Fear That Man

and singed clothing and skin.

“Go ahead,” Crazy bellowed, grabbing Coro’s unused rifle. “I’ll hold them off a few more seconds, then leap in after you.”

Coro pulled Lotus — she was reluctant to go before Crazy — to the portal and shoved her through, jumped for Sam and helped him in. A hail of beams chipped at the rim of the hatch.

Crazy fired wildly, his hair bouncing.

Coro turned, opened his mouth to call; his mouth stayed open — in a scream. A beam caught Crazy in the chest, tore him open to the crotch and spilled his insides all over the scaffolding. For a split instant the boyish face looked surprised. Then the eyes fluttered shut. He swayed and toppled over the edge of the scaffold, hooves kicking.

XI

Like a needle sinking through a jar of Stygian syrup, the starship slid silently through the thickness of hyperspace, set on a course for Hope. Lotus lay huddled on a bunk, her wings crumpled carelessly beneath her, her cheeks stained with tears. It had taken both of them to hold her down and hypo enough c.c.’s of sedatives into her to put her to sleep. She wanted to leap out onto the platform, get Crazy back inside — even though he was dead. Dead. A word she couldn’t connect with Crazy, a word distant and unreal. Now, at last, she slept.

Sam stretched out on a bunk, anxious to catch a little nap before they reached Hope and the trouble ahead. A little nap, perhaps, before the longest nap…

Blackness… Blackness…

Concussion! Brilliance! A rectangle of nova-light!

The door had burst open, and the shadow-clad figure of a man stood there, framed in the doorway against the burning background of light. His eyes gleamed madly in darkness. Slowly he advanced.

Who are you?

There was no answer from the shadow-man.

Who are you!

There was a guttural, awful snarling from the man, the snarls of an animal. He was large as an ox, shoulders as wide as an ax handle, hands like chiseled rocks.

Desperately, Sam palmed the light switch, heart thumping like the heart of a bird. Light fired the room — but the flickering light of a strobe. On… off… on… off. The approaching giant was a pulsating, cardboard- like creature in the weird light.

On, off, on, off…

His face was a twisting mass of shadows.

The face of… of…

Who are you?

The face of Buronto! Black Jack Buronto! A leer split the all too familiar face. Hands reached out to grab, tear, strangle.

Don’t touch me! Please, please, don’t touch me!

On, off, on, off, the strobe threw flickering blacknesses and sporadic waves of yellow light over the snarling colossus. The hands fidgeted as they reached out for his throat and…

… and then Buronto wasn’t Buronto any longer. Buronto was a slug, segmented and pulpy. There was a laser weapon in his pseudopods. Slithering, hissing, he moved toward the bed and…

… and then the slug was Buronto once more, leering and…

… and then it was the slug, slithering…

Buronto-slug-Buronto-slug-on-off-on-off—

He woke, squeals of terror stuck in his throat, squirming to pass the constricted muscles in his neck and emerge as full-bodied screams. But he knew! He knew how they could fight the Central Being even though they were not violent men. He had the whole goddammed answer!

“Sam!” Coro was saying, shaking him.

With more than a little effort, he forced the grogginess from his mind, sat up. “Andy, I’ve got it! I know how we can stop the Central Being! I know just exactly what we can do!”

“I hope you do,” Coro said. “ ‘Cause I just picked them up on our screens. They’ll reach Hope about two hours after we do.”

XII

The Inferno was just as he remembered it. It assaulted the senses like a thousand pile drivers pounding concrete. It washed, slithered, scraped, chipped, sanded, sheared the mind, split the senses open to an expanded, brighter awareness. Letting the atmosphere of the place pick them and carry them like flotsam in the winds of eternity, they moved along the wall toward an empty table. A clown in an imagi-color suit that was purple to Sam, green to Coro, and blue to Lotus, sprang from the floor, wiggled insanely large plastic ears, and popped out of sight just as an ebony and silver cloud passed with two naked acrobats performing a complicated series of head-, hand-, and shoulderstands.

“Here,” Sam said, raising his voice above the music, and squinting through the perfumed clouds. He pulled out a chair for Lotus. She was wide-eyed, taking in the wonders of the bar. She had forced herself to recover — externally, at least — from Crazy’s death, and she seemed a bit more like her old self. If old selves can be resurrected from the ashes of pain and change. Sam and Coro sat down also.

“What—” Coro began.

“Drinks first,” Sam said, holding up his hand.

“We only have two hours,” Coro said. “Less than two!”

“And drinks will relax our nerves, which are, as you bear testimony to, nearly ready to snap.” He took their orders and punched the robotender for them, depositing the correct change. He also pressed the button requesting a human waiter’s attention. A few moments later, a thin man with eyes like those of an eagle and a long nose pointing to a longer chin, came to their table. “I would like you to find someone for me,” Sam said.

“Sir?”

“Buronto.”

“Who is—”

“Black Jack Buronto. Is he here?”

“Yes,” the waiter said reluctantly, and suspiciously.

“I’d like to see him. Would you tell him that, please?” He placed a bill on the table and shoved it toward the waiter.

“Look, Buronto isn’t just a tourist attraction, mister. He’s—”

“I know all about him. I once knocked him out in a fight.”

The waiter drew back, started to say something, grabbed the bill, and scurried away through the crowd.

“What was that all about?” Coro asked. “Who is this Buronto?”

Sam explained the nature of the man they were after. There was no police force on Hope, no army, no navy, air force, or marines. No fighting force at all and absolutely no possibility of putting one together. But there was the masochist killer, Buronto. Wasn’t he their only chance?

“And you knocked him out in a fight?” Lotus said. Her eyes pierced him as if they were electronic knives, cutting into his bone marrow, flipping through each cell of his mind.

“I was… more or less… under hypnosis at the time. Delirious, really.”

“And this is the killer,” Coro said, visibly shivering.