Single Combat

CHAPTER 1

The reverend Ora McCarty faced the wall in the most sacrosanct office of International Entertainment and Electronics and watched a holo image of himself sing an old inspirational: 'Rocky Mountain High'. It had aired — or so McCarty believed — during his Sunday morning program. From the corner of his eye McCarty could see the expression on the face of IEE Chairman Boren Mills. It was, in Ora McCarty's jargon, nervous-makin'.

The holovised McCarty strummed a last chord on a sequined guitar, held the last note, then winked from existence as Mills keyed his hand-terminal. "Hey, you cut off my finish," McCarty said affably.

"Call me a music-lover," Boren Mills replied in soft derision. "But don't tell me you didn't know that song is on the prohibited list."

McCarty turned to face the smaller Mills. "Aw, that's for Mormons! That song don't tempt people to take drugs, no matter what they think in Salt Lake—"

"Do I have to remind you who subsidizes your gentile services?" Boren Mills snapped, his bright dark eyes flashing under heavy brows. "If the church is liberal enough to support a mildly heretical preacher, the least you can do is exercise judgment with your material."

"Censor myself, you mean," McCarty grumbled. "Seems to me, you LDS folks—"

"Correction! I'm a Congregationalist, Ora. Never, ever, link me with the Latter-Day Saints."

"Well…" McCarty's half-smile suggested that he was buying a polite fiction, "… those LDS folks are happy with my mission just so long as it's mainly country-western entertainment that don't take issue with anything they want said."

"Entertainment is my middle name," said Mills with deliberate symbolism. IEE's middle name was 'entertainment', and whatever board members twice his age might prefer, thirtyish Boren Mills was IEE.

"Entertainment's what I gave my holo audience," McCarty nodded.

"Not with 'Rocky Mountain High," Mills rejoined, the receding vee of his widow's peak moving side-to-side in negation. "Your monitor has his orders. Since my last name is 'Electronics', what your holo audience got was 'In The Fourth Year of Zion'."

"The hell they did."

"The hell they didn't," Mills replied easily.

"I don't even know that piece," McCarty insisted, then formed a silent 'oh' of sudden enlightenment. Ora McCarty was still essentially a twentieth-century man in 2002 AD, coping with the technology of war-ravaged, Streamlined America. At times that coping was slow, and sullen. "You faked me."

"Regenerated you," Mills shrugged the implied correction. "Don't worry; thanks to us you never looked better or sounded half so good. Want to see what you really sang?" The Mills hand, small and exquisitely manicured, held the wireless terminal, thumb poised.

McCarty shook his head quickly, both hands up in dismay. "Now that's an abomination, Mr. Mills. And what's worse it makes me break a sweat to see a me that isn't me." To stress his rejection, McCarty turned his back on the holo wall and faced rooftops of Ogden, Utah outside the smoke-tinted glass panel. The giddy height of the IEE tower yielded a unique view; no other commercial structure in Ogden was permitted such an imposing skyward reach. McCarty supposed it had something to do with the microwave translators built into the temple-like spire. Even in architecture, IEE suggested its sympathy with the reigning Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Now that a Mormon administration directed the rebuilding of an America whittled down by ravages of the Sinolnd War, McCarty could condone such corporate cozening as good conservative business practice. He let his eyes roam past the city to salt flats shimmering in late spring heat, to the tepid Great Salt Lake beyond, so impossibly blue in the sun as to seem artificial.

As artificial, for instance, as his rendition of a song he'd never sung, or as his effectiveness as a man of God, when image-generating modules could replace him right down to the wrinkles in his shirt. Squinting against a glint of sunlight from the too-blue lake: "I wonder when they'll start fakin' the news," McCarty said.

"Oh, — I suppose someone will try it sooner or later," said Mills, but McCarty did not notice the subtle twitch that passed for a smile. "You can't imagine how much it cost FBN to regenerate your little ditty." It was, of course, very cheap. "If it happens again, you'll pay the tab. Try to curb your paranoid fantasies, Ora; as long as we maintain control of FBN Holovision, we won't often squander big money regenerating events."

Not once did Mills lie outright; as usual, his lies were chiefly implicit.

Reluctantly, McCarty faced Mills. "I guess the world isn't as simple as I'd like," he sighed, fashioning a shrug that ingratiated him to audiences; awkward, gangling, suggestive of a reticent mind in the big rawboned body. "I appreciate your takin' your own time on this, Mr. Mills. A lot of men wouldn't bother."

"A lot of men don't succeed," Mills replied evenly, with a light touch at McCarty's elbow, steering him to the door. Boren Mills was one of those compact models that did not seem diminished when standing among taller men. With a forefinger he indicated the needlepoint legend framed behind his rosewood desk: SURPRISE IS A DIRTY WORD. "See that your programming people check your scripts from now on. We can do without any more surprises on the Ora McCarty Devotional Hour."

"That goes without saying," McCarty murmured.

"Nothing goes without saying," Mills replied. "That's the essence of written contracts. Read the prohibited list, Ora."

Damn the man, thought McCarty, and tried to respond lightly as he stood in the doorway: "You've made me a believer, Mr. Mills. If I lost network support by stickin' a burr under the LDS's saddle blanket, I'd wind up so far out in the sticks you couldn't find me with a Search & Rescue team."

"Nicely put," Mills grinned, and terminated the interview. Mills was still chuckling to himself as he returned to his desk, knowing that McCarty could not fully appreciate his own jest. If the federally-funded Search & Rescue ever did seek the reverend Ora McCarty, McCarty would not survive that search.

CHAPTER 2

Ted Quantrill was not yet twenty-one, Marbrye Sanger was twenty-four; and their entwined communion was as old as humankind. Their Search & Rescue uniforms lay near, boot-tips aligned with unconscious military precision. Had the lovers stood erect there would not have been a centimeter's difference in their heights, for the long taper of her questing fingers was repeated in the span of her arms, the extraordinary length of her legs. Yet many men would have been reluctant, viewing her naked splendor, to seek her embrace. Those long limbs revealed the muscles of an athlete, the physical equal of the youth who shared her delight. Only in the upper body could his sinew overmatch hers.

Presently she smiled for him, her eyes heavy-lidded through an errant lock of chestnut hair, and arched against him as she felt his thrusts quicken. At his faint moan she pressed a forefinger against his open mouth, now grinning, teasing him, then reaching down with her other hand to milk his masculinity. At the same moment she made her eyes wide, her mouth a tiny V of innocence, brows elevated as if to ask, 'who, me'?

Gritting his teeth, laughing softly through the pulses of his own climax, he nodded back a silent, 'yes you'.

You, you and I, we together. They lay, mouths open to silence their breathing, her roan-flecked eyes interlocked with the startling green of his own.

Then he rolled slightly to one side, brought his right hand up, said in sign-talk: " I died. You?"

She would not lie to him about the little things. Signing in the bastard dialect they had learned while still in Army Intelligence: No. Doesn't matter. Love to watch you."

It was the only use either of them dared make of the heart-touch gesture, love. Each of them — mistakenly — assumed the other would recoil from overt words of tenderness.

"I'm only a sex object," he signed in mock dejection.

"A killing object. You died, remember?" Then she thought of something else; bit her lower lip.

"Problem," he signed. Not a question, but his eyes probed.

She nodded. Carefully, she placed a strong hand against his breast, rolled to one side, breathed in the conifer-spiced evening air of northern Wyoming highlands. Signing: "My last hit. They always promised we'd never get a mission against someone we know."

"So?"

"I knew her— second-hand."

There was really nothing he could do about it but: "Sorry," he signed.

Momentarily then she wanted him to feel the full impact, and spelled it out for him. "Dr. Catherine Palma."

Quantrill froze. He had known the woman well, a stolid, fiftyish medic who'd risked lingering death in the fight against Chinese plague during the war. Palma, a mother-figure for him before his enlistment at age fifteen. He'd mentioned Palma to Sanger on many occasions, always silently by necessity. The late Palma? In a soundless agony he balled his fists, rolled onto his back, eyes closed.

Sanger placed her hand on his breast as if to smooth away the tendons that stood out, fanning inward and up from pectorals to throat. Then she coughed, a demand for attention.

When he opened his eyes again she was smiling, almost in apology. "I suspect she was on guard," said the lithe fingers. "Rebel medic now; couldn't find her." About the big things, she had to lie.

"Bitch. Could've told me an easier way."

"Sorry; honestly," she signed in shame.

Suddenly suspicious, he squinted as his hands said, "Really couldn't find her? Or wouldn't?"

" Think I want to die? Tried my best," she lied again.

His exhalation lasted at least five seconds. "I believe you."

Now she was up on one elbow, frantic with the notion that he might not believe her. They were both professionals; it was his duty to report suspicions, even such a one as this. Perhaps she could phrase it in a way to compel belief. "Listen hotsy; better believe me. If you ever deliberately funk a mission, make sure you tell me first."

"Why?"

"Because I want you to get it from friendly fire," said graceful hands that could kill him as easily as caress him.

CHAPTER 3

Search & Rescue was both highly publicized and saturated in secrecy. Boren Mills was one of a dozen outside S & R ranks who knew its double purpose. At war's end in 1998 America's great Mormon president, Yale Collier, had envisioned a regular cadre of young civilians who would operate directly under executive orders, and who would be superbly trained to rescue citizens in mortal trouble. Freeway overpasses, weakened years before by nuclear blasts, still occasionally collapsed without warning — as did buildings, dams, and underground structures. Along the eastern border of Streamlined America, hotspots of paranthrax sometimes appeared, usually borne by some illegal immigrant from the Confederation East of the Mississippi River. Along the vaguely-defined southern border region called Wild Country, ranchers from Texas to the San Joaquin valley appealed for help against a variety of deadly problems.

To the North, Canada now controlled what had once been most of the northern U. S. until the keratophagic staph plague scare during the great war; and along that border, the problems were less obvious.

Collier had become infused with a dream that Streamlined America, under the Mormon stewardship of his administration and those groomed to follow, would be rebuilt into the true Zion. But Yale Collier had been infused with cancer, too. He lived long enough to see his Search & Rescue teams become a symbol of young American altruism and audacity, and he entrusted the development of S & R

to his successor, Blanton Young. Collier was spared any suspicion that Young might have his own ideas about the uses to which a small cadre of daredevils might be put.

Shortly after the death of Yale Collier in 1999, President Young exercised some executive options.

Search & Rescue's three hundred regulars already had Loring Aircraft's sleekest new close-support sprint choppers, with the shrouded fans swiveling on stubby wingtips to provide both helicopter modes and level flight in excess of six hundred kph — and the hell with fuel consumption.

They already got the best training: paramedic skills, alpine and desert survival courses, flood and mine disaster seminars. Their equipment was already the latest, including dress and mission uniforms familiar to millions who saw holovised rescues to the greater glory of Blanton Young and his Federalist party.

What S & R did not initially have, — what the sainted Collier had not wanted it to have, as an arm reporting only to the Chief Executive — was a covert military charter. Blanton Young wasted no time in swelling the S & R ranks with another select group which had been attached to Army Intelligence during the war. The group had been known to its members as T Section; T, as in 'terminate'.

Survivors of T Section were almost all wary youthful specimens to whom the quick covert kill was paramount, and these few became S & R's rovers. Regulars gave each other nicknames. Rovers did not answer to nicknames, scorning even the small luxury of feeling damned together. Quantrill was only Quantrill; Sanger only Sanger.

Blanton Young did not regard himself as a heretic. He took great pains to show that one could remain on the church's Council of Apostles while serving as the nation's chief executive. America was recovering; and as always during a reconstruction period, the government relaxed its restrictions on business and industry. And individual freedoms? That was something else again.

An industrial spy, a union organizer, or an anti-Mormon activist was more likely to disappear than to face public trial. The President viewed his S & R cadre as a nicely-balanced tool. Regular missions, eighty per cent of the total, searched out the vulnerable and rescued individuals. The rover missions searched out dissidents and rescued the status quo. So far, Young's hit team was barely a rumor even among grumbling Catholics and members of masonic orders. Certainly the regular S & R members would not broach the secret because they did not share it. Just as certainly the assassins would not divulge it; each of them still carried small mastoid-implant transceivers, 'critics', with self-destruct charges that could drive a gram of debris into the brain with the same results as an explosive bullet.

The critic had been a wartime innovation and, working with Naval Intelligence, Boren Mills was as quick as Young to see the potential peacetime uses of this tiny, deadly audio monitor buried behind the ears of agents thoroughly trained in single combat. If government and business found common cause, they could also share common remedies. When both could fly the banners of a popular religious movement, a certain amount of excess could be made palatable to the public.

This was not to say that most Mormons, guided by their Council of Apostles, sought a repressive society.

In a genuine ecumenical spirit, LDS tithes helped defray the costs of some protestant sects and promoted open forums for debate. The church had even donated campaign contributions to some fence-straddling legislators of the Independent party, though Indys were similar to Democrats of the prewar era, many of them openly critical of this growing connection between the state and the church of the LDS.

It was not the fault of devout Mormons if open debate helped pinpoint certain rabble-rousers who might, if they proved both troublesome and refractory, simply disappear while crossing the path of an S & R rover.

CHAPTER 4

Quantrill felt the sprint chopper lurch in treacherous downdrafts behind Cloud Peak, wrestled his backpac into place without disconnecting his seat harness. "Sorry 'bout that," said the voice of Miles Grenier in his headset. "These ugly birds are too sensitive with a light load."

Like all regular S & R pilots, Grenier disparaged the beauty of his sprint chopper and his expertise in flying it, as a good Mormon curb against excessive pride. Grenier did not ask why he'd been ordered to leave the alpine survival exercises near Sheridan, Wyoming to drop this lone S & R/over into broken country to the South.

For an S & R regular, the primary virtues were skill, unquestioning obedience, a good nature, and good looks — in that order. Rovers were a phylum apart. The rovers trained first with one team, then another.

They seldom talked about their ‘surveillance' sorties and were clearly not LDS in outlook. For a rover, good looks were secondary and good nature just about nonexistent. Rovers had been known to rage against a mission, to swill illegal hard liquor, even to grow combative. The one thing a rover almost never did was to encourage close friendship with regulars or, so far as Grenier knew, anybody else.

Of course some rovers seemed to relax among themselves, thought Grenier. Quantrill, the youngest rover of them all, definitely seemed to unwind in the company of that gorgeous creature, Marbrye Sanger, during paradrop practice into rotting snow in the Bighorn National Forest.

Sanger, one of the half-dozen female rovers, could have had all the friends she wanted merely by a toss of those chestnut curls or a flirt of the long strong legs. Instead, she spent much of her time as companion to the silent, muscular Quantrill. Grenier thought them an unlikely pair: Sanger in her mid-twenties, elegant even in her mottled coverall, vivacious on a team problem but otherwise aloof. Ted Quantrill, and scarcely out of his teens, a sturdy churl of Sanger's height with chilled creme de menthe eyes and a talent for doing nothing until the last possible second. When Quantrill moved, you knew he'd been thinking about the problem; the little son of perdition might make a botch of it the first time, but it was the fastest botch anybody could ask for. The second time — with a rappel, recovery winch, whatever — he was usually perfect. And quicker still. Grenier decided that Quantrill had already had his second time with Sanger, and cheerfully damned him for getting there first. But then, Sanger was a rover, too…

Another lurch. Grenier let the autoleveller have its head, watching the coleopter shrouds at the wingtips jitter as they sought to obey the gyros. "Still with me, Quantrill?"

"If you really crave my lunch, bub, I'll come forward and flop it over your shoulder," was the reply, with a Carolina drawl in it.

"We're nearly out of it," Grenier promised. "That's Powder River Pass just below. I'll swing past Hazelton Peak and throttle back at the DZ. If it'd been up to me, we'd have come over the top." It was as near as Miles Grenier would come to complaining about a flight plot.

"You pays your money and you takes Hobson's choice," Quantrill said. "Maybe CenCom knows what he's doing; quien sabe?" in the S & R chain of command, the synthesized male voice of the central computer surrogated the President himself; could countermand an S & R instructor or even the Executive Administrator, Lon Salter. S & R regulars did not even joke about CenCom's omniscience, and felt discomfort when a rover did it.

Miles Grenier could not know that rovers obeyed a second, vaguely female, voice they called Control.

To Control, rovers showed a more rock-bound obedience than a regular ever could; a surly obedience residing in a bit of chemical explosive that Control alone could detonate within the rover's skull. If Control was listening, whatthehell: she knew how complete was the rover's subordination.

CHAPTER 5

The sprint chopper, its dull radar-absorbent black surface set off with distinctive yellow S & R sunflower emblems, throttled back behind a grassy knoll and maintained a three-hundred meter altitude as a bulky object fell from its belly hatch. Quantrill, his descent controlled by a handheld frictioner on the thin cable, grimaced as the harness connectors pulled against the epaulets of his mission coverall. Now he was no longer falling, but hurtling over uneven ground twenty meters above high grass with God knew what footing beneath. "Once around the park, Grenier," he said into his helmet.

The 'once' was a joke; it took several tight circles for Quantrill's mass, pulling a tight curve into the cable, to stabilize over a precise point on the ground. Many years earlier the trick had been discovered by a missionary whose small aircraft, with a bucket winched on a rope, could maintain a circular bank with the bucket nearly motionless at the center. The missionary had supplied friends in a South American jungle clearing too small for a landing. A sprint chopper could land and take off vertically, of course; but any casual eye could see that landing and might draw sensible conclusions.

Quantrill's drop from the hatch to treetop height had taken only seconds. Several tight spirals by Grenier brought them near enough to a stale position that Quantrill could ease off the cable tensioner and hit the quick-release when his feet neared the rank grass that invaded from nearby prairies. A landing would have taken a little more time. From experience, S & R instructors knew that most casual witnesses at a drop zone only recalled seeing a sprint chopper banking in tight circles for a few moments before it accelerated away from the DZ with the droning whirr peculiar to shrouded props.

Quantrill was not concerned with casual witnesses. He dropped into knee-high grass, rolled, lay prone.

"I'm down and green, Grenier," he muttered into his helmet mike in their 'green for go, red for no-go' jargon. "Hit it."

Grenier hit it. The cable's whine dopplered away behind the little craft which spurted off at full boost; and nothing but a rocket accelerated faster than a light polymer aircraft pulled by big props.

Quantrill lay quietly for a time, using his helmet sensors to test for the sounds of other humans. But the afternoon sun was hot, and the dry up-country breeze did not venture below the grass tops, and he heard nothing of interest. Quantrill quickly doffed his helmet, pressed its detent, let the visor and occipital segment slide into their nested positions. He stowed it, a greatly diminished volume no greater than a medium slice of watermelon rind, in the curve of his backpac that cupped near his left armpit. His right armpit was already occupied by a seven mm. chiller carrying explosive slugs in its magazine.

The nice things about a chiller were numerous. While it had only a small suppressor instead of a bulky silencer, it did not say BLAM! It said cough* cough*cough, and would say it twenty-four times, as quickly and delicately as a tubercular butterfly. Its gas deflectors kept recoil almost at a null category, so that you could aim it and keep it aimed. It was small enough, with few enough projections, for a breakaway holster. And thanks to the cold-gas plenum in each cartridge, there was exactly enough endothermic blowdown to match the ferocious heat release of the powder charge that consumed the cartridge case.

It was the so-called caseless cartridge, with no telltale spent rounds nor even a muzzle flash from the dual-propellant system, that made this side-arm practical. The exhaust gases were not literally chill; the chiller's name sprang from its lethal efficiency. A chiller's only limitation, went a rover joke, was that it couldn't hide the body.

Somewhere upwind was a reef of sage; below the twice-broken bridge of his nose, nostrils flared briefly in welcome. The sky was hard and laser-bright, with fluffball clouds herding obedient shadows beneath them — what the old hands called 'solly sombry' in bastardized Spanish. It would have been a good day for lazing, and Quantrill always felt a dangerous rush of kinship when he saw someone pause to savor the gifts old Earth lavished.

But it was a good day for killing, too. Now out of Grenier's sight, he dialed his coverall chameleon stud, watched incuriously as the mottled fabric became grassy green, the sunflower patch fading quickly.

Outwardly now, Quantrill was anonymous. He checked his microwave compass, tuned by an orbiting SARSAT, and shuffled into a dogtrot toward high ground a klick southward. From there, he might spot the North Fork of the Powder, where his quarry had camped for some of the languid hatchery trout stocked there. As he always did, Quantrill found some hook of justification on which to hang his deadly purpose; any man who preyed on tame hatchery trout, he told himself, needed a bit of killing.

Side hammer in thumbrest contains print recognition plate. Muffled, not truly silenced. Antirecoil practical because exhaust is cool. The chiller's effectiveness comes from the round w/consumable case that adds to propellant; so gas plenum takes up more than half of case length. No ejector needed. Long rounds angled in clip.

If print recog. program set, trigger-pull by anyone unrecognized punctures only cold-gas plenum which forces trigger forward to lock finger with enough force to break it & hold it. Round doesn't fire since hollow needle punctures plenum & drains gas into trigger piston. S & R people have been known to test strangers by making Chiller 'available'.

Quantrill did not care that Ralph Gilson, paunchy and fortyish, had waxed fatter smuggling unscrambler modules through his holovision dealership; was selling them for the express purpose of bringing Mexican — hence sometimes Catholic — holocasts to Americans. For that matter, Quantrill would not have cared if Gilson's crime had been spitting on a sidewalk or bagging a President.

A rover's day-to-day survival required strict compartmenting of one's concerns. Empathy, altruism, patriotism; all were casualties of the job. Quantrill's secret fear — shared by other rovers, though none admitted it — lay in those moments when pity or tenderness threatened to soften the tempered cutting edge of his killing skills.

So Ted Quantrill did not think about his previous night with Marbrye Sanger while he rested, scanning the North Fork that sparkled below his vantage point. He could not allow vagrant memories of his parents and sister, long dead; of little Sandy Grange, tracked and presumably eaten by an enormous feral Russian boar in the Texas Wild Country; of smiling Bernie Grey, cargomaster of the delta dirigible Norway, blown to fragments by a Sinolnd fighter-bomber. It was safe to remember the dead, but not to mourn them. Memories of the dead could hone his appetite for revenge. He'd even returned to Wild Country early in 1998 to destroy the legendary boar, Ba'al, but hadn't cut its trail in a month of dogged search near Sonora, Texas. Ralph Gilson's trail was a simpler matter.

