Fear That Man

distance between closed rapidly.

Twenty yards…

Ten…

Five…

There was a sickening crunch, a severe jolt, and they were rushing past the other sled toward the end of the alley a few blocks further on. Behind, the other sled smashed into the wall, bearing its headless passengers, and crashed into the street. They had had the advantage of being four feet higher when they met the other sled. It had been a deadly encounter for the slugs, their heads sheared away by the bottom of the sled. But they had gotten away untouched, miraculously.

Buronto roared with laughter. A laughter, somehow, too deep for his fragile voice. The added depth of bloodlust.

“Land here!” Sam shouted a while later, his voice almost washed away by the whistling wind and the booming of the slaughter progressing in the depths of the center city behind them.

Buronto brought the sled to a jolting halt, gouging out five feet of grass at the entrance to the park. They clambered off and through the gate just as a slug stepped from behind a free-form aluminum statue.

“Watch it!” Coro shouted, catching the movement first.

Buronto brought his gun around, smashed the barrel into the slug’s head, brought it up, down again. Up and down, up and down. Blood sprayed out with every swing.

“That’s enough!” Sam shouted.

Buronto laughed, spittle flecking the corners of his lips. He poked the narrow barrel through the middle of the alien’s chest as if it were a bayonet, gouged the soft flesh, twisted and tore as orange blood poured down the gun and over his hands.

“I said that was enough!” Sam shouted even louder, his face red with disgust.

Buronto looked up, got angry, then realized who he was talking to. He still had that minimum of fear. Besides, this was the man who had given him the chance to kill. “Hurry up, then,” he snapped shrilly.

Sam realized the savage lust of the giant was pushing any thought of servile obedience further and further from his mind. That last had sounded much like an order, not an agreement. “I’ll say who is to hurry and when!” Sam roared.

Buronto looked at him, looked away. “There’ll come a day—”

“But it’s damn far off!” Sam snapped. “Now, let’s hurry.”

They moved briskly through the park. The green trees, leafy and rustling with the passage of the wind, the grass as green as a finely woven carpet, the flowers multi-hued and full-bloomed, all belied the horror transpiring in the streets beyond, denied the death and pain Buronto had perpetrated in their midst only moments before.

The ship was where they had left it, almost invisible, half submerged in a large pond, the other half well- hidden by thick masses of Spanish moss strung from the trees like beards. They slopped through the water, activated the portal, and entered the last free ship on Hope.

“Now do you understand?” Sam asked, staring the giant down.

The lights on the control console flashed, pulsated, flooded the room with weird currents of color. Coro sat bent over the monitoring devices, occasionally rubbing a hand across dry lips. The time had come. Almost. Very near. Blessed be the time. Frightening too. Lotus sat beside Coro, a hand on his arm, pointing now and then to different dials and scopes.

“I understand,” Buronto growled.

“No indiscriminate killing. We have to sneak in. If we’re confronted with the choice of killing a guard or sneaking past him — we sneak.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Or you either?” Buronto said, laughing slyly.

“It’s a matter of necessity,” Sam said wearily. They had been through it ten times now. He could think of no blunter, more forceful manner of putting it. “If you start killing everything that moves, the Central Being will have us pegged and dead before we’re anywhere near It. It’ll blow your head off the first moment It knows you’re in Raceship. It’ll win, Buronto. And you’ll be real dead.”

“Okay, okay. I got it well enough. Play it pansy. Gentility is the byword. No rough stuff until we bump off the big boy. But then, mister, I am going to have myself a lot of fun with the slugs.”

“And you’ll have earned it.”

“You too, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ll be twice as bloody about it, I’ll bet.”

“Most likely,” Sam said, leering false-heartedly. “Twice as bloody.” He wondered how he would handle Buronto after the mission was completed — if it was completed. It was going to be a tight situation. A kill-crazy giant running amok with a laser rifle. How could he control him? If he refused to kill after the Central Being was disposed of, then Buronto would realize his masochism was a front, a trick. What would the giant’s reaction be to that? Or, rather, not what would it be — but how fast would it come? Well, that was a problem he would have to think about later. Later, when he was driven to the wall.

“They seem settled for the duration, Sam,” Coro said, turning from the controls. “Raceship hasn’t moved since we’ve been monitoring it. But the battle is raging beyond belief. Millions of people have died. I wish we hadn’t waited for dark.”

“But it is dark now,” Sam answered, standing, stretching. “And we have a much better chance with darkness as a cover.”

Buronto went to get their weapons and a laser hand-torch.

“Look, Sam,” Coro said, moving close and whispering. “He frightens me. And—”

“Me too.”

Coro hesitated. “Yeah. I see. He may be hideous, but he’s the best-looking chance we have. But do you really think he can kill this Central Being that easily?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Our God was weak and easy to dispatch because Breadloaf’s Shield had drained Him of His strength over the centuries. This God has not been drained.”

“Then why the devil—”

“He doesn’t have to kill God,” Sam said, pulling the black hood of the nightsuit over his head.

“What? I don’t understand this at all.”

“Oh, he may kill God. He just might. But it isn’t necessary. If we can get him in there and let God kill him, I think—”

But Buronto had returned with a rifle for each of them and a cutting torch. “Let’s go,” he said.

The two of them stepped quietly through the portal into the black blanket of night…

XV

Raceship had settled in the vast wild game reserve that stretched forty-seven miles on a side behind the Congressional Archives. It took a great deal of space to park a boat that big, and as he and Buronto stood among the still forms of oak trees looking at the vessel, Sam wondered how many animals had been crushed by its descent. And how many tourists.

“They came in that?” Buronto asked.

Sam grinned. It was a difficult thing to do under the circumstances of the moment. “Scare you?” Delicately, delicately lead on the brute…

“Nah! But, Mother, how big!”

The black hull loomed so high overhead that it was difficult to tell just where it ended and the night began. Trees had been snapped off around its base and were jutting outward like splintered toothpicks. The earth had