uttering a tiny cry as it was blown apart.
Beyond it, in the night, Hilligan heard the other one running.
Fast.
Hilligan followed. They had entered a desert forest of cactus, up the side of a small hill. The cactus looked like they had been planted, lined up in neat rows up the side of the hillock, each giving the next just enough room to catch any available water.
Hilligan caught a brief glimpse of his prey, heard a scraped tumble of rocks that splashed down past him to the foot of the hill below.
“I’m coming for you, you bastard!” Hilligan shouted up into the darkness.
Only silence greeted him.
In the dark, with the night over him, Hilligan moved upward, from cactus to cactus. Cursing his boots, he knew that he was the one making noise this time as he kicked a scuff of shale that slid down the mountainside.
He stopped, leaned into the curve of a prickly pear without touching it, and waited.
Still nothing.
The night breathed silence.
He felt presence; heard the faintest of sounds—
A silver-white hand appeared from behind the cactus and was on him before he could react.
He was knocked to the ground. A chrome head loomed over him. He heard his rifle slide away down the hill in the darkness. His attacker raised a Colt .45, then tossed it contemptuously away and held his palm downward over Hilligan.
“This game’s over,” the bandit hissed at him. “Tomorrow I’ll play games in Lawrence. And then everywhere else on this miserable planet…”
The palm began to glow with silver light.
Something flashed in the darkness, hovered overhead, dropped on the alien’s back.
The alien cried out and fell off into the night.
Hilligan pushed himself up to see the bandit clutching at his ripped-out throat, see it thrash helplessly before lying still.
“That would have been you in another second,” Hilligan heard in his head, weakly. There was familiar laughter behind the words.
“Sparky,” he said.
The dog lay panting a few feet from the imploded corpse of the desperado. His head looked like a scooped- out bowl, the top completely collapsed, wires and bio-tubes hanging uselessly. But there was the old look of unmistakably intelligent though weakening fire in one of his eyes.
“Should always check to make sure your sidekick has really stopped playing,” the dog’s thoughts said to him. “That bullet they hit me with fused a couple of the right circuits back together. It was like waking up from a bad dream. And you were gone.” There was more humor than blame in the voice.
“Sparky—”
“Don’t apologize, Mitch. I had just enough left in me to save your ass and this planet…” The voice trailed off tepidly.
As Hilligan watched, the weak light began to fade in the dog’s eye.
“So long, pal…” the dog said in a dying whisper.
Hilligan stood in the darkness for a long time. The Milky Way, a blue glowing ribbon cutting the night, passed overhead toward the West and morning.
~ * ~
Finally, as the Milky Way faded, Hilligan picked Sparky up in his arms and headed back to the Toyota. He pulled off the camouflage, lay the dog gently in the back, and headed out.
The morning colored the east purple and yellow. Hilligan smoked a cigarette and thought about his own spaceship hidden out in the desert. He thought about the four bandits he had been sent to catch who had terrorized and destroyed so many other worlds, and about how his race’s addiction to games had probably saved himself and this planet. And he thought about Sparky, his only weapon, and how he’d been constructed to look like any Earth dog. Hilligan thought about the thin plastic flesh that covered his own chromium skin.
Hilligan thought about what he would do now. He could go home, but somehow, the remembered kiss of a woman named Anne made him want to stay for awhile.
He had a feeling that love was a good game to play.
There was a tool kit out in that spaceship buried in the desert; perhaps he could spend his spare time trying to fix Sparky up. A good sidekick was hard to find.
Perhaps the town of Lawrence needed a Marshall.
Hiligan rode the Wild West in a Toyota.
THE MAN IN THE OTHER CAR
By Al Sarrantonio
I think I saw his face as we went by. We passed his car as you pass most cars, using peripheral vision and a vague radar sense of distance and speed. I think the car was blue, possibly gray. The plates were green and white, in-state, I think.
My son was the first one to bring it up. “Dad, did you see that guy?” he asked, and my eyes were on the road and my mind elsewhere because I grunted and said, “Why?”
“The guy in the car you just passed—the one that looked like ours—did you see him?”
My first instinct was to glance in the rear view mirror—at Rusty’s face, half filling it on the right, the features matching the worried tone of his voice—and then at the car in the right lane, now receding, almost as if it had stopped. It was at least a quarter mile behind me now. I could see the front grill, a lot of plastic chrome, squarish, just like my car and a million others on the road. There was a glint off the windshield.
“What about him?” I asked.
“He just looked…” Rusty left the statement unfinished, and I glanced at him again in the rear-view mirror. I moved my head so I could briefly study Mona, sitting next to him. She, too, had a strange look on her face.
“Did you see him, Mom?” Rusty asked.
“No,” Debra said, in a clipped tone.
“No need to snap at the kid—”I started, but she cut me off, as always.
“I’ll say any damn thing I like,” she said, and without looking at her I knew she wore
I took a deep breath and said, “Let’s try to keep the trip pleasant.”
“Pleasant as you like,” she said, only now I was studying the rear view mirror again, my kids in the back seat whose looks had turned stony.
“So what did he look like, Rusty?” I asked, trying to change the subject in the suddenly quiet car.
He shrugged, looking away.
“Whatever,” he mumbled.
“Look,” I said, in a measured tone, knowing I was using the conciliatory tone they all knew a mile away. “I know the trip has been difficult so far, but I think we should try to get along better.”
Debra was silent, eyes closed, leaning back into the headrest. Rusty and Mona were looking out each of their side windows, lips tight.
“Christ,” I said, letting out my breath. I almost yanked the car into the right lane and then into the service lane, where I would slam on the brakes, but I had already tried that and nothing had come of it. I briefly studied my hands, tightly gripping the steering wheel.
“
“Just drive, Harry,” Debra said, keeping her eyes closed.
