Starrigger

It was Old Fred again, pointing a sniper rifle at me across the top of the clear bubble of a squad car. He was grinning evilly, and something told me it didn't matter whether I dropped it or not. But I had no choice, and let the machine pistol clatter to the floor. Fred raised the sights up to eye level, taking his time, drawing a deep breath as if he were in the finals of a Militia sharpshooter tourney, doing it all by the book, eyes on another platinum-iridium trophy for the collection on the mantelpiece, and all it took was one neatly placed shot dead center, nice as you please, one expert squeeze, all coming down to that, one constriction of a flexor muscle, and it was off to a watering hole with the boys and girls for soybeer and snappers…

Petrovsky came barreling through the doors and slammed into him, sending Old Fred cartwheeling over the floor to crash into a stack of tool boxes. When the clanking and tinkling stopped, Fred was on his back under a pile of metal, out cold. Long before that I had made a fraction of a move to go for the dropped gun, but Petrovsky had already drawn a bead on me with his pistol. I was astonished at how quick he was, both on his feet and with his hands.

'So, Mr. McGraw,' he said, 'there will be no more quibbling over a reason to hold you. Correct?' No triumph in his voice, just finality.

'I'm glad it's all settled,' I told him. I really was.

A snatch of conversation came to me from out in the cell block just as the transparent door to my accommodations slid shut and cut it off.

'Colonel-Inspector, I realize that your rank and your special authorization from Central command our complete cooperation, but I must point out to you?'

The speaker wore lieutenant's pips and had accompanied the procession bringing me here. He had looked like an Elmo. I sprawled across the bunk. Petrovsky had his problems, I had mine, but I didn't care about either right then. I was content to lie there and let the filtered air from the overhead vent wash over me, listening to the dull throb of machinery conduct through the walls to temper the silence of the cell. The mattress was lumpy and reeked of mildew and urine, but I didn't mind that so much either. I let my brain idle for a while, allowed it to perk along and mark off the seconds, the ineluctable increments by which my allotted time was measured, one for each beat of the heart, for each millimeter of bloodflow, for each regret, each sorrow. And then one thought came to me: you can easily recognize the good parts of your life because they are starkly outlined in crap. The good things are mostly negative quantities: the absence of pain, the lack of grief, no trouble. Love, the absence of hate; satisfaction, a dearth of deprivation.

And I told myself: To hell with all that.

I decided to attempt active thinking again, there being a number of things to try it out on, such as the Paradox ? if there really were one. The Paradox seemed to be saying. You will get out of this, you will see Darla again, only to lose her once mare. And that would be the final time. I didn't like it, but there it was, for what it was worth. As I thought it through, I came to regard the notion as another specimen of crap. There was so little hard information to go on. Did I really have a doppelganger out there, a future self who had found a backtime route? Did my paradoxical self really have a Roadmap? Questions. More of them: Who had told Tomasso and Chang to be at Sonny's that day, light-years off their usual route? Did anybody? Oh, there were more mysteries, by the score, by the truckload. Wilkes, the Reticulans, the Authority, the chimera of the Roadmap ? who? where? what? why? And what did politics have to do with any of this?

Petrovsky's slip had been the most significant part of the interview. Of course, the Roadmap would be a great boon to whoever had the luck to snare it. But the Colonial Authority was the only power in Terran Maze, with only a weak Assembly passing rhetorical wind to the contrary. There were dissident elements within the Assembly, true, but they had been bugged, compromised, infiltrated, double-agented, and neutralized long ago, or so the roadbuzz had it. Oh, everybody talked of one glorious day when the colonies would achieve some measure of independence from the mother planet, but what was not spoken about so much was the glum fact that the Authority had already gained a sort of de facto independence and continued to rule all of T-Maze as if it were the Cradle of Mankind, and not merely Terra's proxy among the stars. The CA was a,self-perpetuating, bloated bureaucracy, a chip off the old monolithic Soviet system that had spawned it, and it was entrenched on planets closest to the home system by the Skyway, with its grip gradually loosening the further out you got.

