of a baby high over his head in a curious mixture of triumph and love, his face split by a huge winning grin. The pictures began to flash by faster and faster, whirling, not bringing any sense of grief and love and loss, not yet, no, bringing only a cool Novocain numbness.
Killian assuring that the Network had nothing to do with their deaths, all a horrible accident. Richards supposed he believed him-not only because the story sounded too much like a lie not to be the truth, but because Killian knew that if Richards agreed to the job offer, his first stop would be Co-Op City, where a single hour on the streets would get him the straight of the matter.
Prowlers. Three of them. (Or tricks? Richards wondered, suddenly agonized. She had sounded slightly furtive on the telephone, as if holding something back-) They had been hopped up, probably. Perhaps they had made some threatening move toward Cathy and Sheila had tried to protect her daughter. They had both died of puncture wounds.
That had snapped him out of it. “Don’t feed me that shit!” He screamed suddenly. Amelia flinched backward and suddenly hid her face. “What happened? Tell me what happened!”
“There’s nothing more I can say. Your wife was stabbed over sixty times.”
“Cathy,” Richards said emptily, without thought, and Killian winced.
“Ben, would you like some time to think about all this?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
“I’m desperately, desperately sorry, pal. I swear on my mother that we had nothing to do with it. Our way would have been to set them up away from you, with visiting rights if you agreed. A man doesn’t willingly work for the people who butchered his family. We know that.”
“I need time to think.”
“As Chief Hunter,” Killian said softly, “you could get those bastards and put them down a deep hole. And a lot of others just like them.”
“I want to think. Goodbye.”
“I-”
Richards reached out and thumbed the Free-Vee into blackness. He sat stonelike in his seat. His hands dangled loosely between his knees. The plane droned on into darkness.
So, he thought. It’s all come unraveled. All of it.
MINUS 012 AND COUNTING
An hour passed.
Pictures flitted in and out of his mind. Stacey. Bradley. Elton Parrakis with his baby face. A nightmare of running. Lighting the newspapers in the basement of the YMCA with that last match. The gas-powered cars wheeling and screeching, the Sten gun spitting flame. Laughlin’s sour voice. The pictures of those two kids, the junior Gestapo agents.
No ties now, and certainly no morality. How could morality be an issue to a man cut loose and drifting? How wise Killian had been to see that, to show Richards with calm and gentle brutality just how alone he was. Bradley and his impassioned air-pollution pitch seemed distant, unreal, unimportant. Nose-filters. Yes. At one time the concept of nose-filters had seemed large, very important. No longer so.
True. Even Richards’s loins had produced a specimen for the killing machine. Eventually the poor would adapt, mutate. Their lungs would produce their own filtration system in ten thousand years or in fifty thousand, and they would rise up, rip out the artificial filters and watch their owners flop and kick and drum their lives away, drowning in an atmosphere where oxygen played only a minor part, and what was futurity to Ben Richards? It was all only bitchin.
There would be a period of grief. They would expect that, provide for it. There would even be rages, moments of revolt. Abortive tries to make the knowledge of deliberate poison in the air public again? Maybe. They would take care of it. Take care of him-anticipation of a time when he would take care of them. Instinctively he knew he could do it. He suspected he might even have a certain genius for the job. They would help him, heal him. Drugs and doctors. A change of mind.
Then, peace.
Contentiousness rooted out like bitterweed.
He regarded the peace longingly, the way a man in the desert regards water.
Amelia Williams cried steadily in her seat long after the time when all tears should have gone dry. He wondered indifferently what would become of her. She couldn’t very well be returned to her husband and family in her present state; she simply was not the same lady who had pulled up to a routine stop sign with her mind all full of meals and meetings, clubs and cooking. She had Shown Red. He supposed there would be drugs and therapy, a patient showing off. The Place Where Two Roads Diverged, a pinpointing of the reason why the wrong path had been chosen. A carnival m dark mental browns.
He wanted suddenly to go to her, comfort her, tell her that she was not badly broken, that a single crisscrossing of psychic Band-Aids should fix her, make her even better than she had been before.