Quantrill spotted the wisp of smoke from smoldering campfire two klicks upstream. Gilson had a guide who might be with his client or lounging in camp, and Quantrill wanted Gilson alone. The young rover kept well above the stream, moving slowly, studying streambanks for sight of his quarry while he worked his way toward the campsite.

Once he spooked a brace of pronghorn; cursed as they bounded on sinew catapults to safer open country, because a pronghorn could give you away by keeping you in sight. When a pronghorn moves warily off, the predator is generally within three hundred meters. Quantrill gave them extra room, moved in sight of the camp, lay prone and studied the setup.

The two-man tent, twenty meters from the water, was too opaque to show movement within, but the place seemed deserted. A stainless coffeepot steamed among coals, leaning slightly, and this gave Quantrill an idea. The distance was a hundred meters; he took the chiller from its nest, removed the magazine of explosive rounds, replaced it with a spare magazine loaded with high-penetration jacketed ball ammo. It would sing faintly, but could be mistaken for a deerfly.

Quantrill jacked a round in, steadied the chiller with both hands while prone, elevated the ramp-sight. He had no need to steady his nerves; his rare mastery of adrenal response had been one of the Army's reasons for handing him a hunter's role in the first place.

The chiller grunted once. A hundred meters away, a puff of ash moved lazily from the firepit; otherwise, nothing. Quantrill waited a moment, considering the movement of the ash, and tried a hand's span of windage. Another round: charred wood jumped under the coffeepot, which toppled over, hidden momentarily in its huffing cloud of steam and ash.

"Ahh, shit," emerged from the tent, followed by a lean bronze-faced man wearing skullcap and jeans, naked to the waist. Quantrill changed magazines by rote, watching the guide snatch at the coffeepot.

The man said nothing more, did not gesture to the tent, but stolidly inspected the pot before beginning to clean and refill it. The man betrayed no irritation, no sign that might subtly suggest the presence of another person. Quantrill reseated his sidearm. He had decided that his quarry must have fished downstream, a tenderfoot ploy since it was easier to return downstream than upstream after a tiring afternoon in the sun.

Finally the guide squatted to replenish his fire, his back to Quantrill who began to slither backward, still intent on watching the campsite, until he passed behind a lichen-spotted boulder that jutted from the grass.

"Fella," a gruff voice said from behind him, "you better have a good explan—", as Quantrill whirled onto his back.

Among a million humans, the gene pool may provide a few specimens with responses so blindingly fast they do not even dip near the norm. Ted Quantrill's synaptic speed and the output of his adrenal medulla made him one in a hundred million. Army Intelligence medics had tested Quantrill from hell to breakfast in 1996, found him one of those rarities posited by the early stress researcher, Lazarus. The admixture of adrenaline and noradrenaline that coursed through Quantrill's body during stressful moments did not provoke tremors, confusion, or panic; and so his response could be both fast and unerring.

Ted Quantrill's systemic response was as smooth and purposeful as a rattler's strike — and according to psychomotor tests, slightly faster. A recruiter, one Rafael Sabado, had recognized Quantrill's natural gifts while training the young recruit in unarmed combat; had then passed him on to T Section for the training in single combat which, eventually, coerced Quantrill into S & R. In the Twentieth cent, such men had been racing drivers, circus aer ialists, stuntmen. In the Nineteenth, they had been gunslingers. Now in the Twenty-first cent, it was gunsel time again.

Quantrill recognized the stubble-faced angler and flicked the chiller from his armpit. Gilson's challenge had taken almost three seconds. In less than that time, Quantrill judged that they were hidden from the campsite, made positive recognition, and squeezed the chiller's buttplate to jack a round into place.

The chiller coughed its apology, the HE slug's tiny azide charge muffled inside Gilson's ribcage. The man was holding three trout in his left hand, a wrist-thick hunk of brushwood threateningly in his right. He grimaced, shoved backward by the impact, mouth open as if to shout. Then he fell forward, still gripping weapon and fish.

Quantrill did not linger to study the effects of his shot; an HE's muffled 'pop' at ten-meter range was a lethal statement. He rolled to the boulder's edge instead, peering through grass toward the camp. The guide had turned; stood up slowly, scanned downstream, then swept his gaze past Quantrill's boulder and on upstream.

Quantrill pursed his mouth in irritation. Only once had he found it necessary to bag a guilty bystander, rover parlance for anyone who knew he had witnessed homicide by an S & R rover. Beyond the punishment meted out by Control for that gaffe, Quantrill's own brutalized, manipulated sense of fair play had punished him more. He willed the damn' guide to decide- he'd heard nothing of importance, to squat again at the firepit — and finally, with a single shake of his head, the man did so.

Quantrill reseated his chiller, wriggled backward several paces, then began the feverish process of enclosing a fattish adult male in a polymer bodybag.

The bag was dull green outside, dull tan inside, and he chose the green face outward as camouflage.

From a half-klick, he might be spotted as a man toting something heavy — perhaps a butchered-out antelope. He zipped the bag shut, perspiring now, risking a quick scan that rewarded him with the sight of the guide who was heading downstream in search of his missing client.

For a two-hundred-meter span downstream, Quantrill judged, the guide's path would bring him in sight of the bodybag — if he knew where to look. Quantrill hauled the bag toward the boulder, cursing his heelmarks. He felt justified in his caution when, before disappearing downstream, the guide stood atop a treetrunk which the annual spring runoff had abandoned.

The man seemed to stare directly at Quantrill for a moment, but even in the high clean air of Wyoming it is impossible to distinguish a squinting green eye and a patch of medium-blond hair from three hundred meters. Unless they moved.

The rover knew better than that. If his own incompetence led to a second death then and only then, in Quantrill's beleaguered value system, was the rover guilty of manslaughter. He had argued it out with Sanger, twice upon times, using their old T-Section short-hand sign talk. This manual conversation avoided any monitoring by Control through their mastoid critics. Control, and their cadre of hard-bitten instructors, came down hard on rovers who were disposed to argue ethics. The survival ethic, they said, had been proven paramount in a billion years of evolution — and S & R wanted acceptance, not argument.

Waiting for the guide to disappear, Quantrill looked about him for Gilson's flyrod, presumably dropped in the grass. Then he gave it up. If he couldn't find the thing, neither would a search party. He burrowed under the bag, came to one knee, then lurched off with ninety kilos of dead weight in a fireman's carry.

He did not slow his pace until, sweat-sodden and breathless in the thin air, he had lugged his quarry nearly a kilometer from the stream.

Quantrill could have told Control of his progress then and there, via his critic and the relay stations at Mayoworth or Hazelton Peak. Some rovers seemed pathetically eager to keep Control advised of every step, like anxious children placating a stern, unknowable parent. Quantrill had found Control too free with pointless instructions and rarely initiated contact until his mission was complete. If he had any faith in the corporate state he served, it was faith that he would not be expended so long as his usefulness exceeded the rover average. His faith was not misplaced.

For all his physical gifts, Quantrill was not particularly quick in adjusting to the thin air of northern Wyoming. Control's human and electronic modules had juggled many variables; decided that S & R's youngest rover boasted a better success rate in rough country than anyone but the S & R instructors, Seth Howell and Marty Cross; and arranged for Quantrill to spend five days in a wilderness-area seminar before this’ surveillance' mission. The S & R regulars, almost all of staunch Mormon stock, were an altruistic friendly lot; but they'd been taught to let rovers rove without asking for details. Quantrill had left the seminar, and with luck might return to it, without a ripple in their routines.

At length, the rover felt rested enough to resume his carry and chose the route with the most cover, avoiding the few animal paths he struck. The main thing was to get well beyond the radius of any reasonable search by Gilson's guide, as quickly as possible. The guide probably would not succeed in bringing in a search party until after midnight — an S & R team of regulars, like as not — and no one knew better how to avoid a search pattern than a trained searcher. Long before that, the bodybag and its contents would be under a meter of earth, the bag's pheromones repellent to carrion-eaters. Quantrill put another klick behind him before awaiting dusk under a ledge, and learned then what had been poking into his shoulder. Gilson had been a meticulous man: his flyrod, in five short sections, lay ranked in tubular pockets along his trouser leg.

"One day," Quantrill said to the bodybag, "I'll be able to afford a packrod like this." He was not even remotely tempted to steal the rod while studying Gilson's wallet with gloved fingers. Expensive equipment was often marked with tiny dipoles, and getting caught with a missing man's toys was an error too stupid for serious consideration. Gilson had lived and died in a political clime that favored the already-favored, and equated price with value. Gilson's property was better protected than his life.

Quantrill lost another liter of perspiration before dark. The cold light of his chemlamp yielded less IR

signature than his body did and, if the guide's 'mayday' came to officialdom, Control would know it immediately. Haste to be away on his own, not fear of discovery, prompted Quantrill's speed with his collapsible trenching tool.

Sometime after eleven P.M., Quantrill's critic intruded. "This is Control, Q." Who else? Well, stray tightband messages had been known to piggyback a beam upstream of a scrambler circuit.

"Rover Control, rover Control," Quantrill responded. In an IFF module near White House Deseret, his freq. pattern passed muster. His key phrase, its syncopation, and the voiceprint said that the rover Quantrill was on-line.

"Your program is running. Is it green?"

"Like Giuseppe Verdi."

Pause. It was dangerous to pique Control with dessicant humor but you sometimes provoked a suggestion of mirth if a human operator and not a pure machine intelligence happened to be on-line.

"Your program is running. Is it green?" No change of inflection but higher gain and slightly slower delivery. Exactly what a machine tries first to cure a communication problem.

"Green," he said. "Message delivered, disposition per orders." Gilson dead; buried.

"Can you go on the carpet, Q?" Are you situated where you can be picked up by air?

"I can in ten minutes," he said, uncoded. "I'm a klick North of the DZ."

Pause. "North? Say again, Q."

Quantrill sighed. When would Control intuit that rovers had to misdirect S & R pilots as well? "North.

They'll find me walking South," he said as if to a simpleton.

"Affirm," said Control. "If you can cut your surveillance short, Q, a team of regulars can pick you up en route to an MP mission your area."

Quantrill chuckled. The missing person, of course, would be Ralph Gilson. He was not so pleased when Control added that he would be expected to aid in that search. For a brief instant he wondered what Control would do if he simply led the innocent regulars to the burial site and dug up the bodybag — would do exactly, that is. The general gist he knew well enough. It would serve Control right for scheduling him to work all night at an exercise in futility — but would serve Quantrill ill. Fatally.

Control coded out, leaving Quantrill at peace.

He'd remembered to reset his coverall's chameleon stud, but rechecked anyway, splitting his concentration between his equipment and a big buck — mulie, to judge by the big ears — that had moved downwind of him, sampling the rover's scent. The image intensifier on his helmet visor made hikes in darkness a cinch, but better still it let Quantrill study a night world peopled by creatures as wary as any he had stalked in government service. A curious vixen with her two fox kits came so near they might have been tame, but only a fool would think them so. They merely assumed the visored man was blind, and Quantrill let them. He liked to study other predators, too.

Free natural predator and captive synthesized predator studied each other a long while, until a familiar voice spoke in his helmet commset. He replied: "You again, Grenier?" The foxes, startled, vanished into scrub.

"CenCom said we could haul you in. Sorry." Grenier's apology sounded real. "Got an MP South of you; fishing, probably turned an ankle. Mind giving us some help?"

"It'll take me a little time to deflate my sack," Quantrill lied. He hadn't taken the gas-insulated mummybag from stowage.

"Give us a rough fix from our original DZ. I'll be there in about, ah, fourteen minutes."

"I'm about a klick, true heading three-forty degrees or so, from the DZ and I'll have my beacon on, bearing one-sixty to the DZ. If you can miss me, Grenier, you gotta be trying."

The strength of Grenier's signal was already gaining. "OK if I set her down? I'd rather not use floodlights; we'll need our night vision in a half-hour."

"Quicker if you just hover and snatch me by cable. Ground winds aren't bad enough to bounce me off the hatch, and I won't have to eat as much dust if you stand off twenty meters."

"It's your hide." Cable retrieval was tricky in darkness, even with image intensifiers. Quantrill had suggested a quick pickup that made him slightly more vulnerable. His motive was the training exercise, but Grenier misread it as a friendly gesture. "You're good folks, Quantrill," he murmured.

"Ram it." Quantrill's reaction was instant, un-heated. It brushed away the hand of friendship in pure reflex action. It made his life bearable by constraining his worries within his own skin.

Too many of Quantrill's friends had died. The Sanger connection was — well, a potential problem.

Though their shared embraces never extended to spoken pledges, too often their bodies spoke tenderly.

He told himself that Marbrye Sanger would be repelled by spoken tenderness. Besides, Sanger claimed other partners on occasion — and Quantrill pretended to. Sanger was a rover, and a damned good one.

She could take care of herself.

In thinking Sanger direct and uncomplicated, he underestimated her. He chose not to consider that she might long for an open outpouring of his love, even while knowing it might destroy them both.

Presently, striding through fragrant grasses on his promised heading, Quantrill heard a familiar soft drone in his helmet sensors and, almost at the same moment, "Gotcha," from Grenier in his commset. Moments later he was snapping carabiners, exhaling slowly through his nose to keep swirling grass chaff out of his personal pipes. A sneezing fit was a common hazard when you ran beneath a sprint chopper. The snatch was clean; Grenier did not accelerate until Quantrill had been winched entirely within the fuselage and the belly hatch indicator winked out.

The rover found a litter awaiting him; all three couches were occupied by a team of regulars, all lighthearted, all disgustingly fresh for the night's work. Quantrill snapped on his harness and tried for a few minutes of sleep. Sanger was not among the crew, but he had not really expected that pleasure.

CHAPTER 6

Ralph Gilson's disappearance might best be blamed on midlife crisis, that recurrent panic provoked by bald spots, occasional impotence with a wife who is munching celery in bed, and the fear that one's mistress can honestly ask, 'Ralph who?' two weeks after he dies.

In Gilson's case there was no mistress and no bald spot — though his wife chewed gum at the damnedest times. In 1997, Ralph Gilson had been S/Sgt. Robin Gilbert, one of a hundred thousand troops who had survived the Bering Shoot and refused to stop retreating in Alaska.

For the first time in his life Gilbert had rebelled; had put Army training to its ultimate test, making his way back through Canada to California by shank's mare and cadged rides. But he found Mexican citizens occupying most of the California coast, and rumors that they carried Chinese plague. Gilbert did not want to be a citizen of Alta Mexico; he did not even care much to be Robin Gilbert, deserter.

So he became Ralph Gilson, modestly successful jobber of holovision equipment in Ft. Collins, Colorado. With so many records destroyed during the nuke strikes and the shrinkage of national boundaries, it was an easy matter to generate a new identity so long as you stuck to it. After three years came the onset of internal crisis; and for the second time — it would be his last — Gilbert/Gilson rebelled.

Gilson was a twice-a-year Methodist who believed the holo warnings about the threat New Israel would become, when the Israeli Ellfive orbital colonies were complete. He was not too sanguine about Catholics, either; it was Mexican Catholics who occupied the ruins ringing the dead sites of L. A. and San Francisco. But above all, he began to mistrust a government that made it gradually more difficult for jews and Catholics to share meetings or media exposure.

First came the tax on holo unscramblers, which 'coincidentally' were needed now for all but the major media networks. Gilson owned a little stock and knew how, for example, the Federal Broadcasting Network skipped to the tune of IEE, which pirouetted for Blanton Young's Federalist party and the LDS church. Gilson was not too surprised when the second turn of the screw prohibited unscramblers.

Montana stations were now — temporarily, both governments maintained — Canadian. Tucson stations hewed to regulations of Alta Mexico. In the Wild Country of South Texas and most of New Mexico, stations did as they pleased since neither Streamlined America nor distended Mexico had much success ruling those sun-crazed gunslingers in Wild Country. In this time of reconstruction, the new Southwest was becoming much like the old West of an earlier reconstruction. President Young sought to save the American people from radio and holocasts that might interfere with his peculiar vision of a new, and uniformly Mormon, Zion. Since most LDS and gentile voters might not understand how necessary those measures were, the President elected to mask them in committee recommendations. Of course, a few seditious sons of perdition smuggled unscramblers in from Wild Country. More serious measures would have to be taken; more summary justice.

Gilson could hardly miss the rumors shared by his illegal contacts. In Idaho Falls, now near the Canadian border, 'justice' had caught up with a thirty-third-degree Mason whose lodge formed a nucleus of dissent. In the deep-water port of Eureka not far from Alta Mexico, a bloated body had washed ashore, its dentition matching that of a good Mormon who had felt a calling to reorganize a longshoreman's union.

The bishop of the New Denver Diocese had perished, with other prominent Catholics, in the cellar collapse of a Colorado monastery — and rumor insisted that the collapse was preceded by an explosion.

Ralph Gilson had nothing against Mormons — well, nothing much, anyway — in general. A hell of a lot of them had bought his unscramblers, and a few were willing to joke about the unsaintliness of the 'Lion of Zion', Blanton Young, whom one liberal Mormon had dubbed the Lyin' of Zion. But support for Young at the polls was the final punchline, and his reconstruction policies were steadily clotting the individual have-nots into groups of rebels.

Ralph Gilson's rebellion had put self-esteem into his step, and cash into his pocket. And eventually, an S & R rover on his ass. Gilson was the fifth smuggler to receive Quantrill's attention. He was the only one, however, to have unloaded over a quarter of a million illegal unscramblers by making the price attractively low.

CHAPTER 7

Gilson's contraband had run from Matamoros to Piedras Negras in Mexico, to Junction and Big Spring in Texas, to New Denver. Bits of it tended to flake off en route, like blocks of salt from a camel caravan, tribute to whichever bandits wore the badges during passage. Edwards County, Texas, a weathered piece of South Texas Wild Country, boasted twenty-four hundred people and twice that many limestone caverns honeycombing the heights of Edwards Plateau. Corrugated like Dakota badlands, covered with shrubs, it was an ideal setting for shipment and storage of contraband by the barnload. Gilson never new the debt he accumulated from folks in Edwards County. Anybody with a holo there could afford an unscrambler.

Seventeen-year-old Sandra Grange lived in broken oak-and-cedar land East of Rocksprings, the Edwards County seat, and swapped a three-kilo string of dried peppers for her unscrambler. In the current barter system, two kilos would have been fairer; but barter is more personal than money, and it was understood that Sandy Grange must always pay a bit more. The way that young woman spoiled her mute child, the women whispered, was a crime; and to come down from Sutton County insisting the spindly sprat was her sister! No big sister treated young'uns so well. The comely corn-silk-haired Sandy, they concluded, was simply too proud to tell the truth; claimed she was only seventeen but was probably twenty if she was the mother of silent, big-eyed, five-year-old Childe.

Had there been no Childe, Sandy's age would still have been suspect. She showed great patience but scant interest to the young ranchers around Rocksprings, clearly bored by their efforts to court her. She coveted dictionaries, earned a few twenty-peso pieces and household tools correcting notices and ads for a printer in town, and accepted the town's mild disapproval without complaint. Sandy Grange had known much worse during the war.

On the night of Ralph Gilson's disappearance, Sandy treated herself to an hour of holovision, wheeling her Lectroped into the snug soddy, the kind locals called ‘two rooms and a path'. The two-wheeler's storage batteries yielded steadier power than her creaky fabric-bladed windmill, and furnished a reading lamp too.

The Ciudad Acuna station came in clear. Her voice soft-husky with affection, she called at the door:

"Come on in, Childe, and watch holo with me." Childe, with the most unlikely playmate on Edwards Plateau, had ridden piggyback quite enough for one day.

After a moment the plank door swung open and Childe, slender where Sandy had once been plump, bounded into the half-submerged soddy. Childe was a houseful of kid, a dancing delight radiating affection for those few she trusted. "Want your lap," she piped, and swarmed up to sit on Sandy's legs, sidesaddle. In infancy, Childe had lived the life of an Apache; blistering heat, freezing 'blue northers', malnutrition, and hostile strangers comprising her enemies. She remembered no mother but Sandy, and no other human companion. Childe knew the value of silence in the presence of danger, and by now she was thought mute by all but Sandy and one other. The sisters made a symbiotic pair: Sandy the sturdy thoughtful leader, Childe the spindly little scout who knew the languages of Wild Country better than most adult trappers.

Earlier, Childe had taken Sandy's hand to lead her into dusk-shadowed garden furrows, to show her sister why they must not drive away the coyote that skulked near the garden. Sandy could not afford a fence and placed rabbit snares among the young crops — but there were far more rabbits than snares.

"Coyote's the best trap," Childe had insisted, pronouncing it 'ky-oat' in Sandy's own Wild Country lingo.

She proved her contention with the tracks left by rabbit and coyote.

Now, half-watching the ancient cartoons on Mexico's XEPN holovision, Sandy directed her thoughts from the hapless animated coyote on holo to the shrewd mangy specimen which, she admitted, did patrol her garden. Were the rabbits innocent through their ignorance of guilt? Was ignorance of the law, in fact, the very truest defense? Well, — not when the coyote's justice was like the government's. Sandy had been too young to remember the more liberal prewar form of justice. She knew that she preferred Wild Country and the barter system over the kind of regulation imposed to the North. Any system that would take Childe away to a Mormon orphanage was one Sandy intended to avoid — and so Sandy Grange's personal combat against Streamlined America had begun as flight; South from the few tentacles of officialdom, from her home in Sutton County. Too many acquaintances there would have helped take Childe away

'for her own good', and those Sandy trusted had all been taken by the war. Their father, dead of radiation sickness; their mother, shotgunned by bandits; Sandy's friend, Ted Quantrill, perhaps dead on some Asian battlefield.

On balance, Sandy preferred to live on her land, bought with contraband she had found. Increasingly she lived with books: The Way Things Work; Five Acres and Independence; Baby and Child Care', Twain and Doyle, Traven and Dostoyevsky; and of course the poetry, Benton and Reiss, Neruda, Durrell, and the bits she wrote in her daily journal. Language, she decided, could be a luxury that paid for itself.

