torturing the Damned, or when they'd just been splashed by the boiling blood, you could get straight answers for a few seconds. The pain, it seemed, cleared their minds and turned them away from themselves, however briefly. Nick quickly established a short list of questions to fire at them while it wasn't in their power to give him anything but a straight answer. And after many hours of this, and a lot of slogging around, now Nick had the information he needed. The exit to Seven was actually down in that lake of blood itself, right down at the bottom of it-that being how the Power that ran this place kept the Damned from escaping it. For while wholly immersed in the lava-blood, then and only then were their minds cleared to the truth of how little difference they had made in the world when they were still breathing, and how in the present time, so soon after their deaths, they were either completely forgotten or about to be so. Indeed, it was an irony which hadn't escaped Nick's notice that only here, in this virtual torment, were any of these people still even slightly famous anymore. Only the users of Deathworld, working their way down through this level, were impelled to say, 'Just who was that guy?'… and go check the history sources on the Net to find out. One of the very few exceptions to this rule, and a deeper irony still, was the image of the old, old newscaster who had been alive until very recently, but while still alive had as a joke privately given the Deathworld designers permission to place him here among so many of his lesser contemporaries. He did not deserve to be here, and as a result he sat in something of a place of honor, off in his own little hot tub full of the burning lava of Truth, looking like a wrinkled old Buddha with his mustache on fire, and refusing to say anything to anyone except, with a grin, 'That's the way it is… '
Nick had been lost in admiration when he got the joke. This is a great place, Nick thought. Better than anyplace else on the Net. 1 don't care how long it takes, or how much it costs. I'm going to solve it. And indeed he had been in here every day, for every waking hour he could, for days now. It was a lot of use, he knew, a lot of time when he should have been doing other things, maybe. Schoolwork, or stuff around the house… But those images seemed to have less power than usual to bother him, which suited Nick fine. Because they're not important. They can wait. This matters more. And if anyone doesn't like it, well, the world stinks, doesn't it? Let them just get used to it…
From where Nick stood now, looking out over the lake and up at the cliffs, he saw something which he had missed in earlier visits, but which he had now learned to enjoy, since it never happened the same way twice. One of the demons, a little batwinged guy who reminded him strangely of his science teacher from seventh grade-a round, small, jolly man-materialized up at the top of the highest of the cliffs around the lake. It had a long, long projection of stone sticking out of it over the lake, that cliff, and sometimes this narrow fingerlike projection was almost completely hidden in the miasma of brown-black smoke that rose from the lake. For the moment it was clear, though, and the little dumpy figure walked out to the very end of that narrow pier of stone, held its arms out in front of it, yelled 'Geronim0000000!' and jumped off. It twisted and turned any number of times as it fell through what seemed about a mile of air from that high promontory, tumbling, straightening again, spinning, finally tucking itself into a cannonball shape, then straightening out and hitting the surface in a perfect dive, striking into it like a spear and vanishing in a tremendous splash that threw burning, smoking liquid in every direction. All around, the Damned who were hit by the splash screamed in anguish. From the side of the lake a group of six demons who had been sitting and watching the dive now stood up and held up little pairs of cards with numbers on them, one card in each claw: 5.4, 5.2, 5.1, 5.2, 4.8, 5.9. Then five out of six of them dropped their cards to the ground and started whapping the demon who had given the diver a 4.8 over his head.
I really have to find out who the heck 'Geronimo' is, Nick thought. It might be a clue.
He stood there for a moment more, and then thought, Okay. No use putting it off any longer. Let's put this to the test, and see if I'm right.
He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone real, any of the gameplayers, were nearby to see what he was doing. It was a relatively quiet time. Nobody was nearby. Nick stepped off the edge of the lakeshore and started wading through the lake.
The Damned drew away from Nick a little, and some of them stopped laughing, as they saw where he was headed-that deepest part, where none of them went by choice. 'Surprise, surprise,' he sang softly in chorus with the great cry of rage filling the air above him, 'Never thought it'd happen, Never thought you'd be the one!
'Surprise, surprise, 'Cause here comes the moment, I'll shave you to the bone 'fore we're done! Surprise, surprise-'
Nick knew he was on the verge of the deepest place. He ducked under the lava-
And everything went black.
And in the darkness there burned nothing but two great words written in blazing red fire:
SERVICE SUSPENDED
'WHAT?!' Nick screamed.
He blinked, blinked hard. There was light again, now, but it was just daylight, easing out of afternoon toward evening. It was the light that came through the translucence of the shades in the spare bedroom of the apartment where he lived with his folks, the room where the implant chair sat.
And his father standing there with the hand commlink in his hand. 'Yes,' he was saying. To someone at the other end. 'Thanks, it just went on. Yeah. Thanks.'
His father folded up the hand phone and looked at Nick with an expression too flat and controlled to bode well for anyone.
'Well?' he said.
'What's the matter?' Nick cried. 'What happened? Call the provider, something's wrong with the Net link!'
'I've just been talking with the provider,' Nick's father said, in a voice carefully kept as expressionless as his face, 'and there's nothing wrong with the link… not that hasn't just been fixed, anyway.'
'But it went off while I was in the middle of-' Uhoh. '-something important-'
His father held out an envelope for him to look at. It had their Net service provider's logo on it. In the spare room doorway his mother suddenly materialized, looking grim.
'I thought I told you,' his father said, 'to stay out of that Deathworld place.'
Nick realized that this was not a time to attempt explanations. He said nothing.
'I thought we discussed it rationally,' his father said. 'You agreed to do as I said. Didn't you?'
'Dad, I-'
'Or I thought you had. I see now that I was mistaken. Eight hundred dollars'-the hand with the envelope in it was shaking now-'eight hundred dollars in prime-service charges in the last two weeks alone. Son, are you nuts? Did you seriously think I wouldn't find out about this? Didyou think it was just going to go away, or that it didn't matter? Do you know what this is going to do to household finances for the next month, while we pay this off out of money that was intended for other things? Like spending money for our summer vacation?'
Nick gulped and looked at the floor.
His father stopped, too angry to say anything else for the moment. 'Nicky, half your spending money is going to be docked weekly until you pay back this last bill,' Nick's mother said. 'It would be real smart for you to see about getting yourself some kind of part-time job for the summer, so you can get it paid off in less time. As-regards any further Net access, you're grounded. If you want it, you can go down to the Square and rent a booth out of your own money, since you've proved you can't be trusted to use the Net responsibly at home. After the bill's paid off, we'll look at whether you're ready to have your own service restored.'
Nick said nothing, just stood there with his ears burn- ing.
'And assuming we give you your service back some day, if you ever pull a stunt like this again, we're going to have the thing pulled out,' his father said. 'I don't care if you think you need it for school, or because all your friends have it, or whatever. You can get up off your butt and walk to the library to do your research, the way I did when dinosaurs walked the earth. It didn't kill me. It won't kill you, either. And what your friends think isn't important compared to pulling your weight in this family and behaving like the money we work hard for actually means something, instead of you throwing it out the window in handfuls.'
His father handed him the envelope and turned and went out. His mother stood there and looked at him for a moment, her expression not softening in the slightest.
'I left you some supper in the 'vector,' ' she said. 'Dad and I have to go out and run a couple of errands. Have your dinner and then get your homework done on the laptop. I had the provider copy all your school files to it before