Sheila. Cathy.
Their names came and repeated, clanging in his mind like bells, like words repeated until they are reduced to nonsense. Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one. Grief was impossible; he could feel only a fuzzy sense of embarrassment: they had taken him, run him slack-lunged, and he had turned out to be nothing but a horse’s ass after all. He remembered a boy from his grammar school days who had stood up to give the Pledge of Allegiance and his pants had fallen down.
The plane droned on and on. He sank into a three-quarter doze. Pictures came and went lazily, whole incidents were seen without any emotional color at all.
Then, a final scrapbook picture: a glossy eight-by-ten taken by a bored police photographer who had perhaps been chewing gum. Exhibit C, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. One ripped and sliced small body in a blood-drenched crib. Splatters and runnels on the cheap stucco walls and the broken Mother Goose mobile bought for a dime. A great sticky clot on the secondhand teddy bear with one eye.
He snapped awake, full awake and bolt upright, with his mouth propped wide in a blabbering scream. The force expelled from his lungs was great enough to make his tongue flap like a sail. Everything, everything in the first-class compartment was suddenly clear and plangently real, overpowering, awful. It had the grainy reality of a scare tabloid newsie clip. Laughlin being dragged out of that shed in Topeka, for instance. Everything, everything was very real and in Technicolor.
Amelia screamed affrightedly in unison, cringing back in her seat with eyes as huge as cracked porcelain doorknobs, trying to cram a whole fist in her mouth.
Donahue came charging through the galley, his gun out. His eyes were small enthusiastic black beads. “What is it? What’s wrong? McCone?”
“No,” Richards said, feeling his heart slow just enough to keep his words from sounding squeezed and desperate. “Bad dream. My little girl.”
“Oh.” Donahue’s eyes softened in counterfeit sympathy. He didn’t know how to do it very well. Perhaps he would be a goon all his life. Perhaps he would learn. He turned to go.
“Donahue?”
Donahue turned back warily.
“Had you pretty scared, didn’t I?”
“No.” Donahue turned away on that short word. His neck was bunched. His buttocks in his tight blue uniform were as pretty as a girl’s.
“I can scare you worse,” Richards remarked. “I could threaten to take away your nose filter.”
Richards closed his eyes tiredly. The glossy eight-by-ten came back. Opened them. Closed them. No glossy eight-by-ten. He waited, and when he was sure it was not going to come back (right away), he opened his eyes and thumbed on the Free-Vee.
It popped on and there was Killian.
MINUS 011 AND COUNTING
“Richards.” Killian leaned forward, making no effort to conceal his tension.
“I’ve decided to accept,” Richards said.
Killian leaned back and nothing smiled but his eyes. “I’m very glad,” he said.
MINUS 010 AND COUNTING
“Jesus,” Richards said. He was standing in the doorway to the pilot’s country.
Holloway turned around. “Hi.” He had been speaking to something called Detroit VOR. Duninger was drinking coffee.
The twin control consoles were untended. Yet they swerved, tipped, and fumed as if in response to ghost hands and feet. Dials swung. Lights flashed. There seemed to be a huge and constant input and output going on… to no one at all.
“Who’s driving the bus?” Richards asked, fascinated.
“Otto,” Duninger said.
“Otto?”
“Otto the automatic pilot. Get it? Shitty pun.” Duninger suddenly smiled. “Glad to have you on the team, fella. You may not believe this, but some of us guys were rooting for you pretty hard.”
Richards nodded noncommittally.
Holloway stepped into the slightly awkward breach by saying: “Otto freaks me out, too. Even after twenty years of this. But he’s dead safe. Sophisticated as hell. It would make one of the old ones look like a… well, like an orange crate beside a Chippendale bureau.”
“Is that right?” Richards was staring out into the darkness.
“Yes. You lock on P.O.D.-point of destination-and Otto takes over, aided by Voice-Radar all the way. Makes the pilot pretty superfluous, except for takeoffs and landings. And in case of trouble.”
