overtakes me, I dissolve into purest energy, I am swept away by overwhelming force…
I jerked awake and fell off the barrel to the hard, warm floor.
Sitting up, I waited until my heartbeat slowed, then stood. I had dozed off-or maybe I had had a recurrence of my hallucinating. I was bone tired. Sure, I had only fallen asleep. Time to get moving. Sit here and they'll never find you. Okay.
I walked forward again a few steps and stopped abruptly.
Something tall was standing in the shadows farther down the passageway.
I slowly took Susan's torch from my back pocket. My nonBoojum again, I thought. Will I never be rid of the thing of will it follow me for the rest of my life?
I played the beam of the torch on it and my heart dropped into my stomach.
'Grrreetings, Jake-frrriend. We have found you at last.'
A nightmare in gray-green chitin, fully two and a half meters tall, the Reticulan took a step forward. I assumed it was Twrrrll, the one who had always spoken to me. His zoom-lens eyes rotated slightly to get me in better focus. The complex apparatus of his mouth worked in and out, up and down in a rapid and silent sewing- machine motion. His body was thin, his seven-digited hands and feet huge. Jutting out from a long narrow face, the eyes were dead, containing nothing, no emotion, no palpable presence. A thin spike of a genital organ hung from his lower abdomen. He wore no clothing except for a harness of leatherlike material wrapping his torso. He carried a large pouch hung by a strap from his shoulder. Something was in it.
Twrrrll and his hunting companions had followed me all the way from Terran Maze. They had been teamed with Corey Wilkes. Ostensibly, Wilkes had been paying them off in return for safe passage through Reticulan Maze, the only way back to Terran Maze from the Outworlds. But I suspected that the Reticulans had wanted the Roadmap, too. It would open up new hunting grounds to them, provide fresh honorable game. Their home world and Skyway planets had been hunted out long ago. I also suspected that they had just about given up hope of getting the map. Too many hounds after one fox. The only thing that drove them now was the hunt. For members of a Reticulan Snatchgang, bagging the quarry and dispatching it in a horrific ceremony of vivisection was the overriding concern.
I took a deep breath. At least the danger, the thing to be feared, had taken on a physical form. I had been chased and now I was caught. And now I would deal with the situation.
'So you've found me,' I said. 'What's your intention?'
'Ourrr intention is to give you an honourrrable death, Jakefrrriend. It is ourrr obligation. You are the Sacrrred Quarrry, the honorrrable game. You must die well, and we shall see that you do.'
'Thanks, I was really worried about that.'
'You were?' The question seemed genuine. 'Then rrrest assurrred.'
I pointed to the pouch hanging from his shoulders. Something big was in it. 'Got your lunch in there?' I asked.
'Lunch?' He looked down. 'I see. No, the game was not honorrrable. I did not eat it.'
He reached into the pouch and drew out Tivi's severed head, dangling it by its beautiful yellow-white hair.
The shock left me nauseous and stunned. It was murder so casual, so unthinking that anger was almost impossible. Instead a huge void opened up in me, an emotional emptiness, a helplessness. The meaning of events past and present drained away, leaving only a chilling perception of the blind malignity of the universe.
'Why?' was all I had the breath to say.
'It was…' the alien answered, somewhat at a loss to explain, and somewhat, I thought, apologetic. 'It was necessarrry.'
'I'll kill you,' I said.
'You must trrry,' Twrrrll said. 'Otherrrwise you would do me no honorrr.'
The Reticulan replaced the head into the bag, then drew forth a knife with a curving black blade and a jade- green hilt. He strode forward.
I turned and ran, stopped short when I saw another Reticulan coming down the passageway. I ducked into the maze of pipes. I crawled, vaulted, and sidled my way through until I broke into another passageway. And met another of Twrrrll's companions. I ran from him, found a doorway opening onto a corridor and turned into it. The corridor went about ten meters and debouched into a chamber clogged with more machinery and pipes.
