—not even a squirrel—but this was no time to hesitate. He was giving me the best chance I was going to get.

I lowered the bow before he realized what I was doing and hit him in the lower right thigh. It was an easy shot. I just had to forget about the effect if something went wrong and I hit him somewhere else.

I started moving while he was still going down. I think I only heard him yell once.

The pain had shifted to bearable once the initial shock wore off. The blood was forming a widening stain under his pants, but he knew enough first aid to know it would have been pulsing if the bolt had punctured an artery.

“We’ll be there in about twenty minutes, Mr. Levanti,” the chief of the emergency medical team said. “We’re going to drive up to the edge of the park and come in on foot. Just lie still. We’ll get the bleeding stopped as soon as we get there.”

“We can have Bud drive you toward them in the cart,” Rosa said.

“I’m probably better off lying here.”

“It sounds like it’s a clean wound,” the EMT chief said.

Light swayed across the area around him. Bud jumped out of his cart and dropped to one knee. His big pudgy hands hovered over the bolt.

“Are you all right? Can you lie here by yourself ?”

“I’m fine, Bud.”

Bud heaved himself to his feet. “Then I’ll go after him.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Rosa said. “We’ve got him identified. The crossbow proves it’s Curt Damil.”

“Did Van see his face? Get a picture? You need hard evidence.”

“He’s already used that crossbow once, Bud. He’s clearly getting desperate.”

“It’s too late,” Van said. “Bud’s already moving.”

So now I had another aerobics loon on my tail. I didn’t know how much running he’d done but I knew he bicycled every day. And he’d been sitting in his cart all the time I’d been trying to pull away from his babysitter.

I could use the disorienter on him, of course. But I already knew how much good thatdid. I didn’t need a couple of minutes. I needed a permanent unequivocal cessation.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew I had the bow. He stayed with me but he used the cover, too. He was a big guy but he knew how to stay low. So his body covered his legs.

I turned around, ready to release, and he dropped to his knees and held something in front of him. He’d taken off his jacket. It wouldn’t stop a real bolt but it would trigger the hypo before it got to him if I used the disorienter.

I made two tries. At least two tries. By now I was getting too groggy to count. He dropped down every time before I could shoot. With the jacket held in front of him.

The last time—whichever time it was—I ripped the bolt out of the groove. I held it up so he could see it was the real thing.

“This one is for real,” I said. “It’s going right through that jacket. Into your chest. Get up. Turn around. Run the other way.”

I leveled the bow at his chest. It was an easy shot, like they’d all been. He knew I could do it.

I gave him one more chance. “It’s the only way I can stop you,” I told him. “It’s the only chance I have to get away.”

I can tell you exactly what he said, word for word. I’m not giving you some made up dialogue just to be dramatic. I’ll remember every word he said even if I really do live a thousand years.

“So do it,” Bud said. “Kill me. I’m never going back there. They’ll put you there instead.”

Rosa seemed satisfyingly concerned right up to the moment the medics removed the arrow and it became clear Van was enjoying a comfortable ride to the hospital. By the time she got to the hospital herself, she had returned to checking her displays and running analyses. As for her feelings about her husband—she had obviously switched to the head shaking I-love-him-but-what-have-I-married? mode she fell into whenever her marital partner did something no rational human would even consider.

“So what are you going to do with Bud?” Rosa asked Steinman.

“The governor is evaluating the situation,” Steinman said.

“The surveys correlate with our daughter’s prediction,” Rosa said. “The primary reaction among 70 percent of the commentators is anger directed at the people who did all the damage.”

“We’re aware of all that. The governor will take it all into consideration.”

“And how about Bud’s own contributions? Doesn’t that count for something? That’s one of the main aspects people are commenting on.”

“The governor told me I should offer you both another thank you. He’s been very impressed with the way you’ve handled this.”

“We’re glad he’s satisfied,” Van said. “You can tell him I can probably be back on the job in two or three days.”

“I’ll pass the word,” Steinman said. And broke the connection with his customary display of camaraderie.

“I can just see them,” Rosa said. “Steinman and the governor and all the rest of them sitting around the governor’s office evaluating.”

“I’d say the odds favor Bud,” Van said. “That’s where the votes seem to be.”

“I know. But still.”

“We’ve still got a job, Rosa. We’re still here. We’re still together.”

Rosa smiled—the soft smile that wiped out all the focus her face had acquired as they aged. The smile only Van ever saw.

“There is that,” Rosa said.

I have to admit I had some second thoughts when I saw how they reacted when I told them I could only identify two contacts. They kept coming back to me for more. And I had to keep telling them that was my only link with the operators who’d set me up. It got pretty rough sometimes. They didn’t seem to have any worries about proper legal procedures. Then they showed me some videos and I gave them a solid identification. After that things got better.

I don’t know what they did with the data. Probably nobody will ever know. My guess is they used it to make some kind of deal with our smiling governor’s political enemies. Something that would give him an extra edge when he made his next career move.

Mischiefs don’t go to jail. They catch us, we do what we have to. We all understand that. It’s one of the main reasons mischiefs usually work alone. We aren’t some secret society swearing we’ll keep our mouths locked even if they rip our skin off. I would have given them more information if I’d had it. But the stuff I gave them was good enough.

The newsies keep making a thing about my ankle bracelet. And how it may stop other mischiefs because they think we’re afraid of being shamed. But this wasn’t an ordinary escapade. I let myself go too far. Like Bud did. I let them tempt me. But I stopped myself before it turned into something really bad.

Bud wasn’t the most articulate person you’ll ever meet. He had been a loner before they shut him up and sixty-six years in prison hadn’t given him much opportunity to sharpen his social skills. But I knew he meant it when he told me I would have to kill him to stop him. You would have, too, if you’d been there. You would have reacted just the way I did when you heard the way he sounded when he told me they’d put me there instead.

I’m a mischief, not a murderer. I can take two years house arrest. I like to think I could survive three or four years in a real prison if I had to. But I’m not going to sit in a cage for the next half century like Bud did.

Bud Weldon was a mischief. He fouled up big and he paid for it big. But he was still a mischief. He got in trouble because he was out there doing the job. Striking back at all the people who think they’re safe. Evening things up. You can’t have mischiefs running around killing mischiefs. What would the world be like?

Table of Contents

Start