Runaways

Chapter 10

Shortly thereafter, Megan flagged her system as "busy" to all callers and got ready to lie in wait. It had taken some doing. "This is my operation," she said. "It's my friend. I want to be in at the end!"

"There's nothing for you to do, Megan," Winters had said. "Leif is going to handle it."

"If I don't get to watch it go down," Megan said, "I'm going to-" Then she stopped, for she didn't know what she was "going to." And it was foolish to try to threaten this man. For one thing, she intended to be working with him some day, and for another, it made her sound juvenile.

Megan shut up and just looked at him.

Winters just looked back for a moment. "Oh, all right," he said at last. "There's a place you can sit and watch… with a few hundred other people."

"A few hundred?

"This case calls for an unusual amount of oversight/' Winters said. "As you'll see. Come on, I'll drop you where you need to be. Once you're put there, stay put! I'll be off making sure the surveillance is all in the right places, with the supervisory personnel from Breathing Space and the other jurisdictions all in place. And, by God, after all this they'd better be-"

Megan went with him, her heart racing.

Leif was sitting in the plaza in the same spot he had been in yesterday, drinking an orange juice and twitching. And without any particular fanfare, the man came walking across the sunny plaza, past the big bear sculpted out of blond wood that stood down at that end of the plaza, and stepped into the shade of the umbrella that sheltered Leif's table. Vaud just stood there for a moment, looking down at him thoughtfully. Then, "Prompt," he said "This is good to see. Will you follow me?"

He headed toward the restaurant, as he had done before. Leif got up, leaving his drink, and followed him. A moment later they were in the swirling "default blue" space again. Once again there was a chair set on one side of the table, but this time there were three chairs set on the other side. Vaud sat down in one. A moment later a couple of other men entered the space as Leif and Vaud had, and seated themselves.

"My associates," Vaud said. "Mr. Tessin, Mr. Grau."

They didn't give Leif the slightest sign of personal acknowledgement. They simply looked him over as if he was merchandise. One of them was a small man, round, balding a little on top, dressed in a more modern business suit than Vaud's; he had extremely blue eyes, and a face that had a fair number of smile lines in it, none of which were being used at the moment. The other man, tall and slender, seemed somehow to have his face in shadow even though the lighting in here was even enough. Part of his seeming, Leif thought. This gave him the shivers, for some reason. There was no reason the man couldn't have manifested a face that was normal, but just not his… That's the point, then. It's meant to give me the shivers. Very cute.

"I would like to pick up where we left off yesterday," said Mr. Vaud, looking at the man whose face was in shadow. "There was some question about fluency."

"Whose, mineV Leif said, genuinely outraged.

"Who else's?" said the slender man, Mr. Grau, in Moscow-accented Russian. "I am interested in your technical vocabulary."

Why, for courier work? Leif thought instantly… Unless this isn't about courier work at all, now.

They suspect something. They think maybe I'm a plant. The idea assaulted him, all at once, and suddenly simply seemed true.

Great. Which way do I play this?

Leif's mind raced. There were two possibilities. Hide some of his own acuity, make it seem like he wasn't so strong on the tech side. Or let it shine-for technical vocabulary in all his "primary" languages was a matter of pride for Leif. No way to tell which will work better… not by myself not right this minute. Let it shine.

And so he did, for Grau began firing electronics and comms jargon at him, first in Russian and at high speed, then in German and even faster, sentences that were phrased as hard questions full of three-foot-long German "portmanteau words," big compound structures some of which were familiar to Leif and some of which were plainly being composed on the fly. Leif translated and answered as quickly as he could, consonant with using the words correctly-once or twice he had to use terms with which he wasn't familiar in a way that suggested he understood them even when he wasn't absolutely sure of the meanings.

And it went on that way for nearly another half-hour, grueling, veering without warning from language to language until Leif started to sweat. But shortly he realized that this test was not so much about his linguistic acuity, any more, but about his reaction to stress. Then he relaxed a little, and started to answer, purposely, more slowly, and with a little more arrogance. These guys were going to have to do better than this if they thought they were going to upset him.

