suspected.” Harrisch called over his shoulder to the DZ flunky at the controls of the crane. “Get some medical attention for this unfortunate person. Find out if she’s going to live or die, at least.” He glanced again toward McNihil. “There’s nothing you or I can do for her. Not right now. Why don’t we get out of the way? There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you.” With a nod of his head, Harrisch signaled to the crane’s operator, who kept his bored expression as he put the equipment into gear.
McNihil followed alongside the crane, its caterpillar treads moving parallel to the railroad tracks and the wreckage of the train. “I don’t,” he said, “feel much like talking now.”
“Really?” The other’s smile glistened in the worklights’ bright radiation. “But there’s so much we
McNihil rubbed his brow with the butt of one palm, smearing the blood from the minor wound. The sting nudged him back toward full consciousness; for a moment, from the effort of walking, he’d felt somewhat woozy.
“Don’t worry about the girl.” As they continued alongside the steaming wreckage, Harrisch had the circled cross brought down closer to McNihil, the better to impart confidences. “I’ve got an emergency medical crew here on the scene. My people will do whatever’s possible for her. And if there isn’t anything that can be done…” He shrugged. “Then you needn’t have wasted your time worrying.”
“Thanks.” The exec’s presence repelled McNihil like a magnetic pole constructed of razor blazes. “I appreciate that.”
The smile eased into place again. “All part of the job.”
“Maybe you should look for another job.”
“Ah.” With mock ruefulness, Harrisch gave a slow shake of the head. “But I think I’m getting pretty good at this. And with the Rail Amalgam out of commission, who else is going to take care of the trains?”
McNihil glanced past the toppled cars. “You call this ‘taking care’?” It’d been obvious to him, as soon as the other man had popped up in front of him like some kind of Kristallnacht jack-in-the-box, that Harrisch had been responsible for the derailing explosions. “No wonder I’m concerned about the girl.”
“All minor and easily fixed. Readily assimilated into the overall plan.” The crane moved past McNihil and started up one of the nearby rubbish dunes. “Come up here where you can get a better view.”
As he followed the dangling exec out of the illuminated zone, McNihil’s footsteps ground into shards of ancient circuit boards and the softer detritus of empty gum wrappers. At the hill’s crest, he stopped and turned around, looking where the other’s nod directed his attention.
“You see?” Harrisch’s gaze swept across the vista. “All rubber-or might as well be.” A smirk of self-satisfaction moved over Harrisch’s leanly angled face. “We use the same SCARF weapons technology that the
He saw what Harrisch meant. From here, McNihil could see that the explosions hadn’t ripped apart the railroad tracks. The rails themselves, where they weren’t obscured by the toppled engine and cars, seemed like a demonstration of wave activity frozen at one moment in time. Ripples in the lines of rusted iron, the largest extending higher than any of the surrounding work crews, had turned the tracks into ribbons of vertical S-curves, tapering down into progressively smaller hillocks and bumps. Beyond the last car, the tracks smoothed back down into level, undisrupted parallel lines.
“Very clever.” McNihil didn’t care much, what exact techniques might have been used. He supposed that DynaZauber had found some way of ramping down the SCARF transmutation effects, the narrow-beamed quasi- alchemy that turned aircraft parts into metallic forms too soft to function. That plus enough explosive charges to deform the resulting elasticity, and they could have all the remediable train crashes they wanted. “But you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of devising these methods, if you weren’t going to use them on a regular basis.”
“Regular enough,” conceded Harrisch. “It’s not just an issue of managing the corporation; you have to manage the customers as well. Which in our case is the world. Or at least the Gloss-not that there’s any other part of the world that matters. What some people at DynaZauber believe, is that if it isn’t L.A., it ain’t shit. That language is a little more colorful than what I’d use. But the agreed-upon principle is the same: the Pacific is the new Mediterranean. The omphalos, the middle of the earth. It has been for a long time. The great middle ocean, the navel, the solar plexus. Who cares what goes on in Kansas or Ulan Bator? I mean, if there
“There’d have to be.” McNihil watched the crews bashing away at the deformed rails. Under the worklights’ glare, the lengths of iron reddened as the welding torches and SCARF invectors continued their assault. “All that flesh on the streets comes from somewhere.”
“As I said: Who cares?” The expression on Harrisch’s face was all politeness and charm. “It comes from somewhere. So do cockroaches. But it doesn’t ride these trains to get here.” He looked even more pleased with himself. “Kansas and Ulan Bator aren’t on the schedule.”
“Nobody is, if you keep taking out the tracks.”
“That’s how they learn to appreciate us.” The smile remained, but Harrisch’s gaze had hardened to simulated diamond. “The Rail Amalgam was too soft on them. We have to put the squeeze on every once in a while. Remind the paying public of all we do for them. How we make
“Silly bastards,” said McNihil.
“Exactly.” The other man pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “There was a time when they thought that about air travel. Or, to be more precise, they didn’t think about it at all. But their unspoken assumption was wrong. As the world found out.” The glint in Harrisch’s eyes was one of scary earnestness. “How wrong they were-the
“Or profitable.”
“Oh, admitted.” Harrisch smiled again. “DynaZauber gains thereby-and why shouldn’t we? The truth, the new world, brought us into existence. Therefore, we’re necessary. Therefore, the world should appreciate us, and all we do for it.”
Past the overturned engine and cars, past the crews bashing away beneath the banks of worklights, past the dunelike heaps of rubble mottled with the embers of the dead scavengers’ campfires, a thread of violet had seeped around the edges of the true hills to the east. McNihil was grateful for that vision, the little bit that his own night- filled eyes allowed him to see. It meant that eventually the night would be over in that other world and some form of day would roll across the earth.
“So what do you want from everybody?” He glanced over at Harrisch hanging on the cross beside him. “A letter of thanks? A testimonial dinner?”
“Of course not.” The smile faded a little. “Those kinds of things are always lies. Because they’re made up of words, aren’t they? And thus they would have to be lies, wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know.” McNihil shrugged. “You tell me.”
“More words. When all that really counts is money.” In the flares of light coming from the base of the rubbled hill, Harrisch’s eyes looked ancient and cold. “It takes a lot of money, both officially and under the table, to keep everything rolling along. It costs a great deal to put things where they need to be. Real things, that is; but that’s all that matters, finally.” White-and-blue marbles of ice filled Harrisch’s eye sockets. “All that cute blather people talked about a while back, about how the future would be nothing but little bits of information being zipped back and forth, the whole world on-line and freed of the constraints of gross materiality-that didn’t come to pass. Atoms endure, Mr. McNihil; they have a tendency to do that. Solid things are built out of them. Whereas information is mainly lies.