Presently, Sandy placed the sleeping Childe on their bed, unplugged the holo, took her journal from the high shelf of valuables and sat cross-legged with the Lectroped's lamp to illumine the pages. Sandy's journal was no longer the product of indifferent grammar multiplied by creative spelling. Her books, her teachers, tutored her daily. Not that isolation and spare time for books could entirely explain Sandy's astonishing grasp of language; it may have been a genetic gift.

Between her twelfth and fourteenth birthdays Sandy knew a verbal blossoming, a becoming, that she could not explain. To call it a sea change would be to ravage a metaphor; for Sandy had never seen a body of salt water larger than a pot of soup. All right, then: demonstrably a South Texas ' land change; a broken prairie change. A Wild Country change.

Sandy's journal, 16 May

CHAPTER 8

The holo image of Eve Simpson, once a buxom child star and now IEE's director of media research, was familiar to millions; a sultry-voiced pneumatic package and, by remote means, frequent FBN interviewer of important people. Few, including those interviewed, would have recognized the hundred kilos of Eve's real flesh which had swollen with her clout.

The public Eve, interviews and all, was an electronically-managed image. The private Eve was bloated, brilliant, willful, and in some ways unmanageable.

Boren Mills had lusted first for her famous body, enjoyed it less as he wallowed in it more, and had finally turned toward still younger, less pillowy embraces. But by that time Mills knew the inner Eve, her mind incisive as a microtome, as voracious for media techniques as she was for sex. Mills's intellectual arrogance was tempered by the knowledge that Eve Simpson's subtleties rivaled his own. By now each knew the others uses. And abuses.

"You're going too far," Eve snapped, thumbing the fax sheet Mills had carried to her condominium-sized office.

"Don't tell me the system can't handle a message uniquely tailored to each household," Mills wagged a finger in warning. "I've channeled too much money into your media research and read too many progress reports." It was such hot stuff that Mills had insisted on the electronic programs being stored in a government-controlled underground vault. There, it would not be pilferable by some industrial spy.

But Eve snorted, setting off ripples in the flesh at her throat. She had the trick of switching from the nasally sensuous to imperious tones without pause. "Not the electronics, goddammit, I'm talking about viewer reaction. Boren, you're asking for a level of message control that assumes viewers will never compare videotapes, never start a brush-fire under some Indy congressman once they have proof you're tailoring messages to each holo set."

Mills reflected on the lifetime appointments of media commissioners and waved the objection away. "Not that the Indys could do anything about it," he said.

"Legally? No, your risks aren't legal; they're charismatic." In media research, 'charisma' no longer referred strictly to people. Any message that approached overwhelming credibility was said to be charismatic. Eve was working on it. "As long as John Q. talks to his neighbor, you'll get some coalition of fruitcakes who'll call FBN's credibility on the carpet. Even if you cleaned up your act afterward, it'd be bye-bye charisma — and bye-bye to some network ad accounts for FBN. Is that what you want?"

Mills, sitting on an arm of Eve's ample couch, sighed and retrieved the fax sheet. "So the problem is still word-of-mouth," he mused. "Which means we work harder to alienate the bastards from one another."

"Divide and conquer," Eve chuckled. "Welcome to media theory. Nice to know my chief exec is still capable of an intuitive leap."

Sharply: "Don't patronize me, Eve. Papa spank."

"What would urns do," she cooed, sapphire insets winking in her fingernails as she reached out to knead the calf of his leg; "tie me down like old times? A wittle domestic westwaint for baby?"

He shifted his leg away. "How about lifting your pass to the synthesizer lab? Would that be enough restraint for you?"

A shrug; the sausagelike fingers flirted in the air. "Go ahead, bugfucker, then you'd need someone else to deal maintenance doses to your bloody Chinese slaveys."

"Someone easier to dear with than you are, my dear," said Mills, and let his threat lapse. "By the way: Young's protocol people expect us to put in an appearance when he presents those S & R citations in Santa Fe. Formal, of course."

"A politician after my own heart," she murmured, "parading his hit teams as saviors and reaping public applause for it."

"I don't know if the rover bunch will be there," he said, well aware that a man licensed to kill embodied raw potency to Eve Simpson.

"You know how I hate public display," she said, and Mills knew it was self-display she meant. "Will we be screened?"

"Not from the Prez, but they'll split-screen the dais to make the Secret Service happy. Nobody will see you — us — except Young and a few others like, oh, Lon Salter. You can ogle the beefcake all you like," he said wryly.

"It's not window-shopping I like; it's trying things on."

"Don't put yourself in a bind with Young over it, Eve. The President has some strict ethics about drugging his people."

Delighted laughter, as though Mills had sprung a salacious joke. "Shyster ethics: if you might get punished for it, it's unethical." Long ago, Mills had learned Eve's method of bedding a man who did not fancy tussling with cellulite. She merely laced his food with lobotol, a controlled substance developed to aid hypnotists in making the most intractable patient highly suggestible. While fuddled in this fashion, a man would believe whatever Eve told him, e.g., that she was the most desirable sexual provender he could possibly imagine. And he would further believe that he had hungered all his life to test the adage that whatever one can imagine, one can do.

Mills had discovered Eve's ploy two years previously, after waking one morning with a swirling recollection of boffing his blousy ex-bimbo in ways he had never before contemplated. Those memories did not please him much; the exhausted Mills had the distinct impression that, he’d spent the night with a dirty joke. His cold rage on learning her deception had left Eve frightened and astonished; she'd thought the whole business would amuse him. She had never repeated her mistake on Mills but still found lobotol her chief procurer for the one-nighters she chose like a young Messalina.

Deliberately abrading a troubled spot: "Anyhow, I don't keep my slaves endlessly hooked on heavy shit — like some folks we know," she arched one brow, squinted the other eye.

Icily: "If there were any other way to pursue the most awesome breathrough in recorded history, believe me, — I'd do it."

"Without giving anything away to John Q. or our glorious government, you mean."

Mills, now standing, showed every sign of truncating their old debate. "Eve, if you can keep your great wanton ass out of trouble at the top — and if I can get the San Rafael Desert lab to come through for us — you and I will be the glorious government, for all practical purposes. I know you're laying poor strung-out Chabrier every time you visit the lab; considering the stuff he pollutes his system with, I don't think your lobotol could do him any additional harm. Be circumspect; that's all."

"I don't need lobotol with Chabrier," she said, feeling that her charm had been questioned.

"Thai hash, then," Mills sighed; "whatever. I must get back upstairs; thanks for the warning on individually tailored messages, I'm sure you're right."

Her languid purr followed him to the door. "With enough lobotol in a metro water supply you wouldn't need tailored messages, luv."

"Now you're being absurd, Eve. Only half the population would be tuned to FBN and besides, a steady diet of judgment suppressants would put Mexicans in New Denver inside a month."

"But I can see you've given it a lot of thought," she said, and her cruel cupid lips mimed a juicy kiss of parting.

Mills strode to the executive lift, exasperated.

She hadn't even said whether she'd go to Santa Fe. But Mills knew her cravings; she'd be there, all right.

He made a mental note to check the remote monitors at the desert lab by way of his private access code.

Eve Simpson was the only soul running loose, besides himself, who knew just how Marengo Chabrier's lab was run — and for what purpose.

CHAPTER 9

Cloistered in Utah's San Rafael desert region was Mills's most secure research facility, where need-to-know was as strictly monitored as on any proving ground in the world. There, Mills had carefully assembled a group of the technological elite whose drug requirements made them tractable. From Marengo Chabrier, the French program administrator, to the illegal aliens, all lived out their days behind particle-beam fences within a trackless waste. Their one goal: to find some way to scale up the mass synthesizer which China had developed during the war.

All but a few Chinese researchers had been liquidated by their own leaders, and only Boren Mills had a working model of the device. He had killed to get it. No larger than an overnight bag, the synthesizer had powered the reaction engine of a tiny Sino submarine, also providing oxygen and simple nutrients for the hibernating crew.

Now, twenty-seven months into his scale-up program. Mills rejoiced and writhed. Chabrier, physicist-turned-administrator and a druggie of broad scope, boasted that the little Chinese synthesizer could now produce small amounts of organic dyes, pheromones, heavy alcohols, and other complex chemicals using plain air as conversion input mass. But an inherent limitation existed in the size of the gadget's toroidal output chamber. The Chinese had already built the thing with its maximum output, and neither Chabrier nor subtler asiatic minds in the lab could even posit, let alone demonstrate, a rig that could do any better.

Within a few weeks, the lab would try out the new prototype which could produce an incredible range of substances, so precisely metered that it could issue a shot of bourbon or a root beer complete with effervescence. Mills was no fool; his lab personnel, Chabrier very much included, wore implant monitors that kept Mills informed of their drug abuses. He could not prevent them from manufacturing booze or Fentanyl, but he would know if any one of them absorbed any of it at other than scheduled times. And that would mean cold turkey withdrawal in a padded cell for Chabrier as well as the abuser. So far, Chabrier's vigilance was flawless.

Still more disturbing, Mills found it easier to fund the lab's exotic needs from his own pocket than to continue siphoning money from projects known to IEE board members. Those expenses were mounting, but Mills did not dare permit use of the synthesizer for cash crops; gold, pharmaceuticals, plutonium. Not yet; not until Mills had absolute control of a synthesizer that could produce its goods in staggering quantity.

To make a million copies of the Chinese model would be to court disaster. Eventually its secrets would become known to others outside his grasp and, once every citizen had access to a synthesizer, government-by-scarcity would be a thing of the past. No wonder the Chinese had purged their technocrats; in the nether corners of his mind, Mills had scheduled something similar for his own lab people — but only after they'd done their work.

Mills, who loathed procrastination, had decided to put off his decision for another year. If by that time it still seemed impossible to design a factory-sized synthesizer, he might order a factory full of the small ones. But: should he try to coerce his captives into building wholly automated repair equipment for the inevitable maintenance?

If 'yes', they might prove laggards, even sabotage their own work. To underestimate them would be a disaster; they surely knew their utility would end when a million synthesizers were self-maintaining.

If 'no', then Marengo Chabrier and nine other brilliant trip-freaks would be the maintenance crew, the most expensive mechanics on earth and worth it — and they would know it! The plutonium scenario, for example: what if they produced enough of it, despite the best monitors Mills could employ, to build a — well, call it a negotiating device? It could be scarifying. Hell, it was already scary! With a factory full of small synthesizers, his goosepimple factor would be raised to the nth power. It was almost enough to make Mills ask for government control.

Hypothesis 1: A special security force would help.

Hypothesis 2: A special security force would multiply his security problems. Quis custodiet?

Boren Mills's basic problem was easily stated: he had a cornucopia by the tail.

CHAPTER 10

A half-century earlier, the Santa Fe Opera complex had been modern, a layered amalgam of steel and adobe on concrete, thrusting up from fragrant serrated hills at the city's edge. Noah Laker, the S & R regular who'd piloted Quantrill and four others into the huge parking lot, stood with him at parade rest stance near the nose of their sprint chopper.

"Quaint," muttered Laker, one of the few regulars who saw nothing unGodly about talking in ranks. "But that open roof is a crime against thermal efficiency. Saints! Just look at all that wasted concrete swooping around. Ever see such a thing?"

"Nope," Quantrill lied, lips barely moving. He had seen it often from the highway when T Section was based in Santa Fe during the war. "But who needs efficiency in Santa Fe?"

"Wha-a?" Minnetta Adams, one of the few female regulars, would not turn her head but eyed Quantrill sidelong. Adams was the kind of ecology nut who'd pick a dandelion salad outside a banquet hall; good-natured but serious in her beliefs.

"Come on, Adams; these people have sunlight to burn. Isn't that sweat you're lickin' off your mustache?"

The comely Adams had no mustache though she was the equal of most men in strength. "I'll get you for that," she murmured chortling.

"Bury me in that compost pile she calls her mummybag," he said, loud enough for the others to hear.

Another calumny, for Adams kept her gear spotless. Several snickers rewarded him; any entertainment was welcome when three hundred young people stood sweltering in dress blacks for review.

"Quantrill, are you supposed to be in formation?" It was Control speaking into his mastoid. He guessed from the voice cadence that a human monitor was on-line.

"Um-hm," he hummed his admission softly. You never knew when the damned thing was monitoring you.

Whatthehell.

"Is the President reviewing your assembly at this moment?"

Again he agreed. The President strolled a hundred meters away, taller by half a head than S & R's Lon Salter who strode in his shadow like a king's equerry. Young merely glanced at the teams in their formal dress. A score of rovers filled out the ranks, for four teams of regulars had stayed away on alert duty.

"You're a disgrace," said Control as if she could not care less. "Shut up and report yourself to How-ell after your formation is dismissed." Pause. "Do you affirm?"

"Uhf-furhhm," Quantrill coughed aloud. It might have been just a cough. It would also probably irritate Control — but if Control demanded acknowledgement, you gave it. Somehow. Whatever Control demanded — you gave.

"This is what we get for giving you a freebie entertainment," Control snarled, all too human for a change, and coded out.

Yep, that's what you got, Quantrill reflected. He hadn't asked for a two-hour cruise bouncing across the Rockies so he could stand on display with three hundred other tin soldiers in heat-absorbent black, waiting for a hulking politician to glance his way under a broiling afternoon sun. The flare-leg black formal synthosuedes had been designed to keep creases in, not to keep heat out. The black vee-necked blouse could have been cool but for its high stiff open collar, and the goddam canary-yellow side-tied neckerchief kept the dry breeze from his throat. Okay, so they looked smart as prodigies with the yellow sunflower S & R patch and suede low-quarters, and the belt medikit with sunflower and caduceus. All that pizazz was for the public and for the President who, increasingly for Quantrill, was no more and no less than the controller of Control; his ultimate oppressor.

He turned his mind to more pleasant employment. Somewhere in the front rank was Sanger, among a scatter of other women chosen for the on-camera impact they made. Perhaps, after the awards banquet, they'd find a way to duck out. They could stroll away from the Opera House to sit silently and watch the moon turn the brush-dotted hills to alien country, to smell the night-flower fragrances unique to late spring on a high, dry New Mexico evening.

Most likely, he thought, they'd be burping from the barbecued prime rib which, his flattened nose told him, was already steaming somewhere in the bowels of the place. His belly growled its readiness. In another hour he'd be savoring it, relaxing, glad that he did not have to parade up to a dais and accept a bit of ribbon before holo cameras.

From one-way glass in the Opera complex overlook, Eve Simpson gazed unseen on the Presidential inspection. She grasped the swivel of a magnifier, pulled the scope into position without moving from her motorized lounge chair, and let her mouth water. Eve was not thinking about cooked beef; she was enjoying the human stuff on the hoof which stood in its stalwart innocence, facing her unaware from a distance of three hundred meters. The magnifier made it seem like only ten.

The big one on the front row would be delightful, those long legs and slender hips stripped bare by lobotol and lust. Or — there, the lank towhead on the end, with the bulge at the crotch of his syntho-suedes, the honest farmboy face gleaming with perspiration, the slender delicate nose straight and clean under his blue ingenue eyes.

They were all so photogenic Eve could not — suddenly did not want to — choose. Let kismet choose, she thought, and surprise me. She would go light on the barbecue, heavy on the man. In an hour she would be with S & R's top dog, the glum Salter, who managed to seem a harried bookkeeper while he kept secrets that could topple an administration.

Should she ask Salter specifically for one of his war dogs, a rover? Anytime an interviewer singled rovers out, Salter's pale eyes fairly jumped in their sockets. She would make her eyes huge, innocuous, and propose a brief private interview with a rover for FBN. Salter could hardly refuse under the circumstances — the whole evening was a media event.

The interview would be in Eve's suite at the De Vargas, naturally. She entertained no illusions about the impression her flesh made; she would ask Salter to choose someone, ah, typical of the S & R rover and to send him alone to her hotel in the city.

Eve giggled at the sweet tickle between her thighs, pushed the magnifier away, wrinkled her button nose at the scent of barbecue. Yes, she'd feed delicately on that.

It would be another matter when they sent the meat to her raw.

CHAPTER 11

Boren Mills stood in the reception room amid the hubbub of young voices, the clink of glasses, the exhalations of food and fruit juices, loathing the unstructuredness of it all. The banquet and the award citations, he admitted, had been well-staged and orderly. It was all this chaotic socializing afterward that gave him offense. Idly he sipped his execrable carrot cocktail and, over the rim of his glass, studied the throng for the layers of order he knew were woven through the gathering.

He spotted one of the heroes of the moment, resplendent in dress blacks, his citation ribbon a white satin slash against his breast. Mills murmured something appropriate, shook the youth's hand, touched glasses and moved on.

The President, as usual, stood stockaded within a crowd that was one-third celebrity-seekers and two-thirds Secret Service. Of course it was easy to spot Young's men among the uniformed S & R members, their dark blue suits almost festive against the yellow-accented black of the Search & Rescue people.

Mills began to smile. Order was on hand, you merely needed to know how to spot it. The foci were Young, surrounded by his praetorians; the regulars with the virginal white ribbons, accepting kudos from envious peers; and Salter, talking earnestly to a pair in dress blacks who were twice as old as most regulars — hence had to be S & R supervision.

He'd seen Eve, flirtatious and charming as a vampire whale, gently badgering Lon Salter over the salad course, but he hadn't seen her since the awards ceremony. Who knew what the self-indulgent slut was up to? She was as hard to figure as a Chinese speedfreak. Well, it probably had nothing to do with Mills's own troubles. He sidled to the refreshment table for a change of poisons— celery juice, for God's sake!

Young's Mormons would kill him with nutrition — and moved toward Salter as if by Brownian motion.

Salter was saying to the craggy one, " — And she knows what rovers do, for better or worse; but all the same I'll feel better if you choose a rover who doesn't like to ham it up. Don't give the assignment to Ethridge, for example."

"Ethridge isn't a ham," said the smaller one. "Grandstander, maybe; ham, no."

"But you get the idea. The more laconic, the better — ah, Mr. Mills; salud," Salter finished, raising his glass with a manful attempt at good cheer.

"Health it is," Mills agreed, eyeing his own glass as though undecided whether good health were worth such sacrifice. The men laughed, taking their cue from Salter.

"Boren Mills, let me introduce two of my right arms; Seth Howell," he indicated the long-legged topheavy man with unruly brows, "and Jose Marti Cross," he went on, nodding at a man of Mills's own slight build.

"Marty, Seth: Mr. Mills of IEE."

Mills had intended more polite conversation, but found this Mutt and Jeff team intriguing. Both were training supervisors — chiefly, Salter explained, of the rovers. To Mills it was obvious that the President hadn't told Salter just how much Mills knew about the S & R operations. Obvious: but true? In some ways, Salter was an opposite number to Mills; they both performed crucial operations for the Lyin' of Zion. They even did favors for each other — but at Young's direction.

Mills turned his attention to the supervisors. Most men preened for Mills, hoping to be remembered.

These two seemed to care so little, they might have been members of some other species; Howell a middle-aging grizzly, Cross a graying weasel. To tempt them, Mills tossed out a small bait: "I'm always looking for good security men."

Howell, his wispy tenor suggesting an old larynx injury, his hard eyes amused: "Folks're always mistaking us for the fallen-arch brigade," he said easily.

Mills missed the connection for one beat, equated fallen arches with flat feet, and smiled. Seth Howell might look and sound like a brawler, thought Mills, but like a gosh-and-grits politician he could sandbag you. Or maybe break you like twigs in those huge paws.

Cross, his faint sibilants and high cheekbones tagging him as part Amerind: "Our kids are more like anthro field men — and women, Mr. Mills. Remember those hobo jungle fires two years back? Our rovers saved S & R lots of grief by a little field work."

Mills nodded. He knew rovers would have cover stories and wondered how much scrutiny they could stand. "Tell me about it."

"Army-issue canned heat," Howell husked. "Poor buggers thought it was gel alcohol and tried to process it to drink. But GI stuff makes good incendiary bombs these days." His eyes refocused on someone just behind Mills. "Yes, Quantrill?"

"When you have a minute," said a very young man with a faint southern accent.

Mills turned, smiled, and held that smile while a vague memory of violent death thudded at his diaphragm.

He'd seen this youth somewhere before in dangerous circumstances, but couldn't place him.

Ted Quantrill's green gaze flickered in recognition, then returned to Howell's {ace. "Reporting for extra duty," he said, using their term for disciplinary action.

Cross grinned, big wide-spaced teeth shining in his small dark face. "Let me guess, Quantrill: you spiked your fruit juice."

Quantrill did not smile, but his tone was sadly whimsical. "Talking in ranks during inspection," he said.

"I'd sooner believe it of the Sphinx," Howell joked, then pursed his mouth in thought. "Marty, seems to me that Quantrill has just volunteered for Salter's little tete-a-tete."

"If he's all through talking," Cross said with a grunting laugh.

Mills felt the conversation sifting around him, knew he was not supposed to understand it — and besides, the sturdy Quantrill made him uneasy. "If you gentlemen will excuse me," Mills said, lifted his glass again, and moved off to mull it over.

From a distance, Mills studied the muscular young rover. Somewhere he had met Quantrill face to face.

And the kid knew it. Eventually, watching Quantrill's stoic acceptance of some duty as Cross explained it. Mills shrugged away the problem and slid into the vortex around Blanton Young.

Quantrill took it impassively. He was damned if he would tell Marty Cross and Seth Howell just how much he loathed interviews. It would only give them another key to the small punishments they could use against him. Then he excused himself and made a point of stopping several times, swapping greetings with regulars, on his way to Marbrye Sanger.

She leaned against a partition of decorative 'dobe, which told Quantrill she'd laced her fruit juice with some local lightning. You drew penalties for slouching in dress blacks. "I've already seen the old village,"

she was saying to one of the new regulars who hadn't yet given up on her.

"No harm in offering," he said equably, nodding as Quantrill moved near. "If you don't mind my saying so, you could use the fresh air. What's in that drink, anyway," he went on. It was half curiosity, half rebuke.

"Manna from hell," she grinned, smacking her lips.

"Most regulars don't believe in hell," Quantrill said.

"Show me a rover who doesn't," Sanger challenged, slurring it a bit as she turned toward Quantrill.

"Hello, compadre."

In the private lexicon of Quantrill and Sanger, compadre served for chum, lover, alter ego. Quantrill had kept the word as tribute to a friend in the business, Rafael Sabado; long since gone, long since avenged.

Quantrill glanced at her drink, shrugged to the other man as if to say, 'what can you do? She's a rover.'