Finally Grau stopped and looked at the others. "Well?" Tessin said.

"Adequate," Grau said.

And now I'm supposed to get mad. Yeah, right. Leif folded his arms, leaned back in his chair, and simply looked back at them casually.

Tessin nodded, looked at Vaud.

"Well," Vaud said. "The Russian in particular is good. And we have a delivery that needs to be made out that way. Gentlemen?"

The three of them looked at one another. Then Tessin and Grau nodded.

"Very well, Mr. Dawson," said Vaud. "We wish you to collect a package from someone who will meet you at Reagan International. Details of this will be virtmailed to you-but you must not use the Breathing Space account to access the information. Go find a public booth and access the address we are dropping into your Breathing Space virtmail now." Tessin nodded, the gesture of a man who has just seen to some matter. "You will be leaving tomorrow."

"So what's the pay?" Leif said.

Tessin smiled slightly. "The eagerness of the young," he said. "Well, this is your first time out, so it is lower than usual. We will see how you do. The price goes up somewhat with continued successful deliveries. Six thousand on departure… six thousand on return with the package that will come back."

Leif thought about that. "I'm not sure it's enough/' he said.

The men all looked at him in open astonishment. "Goodness," said Vaud, "I would think you might feel that we were already doing you enough of a favor."

"So you might," Leif said. He thought for a moment, then said, "Fifteen thousand. Split half and half, as you say."

Vaud's expression went back and forth between annoyance and a kind of skewed admiration. "Oh, go on," Tes- sin said, "we can well afford it."

The other two paused, then nodded. "If you will pass us your account information," said Vaud, "we will have the system pass the funds to whatever cash card you use."

"It's a BlueChip card," said Leif, and rattled off a twenty-digit number. "I'll wait."

"My, what a young mercenary," said Vaud, genuinely annoyed now, but Tessin laughed. "Give me that again," he said.

Once more Leif recited the numbers. Tessin repeated them softly, under his breath, and then added something else that Leif didn't hear. "The transfer is being made now," he said.

Leif pulled out the virtual "twin" of his BlueChip and thumbed it on, touching in his PIN number and then glancing at the little screen which contained his balance. Even as he watched, it went from three digits to four before the decimal point.

He looked up, smiling happily. "Okay, Mr. Winters," he said.

The three men looked at each other. "Winters- " said Vaud. Tessin and Grau were already on their feet, fleeing out of the blue space and into the sunlit plaza. Leif lost sight of them as they went out. Vaud followed them fast. Leif went after.

Vaud was hurriedly threading his way among the tables, like a man constrained by Breathing Space's own virtual structure so as not to be able to simply vanish, but to have to leave via a prearranged "emergency exit." He should have put it closer, Leif thought with some amusement, as one of the people sitting at one of the tables he passed now stuck a foot out and simply tripped him.

Virtual experience may filter pain, and did so in this case, but not actual physical motion, which obeys the laws set up by the local programmer. Vaud scrambled to his feet and started to run again…

… and someone else jumped up from another nearby table and straightarmed Vaud right into the table opposite: he crashed into it, went down.

Vaud was good. Even as glasses and plates and cutlery went crashing to the pavement, he came up rolling, bounced to his feet again and started to dash off through the crowd in the plaza…

… only to discover that it was not a crowd as such, as yet another person bodyblocked him to a stop. Vaud stood there, panting, as the group of "diners" nearest surrounded him. Suddenly all their clothes showed an astonishing sameness-the primary "seeming" they had all adopted for this particular online intervention, under the "secondary" street clothes: the light blue, midnight blue, and silver of Net Force uniform. The whole expanse of Barenplatz was full of Net Force operatives, all now suddenly having reverted to their proper day wear after having been in disguise a little earlier, and all looking grimly cheerful.

Vaud stopped where he was. Over his shoulder, among other Net Force operatives, Leif caught sight of Megan… and saw what she was wearing. He grinned, and changed his own seeming to match.

James Winters sauntered into this group.

