Jay took off his seat belt and picked up the carbine, careful not to touch its trigger.
"Keep it down so the other drivers can"t see it."
He did. "This car doesn"t talk to us."
"I killed that b.a.s.t.a.r.d as soon as I got it. It"s pretty easy."
Sensing that she was about to cry, Jay did not speak; he would have tried to hold her hand, perhaps, but both her hands were on the wheel.
"And now I"ve killed the b.a.s.t.a.r.d that was trying to kill you. There"s tissues in back somewhere."
He got them, heard her blow her nose.
"I told you how bad that is. It"s murder one. He was trying to kill you, but that doesn"t make a d.a.m.ned bit of difference. I should have called the cops and showed them your body when they got there. That would have been when? Two or three o"clock. My G.o.d, it"s lunchtime."
He looked at the clock on the instrument panel. It was nearly one.
"You hungry?"
"No," he said.
"Me neither. Let"s skip lunch. We"ll stop somewhere for dinner tonight."
He agreed, and asked where they were going.
"d.a.m.ned if I know."
"Then I"d like you to take Eighty."
"We need to get off the Interstate before too much longer," she said.He nodded. "We will."
"Listen, I"m sorry I got you into this."
"I feel the same way," he said. "You saved my life."
"Who was he, anyway?"
"The man I"d gotten to read your note. You didn"t want Globnet to get it on the air before we"d left, so I had to have somebody who would look at it for me and take me there. I tried to find somebody who wouldn"t call the police as soon as we separated. Clearly that was a bad idea." Jay paused. "How did you think I"d handle it?"
"That you"d guess. That you"d go there and look at my note and see that you were right when you got there."
"No more crying?"
"Nope. That"s over. You know what made me cry?"
"What?"
"You didn"t understand. You can"t kill people, not even if they"re killing other people, and I did it with a gun. If they get me I"ll get life, and you didn"t understand that."
"Who"d take care of your kids?" He let his voice tell her what he felt he knew about those kids.
She drove. He glanced over at her, and she was staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel.
"I"m going back into the woods. Maybe they"ll get me in there, but it won"t be easy. If the holovid company can"t help you, maybe you"d like to come with me."
"You had it all doped out." She sounded bitter.
He shook his head. "I don"t think I understand it all even now, and there"s a lot of it that I just figured out a minute ago. How much were you supposed to get for this?"
"A couple thousand."
He thought about that. "You"re not an employee. Or at least, you don"t work for Globnet full-time."
"No." She sniffled. "They did a doc.u.mentary on the gun trade last year, and I was one of the people they found-the only woman. So I was on holo with this really cool mask over my face, and I thought that was the end of it. Then about a month ago they lined me up to do this."
He nodded.
"They figured you"d want women or drugs, mostly, and they had people set for those. I was kind of an afterthought, okay? Stand by for a couple hundred, or a couple thousand if you called. Another thousand if I sold you a gun. I did, but I"ll never collect any of it."
"The bot must have called you after he gave me your number."
"Kaydee Nineteen? Sure. That"s how you knew, huh? Because you got it from him."
Jay shook his head. "That was how I should have known, but I didn"t. It was mostly the phone call you made last night to somebody who was supposed to be sitting your kids. Real mothers talk about their kids a lot, but you didn"t. And just now it hit me that you"d called your friend Val, and James R. Smith"s secretary was Valerie. Then I thought about the bot. He took his security work very seriously, or at least it seemed like he did. But he had given me thenumber of a gun dealer as soon as I asked, and he had been friendly with Valerie."
"So I was lying to you all the time."
He shrugged.
"Don"t do that! You"re going to get that thing bleeding worse. What happened to your ear?"
He told her, and she pointed. "There"s a truck stop. They"ll have aid kits for sale."
Cutting across five lanes of traffic, they raced down an exit ramp.
That night, in an independent motel very far from Interstate 80, he took off his reversible raincoat and his hunting coat, and his shirt and undershirt as well, and sat with clenched teeth while she did what she could with disinfectant and bandages.
When she had finished, he asked whether she had been able to buy much ammunition.