"He's right about the fresh air," he said to Sanger. "Let's get about five minutes' worth of it."

"Five minutes? Don't do me any big favors," she said, nodding to the disappointed regular as she strolled with Quantrill toward an exit. "And where the hell have you been?"

"Drawing extra duty," he grumped. "That's why I've got only a few minutes. Gotta catch a monorail to the Alameda in town so I can give a goddamned interview." They passed outside, negotiating steps toward a scatter of trees near the parking area. Sanger stumbled once, caught his arm for support, spilled some of her drink. "You ought to dump that, compadre," he said gently.

She cast it onto the ground. "Sure. My source has more." Her hands mimed a sign: Ethridge.

"I thought so. I wish he'd drawn my duty tonight."

"Maybe he will," she said, dripping saccharine sexuality.

"Unfuck you," Quantrill parried. "I was thinking about the docudrama that was made when they were forming S & R. One of our people met Eve Simpson then; said she was fat as a pig, no matter how she looked on holo." It had been the ex-Iowa State gymnast, Kent Ethridge, who'd made that discovery.

Ethridge was still a rover but had suffered too many disillusionments. Now he spent most of his leaves spaced out on pills and booze.

"Rumor says Simpson's a washed-out druggie; that they use a double for her interviews," Sanger mused, then jerked around. "Is that who's going to, quote, interview you tonight? Doesn't sound like extra duty to me, compadre. Sounds like fun and games."

"Reciting cover stories for a cooing sow? Some fun. Some games," he muttered, and drew a polymer poncho form his medikit. "Here; let's just sit and cool off for a minute."

In the pale glow from distant fluorescents, Sanger's honey-tinted skin took on a deathly greenish cast. It reminded him that life was brief, and that they had little of it to call their own. And Control could always be listening. Their shoulders touching, he rested his forearms on his knees, stared out across the dark line of hills under a billion stars.

He felt her hand slide into his lap, provocative, familiar; but shook his head. "What's the point," he said. "I don't have the time."

"Or the urge," she said.

He took her hand, placed his fingers in her palm, began a slow laborious manual conversation learned through moonless nights to deny Control their communion. "I could just forget the interview."

She signed back: "And find yourself packing chutes or overhauling choppers for a month at Dugway?"

"Done it before," he replied. "Can almost fly damn' things myself, been on so many test hops."

"You'd hate me every minute of it."

"Not hate," his fingers insisted.

She willed him to say more; not to say more; avoided this booby-trapped psychic territory by-signing, "If only Quinn had made it."

"We don't know he didn't; only what Pelletier said," he signed.

"We know you have to go," she said aloud, rising, offering her strong hands to pull him up. They took little risk in allowing Control to suspect momentary sexual alliances, but there were some things as verboten as genuine love affairs. One of those things was talk about Desmond Quinn, who'd refused to accept the Army's word that a mastoid critic could not be removed. Quinn had disappeared at the war's end rather than continue his assassin's work in the new guise as S & R rover.

Max Pelletier, Quinn's closest ally, had backtracked Quinn months later. Apparently Quinn had found a Mexican surgeon willing to try removing the critic; a surgeon who had lost two fingers when the critic detonated during the operation, with poor determined Des Quinn the only fatality. Or so Pelletier had said.

"See you when I see you," said Quantrill as they parted near the monorail terminal. "Take it easy. I mean easy," he repeated, miming a sip from a nonexistent glass.

"Don't chide your elders, sonny," she said in false gaity, giving him a fanny-pat toward the approaching transit module. "And take a good deep breath before you submerge in all that blubber."

Quantrill squeezed his eyes shut, wrinkled his nose at this deliberate gross-out from Sanger's lovely lips.

Taking the steps to the platform three at a time, he called, "You've turned words into a martial art; you know that?"

"Don't let it put you on the mat," she called back, made cheerful by their brief moment together, hands on hips, her head thrown back to let the chestnut hair fall free.

He fought down a nearly overwhelming impulse to return to her side, but imagined that Sanger would have considered it weakness.

CHAPTER 12

Eve Simpson, alone in her suite, cancelled her outgoing video before answering the phone. What she saw incoming pleased her immensely. "Ted Quantrill, ma'am; Search & Rescue." You couldn't tell a lot from a room video but he looked like a hunky morsel. Unconsciously she moistened her lips with her tongue.

"Of course," she said; cordial, not too cordial. "Come right up. I'll leave the door unlocked, Mr. Quantrill, I'm — doing a few things," she ended vaguely, and punched off.

Chiefly she was doing one thing: sloshing lobotol in the bottoms of the crystal goblets she had brought, except for the one she would use herself. Faceted crystal didn't reveal trace coatings as a clear glass might.

When the young rover arrived with a diffident tap on the door, Eve was carefully arranged on a couch amid pillows and a satin coverlet. She saw his bemused glance at her camouflage and did not give a damn. She was used to it. "I'm a little dizzy after all that rich food, Mr. Quantrill," she temporized.

"Forgive me for taking my ease this way."

"Oh. You were at the awards banquet?"

"I was there," she agreed, her eyes approving their scan of this splendidly uniformed creature, then abruptly shifting ground. She waved a languid hand toward the inert holocam rig nearby. "I hope these things don't make you nervous."

His headshake was too quick. "We get used to 'em.",

"Confidentially, I never do," she lied. "That's why I bring fortifications with me." She raised her goblet and grinned wickedly. Sipped. "There's fruit juice at the bar — and more of this naughty champagne if you'd care to join me. Please," she said it prettily.

Quantrill chose apple juice, a goblet, and the chair near her couch. His choice of liquids didn't matter, she thought; her gratification lay in the lobotol.

And she was half right, though it was disappointment and not gratification she had assured with the drug.

One of the regular additives to the diet of S & R members was anaquery, a substance that migrated to the brain without obvious effects — unless certain physicochemical changes occurred in that brain.

Whether by hypnotic concentration or drugs, minute chemical changes accompanied the blocking of volition and judgment. It was those changes that triggered anaquery, with results that appalled Eve in due time. Anaquery prevented any agency, including S & R, from digging into a rover's mind. It was a small sacrifice, in Salter's judgment, for the added security. After all, you didn't have to care about the guillotine's internal stresses so long as it sliced unerringly.

"I get the feeling I've seen you on holo before," she said to prompt him. Lobotol did its erosive work slowly.

"Maybe in a group," he said, eyeing the holocam.

"No. By yourself — a long time ago. Um — talking with Juliet Bixby?" Eve managed to hide her loathing of Bixby, her svelte opponent on another network.

"Quite a memory, Ms. Simpson; I'd almost forgotten. I was on the delta airship Norway early in the war.

We got waylaid by a renegade bunch but — we got away," he finished lamely.

Her eyes grew round. "You started a fire or something, I remember now. You saved the Norway and were wounded. You were wearing a thigh crutch, weren't you?"

"Took a round in the leg." He did not add that he had seen his first lover shot dead by renegade sentries and had made his first kills that night. It had all been a long time ago. Long enough, almost, to forget.

"Care to show us the scar?"

"Not particularly." Again a glance at the holocam. The lobotol was taking its own sweet time.

"The camera's not on," Eve murmured. "We're just getting acquainted, you and I. May I call you 'Ted'?

And by all means, my name is Eve. Tell me, Ted; do you have any special lady? Or maybe a hotsy 'in every port'."

"I'm a rover, not a sailor, Ms. — Eve. But no; no one special."

"Surely a young man in his prime," she smirked, "enjoys a woman now and then. Do you like a strong full-bodied woman, Ted?"

Those piercing green eyes were slightly unfocused now as he took another sip of apple juice. "Sure I like'em," he smiled uncertainly.

"Take another little sippie, Ted." She watched him do it, his motions less assured, his breathing now shallower. Got him! Softly, cooingly, with sexuality dripping from each word: "You know, primitive societies didn't care much for the slender-assed fragile little hotsies you see on the holo, Ted. We know, because they made effigies of their sex goddesses. Nice luscious great tits, round soft lovely ass, lots of woman to screw and screw and screw." She undulated slowly under the satin. "You look primitive to me, Ted Quantrill."

He just sat there, blinking, his respiration rapid and shallow as he watched her peel the satin away.

Beneath it he saw her enormous breasts resting comfortably against a billowing ledge of fat. "May I show you what a sex goddess really looks like," she teased, pausing in her routine. Her legs, below the coverlet, were separate mounds spread for coming attractions.

He blinked. Swallowed. "I need to find the bathroom, Eve."

"To relieve your tummy or your tensions, lover? Maybe Eve can help. How would you like—

She never got to describe it. Quantrill lurched up from the chair, but Eve caught at his trouserleg. He fell against her, shaking like a malaria victim, and vomited once, twice, squarely between her breasts, before she could get her great girth underway.

With a squall of revulsion Eve rolled aside, squirmed to her knees while trying to avoid the line of fire from Quantrill's much-used barbecue. She saw the finely corded muscles of his throat grow taut, another spasm building in his belly and working its way up his torso, and then she was reeling toward the bath.

The rover fell on his face as she slammed the door. She could hear him retching, gasping, as she turned the needle-shower on full force. If the little bastard suffocated in his own gorp it would be good enough for him.

Eve soaped herself furiously as she cursed and lathered, lathered and cursed. Eve was convinced that she had simply moved faster than the laggard lobotol; that the sight of her naked body had prompted this ultimate rejection from a man. Eve was not often embarrassed, and all her half-acre of skin blushed under the needlespray.

Reject her, would he? The scrumptious little hick would be sorry for this. She felt like rushing back into the boudoir to stamp out his life, and in mounting frustration Eve flung open the door.

Quantrill lay in his filth, repeatedly pushing himself up on trembling arms only to fall again, his limbs twitching in a way to make Eve suspect a seizure. To someone or no one he was grunting 'mayday', over and over.

She could not go near him, could not even stand his smell. She slammed the door; found that she liked the fury of it; slammed it again, and again, bellowing her rage and vindictiveness. She was still screaming when the hotel staff arrived.

CHAPTER 13

Sean Lasser had grown too old for active training operations, but he knew far too much about S & R to be turned out to pasture. It was Lasser, alone among rover instructors, who drew the gentle chores.

"No question about it," Lasser muttered as he studied the printout of Quantrill's vital signs; "you took a fair-sized dose of some narcohypnotic, to judge from your condition when they brought you here last night. Anything from PZ to lobotol could have done it. We're assuming it wasn't an injection." Lasser tapped his front teeth with a thumbnail, usually a sign that he was brainstorming. "Did you sit down to watch the holo? God knows you're not a likely subject, but some people can be put under by the right holo presentation. Had you been drinking anything alcoholic?"

"Not even beer. I remember sitting by Eve Simpson with a glass of apple juice while she asked fool questions about the love life of a rover." Quantrill, propped up in a bed in a very private room in Los Alamos clinic, was still a bit gray under the eyes but obviously on the mend. "I don't think it was the holo.

Could it have been during the banquet?"

"Too long a delay. My lad, I'm afraid it was Simpson herself who zonked you. Any idea why?"

"Jesus, Lasser, I was picked out of a hat for the interview! Ask Cross or Howell."

"I've already gone around and around with them both on this — and with Salter. Eve Simpson told them she wanted to record an informal chat with a rover. She didn't specify you. But we know something about that lady and—" Lasser grinned apologetically, " — there is evidently nothing she won't do for a roll in the hay with a studly young buck."

Through gritted teeth: "I'll give her a roll off Truchas Peak! What if she'd asked me something Control doesn't want answered?" Quantrill did not know he got regular doses of anaquery. He assumed that Control would sooner see him dead than see S & R compromised — a fair assumption.

Lasser's tongue filled his cheek: "Well, — I suppose that's a risk she was willing to take."

"So who's she really working for: Mexico? I don't envy the rover who has to stuff that broad in a bodybag."

"Eh? Surely you don't think—"

"Howell told us once, 'media star, bishop or bird colonel; if Control says he goes, — he goes.' I don't see why Eve Simpson should rate any special immunity."

"You don't? Well, she does." Lasser dropped the printout, clasped his hands over his little belly in a familiar lecture pose, and considered his words before using them. "Eve Simpson and Boren Mills are the heart and soul of IEE. Mills is as close to our President as Lon Salter — and we don't want to get into a pissing contest with the CEO of the most powerful industrial arm in Streamlined America. I may as well tell you: Mills was one of the few Navy people during the war who knew T Section's charter — and he knows about rovers too. We couldn't prevent him from telling the Simpson woman. It's my guess she was toying with you in several ways at once; don't underestimate her. Young and the Fed party owe more to Simpson and Mills than they do to S & R. Between 'em, those two can do more for an image through media than all the rest of us put together." The portly little man sighed, made a helpless gesture with one hand. " Now d'you see why we have to shrug this little fiasco off, Quantrill?"

"Do you see that she's no more responsible than a spoiled brat?"

"Granted." Lasser began to chuckle, shaking his head in gentle disapprobation. "You should've heard the hotel staff report, it fairly begs description. First thing they saw was you, facedown on the floor, and they got the idea there was a hand-to-hand fight going on in the bath. So they broke the door down, and found your, ah, friend Eve alone, naked as a thousand-pound jaybird and ready to toss them all out. She damn' near did. But Control picked up your mayday and there's no shortage of S & R teams in Santa Fe at the moment, so…" Lasser spread his hands; seemed to take the whole thing as a great joke.

"At least you've explained something about Mills," said Quantrill. "I thought I'd seen him before, and now I know when. It was the night I did my first hit, on some Navy saboteur. Mills was Navy too; saw me coming out of the guy's room. I had cosmetic cover but I think he made me last night at the banquet. It was one of those deja vu things; you look around and you're staring at him, just like the first time."

"I wouldn't worry about it," Lasser said after a moment of reflection. "If you wore cosmetic cover, Mills probably isn't sure — and if he is, so what? He knows what you do for a living."

Quantrill narrowed his eyes, cocked his head at Lasser, sat up straight. "If he has the need to know, he's in my chain of command."

The two stared at each other a long moment.

Lasser said, "What's good for IEE is good for this country. But you are not, repeat not, to repeat that irresponsible notion." The flush across Lasser's cheeks said, I've told you too much.

CHAPTER 14

Quantrill was on his feet in a day, and in a sprint chopper a week later en route to Indianapolis. From the air he spotted two of the three old nuke scars, vast gray dustbowls with shallow lakes at their centers, that had all but killed Indianapolis in '96. Both bombs had targeted soft military sites, a Naval weapons plant and an Army post East of the city's center. The third strike had come during a later nuclear flurry, taking out the Municipal Airport after its conversion to a military base.

Slammed by airbursts, partly consumed by firestorm, the Hoosier heart of the city had refused to quit.

Some of the of the old buildings still stood, monuments to an architectural style that had wasted energy when the stuff was cheap. Now, this very morning, one of those old structures had succumbed.

Dropping toward a parking area off Burdsall Parkway, Noah Laker banked their sprint chopper over the felled trade center, now no longer burning but smoldering still. Adams strained at her harness, craning her neck as Laker's deft work brought them over the collapsed edge of the structure. "One of those long-span deathtraps of the eighties," she said. "Rain load, you think?"

Quantrill shrugged. Heavy rains might have been the last straw, but Howell had told him to look for earlier straws. They'd found rebel arms along the border, but in Indianapolis? It'd been a deep cache, the kind you might expect in a region of heavy industry. So deep they'd excavated a bit too far under the old blast-damaged foundation. The acres-wide roof had collapsed only on one corner, kneeling into its parking lot, an obeisance toward Monument Circle in the center of town.

Three of the stubby black Loring sprint choppers were already at the site. Laker's group brought their strength up to nineteen, not twenty; they expected the rover, Quantrill, to disappear. He did not disappoint them.

He took his time, nodding at the fluorescent scrawls left by regulars at stairwells and ramps as he descended into the bowels of the structure. Some of the crews had been on the site for twelve hours, and you had to accept their cryptic signs as gospel even if the ferroconcrete swayed underfoot. "Going in, Control," he said. "Ramp three-ell. Somebody's been here with chemlamps. You copy?"

A moment's pause. "Copying, Q. Mirovitch set the lamps, ah, eleven hours ago, so you should have light for another twenty-five hours."

Quantrill came to a landing halfway down, saw an arm protruding from beneath the laminated girder which had slammed down through the walkway. He grasped the wrist, released it gently. Only one more level remained, but now he picked his way over shards of plastic rail and jagged hunks of concrete. The air below carried a pungent damp stink and the faint odor of ozone.

At the bottom stairwell door was a woman. No, only half a woman. He kept going, eased the heavy door open and jammed it with a hunk of debris. He studied the faint glow in the quiet dank hell of the lowest sub-basement for long seconds. It wasn't entirely quiet; as he stood in the scant protection of the doorframe, a desk-sized chunk of concrete slithered a few centimeters down a pile of debris in muted warning.

"Bottom level, Control, facing East. Either Mirovitch planted some chemlamps under debris, or there's been more settling since he was here. Don't suppose you could send him down…"

The desexed voice was distant now. "Mirovitch was rotated out after he reported what he found, Q."

"Mustn't risk the prettyboys, huh?" But he knew better. The less a regular knew about weapons caches, the less he would speculate.

"Say again, Q," the faint voice requested.

"Forget it." He drew two chemlamps from his backpac, energized them, snapped a teat on one and squeezed carefully against its slender length. Bright gobbets of liquid light splashed near his feet, a trail he could follow later. With stealthy caution he skirted the collapsed segments, moving into deeper gloom.

He felt the faint tremor through his bootsoles, saw dust sift through another rent in the concrete above to his left. Several levels above him — endless tons of hair-trigger-balanced junk above him — something big had let go.

"Report, Q." It must've been a beaut. Now Control was loud in his noggin.

"Proceeding East, Control. I'm still suckin' wind, if that's what — wups. Well, Mirovitch was right." In the dim dazzle of his chemlamp was a welter of cartons. They had fallen from a stack against the East wall to reveal the top of a trapezoidal opening. It hadn't always been trapezoidal; it had been forced awry by the building's collapse. It hadn't been part of the original concrete pour, either.

The cartons weighed little, obviously just a mask for the portal beyond. Quantrill eased several of them away; stood shaking his head as he studied the skewed opening. He squirted the chemlamp fluid into the black maw before him, saw the spatter outline a stack of fiberite casings and, farther back, more military storage canisters. He wished then for an incandescent lamp but thrust that wish away. He'd seen what happened when an electric bulb cracked in an atmosphere full of dust. Usually nothing happened. But at times that dusty mixture supported combustion, and then what happened was of no further interest to the bulb user.

Some idiot had opened one of the sealed fiberite cartons, as if by leaving a live round in sight he could remind himself of its potency. Dumb… "We've got a cache of rockets, Control — could be old Hellfire ATM's they put on attack choppers against armor. Prewar stuff; I see a 1987 stencil. Estimate two hundred rounds," he said, easing his head into the opening to peer past the hole in the foundation wall.

Someone had run an earth-borer through that hole and hollowed out one hell of a room, without more than the flimsiest kind of wooden mine-shoring to keep the earth roof in place. The damned stuff had already fallen nearby, he saw with a grunt of fresh surprise. All of that overburden could let go at any second, right on top of two hundred rounds of stolen antitank missiles. And old munitions were touchy.

It was then that he heard the rustle of fabric.

He tossed the chemlamp onto a distant pile of soft earth; fumbled for another. After a moment he catfooted through the hole to kneel in the dirt under that half-assed mine shoring. "Control," he said, "I've found a live one."

Silence in his mastoid, but ragged breathing from beneath a splintered plank. Half buried, left wrist flopping, hell of a bruise spanning cheek and forehead — but a steady pulse despite shallow breathing.

Poor sonofabitch was just a kid. "Control? Verify, Control." Now he spoke louder, but into his cupped hand to minimize the echo. No answer.

From the sub-basement came another, louder slither of debris. Quantrill eased through the hole again to hear, " — Again, Q. Say again, Q. Say again, Q."

"Say what again?" The goddam building was completing its collapse in bits and pieces, he decided. And doing it directly above him.

"Two hundred rounds of ATM's and what else?"

Ah. Once through that hole he was shielded from Control. Quantrill had been warned that his critic might not function far underground. Of course they hadn't ever hinted that a Faraday cage might be a better shield against RF energy. "I couldn't be sure but there could be some binary nerve gas rounds there," he said, starting to grin as an idea blossomed. "I can't risk blowing the antitank rounds if there's much of that stuff down here. Concur?"

Pause as Quantrill's grin widened. "Concur, Q. How long do you need?" Another way of asking how long he'd be out of contact, without actually telling him he was beyond range of their signal.

"Five minutes, but this place is settling around my ears. Can you send a regular down with a doughnut?"

"Might be quicker if you called up for one, Q."

"Shout? In this house of cards? You have a lovely sense of humor, Control." But he began retracing his path up the stairwell.

Minnetta Adams met him at the fallen girder with a bundle the size of a cheap bedroll. "Laker said you needed a doughnut. How'd he know?" She ignored his shrug as she spied the deader sandwiched on the stair. "Any more like that?" Adams was trying to keep it impersonal but any victim beyond her help affected her like a personal reproof.

Quantrill said nothing, only shook his head and waved her back up the stairwell before descending with his thirty-kilo burden. A doughnut inflated to virtually fill a narrow hallway; a fat sausage three meters long, two in diameter, with a long central passage like its namesake. A stopgap measure, but it had saved more than one life. Doughnuts could be inflated in place to raise timbers, but their primary use lay in keeping that small central passage free of sand, water, silo grain — whatever might otherwise block you off during a rescue attempt.

Quantrill snapped the webbing seal, rolled the flaccid sausage out, dragged it after him through the hole in the foundation, cursed as he remembered his backpac. It could hang up in the traction ribs of the annulus.

He duckwalked back, tugged on the doughnut's D-ring, then worked furiously to get his pack off as he watched the orange ripstop fabric inflate. It would be jammed in the hole in twenty seconds. If any adjusting were to be done he'd have to do it now.

He oriented the mouth of the doughnut so that it protruded into the basement, thrust his backpac into the annulus, clipped a chemlamp at his wrist, listened to sinister pops and rustles as the doughnut fleshed itself out. Finally, thrusting the pack ahead of him, he hustled through the annulus. It was like crawling through the guts of some great animal.