"Well, we've been looking for you for a while," he said. "Nice to see one of these operations pay off, though God knows it took long enough." He shook his head. "And wouldn't Dickens just have loved this? Take the innocent kids, use them, throw them away. Or turn them not-so-innocent any more, farming them out to the nastier intelligence organizations and criminal gangs. Pay them a pittance, keep the big bucks yourself… " He shook his head. "Well, I don't think you're going to be harvesting the 'orphanages' of the world anymore. We have about twelve different law enforcement organizations looking at your people's work right now. I think this is a scam that's outlived its usefulness. Certainly for you. Take him and his friends away, boys and girls… "

The Net Force operatives closed in around Vaud: a moment later they all vanished together.

James Winters turned to where Megan and Leif were standing, as the operatives dispersed. "We got a clean line on where they were 'physically' during this little visit," he said. "Three locations: Prague, Helsinki, and New York. Tessin there was right around the block from your dad's corporate headquarters," he said to Leif, "not too far from Wall Street. That wants to be looked into."

Then he grinned rather ferally. "Nice job, though," Winters said. "Nice work, both of you. Though you turned a few of my hairs gray when you upped the price, Leif."

"Why do a deal right away?" Leif said. "I had something they wanted. And besides, it would have made me look too eager."

"Yes, well," said Winters, bending a slightly more severe regard on Leif. "You should talkSo all right, maybe it was allowable as protective coloration, seeing what everybody else was wearing. Just this once. Now take those off… until you're entitled to them."

Obediently enough, though with a touch of regret, Leif vanished his Net Force uniform, going back to polo shirt and jeans, and saw Megan revert the seeming of her clothes to the more normal sweatshirt and day tights that she had been wearing.

"But what about my friend?" she said, losing her brief smile. "What about Burt?"

"We have a couple of guesses where he is at the moment," Winters said, and smiled again. "We'll confirm them if we can with Mr. Vaud. I think he's likely to prove talkative enough. So let's get on with business… "

The process of getting off the plane seemed to take forever. It was amazing how long people could take just to get their bags together and walk off a plane without getting in each others' way.

Into the crowd of people standing around the baggage claim area, surrounding one of the carousels, came stumbling a tired looking young blond man carrying an overnight bag. His stance and gait suggested that he was desperately weary. He was, having been thinking with desperate speed for the last seven hours… but he wasn't tired enough so to make him stagger. Ahead of him, the man in the trench coat was stuck in a tangle of luggage carts behind some people who were trying to reorganize their bags on those carts, while waiting in line at the exit to drop off their customs declarations with the U. S. Customs people at the desks between them and the exit doors. Burt came slowly along behind the man in the leather trench coat, though not too slowly, and yawning.

Without looking at Burt, but as if he knew he was there, the man speeded up a little, as if trying to make it up to one of the Customs desks before Burt. The guys at the desks were looking at the people they were then dealing with. Not one of them, as far as he could tell, had even seen Burt yet, and they were not noticing what was happening behind the people right in front of them.

Burt stood there, wobbled, swayed… and fainted.

Or at least it looked that way. He simply pitched himself forward, not trying to catch himself with his arms at all, and plowed right into the man. Burt had played enough football in his life to make sure that his weight hit the guy right in that spot in the small of the back where it's almost impossible for the unfortunate person tackled to save themselves from falling. They either go down or hurt their back real badly in trying to prevent it. The guy started to go down, and now came the tough part, as Burt fell down on top of him, twisting rightward and sideways as he went, pushing the bag rightward, sideways, and most important, under… so that when they finally finished falling, the overnighter was mostly under the guy, and his briefcase had gone skidding right across the floor.

That got the attention of the Customs guys. The two of them who were processing people directly in front of Burt and his target looked up. The Customs agent immediately to their right, who had just finished dealing with somebody, now came around from behind his desk at the sound of the exclamations of the passengers behind them and the sight of Burt falling. He helped Burt up.

"Oh, he dropped his bag," Burt said. "I'm sorry, mister, look, there's your bag-" And he pointed to the overnighter, which was mostly under the man in the trench coat.

