Single Combat

carry any bugs if you won't.'

Recording devices were easily detected anyway. 'Agreed,' Mills rapped. 'One more thing: we both know why we can trust rovers to keep quiet. I want no one but rovers to collect anything from the site.

No outside experts, no regulars! There are some things so sensitive that it could be necessary to disappear some of your own people.'

'You'll go on record with that?'

'I'm sure I already am.'

A pause to confer with his roster display. Salter registered something akin to pleasure as he said, 'Mills, to do that I'd have to pull every rover in S & R from other duties all over Streamlined America. A national red- alert emergency: are you ready to justify that to cool down a fire in IEE?'

'What do you think Streamlined America is all about? Who backs the Lion of Zion? Where would he be without you and me, Salter? Now stop acting naive and get those rovers to my lab site! I'll see you there as soon as possible. Make it possible very, very soon.'

Mills slapped the holo off, stood up, started pacing his office. Oh, he had a lot of the prints and specs for the synthesizer; everything Chabrier filed into permanent memory. But the subassembly prints for the cermet parts, and the ones for the toroidal yield chamber, were top-assembly prints without breakdowns.

Chabrier had held out on him, and now the goddam Frenchman was either Quantrill's hostage or, worse, his companion!

And what if he couldn't get Chabrier back? Well, there was always that tiny unit the sex-crazed frog had made for Eve. Other men might upscale a standard model synthesizer from that. Suddenly the Ember of Venus and its tiny integrated synthesizer took on an importance it had never owned before.

Mills detested drugs, but with his back to the wall he would shoot Eve's fat arse full of alkaloids. He would have her mainlining popcorn, hulls and all, if that was what it took to recover that sole remaining model of a working synthesizer.

He was striding toward his holo, phrasing his recall demand so that Eve would suspect nothing unusual, when the intercom spoke.

Mills's secretary had been hired not for her thirty years of experience so much as for her seventeen-year-old voice. Vibrant and girlish as ever, now it was also troubled. 'It's some manager of a ranch in Wild Country, Mr. Mills, on line one. He says he can't speak with anyone else — and he seems to be crying.'

CHAPTER 56

The hardest part about getting from New Vegas to Eureka was persuading Chabrier to shave. The man flatly refused to let anyone but a female registered nurse scrape the fur from his back, buttocks, and thighs, and finding a woman they could trust took Quantrill's contacts nearly a full day.

Quantrill was shipped in a container labeled 'Radioactive Waste'. No one had expected Marengo Chabrier — for that matter, they hadn't really expected Quantrill — so the scientist underwent six hours of cosmetic work. Chabrier was wheeled into a Greyhound omnibus as a sallow drooling fossil by the same slender nurse who had shaved him. Before they reached Eureka, Chabrier and the woman passed narrow scrutiny several times, and knew the stirrings of a beautiful relationship.

Quantrill was in no position to read faxpapers. Chabrier's nurse bought a fresh four-page edition at every stop and read it aloud as one might read to a bedridden child. Nowhere was there any mention of an explosion in the desert wilds of Zion, but the Reno Tattler was of the tabloid persuasion and squandered ink on a bizarre report from Wild Country. The Tattler confided that, according to unimpeachable sources, a creature the size of an elephant had emerged from its age-long sleep in local caverns to gorge on human flesh. Its most recent victim was a lovely young girl, one Eva Simmons, whose talon-ravaged parts had been found in the ruins of her isolated cabin.

So much for tabloid accuracy. Nothing in the piece gave Marengo Chabrier the slightest cause for concern.

Quantrill never saw young Brubaker again but, while retrieving a vacuum vial from one of old Brubaker's light fixtures in Eureka, he reminded the older man of their bargain. 'I've had my paranthrax shots,' he admitted, 'so I'm not worried about Nashville. But if you have contacts in Corpus Christi, that's my choice. Is there some way I can go without climbing into another box?'

There was, said old Brubaker, if he didn't mind routing through Alta Mexico. 'Port of Oakland or Los Angeles to Tucson, El Paso, Matamoros, and then to Corpus; Mexican territory all the way to the gulf.

You speak Spanish?'

'Enough to get by unless they grill me.'

'They won't, with your papers. You'll be a security man, keeping your eye on dredging machinery that Midas Imports ships to Corpus. Mex transport is cheap with all their oil, so we route heavy stuff around Streamlined- ptooey-America. Anyway, you'll be safer on Mex soil than you'd be crossing Wild Country.'

Quantrill recalled his days in Southwest Texas; the free-wheeling ways of the people who had a law unto themselves; and smiled. 'I doubt it.'

'Then you haven't heard what happened while you were earning your passage. Your friend Chabrier was debriefed last night with some LockLever people — he beat you here by a day, sorry 'bout that — when he heard about Eve Simpson.'

Startled: 'My God, Brubaker, I know the crazy broad!'

'Not any more, you don't.' Old Brubaker gave him a sketchy version of the woman's death as reported by UBC Press. 'It hit Chabrier pretty hard. He clammed up right away, but evidently she was carrying a keepsake he gave her. Would you know why it might be important to him?'

'Haven't the foggiest.' Staring out the window at the growing port city, Quantrill mused, 'I'm tempted to believe in fate, Brubaker. I mean, that huge boar is something I know about first-hand. I tracked him once after he snuffed a little kid I knew — but I never located him.

'And I met Simpson once. And now I find that Chabrier was a friend of hers, God help him! It's almost as if there really were only a few hundred people in the world…'

Old Brubaker stood beside him, chuckling, fondling his one-a-day cigar. 'In a way it's true, Ted.

When you're as old as I am, you'll realize how few people there are who do pivotal things; people full of ideas and vitality, gamblers for the most part; stepping on people's toes as they pass, shaking the rest of us in our little ruts and striking sparks from each other. Not exactly a prescription for a quote, nice guy, unquote. My only surprise is that some of you live so long. Oh, you're obviously one of the breed,' he said, showing patently false teeth, laughing at Quantrill's quizzical look. 'So is Governor Street; so are those quintessential assholes, Young and Mills. I'm not saying all you hyperactive wowsers are good for us; only that you're all agents of change, one way or another. And I wouldn't trade places with you. I like to play chess, read a Michener epic I've read twice before, watch a long sunset; things I couldn't cram into a short life.'

'And you expect to outlive me; is that it?'

Pause to light the stogie. A long pleasured puff. Gently, then: 'Yes, I do. I got a look at the Canadian file on you, Ted. You've lived several lives' worth of risks and you're barely old enough to vote. If you keep living on the cutting edge — hell, as a cutting edge — you'll run out of reflexes or luck one day. Soon, maybe. Or later, maybe.'

'It's been years since I had a chance to bullshit with someone like this,' Quantrill sighed. 'I'd like to try a slower pace, myself. I intend to, when all this is over.'

'It'll never be over! There'll always be a gamble somewhere with your name on it, Ted.'

'You don't think I could change?'

'Not sure you ought to. Remember, I sit in on the game too, now and then — with you, for instance. One day it could get me snuffed. But I've found a slot, call it a rut if you like, that isn't too hectic for a family man like me. If you weren't in such an all-fired hurry I'd invite you for a home-cooked meal. You're one guest my grandkids couldn't terrorize,' he laughed.

'You keep sliding away from giving advice,' Quantrill observed, studying the play of fine wrinkles that fanned