He clambered onto packed earth and splintered shoring, then placed his pack near the cache of rockets.

There was no sign of nerve gas; never had been. But judging from the stenciled hides of other crates there were enough CBW protection suits to bring half a battalion through a gas attack. The rebels, thought Quantrill, must expect some very nasty treatment from Streamlined America.

Or maybe the rebs intended to wear those suits while dealing with the Confederacy. It was only a hundred klicks to the Ohio River, the boundary and quarantine line separating Streamlined America from the region that had once been the southeastern United States. Paranthrax had fixed that.

While Quantrill reflected, he worked. It was one hot sonofabitch in this hole, and damp as well. He eased a plank from the semiconscious youngster, roughly palpated arms and legs probing for major fractures beyond the wrist. Satisfied, he reached under the lad's jawline, pressed hard, held his thumb down. The faint moaning ceased. He did not want that kid coming around while in a rover's care. There was no proof that the kid was a reb; he might've panicked and run down here by sheer accident.

Yeah — and there might be no water in the Pacific Ocean.

There was only one way to haul a limp body through a doughnut; pull him after you. Quantrill gripped the boy's clothing and hauled. He did not realize the boy's trouserleg was hung up until he'd pulled the vertical timber sideways, and then he was scrambling as fast as he could, thrusting his legs into the annulus, taking a better grip on the boy's jacket while feeling for traction ribs with his feet. Staring at the dirt that dribbled down from that column was not going to slow it down one little bit.

He found purchase against the ribs and backed furiously. He could feel thumps on the tough fabric; hear the hiss of dirt cascading down on it. If the whole thing gave way it would burst the doughnut like a wet bag.

"— Q. Report, Q. Report, Q," he heard as he scrambled backward.

"Stop honking," he panted an ancient routine. "Pedaling — as fast — as I can. You copy, Control?"

"We copy, Q," he heard as he ripped the youth from the annulus and rolled under the limp form. Under these circumstances, the first step to a fireman's carry was getting the load to roll over on you. "Regulars moved the wrong piece, Q. Are you trapped?"

"Don't know." This confusion might be a break. In all his missions for S & R, Quantrill had never actually saved a life. His real function made the idea slightly ridiculous, and as Quantrill moved toward the stairwell he was grinning again, licking sweat from his upper lip. But he mustn't be seen with his burden, and, "Suggest you tell regular crews to clear out above," he grunted. "Now, Control. It's like the bottom half of an hourglass down here, shit's raining down steadily." He was exaggerating only a little.

"Report on those munitions, Q."

Quantrill heard someone call from above, flung the unconscious boy behind an abandoned forklift at the first basement landing, raced below again. "No chemical munitions, Control. Old GI suits, stacks of timbers, ammo cans. Nothing that looks like ceebee or nuke stuff."

"Blow it, Q."

He stared at the doughnut; licked his lips. The annulus was distorted now, almost closed at the far end.

"Don't know if I can get there again, Control. The whole fucking rig is caving—"

"Blow it, Q. Set it for a half-hour. Nobody will be inside by then."

"Except me," he snarled, and felt for the doughnut's release valve.

He played the valve by ear, ready to sprint for the stairwell, hearing soft rustlings past the hole. Finally he could clamber over the pillowy fabric, saw that there was barely room to squeeze between an angled piece of shoring and the outside of the foundation wall. The chemlamp on his wrist was his only light source. A hundred tons of earth had fallen into the makeshift munitions room in the past five minutes, and a timber groaned only an arm's length away.

Quantrill drew his chiller; clasped it to his breast. Whatever happened, he was not going to suffocate. He reached his pack and with one hand he stripped the timer from its velcrolok clasp. He placed the pack against the nearest ATM canister. He did not bother to dump the 'candy bars' from their pocket; inside each wrapper was a tenth-kilo of explosive. He grasped the detonator buttons in his teeth, unwound them like a tasseled cord from the timer body, blew sweat from his brow, stuck three of the tassel buttons through innocent-looking wrappers into doughy plastique.

When the timber gave way, he just managed to flatten himself against the foundation so that the cascading earth buried him only to his knees.

"Control, you suck," he breathed, running his thumb along the ID plate on the butt of his chiller. Then he reached forward, groped blindly into the fresh earthfall, and at last felt the timer. He set the damned thing by feel, unwilling to move it, murmuring every outrageous phrase he could recall and investing it in Control. Then, for the first time in years, he had an inkling of what people meant when they spoke of panic.

He could not lift either foot.

Somewhere just ahead, the timer was slowly willing itself to die. When it went, it would take two hundred antitank rockets with it, unless the effing timber just overhead went first. And he could not even ask Control to pull his plug. Control could not hear him.

Well, wasn't that what he'd dreamed of for years? Bitch, bitch, bitch… He reached his decision, thrust his chiller into its clip, began to burrow with both hands at his right shin; sneezed. Clods of dirt were raining down on his neck as he wrenched the foot free, knelt, scrabbled at the stuff imprisoning his left leg.

When he lurched upward it was only to reel back, tumbling onto fabric that half-enveloped him; and then he was rolling backward, away from the rain of falling earth and timbers, through the foundation hole and onto concrete. He did not ignore the rumble behind him. He sprinted from it.

At the stairwell he remembered. "Message delivered, Control. The candy goes rancid in twenty-seven minutes do-you-copy?"

Faint but clear: "We copy, Q. Can you get out? If not, — can we help?"

Quantrill knew what kind of help they had in mind. How touching! "Twisted my knee. Stairwell is clear but getting up it will be a bastard. Can you send me an arm to lean on?"

Pause. A life depended on the answer. Not Quantrill's.

"We'll ask for a volunteer. All regulars are now out of the structure. Keep talking. Well done, Q."

"I won't faint on you." He climbed one level, paused to listen and to test the knee; he really had wrenched the bloody thing.

"Keep talking, Q."

"All I can think of is that old Chinese proverb: yuck foo," he said with relish. Somewhere above him, heavy concrete shifted. "Okay, okay, just kidding," he said to the cubic meters of concrete.

When he heard quick footfalls above, he reported them. It was Minnetta Adams. It would be.

"Get on," she said, all business, patting her shoulder. He realized she intended to bodily carry him all the way up.

"Just give me a shoulder," he responded, and proved that he could walk.

At the first basement landing he lurched as though in pain, staggered, fell and rolled. His chemlamp, still clipped at his wrist, shed a glow over the dusty forklift and, "Hey, Adams, is this a deader?"

She found the youngster as Quantrill had intended, but her joy was brief. "Maybe I can come back for him."

"In a pig's — ah, look, let's see if I can hobble ""alone, Adams. You grab the casualty." She was still arguing when he started up the last flight, one leg held stiff.

Minnetta Adams was still arguing, carrying one casualty and steadying another, when the three of them emerged from the wreckage of the trade center into open Indiana space, to a delighted roar from eighteen S & R regulars and twice that many holo newspeople.

And when the lower levels of the building disintegrated some twenty minutes later, holo pundits opined that the source had been a pocket of natural gas. By then, the commercial networks were in the process of lionizing Adams, announcing that she'd found the unconscious boy.

By then, too, Adams herself believed it. And by then Quantrill was at nearby St. Vincent's Hospital, hearing from medics that his knee cartilage wasn't seriously torn.

FBN holovision carried the story that night as Quantrill watched. Sixteen-year-old Geoff Townley was in satisfactory condition after his dramatic last-minute rescue from entombment just one level below ground floor in the trade center. Rescuer Minnetta Adams had also brought up an injured colleague — unnamed — minutes before a gas explosion completed the building's collapse.

The Townley boy, on summer hire from Nauvoo, Illinois, evidently recalled nothing of his day-long ordeal.

Quantrill winked at the holo set. If the kid was from Nauvoo he was probably LDS, and it was almost a felony to say ‘rebel' and 'LDS' in the same sentence. The Townley kid was home free, whatever his political leanings, and no one but Quantrill — not even Adams herself — was the wiser. It was incredible, he thought, how much trouble you had to take, merely to do what the taxpayers thought they were paying you for. A damned shame that he'd never be able to share the joke with Sanger.

CHAPTER 15

The broad-shouldered man steadied his monocular in a cedar crotch and from his cover, studied the little homestead for long minutes. Finally he turned toward the soft footfalls approaching behind him. "If you can't keep those horses quiet,

Espinel, move 'em further back into the cedar brakes."

Espinel started to complain; thought better of it. Judging from the squint lines at the corner of his leader's eyes, this was no time for debate. "They smell water, Lufo," Espinel shrugged, and turned back. Lufo Albeniz might be the toughest jefe in Wild Country but his big scarred, slim-hipped body only looked like that of a Mexican cowpoke. Lufo was TexMex, but city-bred and no vaquero. He'd been cursing those good horses all the way up from Ciudad Acuna.

Lufo ran a hand inside his mottled threadbare shirt, scratched his swarthy hide, spat cottony fluff. He wanted water as much as those scruffy horses did, but you didn't just ride up to some squatter's soddy in these parts without reconnoitering first. Lufo saw a flash of yellow hair and trained the monocular near the soddy again. After a moment he grinned to himself and, almost without sound, whistled his appreciation between his teeth. She was young and blonde, and he guessed that her husband would be inside.

Lufo flicked his comm unit on, speaking softly. "Espinel; Thompson; there's a cute little rubia moving out to hoe the far end of the garden. If I can get near the soddy on foot, I'll be between her and whoever else is inside. Tie up those goddam horses; bring your carbines and cover me."

Tinnily in his speaker, from Thompson: "I'm no good with a weapon, Lufo, you know that."

"But those folks don't know it, and you can pull a trigger for effect. We're not after trouble, Thompson, but we must make a show of readiness for it. Do you want a roof over your head so you can work, or don't you?"

"Got it," from the speaker.

Lufo stuck the monocular in his pocket, made sure his sidearm was hidden, and began a careful approach. He limped for effect, in case someone was watching from the half-submerged cabin with the log walls and sod roof. His pauses might have been frequent rests. But they weren't; he moved only when the woman turned away to chop with the hoe. The place wasn't much, but they had a wind-powered generator and a gravity-feed water tank. From the look of it, the place didn't support more than a small family. Perhaps there'd be only one man to watch for as long as Thompson needed the place. And if the man was in sympathy with the Indys, Lufo wouldn't need to use threats. In Wild Country, you never knew…

The high shrill tone stopped him in midstride, the woman turning, hurrying between rows of vegetables with the springing step of a girl. But Lufo was already near the doorway, calling out. "Hello the soddy!

Can you spare a liter of water?" He saw the thin big-eyed child inside through the multi-paned window, did not realize such small lungs could generate such a piercing blast until she whistled again, thumb and forefinger curled at her lips.

He laughed then, raised his hands in mock surrender, put them back on his hips. The sidearm was only a flicker away from use as he awaited the man of the house.

No man emerged — but that proved nothing. The yellow-haired young woman approached quickly.

"Welcome," said the shapely gardener, eyes wary, carrying her hoe in a way that was not quite a threat.

She had a low husky voice but, Lufo realized, she couldn't be over eighteen. Strong-limbed, sun-bronzed with startling blue eyes, she reminded him that he hadn't had a woman in too long, not for nearly a week…

"Wondered if I could buy some water," he said, fishing with two fingers into his jeans.

She completed her half of the ritual by pushing with one hand, palm down. "No, but you can have some.

Childe, fetch our visitor the pitcher," she said past him, then walked around him. He allowed it; even if anyone had a bead on Lufo, he'd be crazy to take chances with two vulnerable females so near.

Lufo followed the blonde's gesture, ducked into the soddy, let his eyes adjust to cool shadows. His nostrils tasted earth, smoke, cornmeal, goat cheese; the odors of a clean soddy. He smiled at the tiny girl as he took the plastic pitcher from her; paused before drinking. "Got a broke-down pony out in the brush. You suppose I could talk with your man?"

"I thought you were thirsty," said the girl-woman.

He nodded, took a mouthful, rinsed and spat it out the door onto hard-packed earth. Then he drank, feeling danger somewhere near. But perhaps it was only the low roof that seemed to threaten his head.

"I can look at your horse," she said when he handed the pitcher back.

"Well, — I'd like to talk to your man first," he said carefully. "I'm not alone, but I didn't wan't to worry you folks. The others are out in the cedars."

"I know," she said, smiling for the first time, showing strong small even teeth and a confidence that was downright unsettling. "You three have been out there for an hour with a half-dozen thirsty ponies.

Anyway, consider me the man of the house."

"You weren't worried — without a man here?"

This time she made a distinct effort to hide a smile. "If I need help, it's a lot nearer than you think, buckaroo." She used the anglo pronunciation instead of 'vaquero'; it was a subtle shading of language that said she was not intimidated by this lean athletic macho.

"Thought it might be that way," he said, utterly failing to understand her. "But I do need to talk with whoever makes the decisions here."

"Talk away," she said. "But if you're running drugs, just keep running."

Negative headshake. "You don't mind any other kind of little independent operation then," he hazarded.

She reached out to tousle the hair of the small silent girl before saying, "We're pretty independent here ourselves. My name's Sandy Grange and this is my sister, Childe. She doesn't talk."

Now his answering smile was more relaxed. With the faintest stress on the word 'independent', she aligned herself with the Indy party. At the least, it meant a somewhat liberal interpretation of the law. At most, it meant you leaned toward the rebels — or were one of them yourself.

Lufo walked to the door, spoke into his comm unit: "Bring the horses in, Espinel, it's clear. I have some negotiating to do with a lady."

"First five-cylinder-word I've heard for months," said Sandy.

"Sorry."

"For what? Music to my soul," she said, then turned quickly to Childe and whispered something, patting the little backside as it whisked out the door. She stepped to the doorway and called, "And don't you dare let him come nosing around up here; I know how you love to show off!" Turning to her guest again, pleasantly: "Don't ask. I don't want trouble any more than you do. Now then: what do I call you, and what's your problem?"

You didn't ask for real names in Wild Country unless you courted violence. The title of a very funny new Southwest ballad was "What Was Your Name In Streamlined America?". It acknowledged that many a saddle tramp was a fugitive from Fed justice.

"Lufo Albeniz," he said, shaking her small work-hardened hand. "We're packing some things back to Ciudad Acuna — they strayed, you might say. Very delicate stuff but as you put it, don't ask. In fact, it's so delicate we need to repack it. What if I offered you two hundred pesos gold to go into Rocksprings for a day?"

She pursed delectable lips in a silent whistle, her brows arched. Then she reached under the silky blonde mane and scratched behind her ear in a gesture so artless, in a way so unfeminine, that he could have hugged her in sexless camaraderie. "I didn't realize I could be so easily tempted," she said.

She waved him to a homemade cane-bottomed couch, trundled her Lectroped to one side, and plumped herself cross-legged on the floor, fetchingly limber for a girl so nicely rounded. "This isn't the first time someone's borrowed my place for a day or two," she explained, "but the last time I came back to find the soddy just ruined. Somebody had spilled a lot of blood and mezcal in here, shot my mirror all to flinders, even disamorced my generator."

"Dis-what?"

She grinned. "Remember the Rosicrucians? A M

R C? The light and power of the universe, and all that. Well, those ladrones took away my light and power. Disamorced me for a month. That's worth more than two hundred to me."

Lufo nodded uncertainly; this anglo hotsy had more kinds of language than a polyglot parrot. "We intend to work, not play — but you don't know that. Okay, I give you four hundred, just about all have, and you come back in a few days and give half of it back. Fair enough?"

A slow smile: "Four hundred pesos? What if I don't come back?"

He met it with one of his own, feral, canny: "That garden's too well-tended, hija. You'll come back."

"You're right, I — uh-oh," she said, starting to rise. Lufo beat her to the doorway; he'd heard the commotion as soon as she.

Something had made the horses-skittish as they approached the soddy, for the wiry latino, Espinel, had all he could do to keep his mount and the two he led under control. Behind him were three pack-horses in a string, carrying polymer-wrapped bundles much too long for any pack animal. Thompson, a medium-sized anglo afoot, hung onto his leadrope with foolhardy courage as the pack-horses milled and bucked around him, their ears laid back, nostrils distended, eyes rolling in fear.

Lufo sprinted around Espinel's remuda of three and hurled himself into the melee heedless of flying hooves and dirt clods, snatching at leadropes, making things worse by rushing headlong at the already panicky animals. Abruptly, one horse went down in a tangle of lashings, its almost weightless bundles rolling free. Lufo took a deathgrip on the second animal, the third growing calm after Thompson wiped his bandanna across its nose. Lufo saw that Espinel was leading his animals away from the soddy, found himself jerked off his feet, was thrown bodily under Thompson's horse and rolled stunned in the dust.

The pack-horse sunfished once, its bundles slipping, and set off for distant places. "There goes the rectenna," screamed Thompson. "For God's sake, Espinel!"

The latino's head jerked to and fro like a puppet's as he surveyed a situation gone to garbage and getting worse, and his restive mount helped his decision. Espinel vaulted from his saddle in one fluid instant, unslinging the wire-stocked carbine from his shoulder; staggered upright, spent two seconds aiming, and fired a brief burst at the fleeing animal. The pack-horse jerked, continued at a canter, then faltered and fell.

Sandy was running toward the groggy Lufo but Thompson waved her forward to Espinel's horse. "Grab the reins, lady, and stand fast!" Sandy did as she was told, reflecting that these men had priorities they valued more than their skins.

Espinel remounted then, and with Thompson's help managed to get the five horses tethered at the nearest cedar. Thompson wiped the nose of each animal, muttering. Sandy helped Lufo to stand and gasped as she saw the bare patch of skin on one side of his head.

"You're lucky he didn't kick your head off," she said with more tenderness than anger, and started to inspect the wound.

But Lufo shook his head and drew away. "That's an old scar, hija," he said, almost chuckling, "and I'm kinda sensitive about it. Here's where he got me," he finished, pulling up his shirt.

The hoofprint was an angry blue crescent at the side of his belly. The lowest rib was cracked but not floating free, and Lufo insisted on walking alone to his comrades. Sandy studied them, then the horses nervously testing the breeze, and walked back to refill her pitcher.

The three men paused outside the soddy to lay their bundles down before knocking. "You've rented it,"

Sandy called, "so don't stand on ceremony."

It appeared, as she ministered to them, that the rental terms would have to change. As Thompson put it,

"We have no choice now, Lufo. We'll have to launch from here if I can repair the damage. It could take a week."

It was Lufo's decision to offer the four hundred in gold to Sandy in exchange for meals and her silence.

"We'll sleep out with the stock, hija, but there's something we have to keep inside, and it's big. We can't take chances on anybody seeing it. If you have visitors you'll have to keep 'em out of here."

She looked at Thompson, whose quick precise speech tagged him as a nor'easter. "Sorry, but that's the way it is," he said. Espinel only shrugged as if willing to accept whatever the others decided.

Sandy had options none of them could know; and had she chosen, she could have arranged their departure in one Godawful hurry. But Sandy did not feel threatened; she would accept the situation.

"You'd best hobble your mounts and take them down in the draw yonder," she said. "Less breeze down there, and some forage."

"Something in the air, es cierto," Espinel agreed. "No bear or cougar in these parts, senorita?"

They had moved on in the interests of health but Sandy only said, "No. By the way, Mr. Thompson, what's on that bandanna of yours? It certainly worked miracles in calming your ponies."

"Mentholated jelly," he said. "A horse can't smell anything past it. Espinel taught me that."

"Kerosene works okay, but not so good," Espinel said shyly. "Lufo, can you ride with that rib stove in?"

"He won't have to for a week," said Thompson, "but he may have to do some digging."

Lufo: "What for? The launcher?"

"No, to bury that damn' pony. It'll draw buzzards."

"I had no choice," said Espinel.

"You did right," Lufo said quickly.

"Don't worry about the pony," Sandy put in. "I can butcher it out, and what I don't smoke or tan will go into my compost heap."

"I hadn't thought about that. You've got your own cottage industry here, don't you," Thompson said admiringly.

"Yes — but keep wiping your ponies' noses," Sandy warned. "As long as they're here they'll be spooky."

"You must have one hell of a compost heap," Thompson joked.

"It has an air about it," Sandy admitted. "And those big bundles of yours have an air, too — of mystery.

What is it, some kind of secret weapon?"

Silence. Then, "She'll see it anyhow," Thompson mused.

"And she'll be an accomplice, which should keep her quiet," Lufo said, grunting in pain as he stood up.

"Let's go get the stuff. We can lay it out inside the soddy while Espinel stakes the horses out."

"You've really piqued my curiosity," Sandy murmured, watching as the men carried the bundles in.

"Young and the Feds wouldn't put it quite that way," said Thompson, peeling back the polymer from one bundle. "They know Mexico can't afford holo satellites, and they didn't expect anybody to build an antenna thirty-five klicks high along the border. This one strayed too far into Wild Country and somebody nailed it with a laser — but it landed a few klicks North of here. We hoped to get it back across the Rio Grande for repairs but now I'm afraid I'll have to fly it back." He spread his hands above the naked bundle as if it were self-explanatory.

Sandy saw a protective framework of cot ton wood, bound carefully with cord. Inside was an intricate gossamer structure covered with an almost invisible film and supported within the framework by a jury-rig of rubber bands as protection against shock or abrasion. Nevertheless, the elegant structure was ripped and buckled in places. Certain that she had misunderstood something, Sandy said, "You're telling me this is part of a tower that's thirty-five kilometers high?"

"Does the same job — and relays holo programs that the Feds manage to keep off their captive networks in Streamlined America," Thompson nodded. "That includes anything Governor Jim Street and the Indys have to say about little matters like industrial cartels, strike-breaking goon squads, and a team of what seem to be government assassins. What the governor has here," he tapped the gossamer structure lightly,

"is a medium that's out of control. Blanton Young's control," he amended, beaming. "It's called a Boucher relay."

Sandy smiled while she wrinkled her forehead in amused disbelief. "But — but it looks like a huge model airplane!"

Thompson's hand formed an 'OK' in the air. "Dead center," he said.

CHAPTER 16

The Boucher relay was no model, but clearly reflected its modeler's origins. Kukon and MacCready, both pioneers, had both drawn on model techniques to develop aircraft that were ultralight for their times.

It had been a third modeler, Boucher, who proved that balsa and plastic film could be mated to solar cells for a permanent media relay in the sky.