"That's not mine," the man was saying, shaken, "that's not my bag, where's my-"

And it was immediately obvious why he might have said something like that, for the overnighter's zipper had been open when Burt dropped it; and protruding from it now, sticking partway out of its jiffy bag, was an object which could not possibly have been mistaken for anything but a large rectangular lump of brown stuff with a texture like that of a good fudge brownie.

Now Burt stood there brushing himself off, and wondered in sheer terror whether this was going to get him in even more trouble. After he had decided to try his chances at changing the situation he was stuck in, and had decided on a plan, he had spent an uneasy few minutes in the one of the airplane's toilets with the overnighter- using one of the disposable, thin plastic toilet-seat shields to cover his hands while he wiggled the contents of the jiffy bag halfway out of it. He didn't know if he had contaminated himself again in the process. All he had thought at the time was that he was going to be in trouble no matter what happened, and it would be stupid not to try to alter the situation a little in his favor.

But now the Customs agents had the bag with the drugs in it, and were peering into it in greatly increased interest; and to Burt's utter astonishment, the man in the leather trench coat actually tried to push one of the agents away and run out through the door into the arrivals hall. The Customs agent grabbed him, and was joined a moment later by another one.

The passengers all around stared at this. And suddenly there now seemed to be about twenty Customs agents concentrated in a relatively small area. Where did they all come from? Burt wondered.

One of the Customs people, glancing around, said, "Okay, folks, come on, give us your cards and go on ahead… " And several others of them led the man in the brown trench coat away into a small side room. One of them, holding the overnighter in rubber gloves, followed them.

Burt stared at this, too; then, as unobtrusively as he could, he attached himself to the confused family who were going past the desks now, the ones with all the baggage. They had several older sons, and some of these guys were passing in separate declaration cards for themselves. So Burt simply went in last after the third son, and passed his card in, too, as if the bags that went with it were on one of the carts. The agent who was taking the cards now just stamped Burt's and waved him on through, her attention rather more focused on the door through which her colleagues had taken the man in the brown trench coat.

Burt was shaking harder now, and hoping it didn't show, expecting every second that somebody was going to say "Wait a minute, kid" from behind him. But no one did. That was nice, but it was not the end of his troubles. For just past the Customs area door, probably, was the person to whom he was supposed to pass on his package… the package Burt didn't have any more. They would be waiting for him… and Burt was sure that when the man in the brown trench coat didn't come out, that other person would almost certainly figure out what had happened… and would not feel very kindly toward Burt. I have to get away. But where…? How?…

He brushed blindly through the crowd of taxi drivers and car-service people who were standing outside the Customs area, holding signs, some paper and some electronic, on which appeared the names of passengers who had yet to come through. Burt didn't stop, and didn't look at any of them, for any of them could be his pickup, the person he now desperately didn't want to meet. No one followed him right away. But this was no consolation. It was still hopeless. He had no money left. There was nowhere for Burt to go.

Except the one place they didn't expect he would be likely to go, under any circumstances, considering that Burt was a runaway…

He hurried across the arrivals concourse to where there was a line of public-access Net booths. The first one he came to was engaged. Burt gulped and went on to the next one, and the next, and the next, and they were all engaged. There were footsteps coming fast behind him, but he didn't look back at the source of them, he didn't dare. Never look back, they might be catching up. The next one was occupied. And the next. Oh, come on, what are all you people doing on the Net, don't you have lives! Burt thought, and put his hand on the last one-

AVAILABLE, read the little green glowing sign over the door.

He threw himself into it, shut himself in, and threw the lock. There he stood trembling, half-waiting for someone to start banging on the door.

"Megan," he breathed. She was a Net Force Explorer. He had teased her about it enough times in the past. Now maybe it would come to something. He felt around in his pocket for his local-access comms chip-it seemed about a hundred years since he'd stuffed it into his pocket on leaving home-and threw it down on the booth's reader plate.

Everything went white as the Booth's Net hardware locked on to his implant and pulled him into synch. "Welcome to-"

"Abort start sequence, contact now, preset, Megan," he said.

"Trying that connection for you now."