But I knew very little of what had been happening lately, having sworn off listening to news feeds long ago. T-Maze is big, thank God, and the Authority's chubby fingers could not reach everywhere, nor could they control the Skyway, which has a life all its own. There' were undercurrents of rebellion out here, to be sure, at the grassroots level, but this Roadmap affair spoke of vastly larger dimensions. Some sort of struggle for ownership of the map was going on, both inter- and intra-Maze. It was a hunt, and many were riding to hounds. Call me Reynard.

And then there was Darla to think about….

There was a mirror above the wash basin. It was flush with the wall and rung hollow when knocked upon. Doubtless it hadn't been put there with the prisoner's cosmetic needs at heart. I was staring into the blind side of a one-way observation window, but that didn't bother me. What did was me sight of my reflection, a thirty-five-year- old face on a chronologically fifty-three-year-old body that was gradually winning its war of attrition against antigeronic drugs. The face had aged some. People say I look perennially boyish, but the child was sire to the old gent I looked at now, wrinkle lines at me comers of the eyes, black curly hair gone dry and a tad thinner, jowls going slack and pendulous, skin a lime more leathery, splotched, beardline more definite, its shadowy stubble more intractable.

Then again, I thought, I might just need a shave and a hot shower. I angled my face to get a profile shot. 'Good profile,' Mom always told me. 'Strong.' But what was that puffy area under there ? the beginnings of a double chin?

Enough. I lay back down. Self-absorption is not my usual brand of neurosis; besides, I felt a sudden headache coming on.

I wondered if I could afford the luxury of regretting the escape attempt. The cop I had shot would probably pull through okay if they had gotten him to a hospital in time. But an escape/assault charge was going to be hard to beat. The only thing I had going for me was the illegality of my detention, but I had the feeling it wouldn't go very far. Then there was the hit-and-run charge. True, I hadn't been driving, but drivers are responsible for their automatic systems….

Damn, that headache was in a hurry. I heard a curious buzzing sound coming from behind my head, and it stayed there no matter which way I turned. It quickly grew louder and louder. I sat up, feeling suddenly nauseous and dizzy. I put my head between my knees, but that only made it worse. The buzzing became deafening, as if someone were tearing through sheet metal with a vibrosaw directly behind my neck. Blood pounded in my head and I could see the pulse in my field of vision.

Well, this is it. Heart attack or stroke. Antigeronic treatments or not, the body has ways of extracting its dues from you. I hoped somebody was watching through the window. Petrovsky seemed to want me alive. Maybe he'd convince Elmo I was worth bothering to cart off to the hospital.

I slumped back against the wall.

… keep me alive, Petrovsky being the dedicated professional that he was, but going around with one of those isohearts; well, I didn't know about that…. They still hadn't perfected them ? tendency to go into fibrillation without warning; they didn't know exactly what the problem was, probably a mismatched enzyme that hadn't replicated true…. I was awake, wide-awake. The cell door was open. I shot to my feet. Someone had just been in here, doing something to me. What? There was a tingling on my upper arm, calling card of a tickler. It doesn't leave a mark, but my jacket had been pulled down off my left shoulder. I still had no shirt. I hadn't been out cold ? the state had been like Semi-doze, but very unpleasant at first, then a vapid nirvana. I had the distinct recollection of someone bending over me while I was sitting mere, and I hadn't even given him a glance, as if it hadn't been important enough to trouble myself. But I had seen, out of the comer of my eye or with some part of my perceptive gear, a familiar face. Very much so, but the face had been a blank, a hole in the cognitive field, a missing datum. I tried to fill in that blank, but I couldn't. The recognition signal was blocked somehow, lodged in the preconscious. I knew, damn it. I knew who it was, but I couldn't say it.

But there was no time now. I walked out of the cell.

The turnkey was on duty at his desk, with one side of his face down in a plate of stew, eyes open, staring. Quietly, I lifted his master key, went over to the door and waved it at the code plate, and let myself out of the cell block.

Everyone in the station was out but me. Wide-eyed bodies littered the corridors, office workers were slumped