Deathworld

have to refer back to your father. Again.'

Mark didn't quite squirm.

'Don't bother trying to play to the stands quite so blatantly,' Winters said. 'There is no one in the stands but me, and I am not cheering.'

He looked slowly over at Charlie. 'Meanwhile,' Winters said, 'your mother is a very understanding woman.' 'She is? I mean, yes, sir, she is… '

'Because she has not herself assisted in having you committed,' Winters said, 'on finding out what you've been up to these past couple of weeks. I seem to remember you telling me that, as soon as you came across any information concrete enough to warrant action, that you would let me know.'

The silence settled down heavy. 'I didn't think it was concrete enough yet,' Charlie said, his voice sounding even smaller than he was afraid it would. 'It needed to be tested.'

'Using yourself as bait,' Winters said.

'When you're hunting polar bear,' said Charlie, 'that's the only bait that's any good.'

Winters looked at him hard for a moment. Then he sat back and rocked a little in his chair. 'This much I'm going to give you,' he said. 'You were right about one thing. The woman you caught was definitely getting ready to do it again. Immediately. Besides the stun gun, we found a big spray can of sco-bro in the front seat of her car. And all the ropes and ligatures you could have desired were in the trunk, ready to use.'

Charlie shivered. 'It's still May,' he said.

'Yes,' said Winters. 'That much you're right about. But why?'

Charlie blinked. 'Why is it May?'

'I mean,' Winters said, 'why was she attacking these kids in May?'

Charlie shook his head. 'I never did figure that out,' he said.

'Because,' said Winters softly, 'that's very close to when her son committed suicide.'

Charlie's eyes widened. 'Richard-'

'Exactly wrong,' said Winters, annoyed. 'Don't guess, Charlie. There's been too much guessing in this, not enough precise use of data. Fatal for a doctor.'

Charlie swallowed.

'Mitch Welles,' said Winters.

'He was the first one,' Charlie said. 'April of 2023-' He shook his head.

'April,' Winters said. 'Not May. Now, Maureen Welles had… well, not exactly a collapse after her son died. But she wasn't well. After she recovered, she went on a campaign to prove that her son had been induced to kill himself by something that had been done to him in Deathworld. She spent all her efforts trying to get the legislation that I told you about through Congress. It didn't get her anywhere. She was sure that there was a conspiracy against her, but as I said, the only conspirator against her that anyone can identify was the Congressional calendar. And her own single-mindedness.' He let out a long breath. 'Her marriage went to pieces in the middle of it all. She and her husband separated-he said, because chasing down her son's murderer had become her entire life.'

Winters went on rocking in his chair for a few moments, scowling at his desk.

'Sounds like she was obsessed,' said Mark very qui- etly.

'It sounds like it,' said Winters. 'Well, all her complaints and attempts to get Deathworld shut downgot her nowhere, as you might imagine, since there was no evidence whatever to suggest that the environment, or Bane, were implicated in any way in her son's death.' He sighed. 'And then the second suicide happened. That's when we got involved. Once could be an accident. Twice could be a coincidence-'

'Three times is enemy action,' Mark said.

'Well, even proverbs can be wrong,' said Winters, lacing his fingers together. 'But this time, as it happens, it was indeed enemy action. Because Mitch Welles's mother decided that if the government and Net Force weren't going to do the responsible thing and shut Deathworld down, then she would do it herself.'

He breathed out. 'Well, that's the simple way to describe it. Your mom would know,' and Winters glanced up at Charlie, 'that the ways a human mind gets itself into such a position are usually a lot more subtle than people suspect from outside, or after the fact. After all, she had managed to convince herself, over time, that her son couldn't have killed himself, that it had to be murder. Well, acknowledging that he had committed suicide would mean admitting that it might possibly have been due to something she d done wrong… so that was a realization that her mind buried as soon as it could. From that it was just a step to believing that Joey Bane was personally responsible for his death. And from there, maybe not such a long step to believing that anyone who was in Deathworld willingly was somehow complicit in her son's 'murder.' '

'Maybe,' Charlie whispered. 'It would explain a lot.'

Winters shook his head. 'It may be something like that which was going on in her head. The process itself is obscure, and it's probably going to stay that way for a while, because she's not talking about much of anything now. But soon enough Maureen Welles got the idea that, if people had accused her son of being a suicide, then she was going to turn that back on them, get revenge on them for hurting her, for hurting him like that. They would be the suicides, not him. She started monitoring the new login information, and the message boards, as anyone could… but her purpose was to pick likely targets, to make sure that the ones she 'worked with' in her Shade and Kalki personas seemed genuinely suicidal, people who 'were going to do it anyway.' Their deaths would make her son's look like what she was sure it was: something done to him, to them, by the environment they'd been spending time in. That this would also hurt Joey Bane must have occurred to her. She may even have had some fantasy of killing him and turning him into a 'suicide' as well. More to the point, though, she was sane enough to realize that a string of suicides would affect the place adversely.'

'But it didn't,' Charlie said. 'It went wrong. In a lot of ways. No one put it together that the suicides were connected. And Deathworld got even more popular.'

Winters's look was grim. 'You're right. It backfired on her. Her methods were too subtle. Not subtle enough to completely prevent the suspicion, here and there, that these suicides weren't uncomplicated. But distributed over so much time, and such a large physical area, they didn't attract the attention she wanted. And she wasn't completely nuts, not yet. Her first murder took a lot out of her, scared her-scared her briefly sane. She kept quiet for a while. The next suicide, the one in October, was genuine, and had nothing to do with her. But come the next year, around April, her pain started to unseat her reason again. By May she was more than ready to murder someone else, as revenge against Bane… or as a kind of sacrifice to her dead son.' He frowned. 'And she did… then scared herself sane again for a little while.'

'But she couldn't stay that way,' Charlie said. 'Probably the knowledge of what she'd been doing was starting to prey on her. And her son was still dead… '

'And Deathworld was still in operation,' Winters said, sounding a little sad now. 'It must have been intolerable for her. One part of her wanting to believe that her son had been exonerated, avenged… another part of her continually wanting revenge on whatever had taken him away from her.'

'And so she kept on killing,' Mark said. 'And then did it again, this month… '

'Twice,' Winters said, somber. 'But now she was getting into the pattern of serial killers. One murder isn't enough. The same kind of murder isn't enough. They have to get closer together, be more terrible, somehow, to provide the same level of catharsis. But they never do.'

'It's a drug,' Charlie said softly.

'Something like one,' said Winters. 'The addiction always getting worse, in her case, because the dose increases and increases and doesn't do any good. And then this last time, she was driven to commit two murders.. and no sooner have they happened than Deathworld, her old enemy, suddenly is doing better than ever. It drove her to levels of rage she'd never experienced before. She decided to go straight out to try to kill again. And found you… using some pretty advanced 'hunting' routines. She tripped the 'wire' around your workspace, as you thought. Felt you out, to make sure you were suicidal enough. And then went for the kill.'

Winters's eyes were resting on Charlie in a way that made him even more uncomfortable than the man's anger had.

But there was only one answer to that look. Charlie swallowed. 'You remember Helicobacter?' he said.

Mark looked at Charlie as if he was from Mars. But Winters's expression shifted microscopically to something a little less uneasy than it had been.

'Helicobacter pylorii,' Charlie said. 'Forty years ago everybody thought stomach ulcers were caused by stomach acid.' He had to laugh, for at this end of time, it sounded silly. But back then, they hadn't had any other