And there she was, standing in front of that big fat planet Saturn. "Megan, listen, I'm in-"

— and with a horrible sinking of his heart he realized that he wasn't looking at the live Megan, but her answering routine. "-can't come online right now, but please leave a canned message or virtmail, I'll get back to you-"

"Kill it," he said to the booth, and the image of Megan whited out. "Dial-"

It was awful. He was almost ready to name his home address-but not quite ready. Not even for this-

And then someone did bang on the door.

Burt gulped and did the one thing which he suspected the person outside had no idea he was likely to do, under the circumstances. "Nine one one!" he shouted.

The emergency locks on the booth's door engaged.

"State the nature of your emergency!" said a dry female voice out of the whiteness.

"There's someone trying to kill me," said Burt, "and he's going to get away with it unless I talk to someone from Net Force right away!"

"Where are you, sir?"

"You know damn well where I am," Burt said to the unseen voice, "you've got this booth's Net address right in front of you right this minute, and if you don't let me talk to someone from Net Force in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to be dead shortly, and probably a lot of other people will, too, pretty soon, so get on it!"

"Connecting you," said the voice, rather hastily.

Burt smiled rather grimly as the world blacked out around him and the hardware in the booth made the connection with his implant. Dad's voice again, he thought. Yet there were unquestionably some things that it was good for. Now he could only hope that those things would happen fast enough…

Megan blinked her implant off, sat there in the chair, and just let out a long breath. There was nothing more she could do, not for the moment. She had to just relax and let matters take their course. Relaxl she thought, amused at herself, for she was trembling all over with reaction. "Yeah, right."

She got up and stretched. "Boy, could I use some tea," she said, and headed down the hall; past the bathroom, where at least one of her brothers was having one of his legendary hour-long showers; past the den, where her dad was in the chair, talking to somebody; into the kitchen, where various Day-Glo water sports gear was draped over the kitchen chairs. Apparently Mike was thinking about going kayaking later today.

The doorbell rang.

"Oh, great," Megan said, and went to answer the front door.

There was a man standing there, wearing a business suit-a shortish man, dark-haired, with one of those faces you would pass on the street and which would leave no impression. "Megan O'Malley?" the man said.

Oh, no! said some part of Megan's mind, very loudly.

And she hit him. Right there, with full straight-armed extension, with the heel of the hand; right in the good spot, the spot where her martial arts instructor had strongly suggested she not hit anybody unless she really meant it, since the move actually veered a lot closer to unarmed combat than any martial arts move, and unarmed combat (unlike martial arts) is about having people not get up again after you hit them.

She heard the man's sternum crack. He fell backward down the stairs.

Oh, no, she thought, going no more than one step after him, and there falling into ready position, just in case he should try to get up again. But he showed no signs of doing any such thing. Oh, please don't let me have ruptured his pericardium, Megan thought, for that was always a danger when you played around with the sternum. Your opponent could bleed to death in a matter of a minute or so. Or bruised his liver-1

"Megan," her father said, very calmly, from behind her. "One step to the left please, dear."

She turned. Her father was holding what was usually kept locked in its safe in the den, a firearm of truly monstrous proportions, to her mind anyway, and it was leveled at the man's head. Megan gratefully took one step to the left.

"Megan," said Mike, coming around the corner of the house from the garage side at a dogtrot, holding a kayak oar with what looked like very unfriendly intent, "you've gotta stop doing this stuff to the magazine salesmen. It's not their fault."

"Megan," Sean said, appearing behind her father with a towel wrapped around his middle and completely dripping wet, "how're we supposed to beat up the people who beat you up if you won't let them beat you up first? We never get a chance to do the brother thing anymore."

Megan stood there, breathing hard, and smiled.

"Your mother's going to be furious that she missed this," Megan's father said mildly. "As for you, sir, I suggest that you lie very still and try to keep the writhing to a minimum, as I or one of these extremely dangerous and uncontrolled youngsters might be forced to construe some sudden motion of yours as an aggressive action, and then to do something we'll all regret later. Though as a family we would certainly be sure to send flowers afterward. Megan, is this one of your threesome?"

