to share the wisdom in the great man’s hidden vault would never have arisen.
Now, curled fetally on the back seat of the Buick, he may be temporarily blinded in one eye, bullet-creased and bullet-pierced, weak and weary, defeated for the moment, but he is not despairing. He has another advantage in addition to his magically resilient body, unparalleled stamina, and exhaustive knowledge of the killing arts. Equally important, he possesses what he perceives to be great wisdom, acquired from movie screens both public and private, and that wisdom will ensure his ultimate triumph. He knows what he believes to be the great secrets that the wisest people hide in concealed vaults: those things which women really need but which they may not know they subconsciously desire, those things which children want but of which they dare not speak. He understands that his wife and children will welcome and thrive upon utter domination, harsh discipline, physical abuse, sexual subjugation, even humiliation. At first opportunity, he intends to fulfill their deepest and most primitive longings, as the lenient false father apparently will never be able to do, and together they will be a family, living in harmony and love, sharing a destiny, held together forever by his singular wisdom, strength, and demanding heart.
He drifts toward healing sleep, confident of waking with full health and vigor in several hours.
A few feet from him, in the trunk of the car, lies the dead man who once owned the Buick—cold, stiff, and without any appealing prospects of his own.
How good it is to be special, to be needed, to have a destiny.
PART TWO
At the point where hope and reason part, lies the spot where madness gets a start. Hope to make the world kinder and free— but flowers of hope root in reality.
No peaceful bed exists for lamb and lion, unless on some world out beyond Orion. Do not instruct the owls to spare the mice. Owls acting as owls must is not a vice.
Storms do not respond to heartfelt pleas. All the words of men can’t calm the seas. Nature—always beneficent
Mankind shares all Nature’s imperfections, clearly visible to casual inspections. Resisting betterment is the human trait. The ideal of Utopia is our tragic fate.
We sense that life is a dark comedy and maybe we can live with that. However, because the whole thing is written for the entertainment of the gods, too many of the jokes go right over our heads.
Four
Immediately after leaving the roadside rest area where the dead retirees relaxed forever in the cozy dining nook of their motorhome, heading back along I-40 toward Oklahoma City with the inscrutable Karl Clocker behind the wheel, Drew Oslett used his state-of-the-art cellular phone to call the home office in New York City. He reported developments and requested instructions.
The telephone he used wasn’t yet for sale to the general public. To the average citizen, it would
It plugged into the cigarette lighter like other cellulars; however, unlike others, it was operable virtually anywhere in the world, not solely within the state or service area in which it was issued. Like the SATU electronic map, the phone incorporated a direct satellite up-link. It could directly access at least ninety percent of the communications satellites currently in orbit, bypassing their land-based control stations, override security-exclusion programs, and connect with any telephone the user wished, leaving absolutely no record that the call had been made. The violated phone company would never issue a bill for Oslett’s call to New York because they would never know that it had been placed using their system.
He spoke freely to his New York contact about what he had found at the rest stop, with no fear that he would be overheard by anyone, because his phone also included a scrambling device that he activated with a simple switch. A matching scrambler on the home-office phone rendered his report intelligible again upon receipt, but to anyone who might intercept the signal between Oklahoma and the Big Apple, Oslett’s words would sound like gibberish.
New York was concerned about the murdered retirees only to the extent that there might be a way for the Oklahoma authorities to link their killing to Alfie or to the Network, which was the name they used among themselves to describe their organization. “You didn’t leave the shoes there?” New York asked.
“Of course not,” Oslett said, offended at the suggestion of incompetence.
“All of the electronics in the heel—”
“I have the shoes here.”
“That’s right-out-of-the-lab stuff. Any knowledgeable person who sees it, he’s going to go apeshit and maybe—”
“I have the shoes,” Oslett said tightly.
“Good. Okay, then let them find the bodies and bang their heads against the wall trying to solve it. None of our business. Somebody else can haul away the garbage.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll be back to you soon.”
“I’m counting on it,” Oslett said.
After disconnecting, while he waited for a response from the home office, he was filled with uneasiness at the prospect of passing more than a hundred black and empty miles with no company but himself and Clocker. Fortunately, he was prepared with noisy and involving entertainment. From the floor behind the driver’s seat, he retrieved a Game Boy and slipped the headset over his ears. Soon he was happily distracted from the unnerving rural landscape by the challenges of a rapidly paced computer game.
Suburban lights speckled the night when Oslett next looked up from the miniature screen in response to a tap on the shoulder from Clocker. On the floor between his feet, the cellular phone was ringing.
The New York contact sounded as somber as if he had just come from his own mother’s funeral. “How soon can you get to the airport in Oklahoma City?”
Oslett relayed the question to Clocker.
Clocker’s impassive face didn’t change expressions as he said, “Half an hour, forty minutes—assuming the fabric of reality doesn’t warp between here and there.”
Oslett relayed to New York only the estimated traveling time and left out the science fiction.
“Get there quick as you can,” New York said. “You’re going to California.”
“Where in California?”
“John Wayne Airport, Orange County.”
“You have a lead on Alfie?”
“We don’t know what the fuck we’ve got.”
“Please don’t make your answers so darn technical,” Oslett said. “You’re losing me.”
“When you get to the airport in Oklahoma City, find a newsstand. Buy the latest issue of
“Is this a joke?”
“We just found out about it.”
“About what?” Oslett asked. “Look, I don’t