Essentially the Boucher relay was an incredibly lightweight aircraft driven by an electric motor, its wing panels glistening with the fire-opal glitter of featherweight photovoltaic cells. Catapulted like a sailplane, a Boucher craft used both multichannel radio control and sun-sensors to provide its orientation. The earliest of these superb devices had boasted wingspans of nearly ten meters with overall weights under ten kilos, thanks to handforming techniques.

For two generations, said Stan Thompson as he worked, Americans had been urged to buy prefab toys that gradually deprived fledging engineers of construction techniques, stress-analytical knowledge, and optimum performance — for no prefabricated gadget could compete against the best hand-crafted models. A 'Wakefield' model, hurtling almost vertically upward with a propeller driven by only forty grams of rubber band, was a culmination of science and art; and looked it. Soviet-influenced countries seemed to understand the research value of the small Wakefield models, for their craft often won Worldwide competition events and enriched their understanding of high-efficiency aircraft while Americans watched and ignored the implications.

By the end of the Twentieth cent, only a few enthusiasts built these gossamer brutes; but those few tended to be stress analysts, architects, aerodynamicists. Wakefield techniques tended to interest those who could combine the mind of a theorist and the hands of a watchmaker. Stan Thompson qualified on both counts.

Sandy Grange watched Thompson uncrate the ultralight craft with dwindling disbelief and growing appreciation as he spoke. "What Boucher proved was that you could build an aircraft that would fly for years," Thompson said, pausing to cluck over a cracked spar. "Once you get the little bugger up above the weather, fifteen klicks or so, there's not much to impede sunlight."

"Except nightfall," Sandy murmured.

"That's where Boucher's vision came in. He designed 'em to climb so high that, by nightfall, they're over thirty klicks high. They go like hell in that thin air but so what? They're radio-controlled and they keep circling — more or less geostationary over some chosen spot.

"With such ridiculous wing-loading, the sink-rate is lower than a lizard's navel, and the aircraft carries storage cells to keep the propeller going at night. By dawn, it's still fifteen klicks up and sunlight recharges the accumulators — which are over there in the fuselage," he said, nodding to the package Lufo was unwrapping. "So up it goes again until nightfall."

"I don't see any propeller in front," she said.

"It's a pusher. The first Boucher relays were conventional, but this rig is a 'Daytripper'—designed around the rectenna for a holo system. The fuselage must be almost a meter wide to hold that gear, so somebody thought of making a lifting-body fuselage. Actually it's a triple-delta shape with air-control vanes to keep airflow where you need it for maximum lift. The Day tripper has a nine-meter span, with a butterfly tail up front for still more lift, and wings at the rear. The technical term is 'canard'," he finishd.

Pregnant silence from Sandy before, "That means 'hoax' in French, doesn't it?"

He blinked. "Does it?"

Her gaze was a challenge. "Are you pulling my leg, Mr. Thompson? Look at it from my view: I'm being offered four hundred pesos so you can use my soddy to repair an airplane that flies forever.

But you brought it here on pack-horses! And if that doesn't stick in my craw, you ask me to swallow the idea that it beams forbidden media into Wild Country."

Stan Thompson pulled out ancient bifocals, chortling as he adjusted them. "Actually, they're scheduled to come down in Mexico once a year for maintenance — but yes, that's about it. We knew this one had gone off-course and landed in this area, and for our purposes, for a low profile, a horse is still the best way to travel. I figured I could trouble-shoot the Daytripper and get it launched again, but I found it had been damaged too much. First by a beam of some sort that melted part of the film, and then in landing. Took us days to find it.

"I decided it'd be easier to dismantle it and take it back to Mexico for repairs, but I was wrong; it won't take rough handling.

"Now I either repair it and launch it from here — primitive as our accommodations are for it — or we destroy a hundred thousand pesos' worth of Boucher relay and go back empty-handed."

"Well, I'll believe it when I see it," Sandy replied.

Lufo had been listening. Now he pointed to Sandy's old holovision set. "Does your holo work?"

"Usually. For the past week I haven't been able to get XEPN, the Piedras Negras chan—." She turned back, mouth open slightly, to gaze at the disassembled craft. "Well I be damn," she whispered.

"Nine days, to be exact," Thompson muttered. "By the time I get it back on station, a lot of nice folks in Wild Country will have been without Indy media for two weeks."

"I thought you were working for the Mexicans."

"I am — because Governor Street asked me to.

How else can he get media coverage into Streamlined America?"

Sandy mulled that over for long minutes. The credentials of James Street were well-known: Major General, USA, (ret.); Governor of Texas; Undersecretary of State; then unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency on the Independent ticket. In Texas he was still ‘the governor', a man who could sit a horse or kiss a baby with the best of them. But Street's anti-Federalist rhetoric had hardened after the war; Blanton Young labeled his trenchant truths as sedition, and saw that the label became official. Old Jim Street found himself branded a rebel fugitive from justice, and knew what brand of justice he could expect. Thus the official label became the fact: James Street was the guidonbearer for rebel forces in Wild Country.

"Most of the news on the governor confuses me," Sandy said finally. "I heard on FBN that he's a dying man."

"Sure you did. He isn't," Lufo assured her. "Who d'you think plans strategy for the unions?"

"I hadn't thought about it. But I should think the governor's too old to be sneaking around the country like that."

"Mostly they come to him. And that's about all I want to say about it," Lufo ended gruffly.

Stan Thompson moved sadly between the separated pieces of the Boucher relay, sighing as though the device were an injured child. "It'll be a miracle if this ol' Daytripper makes another trip. Lufo, will you get my repair kit? May as well start now."

But Espinel had anticipated him, carrying the kit over his shoulder as he entered the soddy. Thompson took it with a nod, then turned back to stare at the latino. "Trouble?" Lufo had seen the look too; stepped to the doorway, his sidearm ready.

"I don' know," Espinel replied. "But I took a ride aroun' the perimeter. Miz Sandy, you got any pigs here?"

She swallowed hard, then spread her hands. "Where would I keep them?"

"I guess you wouldn'. But I see the biggest hog tracks I ever see in my life out there," Espinel said. "Un monstruo, prints big as my hand."

Lufo crossed himself. "I thought that damn' thing was just a Wild Country legend. No wonder the ponies were spooked!"

Thompson fitted a scalpel-like blade into a handle; began to slice film from a shattered wing spar. "What the devil are you talking about, Lufo?"

"The devil is right. Used to be a story about a Russian boar that escaped from a Texas Aggie research station near Sonora, North of here. Big as a pony, mean as a grizzly; sooner eat a man than look at him and has bowie knife tusks to do it with. Sandy Grange, where the hell are you going?"

She paused at the door to reply: "I, uh, have to find Childe. No, you stay there. I'll be all right."

"If you say so," Lufo said, doubting it, replacing the pistol with reluctance. He turned back to Espinel.

"She's survived this long with that monster out there in the brush. Espinel, you sure about these tracks?"

Espinel essayed a wan smile, put his thumbs and middle fingers together to form an oval the size of a human hand.

"Mierda! So Ba'al is loose out here after all," said Lufo.

Thompson: "Who?"

"That's what they named him after he took a lot of slugs and killed some people. The false god; the devil; Ba'al. I hope that cute little rubia knows what she's doing out there. And we better mount a sentry at night; he might have a taste for horseflesh."

CHAPTER 17

Sandy's journal, 3 Jun'

CHAPTER 18

Ten minutes after the plush executive hoverbus whirred from its lair under the IEE tower, Eve Simpson saw the southernmost tip of the Great Salt Lake pass on her right. That meant the bus was making better time since she'd urged Mills to wangle a police-freq. trip plotter. Once Eve tasted the lucullan comfort of the big fandriven bus, she refused to visit the desert lab in anything else. Besides, it needed no driver, skating smoothly above the potholed freeway with its onboard plotter in command.

With her police module, of course, other traffic was shuttled aside for Eve's passage, countermanding whatever other ideas the drivers might have. That way Eve could whirl along at. absolute top speed and the hell with optimum energy trip plots.

The hoverbus drew on narrowcast power transmitters along the freeway until Eve passed Nephi. After that it would automatically receive LOS — line-of-sight — recharges from the transmitters that began to dot high points in the heartland of Zionized, Streamlined America. Those LOS recharges were frequent, for Eve's demands on everything she used were rarely less than the maximum. She had punched in the Nephi-Salina-Green River route, for example, instead of the more direct Provo-Price-Green River route because she did not enjoy the faint side-loads on her great bulk when the bus took a twisty course.

Her chosen route was longer and took more power. So what? Eve had power to burn. If Marengo — poor haunted, hairy, heavy-hung Marengo — was as good as his word, she'd have still more power soon. And he'd damned well better come through or she'd cut his dose of dreamstuff. She liked to think Marengo Chabrier enjoyed her sexuality as much as he enjoyed taking a nice long hit; and therefore that was what she did think.

At Salina she adjusted the lounge pneumatics, lit a filtertip joint, selected a porn cassette from her shoulder bag and lay back, her own vastness diminished by the room-sized insulated compartment. The fact that viewing such salacious stuff was now punishable, and ownership of it a felony, only heightened its charm for Eve. Since that stupid fiasco in Santa Fe she'd been horny as a rhino and not much easier to please. Her demand for sexual acceptance to counter that event was not entirely subliminal; with Chabrier, she knew, she could slake her thirsts. If it hadn't been so much trouble, she'd have plotted some revenge on that emerald-eyed young hit-man, Quantrill. But there was plenty of time. Sooner or later he would wander across her right-of-way, an ant on her freeway, and then…

The little holodrama unfolded before her, the voluptuous cowgirl, Patty, flirting with the wrangler but clearly more interested in the erection of her pony. Presently the heroine — for in a sense she had to be one — found a way to rig a sling under her little stallion.

Eve began to enjoy herself — more so when she perceived the vibration that rose under her bass-fiddle buttocks when she sat in the right position. She toyed with the pneumatics. The vibration toyed with Eve.

Patty toyed with her trusty, lusty steed; and as the hoverbus neared the highway summit it occurred to Eve that a lot of summits were approaching simultaneously.

Eve reached down with tender sausage fingers; womanipulated herself, laughing at the holo and at the world. She flicked off the audio and, in a fit of whimsy, began to sing an ancient ballad, 'Always,' in her clear sweet soprano. In this context of purest narcissism, every phrase seemed funnier than the last and, once she'd sung "… need a helping hand…" Eve rolled in her couch gasping with laughter and orgasmic release.

She flicked the pornodrama off then, suspecting fakery in the action. She wasn't sure it was possible to make it with a horse. Even if it was, she'd leave this little Cow Patty electronically stranded in mid-hump.

It was a concept as silly, as willful, as tacky as the holoporn itself. Eve gloried in that because she could afford to do it when most citizens did not dare even watch such things. Pleasure without consequences: the goal and the province of power.

Eve had reached a pillowy mellow before the bus passed a road sign: NO SERVICES NEXT 170 KM., and whipped down the grass-obscured surface of an ancient ranching road near Green River, Utah. Five klicks South of that turnoff, a decrepit-looking gate of steel pipe accepted a signal from the trip plotter and swung open until the bus whooshed by flinging its broad flat wake of dust and weed seed.

It never occurred to Eve that the bus might someday have a breakdown, leaving her stranded. Her position in such matters was that no machine would dare risk such wrath as hers.

Forty klicks further, beyond the warning signs, Eve spied the P-beam obelisks that defined and protected IEE's San Rafael desert lab. The bus did not pause, or need to. Finally she saw the two-story chain-link fence and the earthen berm inside. The lab, dug into the desert floor, was perfectly placed, roughly midway between three geographic features. They were called Goblin Valley, Dirty Devil River, and Labyrinth Canyon. The names were old and apt. As Boren Mills had once drily remarked, it was no tourist trap.

The last automatic gate swung aside and then Eve's hoverbus settled on concrete, near the elevator platform atop the berm. Chabrier waited for her, alone on an electric cart, wearing his bright tragic smile that she knew so well.

A tongue of ramp slid from the side of the bus and Chabrier, familiar with Eve's desires, backed the cart up onto the deep pile carpet. Only then did he step down, making his slight continental bow. "You are early, madame," he murmured.

Eve warmed to the attentions of Marengo Chabrier. His deepset gray eyes were hooded by eyebrows so thick and black that they met in a ledge above the strong nose. His lashes were luxuriant, his cheekbones Scythian, his mouth sensuous and as small as Eve's own. The open collar of his beige IEE coverall revealed what seemed to be a tee-shirt of black fleece, but was body hair. The stocky Chabrier was marvelously endowed with hair except, as Eve knew, the top of his head and two bare islands flanking his backbone. Eve envied Cow Patty for her pony a bit less; she herself had access to a gentle ape with two doctorates and a tongue that could clean a mayonnaise jar.

"I couldn't wait to test your magic, curly," she vamped, letting him help her to her feet. "Let me see it."

The long lashes flickered over his sad sheep eyes. "Here?"

She nodded, chins aquiver, then emitted a volley of giggles as he reached for his coverall closure. "Not that, you fool," she said, staying his hand, rubbing the mat of curls over his sternum. "That I can see in your rooms — and I intend to." The pun-took on a hint of rasp: "Isn't the amulet ready?"

"Ah." His open palm indicated the cart seat. "That is in my rooms as well. M'sieur Mills has many devices to monitor and I should be sorry to be recorded aboveground with such a thing. You however are a law unto yourself, n'est ce pas?"

"C'est tout dire," she agreed, and vented a whoop as Chabrier sped his cart down the ramp. She clutched her bag in her lap. In it lay much of her charm: the drugs for which Chabrier, as lab administrator, was responsible.

Inside via the elevator to the first level, then down ramps between backlit walls, fat tires squalling on clean linoleum, the air cool and tasting faintly of sidewalks after summer rain. Once during the trip — Eve knew he was taking this route as an informal patrol when they could have gone directly to the lowest level by elevator — a lank mongol hesitated in the passage to let them pass. On his middle-aged face was no trace of recognition that they were anything but machinery. He might have been a machine himself.

"Don't you ever get cabin fever in this dump?"

"We are all well — ah, le reclusion," he said, tardy to catch her idiom, nodding when he did. "We suffer, each in his way."

"But you all take the same prescription."

"In a general way." Quickly he added, "For me it is not so bad; I have you twice a month, ma petite." He nearly strangled on that diminutive term under the circumstances, but knew she liked to hear it.

At last Chabrier reached the utmost depth of the lab and passed through the chuffing armored doors.

Here was no receptionist, but a room with couches. Eve never got used to the jungle of potted greenery there, so many levels under the desert floor, fed with synthetic light and nutrients and even with subtle variations in the air-conditioning currents. Her arm laid on his, Eve swept into Chabrier's rooms to claim the chaise. "Compliments of Boren Mills," she smirked as always, handing him a package labeled PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM. It contained enough drugs to pacify Chabrier's minions for two weeks.

Chabrier tossed it aside as though it were not the most important single facet of his existence; offered her a drink. She accepted, noting the tiniest of tremors in his hands, choosing to think it was her humming sexuality and not something else that provoked it.

"So how goes the scale-up?" She was only making small talk. For Eve, the synthesizer was only an abstract notion, an iffy means to power. Her specialty, media, was power. She could not fathom the logic by which Mills had let his early media expertise run to seed while he chased this technological enigma — and by proxy! She had never managed much interest in synthesizers of any size until one of her spaced-out discussions with Chabrier, two months before.

The scale-up program, Chabrier admitted with the shrug of a much thinner man, was still in Phase Two.

Phase One, design analysis of the unit Mills had committed murder to obtain, had been complete for over a year. Phase Three, if it ever arrived, would be a big unit, one for which Mills would cheerfully kill millions. But Phase Two was that crucial interval between analysis and synthesis, without which Phase Three could not begin.

Some philosophers of science virtually ignored this transition phase because, bluntly, it eluded them. Mills revealed his partial understanding — and mistrust — of it by calling it 'interphase brainstorming'. Marengo Chabrier understood the creative process better; it was he who termed it the 'gestation' phase.

An organism recapitulates the development of its race, as a human fetus will reveal gill slits in its early growth. But the organism does more, when it mutates beyond. The change is made real, not merely potential, during gestation. A plan gestates; ideas gestate; earth-shaking social movements gestate — sometimes useful mutations, oftener not.

Marengo Chabrier understood that few mutations become dominant, that ideas are rarely more than the sums of their parts. He also understood that IEE's chief exec was demanding a useful, dominant mutation tailored to fit. More worrisome still, Chabrier understood that short-term success, measured in these terms, was damned unlikely. It was a remnant of intellectual honesty that made him use the term 'gestation', for it promised nothing beyond recapitulation.

Most worrisome of all, Chabrier knew that Mills was very unlikely to let a lab full of addicts flush various expensive shits through their systems forever.

One way or another, the synthesizer scale-up program would be terminated someday and, like as not, Mills would reveal it with a handful of permanent personnel terminations. Slow poisons in the drugs? That was why Chabrier had them chemically analyzed before he dispensed them to his lab staff. He would, in any case, dispense them — though his friendship with Sun and Ming would make that act painful. But Chabrier himself would then turn to his clean stash, and would either escape or plead for his life.

He knew he had no hope of crossing the San Rafael desert without help. That was why he hoped to infatuate this great sow, Eve Simpson. And if sexual bonds alone were tenuous, he might further ensure her help by making her party to a deception that would drive a wedge between the woman and Boren Mills. C'est le premier pas qui coute, he knew; that first step which required so much resolve. But Chabrier had taken that step two months before, and Eve had cavorted like a Disney hippo at the idea. It had been her own idea, in fact, to disguise the thing as an outsized amulet — for she owned a jewel large enough, unique enough, to account for its size and whatever security precautions she might arrange.

As Chabrier was bemoaning his most recent failures to scale up the Chinese synthesizer, Eve cut in. "Well then, how about our little scale down?" Her face was alight with mischief.

He paused, switching mental tracks. "It functions," he said.

"Omigod, does it? I mean — what won't it make? How much at a time? What do I feed it? Any batteries to change? Give, goddammit!"

His last shred of suspicion — that she was baiting him on behalf of Mills — evaporated with her outburst.

He winked, walked to his safe, spent his own good time opening it, and withdrew a folded kerchief. With a flourish, he shook something from its folds, dangled it from a chain of brushed stainless steel. Eve's mouth was a small 'o' as she tracked its pendulum swing.

"It looks naked," she said. "Can you put the Ember in the thingummy now?"

"The bezel? Yes, if you have it with you."

She ripped open her bag, tore its inner lining, and pulled out a tiny velour bag. The Ember of Venus slid into her palm; and now it was Chabrier's turn to gawk.

The automated Venus sampler craft had found no true life on Venus. Mineral and gas samples, scooped up for physical return to Earth orbit, had mostly confirmed earlier data. The surface temperature of the shrouded planet was, after all, nearly five hundred degrees Celsius.

But one mineral specimen, taken from an arroyo at the lip of Venus's Ishtar highlands, became wedged at one side of the container which was to maintain Venus-normal temperature during the long voyage back.

The specimen gradually cooled in space and was quickly discovered by the sampler recovery team. The exact mechanism by which a mineral specimen became the Ember of Venus was still argued in learned journals, but its existence was unarguable fact.

Almost a centimeter thick after slices had been taken from it, the Ember was an ovoid the breadth of a hen's egg. It was under great internal stress. Despite the most careful progress of the diamond saw, one chip had flown from the side of the jewel.

Otherwise it was perfect, its surface smooth as a soap bubble but with voluptuous prominences on its face. The Ember of Venus compared to an Aussie fire opal as the opal compared to a gallstone. It had been presented to Eve by the CEO of LockLever as inducement for certain favorable media reports in 1998, when her body was merely lush and not yet obese. Eve had performed those services while passing sensitive data on to LockLever's competitor, Mills — which assured her position at IEE.

Thus Eve's possession of the Ember was irregular, but not illegal. She had often thought of wearing it.

Now, to decoy attention from the device it covered, it would find employment at Eve's throat.

"Incroyable," Chabrier whispered. "May I?" He took the stone between thumb and middle finger, intending to check its fit into the bezel he had prepared, but paused again as if thunderstruck. The translucent flickering depth of the gem seemed bottomless; iridescent hues of every color intersected, shifted, moved as if impelled by some viscous liquid.

Chabrier shook off the urge to snarl, 'mine, mine,' chuckling at himself. He laid the Ember into the bezel of the device in his other hand. Then he smiled at the irony. For the Ember of Venus was only facade for something of far greater value, a device more significant than any jewel: a tiny version of the Chinese synthesizer.

"Come, we shall imprison your Ember," he said, and she came out of the couch as if scalded by it.

Together, for Eve would not let the jewel out of her sight, they moved to his littered desk. He cemented the Ember in place, then arranged the tiny padded metal fingers to clasp its edge while she looked on.

Wordlessly he lifted the chain, spread it with both hands, smiled into the eyes of Eve as he hung it around her neck.

"Let me imprison your ember," she drawled. She was smiling, breathing deeply; and without taking her gaze from his she began to open the beige coverall.

Presently, after she had consumed his first orgasm, she lifted the amulet and licked that, too, as if by wetting it she could bring out still more lustre. Murmuring: "Now that you've taken advantage of me, you dirty old monkey, tell me how this fucking thing works!"

Rubber-legged, Chabrier walked with her to the chaise and began to instruct her. Set into small bezels in an oval pattern around the Ember were fifteen opaque black diamonds, cabochon cut, surely the zenith of understatement since they functioned as studs for the tiny integral computer terminal.

At the top and bottom of the bezel were globes of brushed stainless, the size of a child's marble. A grid in the upper globe was the air intake; the synthesizer did not create mass, but converted it — in this case, from nitrogen. The lower globe was the yield chamber, and a hidden detent allowed it to split apart.

Isotope powered, the minuscule device had a yield measured in grams per hour.

Eve's amulet could not synthesize living tissue, of course, nor materials requiring great heat and pressure, e.g., diamonds. But using her access code to CenCom, Eve could request the chemical composition of many substances; punch the memory stud to place CenCom's response in the memory circuits; and then request a sample of that substance in the yield chamber. Chabrier had arbitrarily placed a one-gram maximum on a given yield as a safety precaution.

The readout display was hidden; Chabrier had put it inside the false back of the amulet, fearing that an overt display might reveal too much to any admirer of the Ember.