"I don't think so. Net Force accounted for all of them," Megan said. "But he's nobody I do recognize, and why should anybody I don't know come here looking for me right this minute? But look, we'd better get him to the hospital-"

"Panic button's hit," Sean said, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes. "Let him lie there, the professionals'll handle it. Our legal liability is now limited. Dad, did he make an aggressive move just then?"

"Wishful thinking, son. Go put some clothes on. Response time is down to about a minute these days, the ambulance'11 be here soon enough. Ah-"

But it was not the ambulance. A big multipurpose vehicle with the Net Force stripe and logo came howling down the street and pulled up in front of the house, and even before it stopped, people with various kinds of armament even bigger than her dad's were piling out of it. They surrounded the man lying at the bottom of the steps, and shortly another Net Force van arrived, with an ambulance in tow. A stretcher was produced, and the man was transferred to it and thoughtfully restrained. The handcuffs were probably just an afterthought.

And within about five minutes the vans were all gone, leaving behind them just a quiet suburban street with about fifteen different neighbors standing out in their front lawns or on their front sidewalks, staring at Megan and her father and her brothers. "We're going to hear about this from the neighborhood association again," her father said wearily, turning to lock the handgun away again. "They'll accuse us of lowering the property values around here."

"Idiots," Mike said, heading around the house again with his kayak oar over his shoulder. "Megan's just making the world safe for democracy again."

"Yeah," said Sean, and took his dripping self back inside.

Megan stood there a moment more. "Dad?" she called after him, as she followed him into the house. "I take it back about the boys. They can live."

"Oh, good," her father said. "Funeral expenses are getting so unreasonable lately"

Late that afternoon, in Megan's space, she and Leif met with James Winters. The news had come through a couple of hours ago that Burt had been picked up at Reagan International by a Net Force flying squad. The D. C. police had the man who had been hammering on the booth's door. They were holding him on attempted assault charges for the moment, confident that they would shortly have something much better to book him on.

"Well, first of all, the Gridleys have now left France for Germany," James Winters said, sitting and admiring the view of Saturn in a chair which Megan had summoned out of the air for him, "so I suppose we can all stop worrying about Mark being sent to Devil's Island after all. Though he may wish he'd availed himself of that opportunity after his mother gets through with him." Winters's smile was dry.

"He won't be in too much trouble, will he?" Leif said.

Winters sighed and shook his head. "He'll be all right. He's plainly being saved for bigger things." He turned his attention to Megan. "Which brings us to you, for whom it seems the same could be said. But it all links back, as you thought, to your friend Burt. The operative chasing him had a 'listener' of a kind we haven't seen before. Net booths are supposed to be shielded against such things, but there's always somebody out there coming up with something new" He sighed. "He pulled Megan's Net address from the booth as Burt was dialing it. After that it was, as usual, all too simple for him to get your street address… What went on in the guy's head after that, I'm not sure. He may have thought he could snatch you and use you to put pressure on us to release his associate, the man with the briefcase. Not that it turned out all that well for him." He gave Megan a rather cockeyed look. "You reacted fast. Maybe a little too fast."

"You try being born last behind four large and hungry brothers," Megan said, "and see how fast it makes you."

Winters produced a dry smile. "Point taken. Anyway, your reasoning about why someone unknown should show up there right then was correct enough. And I wouldn't worry about having him turn up on your doorstep any time soon-not that, after a welcome like that, anyone lacking a deathwish would be terribly eager to. Besides a very sore chest and a body-bruise you could paper a wall with, the guy's already got several counts of assault, interstate flight, various other black marks… We and the other law enforcement agencies will be having a series of long talks with him, and one or more of those will land him in some none too comfortable Federal retreat for a good while. Your guy in the trench coat may not spend that long on our shores, but that's only because of all the extradition arguments that are going on at the moment."

"Why?" Leif said. "What was he carrying?"

"If either of you spent as much time watching the news as you do working on your hobbies," Winters said, leaning back in his chair, "you might make an educated guess."

