could hear an engine, getting closer. He didn't bother looking behind him. He turned immediately right and plunged across a brownstone's front yard, down the driveway beside it, heading into its paved backyard. There was a Dumpster up against the brick back wall. Charlie blessed its name and that of District Recycling Company, whoever they were. He went up onto the top of it in a rush and from there jumped up to grab the top of the wall, having already seen as he was going up that there was no broken glass embedded in it. Charlie went over the wall into the yard of the brownstone on the other side, paused for just a second to take it in-blind dirty windows, all with security shutters or shades down, another Dumpster, a couple of parked cars- I know where I am, he thought as he plunged out of the yard, into the brownstone's driveway and down to the wall in front of the building and the driveway's open gate. He looked up and down the street. I can't let them catch me out here, where they have the advantage- size, weapons, mobility. If there's going to be a chase, let it be where I have a chance. Not out here!
He ran like a sprinter, terrified that as he got to the corner he would see that car in front of him. Dark blue, a glossy new Dodge sedan of some kind, one of those big ones, they keep changing the names, recent model, Virginia plates- But it didn't materialize. Some kindly fate gave him the few seconds he needed to fly in the door of the WorldGate public Net-access place on the corner. He stood there panting at the front desk, and the guy who manned it straightened up from taking something out of the shelves behind the desk, looked Charlie up and down with an expression of complete boredom, and said, 'Yeah?'
'I need a booth!' Charlie said.
The behind-the-counter guy looked at him with a total lack of urgency. 'Cash or credit?'
Charlie fumbled in his pocket and came up with, to his shock, not one of the family commcards, but something he had grabbed off the hall table that morning on his way to school, thinking that he might as well use up a little of whatever comm time was on it: a public access commcard. Gulping, Charlie slapped it down on the reading plate on the counter. The guy behind the counter read what the plate and the commcard had to say to each other, and pushed Charlie's card back toward him. 'Only got fifty-five minutes on that,' he said.
Charlie swallowed. 'Which booth?' he said.
'Six-'
He ran down the hallway between the booths, found Six, slid the curved booth door shut behind him, then palmsealed it locked. There he stood for a moment, breathing hard, and then flung himself into the implant chair which was the room's only furnishing. He leaned back, sweating, lined his implant up with the chair's pickup, closed his eyes-
Charlie opened them again on whiteness, and jumped up out of the chair. He was standing on an infinite white plane with a featureless blue 'sky' above it, empty of everything except a voice that said, 'Welcome to a WorldGate public Net-access facility. Instructions, please?'
The terrible thing about it all was that the one place where Charlie would have felt safe and at least slightly in control, his own workspace, was the one place he couldn't now go. There was a better than even chance that it had been tampered with somehow, that his accessing it would trigger some tracing facility that would betray his presence here. And that door would only be closed for fifty-five minutes. Charlie had almost no cash on him to buy more time. After that he would have to go out the door, and if they had been able to track him down, one way or another, the people hunting him would be waiting there with some plausible story-
Then it was all too plain what would happen to him, what had happened to the others. If not today, then some other time real soon, at an unguarded moment, he would be snatched. Someone would stuff him full of scorbutal cohydrobromate, either with a FasJect or even just out of a spray can, the aerosol method. And when the drug took, in a matter of a few minutes, when he could not resist, Charlie would be spirited away into some private spot, a hotel room, say, and his 'suicide' would be set up. Possibly even with his own cooperation, but in any case, he certainly wouldn't be in any condition to resist. And even bearing in mind what Mom said… in this case, the odds are better than fifty-fifty that they can make you do something you wouldn't normally do. Think of what Nick said about Jeannine and Malcolm…
Charlie swallowed. 'Workspace access,' he said. 'Address 77356936678822-847722-'
He rattled the number off as fast as he could, having to stop once or twice, because it wasn't one he normally had to remember. The whiteness around him flickered-
Charlie found himself standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal in New York. This was his father's desperate joke about the state of his own schedule, which he described as being like living in Grand Central, though without being able to go downstairs to the Oyster Bar whenever he liked. The terminal's great main concourse was gloriously lit, with sun pouring down in great diagonally striking rays from the tall windows on the Vanderbilt Avenue side. But there were no people in it… and more to the point, to Charlie's despair, his father wasn't in it, either. Normally he had a big desk, made of the same creamy polished terrazzo of the floor, standing just west of the circular information kiosk with its polished brass knob-clock, but the desk was missing.