"So I memorize the functions of the diamond studs," she repeated, "and use the first thirteen for alphanumerics with the 'change function' stud." She saw his nod, then made a pouty-mouth: "But it won't make a kittycat?"

He laughed outright. "Mais non, it can only give you inanimate joys." He saw her puzzlement. "Gold dust, tetrahydrocannabinol…"

She turned it over, weighed it in her hand. Very quietly: "I don't think I'll use it for anything more than a toy."

"I should be very dismayed if you did. I hope you will not be tempted by the urge to create — substances that could endanger you." His expression was serious, the long lashes low on his cheeks. Her wilfullness was a calculated risk which he must take, for if she died he would have no confederates.

"You're sweet, Marengo," she said. "What say we create a gram of harmless THC."

"Please do — and always flush the yield chamber carefully," he warned. "You must not ask for poisonous or radioactive items. That would not be wise."

"I'll be wise," she promised. If she had a motto, it was 'promise them anything…'

CHAPTER 19

Seth Howell stalked back and forth on the podium, cracking his big knuckles as he surveyed the rover gathering. "You get the best food, the best training, the best pay you could ask for," he growled. "And I don't have to tell you that if those carrots don't work, Salter could always use the stick." Howell tapped himself behind the ear; let his hard glance ricochet among ‘the impassive rovers. Howell, of course, had no mastoid critic; for him, the finger-tap gesture came easily. "So let's understand each other: there will be no, repeat no, refusal of missions for any reason whatever. Some of you have been walking too near that line."

Dawna Clinton, easily the tallest of the half-dozen female rovers and the only black in the cadre, uncoiled from her seat. Watching her stance,

Quantrill thought the woman must sleep at attention. "With respect, Mr. Howell, I'd like to hear you comment on some ques — observations," she amended quickly. Nearby, little Max Pelletier shifted uneasily and looked away as if to find further distance from her. Pelletier and Clinton were an unlikely pair, but deadly little Max was one rover who tended to choose a buddy. At the moment, Quantrill realized, he must be wishing it wasn't Dawna Clinton.

"This isn't a press interview, Clinton, but go ahead," Howell snapped.

Voice clear, almost strident with stress: "Since this is a general ass-chew, I gather the rumors are true."

She watched something flicker across Howell's face; continued: "Some rover has been turned, and the Indys are going to run an expose on us. Unless we disappear a few folks as a warning."

"Two out of three ain't bad," Howell cracked. No one smiled. "No comment on the ‘turned rover'

hypothesis; did you expect one? I'll say this much: we know two leak sources, and we're letting them run loose for now." Howell noted the looks among the rovers, most of them some nonverbal variant of, 'could it be you?' "Sit down, Clinton. By now you've all received your mission files. Some of you will have a pair. No doubt some of you, in spite of orders, have been comparing notes and put two and two together.

"And got five. It isn't the Indy party we have to stop. It's the rebels who have infiltrated some religious sects, lodge organizations, and yes, some radicals among the Indys. The Independent party itself must always be viewed as the loyal opposition, a necessary part of a two-party system in Streamlined America." Howell's husky tenor had become almost singsong, repeating the public dicta of Blanton Young.

Kent Ethridge's voice was weary, but cutting: "I learned more poly sci from you, Howell, than from every prof in Iowa State. Are you telling us now, in spite of what you used to teach in T Section, that a gaggle of hits against a loose confederation of rebels is going to stop the expose? Not escalate the trouble?"

"I know you have your orders." Something in the set of the heavy shoulders spelled embarrassment to Quantrill, who could not recall ever seeing the big man register that particular emotion before. But Howell had his orders, too…

"And if it escalates," Ethridge went on, voice as dead, as inexorable, as the collapse of an ancient mausoleum, "won't a rover be a millstone around the government's neck? And what, I wonder, happens to us in that case?"

Hissing it: "You have your fuckin orders." Howell passed a hand over the top of his head, took a breath, tried another tack. "The rebs are no longer a loose confederation, Ethridge. They've bypassed the pure guerrilla stage and are organized well enough for us to pinpoint some nerve centers. That's as well-kept a secret as any you'll hear. You sure won't hear it on the media," he snorted.

"Except the outlaw media." Quantrill spoke against his own better judgment. It had occurred to him that Eve Simpson might be a rebel in IEE clothing.

"We know who they are, too," said Howell. "We can jam some transmissions, and the rest is chiefly around the borders where it doesn't upset people in the heartlands where the strength of Streamlined America lies." He caught himself, aware that he was parroting obvious propaganda. "But whatever happens, don't worry that you'd be thrown away. I've seen contingency plans and, believe me, you'd be needed. Believe me," he said again, as though repetition generated its own truth.

Clinton again: "So, in a way, we're cleansing the Indy party of a few infiltrators and using the, ah, soap to warn the Indys against exposing S & R."

"Couldn't put it better myself," Howell nodded. "By now you've realized that things're heating up before the senatorial elections. If your missions don't send the rebels back into their holes, there could be open violence this fall. And wouldn't Canada and Mexico just love that?"

Quantrill sat preoccupied as Howell dismissed them, wondering at the surge of patriotism he had felt. No, Mexico and Canada weren't the enemy. They'd already bitten off as much of Streamlined America as they could chew — and Canada seemed genuinely ready to return border territories as soon as Streamlined America was capable of meeting their needs.

But there might be thirty million Americans who would love to see the Young administration overturned.

You couldn't disappear them all. Were they the enemy?

Then the young rover glanced around; caught the hopelessness mirrored in the face of Marbrye Sanger; and again he felt the adrenal surge coursing down his spine. It heralded a sense of purpose he had thought lost forever, and identified the enemy of everything Ted Quantrill represented.

And from that moment on, Ted Quantrill was the enemy.

CHAPTER 20

"You don't like my toy," said Eve with a pretend pout.

"It's awesome," Mills conceded. "It is absolutely unique, it is beyond price, and it scares the hell out of me!" He slammed a fist against his console. "It also flies in the face of everything IEE stands for!"

"Like entertainment? Like control of subjects?" Eve studied a jeweled fingernail with elaborate calm.

Mills ticked off his objections as if examining his own manicure. "Wanton display of wealth. A working model of the most mind-boggling economic weapon the world has ever known. It employs chemical inducements, which are a tactical error. And unless I'm missing something, Chabrier made the goddam thing isotope-powered!

"That's just for starters, Eve! I can't let you keep that thing," he said, his hand shaking as he held it out.

"Can you imagine what would happen if the wrong hands got control of your bauble?"

Her open-handed slap metronomed his arm, left his hand numb and his wrist aching. The rosebud lips tucked to reveal small sharp incisors: "Can you imagine what will happen if the wrong hand reaches for it?" Her blazing countenance, thought Mills, was not entirely sane.

Mills stood up, massaging his wrist, fighting for self-control. She had warned him long ago that her death or disappearance would cause certain letters to be opened, so his first impulse was really out of the question. (All aside from the fact that Eve could lift bigger men than Mills off the ground. He had videotapes of her with Chabrier, labeled 'The Argument For Celibacy'.) Perhaps he could manage to destroy the amulet. It was worth trying. Besides, he still needed her expertise in media research.

He took several long breaths before trusting his voice to be steady. "We'll consider the topic closed. I believe you dropped in for a chat on something more important," he prompted, as if the tiny synthesizer no longer interested him.

"Oh, yeah; those media relays," she said, shuddering the luminous glow of the amulet down her bodice. "I assume they're stratosphere balloons since you didn't seem to think I had the need to know. But you told me the Air Force had laser-equipped delta dirigibles cruising around Bakers-field and Gila Bend looking for targets."

"And other places. We think the translator relays are stealth-equipped Boucher relays, using Israeli electronics to displace the signal so we can't get a fix on the real antenna. We'll zap one sooner or later."

"You already have. Somebody did anyway." She noted his change of expression with glee; the sonofabitch didn't know everything! "At least, there's been a total lack of outlaw holo across a big piece of the Southwest for a week. Maybe there's a delta cruising around near the Big Bend, too."

"There is. They get momentary blips sometimes, and laser-grid whatever's there."

"Well, Ciudad Acuna's multichannel media station seems to be hors de combat. Just thought you'd like to know," she added, and energized her motorized couch as if to leave.

"You're even starting to sound like Chabrier," Mills gibed. "But thanks for the data. I wonder why the Air Force didn't know?"

"I expect they do. Maybe," she returned sweetly, "they didn't think you had the need to know."

Mills accepted this riposte with the sad small grin of one bested in a fair game, knowing it would put her at ease, and saw her out. Moments later he was commanding his console, checking the readiness of the facilities in the desert lab.

If Marengo Chabrier could create one amulet-sized synthesizer, he could create a million of them. The sooner Mills had a factory full of standard 'breadbox' size, the sooner he could have the Frenchman disappeared. It meant Mills would have to dump a lot of personal stock to finance the operation, but that was what assets were for.

Later Mills would call up the Lion of Zion for a chat to discuss the success of the delta sorties Mills himself had suggested. If they'd knocked down one of the damned holo relays, maybe they could zap others. But would they stay zapped?

CHAPTER 21

Sandy's journal, 9 Jun'

CHAPTER 22

At 8:03, the shift whistle finally blew. A fading sun cast the shadow of the construction crane across the City of the Saints. Soon it would be dark.

Dandridge Laird stood with his legs apart and mopped his brow with one khaki sleeve, proudly gazing down on his departing work crew from his perch atop the unfinished building. It had been only a few years since the airburst nuke that had blossomed far out North Temple Street, obliterating the airport, the monorail interchange, and many buildings almost to the Salt Palace and the State Capitol.

Already, though, Salt Lake City had repaired much of herself through prayer and twelve-hour shifts by a beehive of sturdy Mormon citizens. Already, Laird could smile down on the rebuilt state fairgrounds, noting the subtle LDS gable motif that graced strictly secular buildings just as the old ones had. And already, Dandridge Laird had marked himself for death by insisting on workmen's compensation for his laborers.

Laird limped to the nearest crane pillar, his scuffing gait masking softer footfalls in the elevator control room behind him. He did not catch the movement of the khaki-clad 'workman' in the un-glazed window; would not have recognized the man in any case. Laird was testing his gimpy forty-two-year-old leg, wondering if the Church would be able to help his family much when he could no longer earn a living as construction supervisor.

Laird's own LDS 'stake', his local church organization, had so many helpless mouths to feed already!

And as for the gentile workers, — Laird shook his head in honest commiseration. The proper solution was industry-funded insurance. The stumbling block was the blind refusal of management.

Or maybe the consortium that owned the construction company saw, and then looked away. None of the big conglomerates seemed likely to allow such reforms. Laird had gone to his congressman, to his elders, even to local reporters without achieving much. But somewhere along the line he'd been overheard by the people who'd come to him with help — and asking his help. Laird would have laughed to think of himself as a conspirator, yet he knew better than to talk about those meetings to anyone but trusted workers.

You didn't keep a strawboss job after they spotted you as a union organizer.

Nor could you expect to keep your life if you were the first Mormon convert to organized labor in Salt Lake City since postwar reconstruction began, a crucial nucleus of Indy reform in the very shadow of White House Deseret. Dandridge Laird did not know how carefully he was groomed by labor 'outlaws'; how high were their hopes for him. Certainly he did not know that a man hidden in the lengthening, softening shadows had been sent to shatter those hopes.

Laird sighed, limped slowly to the control room, intending to walk down the interior stairs. The blow that caught him below the sternum did not wholly paralyze him but shocked his diaphragm muscle into a spasm. Exhausted by his twelve-hour shift, now robbed of his ability to breathe, Laird fell to his knees at the stairwell, clutching the rail with both hands.

His assailant hacked twice at his upper arm, pulled Laird around to a sitting position with his back to the stairwell. The man didn't match Laird's bulk — seventy-five kilos, at a guess — but O Lord, what pitiless strength! A bandanna covered the face, only the eyes showing, and the ugly snout of an automatic pistol was leveled at Laird's breast. The crouching man's other gloved hand came up slowly to the bandanna, its forefinger vertical over where the mouth must be. Laird tried to speak, folded his hands over his belly, felt his chin jerked roughly upward. Again the forefinger, this time over Laird's own mouth. The head nodded vigorously, then paused and cocked sideways.

Laird understood; nodded; let his head loll against the rail as he peered at his captor. His work-callused hands came up, faltering as he fought for breath, in an ancient gesture of surrender.

The man's empty hand flickered at a hip pocket, came up with a tutorial voder the size of a wallet, and then placed the voder on the cement floor. Yet the vented barrel of that handgun never wavered, and Laird tried not to wheeze as his breath returned.

A soft luminescence lit the voder's alphanumeric studs under flying fingers. Then, impersonal and crisp as any other language-teaching machine, the voder said softly: "Whisper all you like. One loud noise and you are dead."

Laird tried twice before he could even whisper. "What have I done to you?"

Fingers flew again. Finally: "Union organizer. Does not matter true or false. Next two days many government enemies dead, you included."

Laird licked his lips and almost forgot to whisper.

"The government? I'm no traitor. You mean the general contractor?"

In due time: "White House Deseret. You more important than you think. Your only hope is disappear.

Now, next few minutes."

Pause. "I have a family, for heaven's sake. How can I leave them without telling them?"

"Their only hope is to think you dead. If anyone knows you survive, you and I both die. Lion of Zion plays for keeps. Time wasting; run or die?"

Laird looked at the gun muzzle, now indistinct in the gloom, and felt cold sweat. "Lord Jesus Christ help me, I wouldn't know how to run! Or where. Maybe I could hide out along the transient camps awhile, but—"

The man's head shook sideways, fingers flickering again. "I have clothes, false papers, money for you.

Written directions for best route, Ogden to Pocatello, across Snake River into Canada. Not long if you go now. Now. Now," said the insouciant tutor with no more urgency than a mattress commercial.

"I think I'd rather die than let my wife think I ran out. You don't know what it means — how it would affect the kids."

"Send for them in a month. Or your wife can be a widow tomorrow. Will not trade my life for you.

Losing patience."

A long shuddering breath; then, nodding his whole body: "All right. I don't really have a choice, do I?"

"Not since your file came to S & R."

"Search & Rescue?" Even in semidarkness, Laird's teeth gleamed as he smiled. "They're rescuing me?

But I thought they were the President's own—"

But the man was waving his hand as if shooing flies. After a moment, from the voder: "S & R has group called rovers. Primary job is assassination. Good at it. Tell Canadians. Truth."

"I whipped my son for repeating that rumor." As if to chase the memory away he went on quickly: "So what do I do?"

"Follow me down after two minutes. May be someone monitoring outside fence, so I carry you deadweight to company pickup."

Laird stood up with difficulty. The smaller man scooped up the voder, moved in a predator's silence down the first few stairs. "It all seems unreal — hard to believe," Laird muttered, not quite a whisper.

Gun muzzle and voder were both out again. "This is real," said the voder lackadaisically, as the gun moved side-to-side. "Death is real. If I have to come up after you, will prove it."

"Go on before I lose my nerve," Laird husked, and marveled at the soundlessness of the man's passage down six flights of stairs. Meanwhile he counted to himself. At a hundred and twenty he began his own descent, swiveling so that each footfall was as steady as the last, no matter how it hurt the bad leg. He did not know whether he expected the apparition to be gone, or to feel the impact of bullets as he reached the first landing.

Yet his nightmare continued as the smaller man handed him a large filmy sack. The voder was already programmed: "Step into bodybag, pull it up over head. When I pick you up, go limp. Whatever happens, play dead until I tell you to speak. May take an hour."

Laird took the huge bag, fumbled as he whispered, "Look, I have to believe you're on my side."

In the dimness, the head nodded.

"How would I recognize the rovers sent to kill me?"

In answer, the man jerked a thumb at his own breast.

"Maybe you would, but—." Laird stopped. "That's not what you meant, was it?"

Slow headshake. Accustomed to the gloom, Laird thought he saw a crinkle around the eyes. A wry smile, perhaps.

Now the body bag was nearly up to his chin. "You're the rover sent to kill me," Laird whispered hoarsely.

Slow nod.

"So you'd have the keys to the perimeter gate and access to a company pickup, wouldn't you? And you still might throw me off a cliff somewhere."

A shrug — but that odd, ugly little automatic was now in the man's hand, held by the muzzle for display.

Yes, if he wanted a man dead he sure didn't lack the means to do it; could have done it already. Over the roof parapet; down the stairwell with a broken neck; or maybe into the bodybag quietly, into the damned company pickup and then out to some canyon where the man could shoot him like a trussed goat.

Laird felt the top close above him, fought an urge to scream, then found himself hoisted in a fireman's carry. An arm slapped at his legs, not hard, and he made himself suitably limp.

All the way out of town and up the old freeway, Laird bounced under a tarp in the bed of that pickup.

And at every bounce he wondered whether he'd been hoaxed into his grave.

When at last he felt himself being dragged feet-first onto the tailgate, Laird vented the smallest of strangled sobs and felt steely hands grip hard against his ankles. Then he was again carried over uneven ground for some distance. He heard the murmur of water; began to breathe deeply, wondering if he could fight his way out of the bag before he drowned.

Laird found himself deposited carefully on grass, then heard the voder again: "Whisper. Pickup may be bugged."

"Where are we?" He helped the man shuck the bag away and now for the first time he began to hope, to truly believe, that he might live.

Pause at the voder. "River near cemetery in Ogden. Good place to lose a deader. Good place for you to walk to monorail." Laird felt, more than saw, the pile of clothes that dropped in his lap. But the voder's glow gave him enough light for him to change.

"Mind if I ask — well, don't you speak American?"

Pause. Then, "Not with a radio planted in my skull. They can hear every word I say. Do not hear this gadget."

"How d'you know they can't?"

Pause. "Still alive. Explosive in the radio in my head. If you get caught…"

Laird jumped and did not hear the last few words from the voder, for the man was suddenly speaking aloud; a young man's voice. "I hear you, Control. No, not yet. Message is in process but not yet delivered." A brief pause before, "You know my em-oh, why not get off my ass until my message is delivered?" Then after a moment, "How should I know? Maybe an hour. I'm already in Ogden so it shouldn't take me long to deliver message two." After the last pause, a sigh: "Into the goddam river. It's the quickest way; quicker still if I don't have to give you a blow-by-blow. Thank-you-Control-and-out,"

he finished in a singsong parody of good cheer. His sigh at the finish seemed only half exasperation. What was the other half? Relief?

Dandridge Laird stood up, tried the fit of the sport jacket while the young rover busied himself with the voder. "A little short in the sleeves," Laird whispered.

"I get the god-damnedest complaints," said the young man aloud, and it was a moment before Laird realized the rover might have been talking to himself for all anyone else knew. The little son of perdition was quick all right.

Then the voder began: "Wait five minutes after I leave. Walk to lights, read instructions, then walk as if you owned IEE."

Laird laughed almost silently. "Only fitting; it owns me."

Pause. "Not any more," said the voder.

Laird nodded; stretched a hand out to be shaken, found it ignored. The rover was busily stuffing old clothes and a hefty stone into the bodybag. Uneasy now, anxious to be on his way, Laird whispered, "Is there any way I can help you?"

Long pause. For a moment the young man did not attack the voder keys. When he had finished, it said,

"Wait a month before telling family. By then I may figure how to disarm this thing in my head. If not it probably won't matter. Best help for me is, you not get caught." He left Laird standing there, and he left on the run.

Laird did not wonder whether the young man's next 'message delivery' would be of life or of death. He was too busy just inhaling the scent of grass, and of flowers, and of life; and of the joy he would take in it for as long as he lived. One day Laird might recognize the inestimable value of Ted Quantrill's gift.

CHAPTER 23

Only a crazy wolf, or a very hungry one, would be hunting at midday on the unprotected flank of the mountain that soared above the San Rafael desert. The gaunt gray loafer had made hors d'oevres of one ground squirrel and the yellow eyes glittered toward another when, simultaneous with the great shadow, an unearthly rustling drone moved down the wind. The little varmint fled. The wolf looked up, then padded swiftly into one of the abandoned man-made caves that once had followed crystalline yellow ore into the belly of the mountain.

Before the war, the huge delta dirigible had been as yellow as that uranium oxide ore. Repainted for wartime cargo missions, it had at last been decommissioned and bought, on very special terms, for industrial use. Now the delta carried the IEE logo on its tan polymer hide. Its crew were veterans of a war and many an unscheduled cargo drop, but they seldom flew over Utah's central desert. In Cassidy-and-Sundance days the region had been dangerous because only desperate men lived there.

Now it was dangerous because, for the most part, no men lived there. The few who did, were desperate for modern reasons.

Cargomaster Cole Riker leaned over the shoulder of the delta captain, pointing to their two-hundred-meter shadow that raced across the mountain.

"If that's Temple Mountain, Steve, we're a little off-course."

Stevens nodded easily, switched off his headset so he wouldn't be recorded. "Thought we'd take a look at Goblin Valley on the way in. Since the war nobody but a few plutocrats can afford sight-seeing in these parts."

"It's a shame what crosswinds can do to a flight plan," Riker said facetiously, and saw Stevens's reflection grin back through the windscreen.

Though the delta had been designed for a crew of eight, wartime mods and peacetime cost-accounting had reduced the crew to two. Neither of the men knew that the corporate CEO, Boren Mills, had personal reasons for employing the fewest men possible on a cargo drop into the San Rafael.

Stevens increased buoyancy, actuated the enormous elevens, and eased more power to the shrouded, stirling-engined props that whirred like a billion muted sopranos on the lifting body of the delta. He could always explain such anomalies on the flight recorder in terms of the plain orneriness of a delta. It was overloaded, for sure; so much so that it could barely climb above three thousand meters. Wind currents were haphazard, too.

At maximum altitude, with the video magnifier, they could study Goblin Valley longer. The bizarre wind-rounded sandstone blobs sat like so many gargantuan sepia biscuits baking on pedestals in the bone-dry Utah heat. Then Stevens thought to flick his headset on and, "I'm getting the lab signal," he said.

"Wonder if they've installed an honest-to-God mooring pad."

Of course they had not. Stevens asked for help in securing the big retractable landing struts which, in a proper moorage, found sockets to fit. The huge delta rocked gently as it lost headway, passing over earth berms that sloped nearly to the roof of the lab complex.