There was no way out.
I looked around for a weapon. In a pile of debris in front of the far wall I found a narrow plastic pipe. I hefted it. It had mass, at least, and would have to do.
Two Reticulans carrying ceremonial knives were walking calmly down the corridor. Twrrrll turned into the doorway behind them.
I picked a spot on the floor that would give me maneuvering room and stood my ground.
'So,' TwrrrIl said when they all stood in front of me. 'We shall begin the consummation of this affairrr.'
The alien on the left went into a crouch and advanced, sweeping the black-bladed dagger in wide arcs before him. He tried to circle but I swung the pipe a few times and thwarted him. I shifted to the right, feinted a broad cut and tried a jab to his face. He ducked neatly, counterthrusting at my legs. I jumped and backed off.
He tried circling again, this time ducking my swings and slashing at my arms, and though a Reticulan's reach is long, he missed. But he successfully circled me. My back was to his companions, but they made no move toward me. Just to be sure, I backed myself against the far wall so that my present opponent was to the right and the rest to the left. The alien glided forward, surprising me by his lightness of foot. He stopped just out of pipe's reach and danced from side to side, leaning in and out of range, inviting a try for a knockout swing, which he would block, then move inside. I countered that tactic by not giving in to the temptation. Instead, I kept jabbing to keep him at a distance, waiting for his move. It came soon enough.
His left hand flicked out, grabbing the end of the pipe. He rushed in, bringing the knife-wielding right up in a thrust to my groin. I jumped to the left, spun around, bringing my arms over my head and twisting the pipe from his grasp, then rushed around him and delivered a solid thwack to the back of his head as he passed. The alien went crashing into the pile of debris, banging his face against the hard masonry of the wall. He was down for only a second, though, and I halted my followup. Pivoting on double-jointed knees, he swung around with knife low, ready to spring to his feet as I attacked. Seeing that I had stopped, he slowly got up.
My heart sank. That blow to the head would have iced any human and nine out of ten aliens. I backed into my original position. Twrrrll and the other one were still blocking the door.
The alien rushed again, coming under the pipe as I swung at his knife hand. The knife came within a decimeter of my eyes. I slashed back to the right and smacked his thin right forearm. The knife went skittering across the floor. He ran to get it and I rushed him, hitting him across the back. He fell prostrate. As he tried getting up I stepped on the bony, segmented ridge that ran up his back, jumped over his head, wheeled around and bashed his skull with all my might. I bashed it again. The alien raised his head and started to rise, coming to his knees. I hit him again and again. Cracks opened up along the chitinous shell of his skull, leaking a pale pink fluid. Again I brought the pipe down. A flap of skull detached itself and fell to the side, exposing a bright pink mass of brain tissue. I thumped the pipe down repeatedly, smashing the brain into pulp, pink sprays of mist shooting out as each blow landed. The alien stayed on his knees. He brought one leg slowly up. I hit him again, and as he raised his head I smashed his face with a vicious crosswise blow. One eye broke off and clattered to the floor like a broken piece of a camera. He fell on his side. I kicked his face and sent him keeling over backwards. He rolled over and I followed up with blows to the spine and back of the head. He got to his knees and began to rise.
I kept hitting him. And hitting him. He fell, tried to rise again. My arms were tired, each blow less forceful than the last. But his head was coming apart, half his brain now exposed and turned to pink mush. Spongy fragments of it clung to the end of the pipe. I swung and swung and swung again.
'Stay down!' I was yelling. 'Bastard!' I screamed it with each blow. 'Bastard!' The pipe fell again. 'Bastard!' Again. 'Bastard son of a bitch!'
He rose to his knees again.
'You're dead, you son of a bitch, dead!' I gathered all my strength into one breath, straddled his body and crashed the pipe down on his skull once again. A fine pink mist shot up, and a thick gush of foamy pink fluid flowed out of the hole in his skull.
But he started to get up again.