'Damn,' Charlie whispered to himself. There was no point in leaving a message, no time 'Home system,' Charlie said. 'Workspace, new access, address, 77356936678822-8472086633-'
Another flicker. A second later Charlie was standing in his mother's space, which for reasons she had not explained to him was currently a huge stretch of sand just east of the Pyramids. The view was spectacular, until you turned around and saw that the suburbs of Cairo were directly behind you, and in fact you were standing in someone's backyard, with a picnic table and a swingset off to one side, and a lawn that was scrubby not for lack of water, but because some kids and an overenthusiastic dog or two had dug or worn it nearly flat. Charlie looked at the picnic table and saw a scatter of his mother's paperwork all over the top of it, stuff from the hospital, her computer pad, a bunch of flowers stuck in a crude vase that Charlie had made her from clay a long time ago. 'Mom?' he said softly.
Her simulacrum appeared immediately. 'Hi, honey,' she said, but Charlie let out a breath of pure desperation, for she was canned. 'Guess what? The best-laid plans have ganged agley after all. I'm going to be late again tonight, sorry… they needed some more warm bodies down in ER, they were short of staff. When you get home, be a sweetie and put some more white wine in the marinade for the ribs, okay? Otherwise, if you need me for something, call the hospital and have them page me, they '11-'
Damn. 'Home system,' Charlie said, racking his memory, and then shaking his head in frustration, for he couldn't remember James Winters's commcode or the code for his office. 'Emergency call. Net Force headquarters-'
Suddenly he found himself looking at a uniformed lady, a cool-looking blonde, sitting behind a desk. 'Net Force. How can I help you?'
'This is an emergency,' Charlie said. 'My name is Charlie Davis. I am a member of the Net Force Explorers. I need to talk to James Winters immediately!'
She smiled at him, an understanding expression, and Charlie was instantly angry enough to spit, for the look was that of someone humoring a child. He then instantly felt guilty for his anger, for there were thousands of Explorers scattered all over the North American continent, and there was no reason for this woman to believe that he had anything important going on in his life at all. 'I'm sorry, but he's not available right now-'
'Then let me leave a message for him,' Charlie said. 'Please tell him that I have the data he asked me to correlate for him, but if I don't hear from him shortly, the body count may have increased by one. Tell him he can reach me here for the next fifty minutes-' And he rattled off the address of the Net center and of the present workspace. 'Thank you! Workspace, new access address, 8846396677336-'
This number he knew well enough from having to input it about thirty times two weeks ago, when his address-filing facility had developed a fault that it took him the better part of an afternoon to put right. Charlie gulped, and then let out a breath of pure relief as the sunlight spilling in through the roof of the VAB appeared all around him, but grayed out, as if through a veil. 'You are entering a restricted space,' a harsh robotic voice said. 'Access is forbidden. Track and trace protocols are in operation.'
'Mark, it's me, it's Charlie!'
Thegrayness vanished immediately. He rushed out into the sunlight across the concrete, looked around him. The Rolls-Skoda was sitting in the middle of the floor. High above him, he heard the buzzards softly squeaking and cheeping to one another as they worked the in-building updraft. 'Mark?' he shouted, and to his embarrassment his voice broke in mid-word.
'Jeez,' Mark said, though Charlie couldn't see from where, 'what's up with you? You sound like a chicken.'
There were about ten possible answers to that. 'Mark, where are you? I'm up the creek!'
