Changer of Worlds

moving slowly through the human wreckage, searching for survivors.

They found one still alive. His last sight was the tongue of his executioner.

Then, silence again.

Jeremy caught motion in the corner of his eye. He turned, raising a pistol, but lowered it at once. With his uncanny reflexes, of mind as much as body, he recognized the motion. A captain and a master of the martial arts, advancing slowly into the light.

The silence was broken, by a scream out of darkness.

“Daddy!”

Motion anew, a girl’s blurring feet. Racing across a field of carnage as if it were a meadow; skipping through havoc as easily as they would have skipped through grass.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! ”

“It’s an odd sort of place, this universe of ours,” mused Jeremy. He smiled at the comrade at his side. “Don’t you think?”

Donald X was cut from more solemn cloth, as befitted such a thick creature. F-67d-8455-2/5 he had been, once, bred for a life of heavy labor. “I dunno,” he grunted, surveying the scene with stolid satisfaction.

“Master Tye! Master Tye!”

“Seems just about right to me.”

Daughter struck father like a guided missile. Jeremy winced. “Good thing he’s a gold medalist. Else that’s a takedown for sure.”

His eyes moved to a young man, standing alone in a lake of blood. The flechette gun was held limply in his hands. There was nothing in that face now but innocence, wondering.

“Odd,” insisted Jeremy. “Galahad’s not supposed to be a torturer.”

Rafe

The first thing he recognized, as he faded back in, was a voice. Everything else was meaningless. Some part of him understood that his eyes were open. But the part of him that saw did not.

There was only the voice.

Your plan worked perfectly, Rafe. Beautiful! They’ll make you a Hero of the Revolution. In private, of course. Just like they did with me.

Oddly, the first concrete bit of information that returned was the name. He felt a trickle of emotion re- entering a field of blankness. He hated being called “Rafe.” He would not even tolerate Raphael.

Everyone knows that! There was less of anger in the thought than sullenness. The pout of an aggrieved boy.

Yeah, it was damned near as perfect an operation as I’ve ever seen—and I’ll make sure to include that in my own supplemental report to Gironde’s.

The name “Gironde” registered also. Gironde was a citizen major in the SS detachment on Terra. One of his own subordinates. Not close, though; not one of his inner sanctum. An “ops ape,” Gironde was; not his kind at all.

You’ll be glad to know that the Ballroom’s sweep of the Loop seems to have damned near wiped out the Scrags completely. Lord, that was a stroke of genius on your part!

The word “Lord” was not supposed to be used. He remembered that. And remembered, also, that it was his responsibility to see to it that it wasn’t.

Between the confusion caused by the rally at Soldier Field— all those people crowding through the streets and alleys—and their own efforts to catch the girl, the Scrags all came out of their hideyholes. Well… No doubt there’s a few left. Not many.

The next sound he recognized as laughter. No, more like a dry chuckle. Very dry. Very cold. Then, more sounds. Someone, he understood vaguely, had pushed back a chair and risen from it.

Oh, yeah. You’re a genius, Rafe. Just like you planned, the Ballroom wiped out the Scrags in one day. And the girl’s safe, of course, so you got us out of that mess. Can you imagine? The nerve of those Manpower bastards! Trying to set us up as the patsy, figuring everybody would believe anything about Peeps now that Parnell’s arriving.

That was the sound of a man pacing, he realized. And then, suddenly, understood that he was seeing the man. His optic nerves had been working all along, but something in his brain must have suddenly switched on. He had been looking sightlessly. Now he was seeing.

He arrives today, you know. Just after the Mesan assassination squad gets arrested by the Sollies we tipped off. You tipped off, I should say. Credit where credit is due.

Another harsh, dry laugh. He remembered that laugh. Remembered how much he detested it. Remembered, even, how much he detested the man who laughed in that manner.

But he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Odd. Irritating.

Like a bird, his mind fluttered in that direction. Irritation was an emotion. He was beginning to remember emotions too.

The man who laughed—very big, he was, especially standing in the center of a room looking down at him—laughed again. When he spoke, the words came like actual words instead of thoughts.

“Of course, there isn’t the horde of newscasters waiting at the dock for him that everyone expected. Plenty of them still, needless to say. But half of the Sollie casters are in the Loop, covering what they’re already calling the Second Valentine’s Day Massacre. Good move, Rafe! Everything about your plan was brilliant.”

Usher. That was the man’s name.

He remembered how much he detested that grin. More, even, than the man’s way of laughing.

“Yeah, brilliant. And after the final masterstroke, which—” The man glanced at the door. “—should be coming any moment now, you’ll go down in history as one of the great ops of all time.”

He had been drugged, he suddenly realized. And with that realization came another. He knew the drug itself. He couldn’t remember its technical name, although he knew that it was called the “zombie drug.” It was so easy to use as an aerosol. He remembered thinking that his office had grown a bit muggy, and that he’d intended to speak sharply to the maintenance people. Highly illegal, that drug. As much because it left no traces in a dead body as because of its effects. It broke down extremely rapidly in the absence of oxygenated blood.

There was a knock on the door. Very rapid, very urgent. He heard another voice, speaking through the door. Very rapidly, very urgently.

“Now! They’re about to blow the entrance!” Footsteps, scampering away.