'TRIP! saved. Command level,' said the computer.
'Run TRIP!.'
'Running. Input required.'
Dairine rolled her eyes at the mile-high ceiling. Nita doesn't do it this way, she thought. I've watched her.
She just reads stuff out of her book, or says it by heart… Oh well, someone has to break new ground.
She stretched her legs out in front of her to keep them from cramping. 'Specify,' she said.
'Birth date.'
'Twenty October nineteen seventy-eight,' she said, looking out across the floor at the great crowd of pushing and jostling aliens.
'Place of birth.'
'Three-eight-five East Eighty-sixth Street, New York City.' The hospital had long since burned down, but Dairine knew the address: her dad had taken them all there to a German restaurant now on the site.
'Time of birth.'
'Twelve fifty-five A.M.'
'Favorite color.'
'You have got to be kidding!' she said, looking at a particularly busy knot of aliens across the floor.
Security guards, most likely: they were armed, in a * big group, and looking closely at people.
'Favorite color.'
'Blue.' Or were these critters security guards? There had been other creatures walking around in the terminal wearing uniforms-as much or as little clothing of a particular shade of silvery green as each alien in question felt like wearing. And their weapons had been slim little blue-metal rods strapped to them.
These creatures, though-they wore no uniforms, and their weapons were large and dark and looked nasty.
'Last book read,' said the computer.
'Look,' Dairine said, 'what do you need to know this dumb stuff for?'
'Program cannot be accurately run without the enacting wizard's personal data. You have no data file saved at this time.'
She made another face. Better not interfere, she thought, or you might wind up doing the breaststroke in lava after all. 'Oh, go on,' she said.
'Last book read-'
'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' said Dairine, looking with increasing unease at the armed bunch of aliens. They were not nice-looking People. Well, lots of the people in here didn't look nice-that purple Jell-O thing for one-but none of them felt bad: just weird. But these creatures with the guns-they had an unfriendly look to them. Most of them were mud-colored warty-looking creatures like a cross between lizards and toads but upright, and not nearly as pretty as a lizard or as helplessly homely as any toad.
They went about with a lumpish hunchbacked swagger, and their eyes were dark slitted bulges or fat crimson bloodshot goggle-eyes. They looked stupid, and worse, they looked cruel….
Oh, come on, Dairine told herself in disgust. Just because they're ugly doesn't mean they're bad. Maybe it's just some kind of military expedition, like soldiers coming through the airport on their way home for leave.
-but with their guns?
'Father's name,' said the computer.
'Harold Edward Callahan,' said Dairine. She was looking with a combination of interest and loathing at one of the warty creatures, which was working its way toward her. In one arm it was cradling a gun that looked big enough to shove a hero sandwich down. In its other hand, a knobby three-fingered one, it held the end of a leash, and straining at the leash's far end was a something that looked more like the stuffed deinonychus at Natural History than anything Dairine had ever seen. A skinny little dinosaur it was, built more or less along the lines of a Tyrannosaurus, but lithe and small and fleet. This one went all on its hind legs, its long thin tail stretched out behind it for balance: it went with a long-legged ostrichy gait that Dairine suspected could turn into an incredible sprint. The dinosaur on the warty alien's leash was dappled in startling shades of iridescent red and gold, and it had its face down to the floor as it pulled its master along, and the end of that long whiplike tail thrashed. And then it looked up from the floor, and looked right at Dairine, with eyes that were astonishingly innocent, and as blue as a Siamese cat's. It made a soft mewling noise that nonetheless pierced right through the noise of the terminal.
The warty thing looked right at Dairine too-and cried out in some language she couldn't understand, a bizarre soprano singing of notes like a synthesizer playing itself. Then it yanked the leash sharply and let the deinonychus go.
Dairine scrambled to her feet as the deinonychus loped toward her. Terrified as she was, she knew better than to try to run away from this thing. She slammed the computer's screen closed and waited. No kicks, she told herself, if one kick doesn't take this thing out, you'll never have time for a second-It leapt at her, but she was already swinging: Dairine hit the deinonychus right in the face with the computer and felt something crunch. Oh, please don t let it be the plastic, she thought, and then the impetus of the deinonychus carried it right into her, its broken jaw knocked against her face as it fell, she almost fell with it. Dairine stumbled back, found her footing, turned, and began to run.
Behind her more voices were lifted. Dairine ran like a mad thing, pushing through crowds wherever she could. Who are they, why are they after me? And where do I run. .
She dodged through a particularly dense crowd and paused, looking for a corridor to run down, a place to hide. Nothing. This part of the Crossings was one huge floor, very few niches to take advantage of.
But farther on, about half a mile away, it looked like the place narrowed. .
She ran. The noise behind her was deafening. There was some shooting: she heard the scream of blasterbolts, the sound that had set her blood racing in the movies. But now it wasn't so exciting. One bolt went wide over her head. It hit a low-floating bit of the ceiling off to one side of her, and she smelled the stink of scorched plastic and saw a glob of it fall molten to splat on the floor. Dairine sprinted past it, panting. She was a good runner, but she couldn't keep this up for much longer.
Bug-eyed monsters! her brain sang at her in terror. These weren't what I had in mind! 'What are they-'
'Emissaries,' said the computer, in a muffled voice since its screen was shut over its speaker.
Dairine kept running. 'From where?'
'Indeterminate. Continue run?'
'If it'll get me out of here, yes-!'
'Last level of education finished-'
She told it, gasping, as she ran. She told it her mother's maiden name, and how much money her father made, and at what age she had started reading, and much more useless information. . And then while she was telling it what she thought of boys, something caught her by the arm.
It was a three-fingered hand, knobby, a slick dark green, and strong with a terrible soft strength that pulled her right out of her run and around its owner as if she were spinning around a pole. Dairine cried out at her first really close look at a bug-eyed monster. Its eyes were an awful milky red that should have meant it was blind, but they saw her too well entirely-and it sang something high at her and grabbed her up against it with its other hand, the nonchalant don't-hurt-it grasp of the upper arms that adults use on children, not knowing how they hate it… or not caring. Dairine abruptly recognized the BEM's song as laughter, once removed from the horrible low laughing she had seemed to hear in transit. And suddenly she knew what these things were, if not who. 'No!' she screamed.
'Intervention subroutine?' said the computer, utterly calm.
Dairine struggled against the thing, couldn't get leverage: all the self-defense she had been taught was for use on humans, and this thing's mass was differently distributed. Not too far away she heard more of the horrid fluting, BEMs with guns, coming fast. Half her face was rammed up against its horrible hide, and her nose was full of a stink like old damp coffee grounds. Her revulsion was choking her: the grasp of the thing on her was as unhuman as if she were being held by a giant cockroach. . and Dairine hated bugs. 'Kill it!' she screamed.
And something threw her back clear a good twenty feet and knocked her head against the floor. .
Dairine scrambled up. The BEM was gone. Or rather, it wasn't a BEM anymore. It was many many little