"Eight boxes. That"s four hundred rounds. They come fifty in a box."
He nodded.
"Only we don"t have it. It"s back in that place in Greentree Gardens."
He swore.
"Listen, you"ve got money and I"ve got connections. We can buy more as soon as things quiet down."
"A lot of the money"s ruined. It has blood on it."
She shook her head. "It"ll wash up. You"ll see. Warm water and a little mild detergent, don"t treat it rough and let it dry flat. You can always clean up money."
"I thought maybe I could just give it to them," he said. "Show them it wasn"t any good anymore."
She kissed him, calling him Skeeter; and he shut his eyes so that Globnet and its audience would not see her kiss.
He had been after deer since before the first gray of dawn; but he had never gotten a shot, perhaps because of the helicopters. Helicopters had been flying over all morning, sweeping up and down this valley and a lot of other valleys. He thought about Arizona or New Mexico, as he sometimes did, but concluded (as he generally had to) that they would be too open, too exposed. Colorado, maybe, or Canada.
The soldiers the helicopters had brought were spread out now, working their way slowly up the valley. Too few, he decided. There weren"t enough soldiers and they were spread too thin. They expected him to run, as perhaps he would. He tried to gauge the distance to the nearest.
Two hundred yards. A long two hundred yards that could be as much as two hundred and fifty.
But coming closer, closer all the time, a tall, dark-faced woman in a mottled green, brown, and sand-colored uniform that had been designed for someplace warmer than these snowy Pennsylvania woods. Her height made her an easy target-far easier than even the biggest doe-and she held a dead-black a.s.sault rifle slantwise across her chest. That rifle would offer full or semiautomatic operation, with a switch to take it from one to the other. Less than two hundred yards. Very slowly Jay crouched in the place he had chosen, pulled his cap down to hide the stars of his upgrade, and then raised his head enough to verify that he could keep the woman with the a.s.sault rifle in view. His wound felt as hot as his cheeks, and there was blood seeping through the bandage; he was conscious of that, and conscious, too, that it was harder to breathe than it should have been.
A hundred and fifty yards. Surely it was not more than a hundred and fifty, and it might easily be less. He was aware of his breathing, of the pounding of his heart-the old thrill.
Thirty rounds in that black rifle"s magazine, possibly. Possibly more, possibly as many as fifty. There would be an ammunition belt, too, if he had time to take it. Another two or three hundred rounds, slender, pointed bullets made to fly flatter than a stretched string and tumble in flesh.
For an instant that was less than a moment, less even than the blink of an eye, a phantom pa.s.sed between him and the woman with the black a.s.sault rifle-a lean man in soiled buckskins who held a slender, graceful gun that must have been almost as long as he was tall.
A hallucination.
Jay smiled to himself. Had they seen that, back at Globnet? They must have, if they still saw everything he did. Would they put it on the news?
A scant hundred yards now. The little carbine seemed to bring itself to his shoulder.
Seventy yards, if that.
Jay took a deep breath, let it half out, and began to squeeze the trigger.
I was working at Doubleday when Ardath Mayhar began her career in the early 1980s-since then, she has published forty novels in various fields besides sf, including Young Adult and Westerns. I can"t believe that was twenty years ago, and I can"t believe that Ardath is seventy years old!
She describes herself as a "tough old lady," but if that"s so, then tough old ladies must have sharp senses of humor, as the following story proves.
Fungi.
Ardath Mayhar.
Jonathan drew a deep breath, tainted, as usual, by the smell of recycled air. His s.p.a.ce suit was awkward and it still rubbed his left knee, though the techs had worked on it again. He hated the suit, the domed station, and the world on which it sat. Almost airless, barren, holding only fungi and rock, the place was a disaster from the viewpoint of an ecologist.
He was thinking about that when the purple fungus spoke to him.
d.a.m.n! Contaminants in the air supply again, he thought, heading back for the airlock. He"d always had a sensitivity; the mold spores that often invaded the interiors of the breather units gave him hallucinations.
"You! Silver fungus! Have you no manners? I spoke to you!"
