what Donahue's balls were encased in.
'I didn't mean to mouth off,' he said unwillingly. Richards thought he could peg him. Well-off young men with a lot of free time often spent much of it roaming the shabby pleasure areas of the big cities, roaming in well-heeled packs, sometimes on foot, more often on choppers. They were queer-stompers. Queers, of course, had to be eradicated. Save our bathrooms for democracy. They rarely ventured beyond the twilight pleasure areas into the full darkness of the ghettos. When they did, they got the shit kicked out of them.
Donahue shifted uneasily under Richards's long gaze. 'Anything else?'
'You a queer-stomper, pal?'
'
'Never mind. Go on back. Help them fly the plane. '
Donahue went back at a fast shuffle.
Richards quickly discovered that the map with the towns and cities and roads was the political map. Pressing one finger down from Derry to the Canada-Vermont border in a western-reaching straightedge, he located their approximate position.
'Captain Holloway?'
'Yes.'
'Turn lleft.'
'Huh?' Holloway sounded frankly startled.
'South, I mean. Due south. And remember-'
'I'm remembering,' Holloway said. 'Don't worry.'
The plane banked. McCone sat hunched in the seat he had fallen into, staring at Richards with hungry, wanting eyes.
Minus 021 and COUNTING
Richards found himself drifting in and out of a daze, and it frightened him. The steady drone of the engines were insidious, hypnotic. McCone was aware of what was happening, and his leaning posture became more and more vulpine. Amelia was also aware. She cringed miserably in a forward seat near the galley, watching them both.
Richards drank two more cups of coffee. Not much help. It was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate on the coordination of his map and Holloway's toneless commentary on their outlaw flight.
Finally he drove his fist into his side where the bullet had taken him. The pain was immediate and intense, like a dash of cold water in the face. A whistling half-whispered screech issued from either side of his clenched mouth, like stereo. Fresh blood wet his shirt and sieved through onto his hand.
Amelia moaned.
'We'll be passing over Albany in about six minutes,' Holloway said. 'If you look out, you'll see it coming up on your left.'
'Relax,' Richards said to no one, to himself. 'Relax. Just relax.'
It was quarter to eight.
Minus 020 and COUNTING
It could have been a bad dream, a nightmare that had crawled out of the dark and into the unhealthy limelight of his half-awake mind-more properly a vision or an hallucination. His brain was working and concentrating on one level, dealing with the problem of navigation and the constant danger of McCone. On another, something black was taking place. Things were moving in the dark.
Huge, whining servomechanisms turning in the dark, in the night. Infrared eyes glowing in unknown spectrums. Pale green foxfire of dials and swinging radar scopes.
Trucks rumbling along back-country roads, and on triangulated flatbeds two hundred miles apart, microwave dishes swing at the night sky. Endless streams of electrons fly out on invisible batwings. Bounce, echo. The strong blip and the fading afterimage lingering until the returning swing of light illuminates it in a slightly more southerly position.
