Dark Rivers of the Heart

Looking at the sky again, Valerie said, “I hate these bastards!”

“Who are they?” he asked, not for the first time.

“You don’t want to know,” she said, as before. “As soon as you know, you’re a dead man.”

“Looks like there’s a good chance I’m already a dead man. And I sure wouldn’t want them to whack me and never know who they were.”

She mulled that over as she accelerated up another hill, a long one this time. “Okay. You’ve got a point. But later. Right now, I’ve got to concentrate on getting us out of this mess.”

“There’s a way out?”

“Between slim and none — but a way.”

“I thought, with that satellite, they were going to spot us any second now.”

“They will. But the nearest place the bastards have any men is probably back in Vegas, a hundred and ten miles from here, maybe even a hundred twenty. That’s how far I got Friday night, before I decided that staying on the move was making you worse. By the time they get a hit squad together and fly in here after us, we’ve got two hours minimum, two and a half max.”

“To do what?”

“To lose them again,” she said somewhat impatiently.

“How do we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space, for God’s sake?” he demanded.

“Boy, does that sound paranoid,” she said.

“It’s not paranoid, it’s what they’re doing.”

“I know, I know. But it sure sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” She adopted a voice not dissimilar from that of Goofy, the Disney cartoon character. “Watching us from outer space, funny little men in pointy hats, with ray guns, gonna steal our women, destroy the world.”

Behind them, Rocky woofed softly, intrigued by the Goofy voice.

She dropped the funny voice. “Are we living in screwed-up times or what? God in Heaven, are we ever.”

As they crested the top of the long hill, giving the springs another hard workout, Spencer said, “One minute I think I know you, and the next minute I don’t know you at all.”

“Good. Keeps you alert. We need to be alert.”

“You suddenly seem to think this is funny.”

“Oh, sometimes I can’t feel the humor any more than you’re able to right now. But we live in God’s amusement park. Take it too seriously, you’ll go nuts. On some level, everything’s funny, even the blood and the dying. Don’t you think so?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Then how do you ever get along?” she asked, but not in the least flippantly, with total seriousness now.

“It hasn’t been easy.”

The broad, flat top of the hill featured more brush than they had yet encountered. Valerie didn’t let up on the accelerator, and the Rover smashed through everything in its way.

Spencer persisted: “How will we lose them if they’re watching us from outer space?”

“Trick ’em.”

“How?”

“With some clever moves.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He wouldn’t relent: “When will you know?”

“I sure hope before our two hours are up.” She frowned at the odometer. “Seems like we ought to’ve gone six miles.”

“Seems like a hundred. Much more of this damn bouncing, and my headache’s going to come back hard.”

The broad top of the hill didn’t drop off abruptly but melted into a long, descending slope that was covered with tall grass as dry, pale, and translucent as insect wings. At the bottom were two lanes of blacktop that led east and west.

“What’s that?” he wondered.

“Old Federal Highway Ninety-three,” she said.

“You knew it was there? How?”

“Either I studied a map while you were out of your head — or I’m just dead-on psychic.”

“Probably both,” he said, for again she had surprised him.

* * *

Because the view from five thousand feet didn’t provide adequate resolution of car-size objects at ground level, Roy requested that the system focus down to one thousand feet.

For clarity, that extreme degree of magnification required more than the usual amount of image enhancement. The additional processing of the incoming Earthguard transmission required so much computer capacity that other agency work was halted to free the Cray for this urgent task. Otherwise, more minutes of delay would have occurred between receipt of an image and its projection in the control center.

Less than a minute passed before the cool, almost whispery, female voice again spoke softly from the public-address system: “Suspect vehicle acquired.”

Ken Hyckman dashed away from the control console into the two rows of computers, all of which were manned. He returned within another minute, boyish and buoyant. “We’ve got her.”

“We can’t know yet,” Roy cautioned.

“Oh, we’ve got her, all right,” Hyckman said excitedly, turning to beam at the wall display. “What other vehicle would be out there, on the move, in the same area where somebody tried to up-link?”

“Could still be some EPA scientist.”

“Suddenly on the run?”

“Maybe just moving around.”

“Moving real fast for the terrain.”

“Well, there aren’t any speed limits out there.”

“Too coincidental,” said Hyckman. “It’s her.”

“We’ll see.”

With a ripple, beginning at the left and moving to the right across the wall display, the image changed. The new view shifted, blurred, shifted, cleared, shifted, blurred, cleared again — and they were looking down from one thousand feet onto rough terrain.

A vehicle of unidentifiable type and make, obviously with off-road capability, raced across a table of brush- covered land. It was still a woefully tiny object seen from that altitude.

“Focus down to five hundred feet,” Roy ordered.

“Higher-magnification view coming up.”

After a brief delay, the display rippled left to right again. The image blurred, shifted, blurred, cleared.

Earthguard 3 was not directly over the moving target but in a geosynchronous orbit to the east and north. Therefore, the target was observed at an angle, which required additional automated processing of the image to eliminate distortions caused by the perspective. The result, however, was a picture that included not only the rectangular forms of the roof and hood but a severe angular view of one flank of the vehicle.

Although Roy knew that an element of distortion still remained, he was half convinced that he could see a couple of brighter spots glimmering in that fleet shadow, which might have been driver’s-side windows reflecting the morning sun.

As the suspect vehicle reached the brink of the hill and began to descend a long slope, Roy peered at the foremost of those possible windows and wondered if, indeed, the woman waited to be discovered on the other side of a pane of sun-bronzed glass. Had they found her at last?

The target was approaching a highway.

“What road is that?” Roy demanded. “Give us some overlays, let’s identify this. Quickly.”

Hyckman pressed a console key and spoke into the microphone.

On the wall, by the time the suspect turned east onto the two-lane highway, a multicolored overlay identified