They both looked blankly at him. "You really do need to pay more attention to the news," Winters said. "Two weeks ago someone shanghaied a bankers' courier outside the main train station in Milan. Dragged him off somewhere, then stuffed him into the trunk of a car that they left up near Udine somewhere, and went off with what the courier had been carrying-which was one point five billion Swiss francs' worth of 'white paper' negotiable securities. The police in Milan assumed that the thieves would run up into Liechtenstein with the paper-they're in a currency union with Switzerland-or maybe over to Jersey via France, and launder the paper by running it through one of the smaller merchant banks there, then moving the funds right along after clearance into various other jurisdictions, the Caymans, say, or Andorra… But whoever was running this particular white-collar thief decided to try the 'hide in plain sight' maneuver instead. They told him to go to the U. S. yia Amsterdam, and then arranged with your friend Mr. Vaud to put a 'disposable' courier on the same flight as a distraction." Winters shook his head. "Strikes me as an error in judgment. They should have covered him up a whole lot deeper… or alternately, they should have given your young friend Burt the paper. Who would have suspected him?"

Winters stretched and yawned. "But they outsmarted themselves. Always nice when they do that" He smiled slightly. "And you two are sitting pretty at the moment. If you want to go to Italy, I suspect the Milanese police would be willing to pay your airfare. That stuff was snatched on their watch."

Megan smiled. "Well," she said, "I'll see what my dad thinks." She sighed. "All I want now is to see Burt. I've had about six calls from my friend Wilma in the last two hours… "

"I'll get out of here," Winters said, standing up. "Come on, Leif. Let's let real life, whatever that looks like, reassert itself." He looked at Megan with something she had never seen on his face before, something which brought her out in a hot embarrassed flush: just simple pride.

It lasted about a second. "I want a complete report from the two of you, with discussion of the sociopolitical ramifications, in eighteen hours," James Winters said. "See me in my office for critique and further discussion two hours after you submit it."

And he vanished.

Megan let out a long breath. "Homework," she said with genuine loathing.

"Yeah, but what homework," Leif said. "I'll call you later."

And he vanished, too.

About two hours later Megan and Wilma and Burt were in Megan's space, sitting around and just reveling in things being a lot more normal than they had been for the past few days.

"I hate to tell you this," Burt said, "but even after all that… I don't know if I want to go home just yet."

"Nobody's going to make you," Megan said.

"But I miss you" Wilma said, She squeezed Burt's hand. The two of them had been holding hands almost constantly since Burt arrived, having been questioned by the police and released as soon as they had conferred with Net Force.

"I miss you, tooBut I can't go back there."

"Megan?" said what sounded like the voice of the Great and Powerful Oz.

"Yeah, Dad?"

"Can I come in?"

"Sure, come on ahead."

A moment later he was in her space and glanced over at Burt. "Perfect," her father said. "I hoped you were here. Look, Burt… You've been through a lot, and you've managed it surprisingly well. If you don't mind, I'd be happy enough to offer you a spare room for a couple of months. We're redoing the garage at the moment, since we haven't been using it. It's better than being in a shelter, no matter how humane the shelter is."

Burt shook his head. "Mr. O'Malley," he said slowly, "it's really nice of you.. but I think the distance was doing me some good. I want to keep working with the Breathing Space people for a couple of months and see where it gets me. But I'll stay in the area." He looked over at Wilma. "We've got those qualifiers to think about in a few months, after all."

Wilma took his hand and didn't say anything.

"Everybody will be able to find me," Burt said. "I'll be getting in touch with my folks, all right. I have some things I have to say to them. Maybe not the things they think… especially my dad. But after that.. We'll see. I can manage to finish school, anyway, if I don't have to go home at night. After that…" He looked at Wilma. "I don't know for sure. But we've got a while to work on it."

"Okay," Megan's father said. "That sounds good to me.

And he vanished.

The three of them sat there looking at one another. "So…" Megan said.

"So," Burt said. "Let me see how you've messed up the sim of Buddy. Maybe if someone puts a real rider on top of him, we can get it fixed."

A moment later he was being assaulted by two young women. A moment later they dragged him off into another area of virtuality. Beyond the white marble amphitheater, the Sun dipped below the surface of Rhea, and very gently, all around, the atmosphere began to sublimate out in a low-G storm of bluish swansdown snow…