It wasn"t a voice in his ear, but one inside his head. He"d never had anything quite like that before. Jonathan stopped and popped the top of his helmet with his gloved fist. Sometimes thatput things back into place.
Not this time. A stream of images entered his mind, along with words. Real human words, not spoken but thought with great vigor. He stopped in his tracks and turned slowly, staring back at the clump of purple fuzz on top of a grim gray stone.
He increased magnification in his eye-plate, staring closely at the fungus. Each of the filaments that formed it was tipped with a speck of black so shiny it glittered in the unfiltered sunlight. As he stared, the entire group curved with synchronized ch.o.r.eography to point straight toward him . . . and stared back.
Eyes?
"Was that you?" he asked aloud, though he knew the helmet swallowed sound almost entirely.
There was no audible reply, but he knew the answer anyway. "Of course. I have been perceiving you and the other silver fangi for several black-times now. I have learned how you communicate, though the vibrations you make are painful. Where did your spores originate? You appeared so quickly- no other intruder fungus has ever grown so large in such a short span."
Jonathan backed up a step and found himself against another stony shelf, this one almost as high as his shoulders. Another silent voice said, "Watch it! Do you want to crush me? "
When he turned to look, a gray-green clump was staring back at him. He felt the hairs rise on his neck beneath the helmet, and sweat popped out on his chest inside the air-conditioned suit.
"You must understand," the purple fungus continued, "that this world does not contain sustenance for more life-forms than it now contains. No stone here can support more than a single organism, and all are occupied. You will have to encapsulate and send your spores elsewhere."
"But. . . but we are not fungi. We travel in other ways, and we don"t live on rocks. I a.s.sure you ..." He caught himself and stopped in mid-sentence. Apologize and explain to a clump of fuzz? Ridiculous!
Something very like a sigh, though soundless, wisped through his head. "Very large specimens always feel they are above the laws of survival. We have noted that in the past, on other worlds. We have, however, invented techniques with which to defend our habitats, over the millennia of our travels between worlds. Be warned, silver fungus. Leave our planet or suffer the consequences."
Jonathan opened his mouth, but he could find no words. He knew he had gone mad. He had to get inside the dome, clear himself of the mold spores, and get the medication Dr. Tait kept for such situations.
He hated to think what Commander Robb was going to say when he made his report. Robb was a military man of the old school. His reply to any challenge to human authority was a blast of laser fire, and he had no use for "slackers," as he called those who developed psychological problems on alien worlds.
Although Jonathan was a civilian, Robb had a way of making him feel lower than the fungi back there among the rocks. Flinching at the thought, the ecologist made his waycautiously toward the dome, avoiding the boulders with great care as he went. Only when the lock cycled shut behind him did he relax.
At last he stepped out into the dome, finding himself face-to-face with the commander.
"EckJes! What are you doing back so quickly? You were to examine Sector Sixteen of the north quadrant. Surely you cannot be done with that already!"
"Medication," Jonathan gasped. "Spores in breather . . . hallucinations."
Robb frowned ferociously, but he stepped aside. "When you finish with Dr. Tait," he said in a warning tone, "come directly to my quarters. I want a complete report from you, Eckles. I will not tolerate slackers!"
The doctor was interested in Jonathan"s description of his aberration while outside the dome. "Not your usual reaction," he mused as he shot the medication into Jonathan"s skin. "I would like to examine your breathing equipment before the techs clean it up. Have them bring it to my laboratory, with your recording computer."
On his way to Robb"s quarters, Jonathan left word for that to be done, but he was so worried about the coming interview that he didn"t think much about it. His push on the commander"s may-I-enter b.u.t.ton was timid, but the port popped open at once.
Robb sat at his desk, looking stern. "Sit down," he snapped. "Now give me a complete report of your very brief activities while outside the dome."
Feeling both foolish and terrified, Jonathan obeyed. When he was done, Robb"s coa.r.s.e white eyebrows were meeting above his craggy nose, and his thin lips had disappeared into a straight line.
"You expect me to believe that a fungus spoke to you?" His tone was dangerous.