Riker counted nine men below, all in lab smocks, and swore as he noted a braided pigtail on one of the men. When a Chinese rejected the revolution of his elders, he tended to do it up brown. Riker didn't mind working with wartime enemies, but when securing a delta you needed flawless communication.

Riker dropped the cargo hatch himself and nearly fell while shinnying down handholds of a mooring strut.

The lab staff was willing but maladroit; not until Cole Riker had snapped a cable latch into a mooring ring did the Chinese understand how to secure the others, and naturally Stevens couldn't cut the stirlings as long as vagrant winds might tug, slap, or tilt the motionless vessel. Finally Riker toggled the winch pneumatics, saw the strut pads squash against concrete, and pronounced the delta secure. The bellicose rustle of the props died and, with the Chinese and one incredibly hairy Caucasian, Riker got the air-cushion pallet in place.

Stevens could not leave the controls with such primitive moorings. Damn a corporation, Riker thought, that didn't give a rat's ass about the working stiff. It wasn't so bad with the small companies, only they tended to get gobbled up by the big ones. In his last state-of-the union address, the President had quoted gross national product figures and claimed that things were improving. For the big boys, maybe. But to Riker it seemed that the split between haves and have-nots was widening.

The Caucasian, Chabrier, signed for the first palletload. "I gather we shall see more of each other in the coming weeks," he said in gallic accents.

"Damn right. And if you can install some strut sockets we can do it a whole lot quicker."

Chabrier asked, as they maneuvered the air-cushion load to the roof elevator, how many trips would be necessary. Riker thought five trips might do it. "So soon?" Chabrier's deepset eyes, Riker thought, were those of a thinner man — at least thin in spirit.

Riker: "Well, we're stripped to the bone and carryin' eighty thousand kilos each trip. With some good cargo handlers and proper moorage we could have all this stuff — whatever it really is — delivered in ten days." Riker had intended a harmless joke along with the pointed hint about trained handlers. In every industrial cargo there were bound to be items that wouldn't match a manifest list.

But the Frenchman's face clouded. "It is merely automated machinery and tunneling equipment," he said quickly, tapping the fax sheet. "How is it that you can carry such loads?"

"Tell you when we're through." Riker scrambled back into the delta to winch another pallet into position.

Hours later, when the sixteenth pallet had been trundled to the elevator, Marengo Chabrier spoke in a richly intonated dialect to his lab crew who disappeared with the load. "Perhaps you will join me below for an absinthe," he said then to Riker. "Or perhaps something even stronger." The barest tint of urgency colored his offer.

Riker whistled. "Stronger than absinthe?"

"I am a chemist, mon vieux." Shy and deprecating — but pleading, too.

"Oh. Uh, some other time, maybe. I'm on IEE time, and the light will be fading soon. Cap'n Stevens will be edgy as three cats in a sack after a whole afternoon at his console." Riker restowed the air cushion, turned to shake Chabrier's hand. "See you day after tomorrow if we maintain schedule. Don't worry about the cable releases; that much at least is automatic. We can afford electrics below the hull. And we can save lots of time if you can get us a decent moorage. Think about it."

"Unfortunately, Riker, I too am on IEE time, and funding. I fear we must do our best with things as they are. It helps when one can relax with one's liquids and powders. Or even to present a friend with a kilo of them."

This time the air of desperation was unmistakable. Cole Riker knew what a kilo of some alkaloids was worth; knew also that he wanted nothing to do with them. Suddenly he wanted only to get away from this half-crazy frog squatting atop a desert lab croaking friendly overtures to a near-total stranger. "It'll bear thinking about," said Riker, and swung onto the strut handholds.

The props were already turning, the fuel-stingy stirlings warming to thermally-efficient range. Chabrier called up through the cargo hatch. "Riker! You are certain you can complete the shipments in so little time?"

"Barring a malf we can't fix, yes," Riker shouted, then grinned. "I'll tell you why now, if you won't let on to your crew. Just didn't want to worry you during your early experiences with an IEE delta. It's really pretty safe, you know."

"What is safe, mon ami?" Chabrier saw the cables release, to whirl like snakes into belly orifices.

"Hydrogen," Riker called, pointing at the buoyancy cells above him as the belly hatch thunked shut. As Stevens poured full power and actuated the strut pneumatics, the vast delta vaulted safely upwards for the first ten meters. Laughing, Riker watched «the poor Frenchman run full-tilt off the end of the roof and tumble down the berm, away from countless cubic meters of the near-explosive hydrogen. It really was fairly safe, Riker told himself. Nothing like the safety of helium, but lots cheaper and with roughly ten per cent more buoyancy. That was IEE for you.

Riker checked the pallet anchors, his smile fading as he mentally replayed his hours with Chabrier. It seemed almost as if the bulky chemist — if that was really his job — wasn't interested in speeding up the shipments. If anything, as if he craved a delay. And friendship. But why would a highly trained scientist crave camaraderie with a delta crewman? As the vast craft slid upward into the last of the sunlight, Riker pondered the question and studied the particle-beam perimeter weapons that stretched away across the trackless desert.

One hell of a waste, he thought, to set up such a P-beam security rig as that. All corporations were a little paranoid about their measly secret processes. What could be so important that anyone would bother to sneak in? But that was IEE for you…

CHAPTER 24

For all its gleam and pillared portico, White House Deseret was chiefly a ballroom with a few staff offices, guest rooms and kitchen. And with one particular elevator to whisk senior staff and certain invited guests, far down below the 'bench'—a natural terrace at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. From the bottom of the shaft, Boren Mills took a ten-minute ride in a magnetic sling tube. Mills was not supposed to know — but knew, nonetheless — that the real hardball business of Streamlined America was transacted directly beneath the repository of Mormon genealogical files in Cotton-wood Canyon. If you weren't safe under the Granite Mountain genealogical vault, you couldn't get safe.

Mills passed through more security, then forced a pleasant smile despite an urge to gape. The raven-haired young amazon who escorted him to the Presidential apartment was nearly two meters tall in her spike heels, and while the hooded white satin gown fell to her ankles, it was also slit to reveal a lot of luscious apricot-tinted thigh. This was a far lusty howl away from the conservative male staff who had escorted him in previous visits. It unsettled him; told him to expect changes in a man he had studied carefully.

That man was also just a tad drunk. "Go and ponder your sins," Blanton Young told the improbable vision, and waited until she had gone.

"Future sins, I hope." Mills could not resist it.

"How'd you guess?" Young took the small Mills paw in his big one, held the Mills forearm with his other hand. The ritual communicated great physical vitality, which Young could squander. "I tell you, Mills, there's no end of wisdom in that scripture."

Mills let his gaze follow Young's open-handed gesture. On one wall of the lavish ultramodern room was a tablet of black onyx, and inset in flowing script of richest polished gold was the legend: "… And it is by the wicked that the wicked shall be punished."

"Interesting," said Mills, not knowing what else to say.

"Interpretation of the Book of Mormon is just a matter of Divine guidance," said Young, as if that guidance was self-evident, leading his guest to the wet bar. "For instance, in '97 it told me I should shunt that bunch of Army assassins into S & R as soon as my," he paused to savor some personal joke, "sainted predecessor shuffled off this mortal coil." With that, he performed a shuffling two-step, then took a sip from his goblet.

To say that Mills was aghast was to claim a delta dirigible was a penny balloon. Mills did not care what caprice a man chose, so long as he chose it predictably. This was not the Blanton Young he had seen previously — or was this, at last, the private Young emerging? Mills managed to say, "Got it: wicked hit men punish wicked Indys."

Rumbling: "Rebels, son; an Indy is a rebel only when I interpret him as one. But it took me awhile to realize that you can make a sinner punish himself-herself," he winked, with a wave of the big head toward the door, "by a penance consh — consisting of more wickedness. You take a girl brought up strict, caught lifting a smoked ham to feed a few useless mouths; and if she's not too keen, after a week or reconditioning you can argue her into, ah, any position."

Reminds me of an old joke," Mills essayed.

"Bet I've heard it."

"About druggies. Their idea of a round-table religious debate is to see who can commit the most original sin on your lazy susan."

Young guffawed after a two-beat pause. Mills would never know whether he really got it. "Well, I owe you one for that," said the pixillated Prez. Staring into his sour mash as if it were a crystal globe, Young went on in softer tones: "So I'll pay off now. A certain industrial concern whose initials are LockLever is pressuring a Texas rancher to sell his whole spread, which LockLever will turn into the wildest, wooliest, modernest dude ranch in the world."

Mills was astute enough to break his chuckle off. " Hanh-I'don't-get-i t."

"It's not a one-liner, Mills. The pressure comes by way of LockLever's control of the aquifer North of Texas Wild Country. There isn't a drop of running water on the Schreiner ranch; they water the stock and imported game animals from wells — always did.

"As it happens, LockLever could pollute or divert the whole underground supply from their experimental rigs nearby. The Schreiner spread used to be a hundred square miles back in the 'eighties. It's grown since. I don't know if they'll sell — they've always been a tough bunch of Texas pecans, I hear — but if they do, LockLever will need cheap power to run the kind of Wild-Country Disneyland they have in mind.

And there isn't any good place to put a line-of-sight tower on the whole, million-acre ranch."

Now Mills got a glimmer. "Where's the nearest mountain?"

"Ten klicks North of the ranch boundary. And there is enough federal enforcement to that prominence — couldn't call it a mountain but an LOS tower could narrowcast cheap power to the ranch; and that little old prominence is now federal land."

Jesus, God and Moroni, thought Mills; to think he'd swapped an old gag for a chance to screw LockLever! "I should think LockLever would've made a handsome bid for such a natural LOS site," he murmured.

"They did. Some hitches developed. Old lawsuits, title irregularities; you know. You can always find something if you look hard enough."

"I've always wanted to own a small mountain in Texas," Mills said with a straight face.

"Oh, I don't think your government could show that kind of favoritism to an individual," Young tutted.

"But of course, some survey crew might find signs of oil, or something else that Streamlined America badly needs. That's an argument LockLever hasn't used. Yet."

Mills: "And what might a geological study turn up?"

Young: "Surprise me. But the discovery would have to come from a reliable company with a good track record."

"IEE owns Latter-day Shale — if memory serves," Mills said.

"A good reliable company," Young nodded sagely. "Excellent track record — in which I may have some stock if, as you say, memory serves."

"Sonofabitch," Mills exulted.

"You're another," said the President of Streamlined America, and drank as if validating his reply.

CHAPTER 25

Over his next glass of sippin' whiskey, Mills learned why the President chose IEE as leverage to balance the proposed LockLever project. LockLever claimed that such an entertainment center would bring wealth to the area and would be welcomed by the locals; but Young had learned something more. The giant consortium had further hedged its bets by paying off some people who had clout in Wild Country.

In a word: rebels. Federalists suspected that much of the payoff wound up in the hands of the Indy leader, old Jim Street. Maybe

LockLever hoped to accommodate all sides while carving out a region of influence where the government had little or no influence.

"You mustn't think I'm against reconstruction in Wild Country, Mills. It'd bring law and order back to those crazies — on our terms. And LockLever could build those ten-kilometer thrill rides and restage the Battle of Britain there twice a day, just like they claim. But I can't trust 'em."

"True," Mills murmured. "When LockLever owns foreign companies, foreigners have clout with LockLever."

"Which reminds me that your own people have a little romance going with — um, what's that firm at the Turk Ellfive launch complex?"

Mills smiled. "ECI; Electronics Corporation of Israel. Those, initials also stand for electronic counter intelligence, which was too near the truth. So they've changed it to Tuz Golu R & D, which makes their Turkish landlords happy."

Very quietly: "But they still do research with microwave relays, or so I am reliably informed. Any gadget that can project multichannel holo from a point in empty space would be ours, or Israeli. And it isn't ours."

At last, Mills felt he was about to learn why he had been invited to Young's inner sanctum. "Those Mex stratosphere relays," he guessed. "You think they're using Israeli equipment, Mr. President?"

The National Security Agency thinks so. And I want those rebel holocasts stopped! You seem the logical conduit for us to find out how it might be done."

"My people tell me you've zapped one already," Mills said, pleased to show how well-informed he was.

"Congratulations."

"It's casting again."

Mills shrugged. He was damned if he'd admit he hadn't known that.

"Let's understand each other," said Young, evidently still clear-headed though his tongue played him false at times. "You'll get the LOS site for trying to wangle us a media countermeasure. If you're successful, you could get the Schreiner land for IEE to develop — assuming you want it."

Mills laughed ruefully. "It's a great idea. Battle of Britain, eh? Some old Lockheed thinktank man is still plugging away in LockLever." He shook his head in grudging respect, then grew serious. "Sure, IEE could do it, if we can get that land. And if we can get protection without paying off Jim Street."

"Our guess is that you could get a ninety-nine year lease from the owner, if the federal government allows some special tax incentives to Schreiner, and if you could convince the Schreiner family you'll keep it all unpolluted and mostly unraped. As for protection, just hire most of the locals and name the goddam place Wild Country Safari."

"My God," Mills muttered, thinking it over. For that matter, the ersatz Spitfires and Messerschmitts for a Battle of Britain show could carry live ammo, just in case. IEE could train those leathery Texas lunatics as maintenance people and let 'em carry sidearms.

And the gambling! IEE could thumb its nose at state laws in Wild Country. A refitted delta could ferry in six hundred high-rollers a trip and could run the games at it pleased. The LOS tower meant cheap power. Nothing need be said about the gambling. A replica of old Dodge City? That would be the first step Mills took after taking the place over.

Inside a year, the gambling sincity could be running at a profit. In two years, mach one thrill rides! Oh, yes, this was too good a thing to pass up. Mills needed something from which he could secretly siphon cash during the next year or so.

Because otherwise, the synthesizer factory would bleed him to death before it came on-line.

CHAPTER 26

Imagine the most complete array of RF sensors available to the National Security Agency to secure a President's lair against bugging. Next, imagine that guests are profiled, fluoroscoped, interviewed and voice-stress analyzed by NSA professional paranoids whose sole raison d'etre is to screw those who would try to screw Blanton Young.

With these conditions in mind, now try to imagine the frustration of the head NSA spook when Young's own personal screwing put the quietus on audiovisual security screens. The President might envy porn stars, but he did not propose to be one even for his own laconic gumshoes who had already seen everything and would not, presumably, have been scandalized to find that a widower President enjoyed a carnal tussle now and again, and again, and again.

Young was perhaps ignorant of the criticism Russell laid on Neitzsche. Paraphrased: it's okay to be tough-minded, provided you start with yourself. Or perhaps Young simply did not want any recordings of any deals inside his Granite Mountain apartment. It was this decision which permitted the raven-haired hotsy to circumvent Young's anti bugging array with basic equipment, ears and memory. The lissome lass lay flat on her belly in Young's bedroom and monitored the Mills meeting through a fresh-air duct that served both rooms. The early part of the evening had justified all her hours of patience. Yet the initial dialogue paled as good booze took its effect in the room just beyond…

CHAPTER 27

"… Told you we'd build the true Zion together four years ago, didn't I?" Young had now switched to brandy, and tended to use shorter words.

"You also said it would take some careful weeding," said Mills, gauging his own alcohol capacity with care. "But I wish you'd told me how much weeding you intended to do last week. Even with control of FBN, Mr. President, we've had a bitch of a time explaining away that rash of disappearances."

"Couldn't be helped," said Young, waving his goblet airily. "Anyway, a good third of 'em were Mormons.

Who'd believe White House Deseret could possibly be involved?"

"Must've been a tough decision for you, of all people."

"Shhhhit," said Blanton Young, and glanced at the younger man with a half-smile. "Not with true inspiration to guide. Mills, in the true Zion there won't be any room for a bunch of old farts wrangling over interp'tations of the word of God. Came to me in a meeting of the Council of Apostles one day. A rev'lation like a thunderclap; I was bein' tested."

Somehow, Mills decided, a tiny ice cube had entered his bloodstream. "You mean — Divine examination?"

Nod. "A dozen old men, balkin' me at every turn. It came to me that the President of Streamlined America can't be wrong every time; that if Blanton Young was put in this office by a higher power, then a solid wall of opposition can only mean that wall is bound together by the devil's flaxen cord." The zealot eyes burned past slitted lids. "You follow me, Mills?" The President's face was choleric with remembered frustrations, his last words a rasp on old tin cans.

Until the past half-minute, Boren Mills had cherished the assumption that Young, whatever his failings, was bound to his Church; that ultimately he would be constrained by its tenets of fellowship and grace.

Mills's ice cube was now a frozen stalactite against his spine. "I couldn't help noticing some, ah, changes in your, um, lifestyle. Are you saying you've decided to leave your Church?"

"I am the Church!" Mills realized with a start that he'd seen the same look on Eve's face when he asked for her amulet. "The Council of Apostates," said Young, relishing his heresy, "is a test. I see that now.

And I have passed that test."

Through his consternation, Mills saw that he was privy to a development so new that it had not yet become surrounded by rumor. With utterly no idea of what to say, he fell back on the hoary goad of interviewers and shrinks: "I see."

"I wonder if you do. I have passed through a purifying fire of the spirit, and I can depend on insp'ration.

When I'm inspired I can't be wrong.

It's a tr'mendous sense of respons'bility but," the President unleashed a beatified smile, "somehow it makes me feel free."

No doubt, thought Mills. That same sense of guidance and inspiration must have given the same freedom to Alexander; to Rasputin; to der fuehrer. But to ride the coattails of Young was to ride a barmy tiger.

Should he dismount now? But how the hell could he? And how long before this loony generated an open break with what was, unofficially, a state religion?

Suddenly Boren Mills knew why LockLever was paying cash homage to the rebels. They knew of Young's instability; were straddling the ideological fence. Yet the CEO of LockLever hadn't helped organize Young's S & R hit team as he, Mills, had done. Mills and IEE could expect no quarter from Jim Street. Unless — unless Mills made himself absolutely vital to the survival of Streamlined America no matter who won the political battles. Choosing his words with utmost caution: "Mr. President, how did the Council of Apostles respond to your revelation?"

Young lurched up from his chair, circled the wet bar as if analyzing an opponent, chose a glass of seltzer before answering. "I'm not an idiot. Mills. I won't feed a man things he can't swallow. What I can do, is replace Council members with my own people. A matter of seein' that some of my folks are standin' in the right places. Pity you're not LDS yourself."

"I can do more as a fellow traveler," Mills said quickly. "How long before, um, normal attrition in the Council," he said, knowing that some members would die by means that were not normal, "gives you the power you need?"

Innocence personified: "How would I know? Could take a year or so."

"If I might suggest it, Sir, you might take care not to let your new lifestyle show in the meantime."

"Council isn't as down on plural marriage as you might think," Young chuckled, "but I get your drift, son.

It has been revealed to me that even the head of the Church must make haste slowly." Horsewink.

Mills exhaled with undisguised relief. Whether mad as Parisian hatters or merely posturing in his cups, Young still understood caution. Mills: "Depend on IEE to move with you. But I'll have to know what you need."

"You can start by talking with those Israelis about a media countermeasure. Streamlined America must break free from foreign pressures." A rolling rippling belch paced the President's train of thought. "And not just media gadgetry. Mex oil, Canadian platinum, African cobalt — stuff this country must have."

At that moment, inspiration struck Mills. Some crucial raw materials were present, in minute quantities, in sea water. "We're already doing our part with shale, but IEE hasn't been idle in the rare metals field either," he said slyly.

"I'm talking metric tons."

A hundred kilos a day of lighter elements from a synthesizer, perhaps ten a day — he'd have to check with Chabrier — of heavy rare metals like cobalt. It would mean a different production schedule of synthesizers, but a few could be on-line in less than a year. A hundred synthesizers could yield a ton of heavy elements every day.

"So am I," said Mills. "Pure stuff. It's, uh, an extraction process we've kept pretty secret. In a few months IEE can be shipping a ton of cobalt a day from Eureka."

"Not enough for the New Denver and Cleveland mills by a long shot. We use seven thousand tons of Zaire cobalt a year."

"In two years we can match that," Mills promised. He hadn't said the process was ocean extraction, but the implication was clear enough.

"Domestic?"

Time to enrich the implied lie: "Domestic as sea water."

"At compet'ive price?"

"No. Sir." Pause for effect. "Cheaper."

The President sat down slowly, then raised his goblet in salute. "The Lord has provided," he murmured.

"I knew I was right about you; inspiration," he said smugly and then added, "but you better come through."

Mills tallied new necessities in his head. He'd have to maintain utmost security on shipments of elemental metals from the Utah desert to the Port of Eureka. And set up some kind of barge facility off the coast as a blind. But once those shipments became mainstays of reconstruction in Streamlined America, Mills could write his own ticket with any administration.

"To Zion," said Mills, and raised his own goblet.

Ten meters away on the other side of the wall, the raven-haired hotsy felt her lip curl.

CHAPTER 28

As the pudgy, chain-smoking Sean Lasser began Sanger's briefing, she surmised that old age was creeping up on him. He'd never shown this much courtesy to any rover. "… Had to be one of the undercover rebels that we disappeared two weeks ago, you see."

Sanger, quickly: "You mean because it had to be a rover who helped him escape? If the man told the Canadians all you say, I suppose so." Finger-snap: "Unless some rebel posed as one of us and—"

Lasser's headshake, slow and commiserating, stopped her. "No one but a rover could've faked that mission," he said gently. "All we needed was the escapee's name, and our man in Calgary couldn't get that. He did manage three minutes alone in the room where the man had been debriefed, and tape-lifted prints off the chair arms. We identified one this morning. Ever hear of a Dandridge Laird?"

Negative shrug. Marbrye Sanger had no doubt she'd learn plenty about him from the file that lay at Lasser's elbow. She'd never had to go into Canada to disappear a man before, but the prospect disturbed her no more than any other killing might. "Will I be on a team or singleton?"

"Team. We have to pick that team with more than usual care. Howell and Cross are busy setting the mission up; that's why Seth isn't briefing you himself." A finger tapping against his teeth, as though the ritual and not his thought processes generated the pause. "How well do you get along with Ted Quantrill?"

Under the little man's deceptive mild gaze, Sanger had to force her eye contact. "As well as with any rover. We've teamed on several missions — but you know that." Taking a risk: "We get along; he doesn't talk my arm off. He's a surly little bastard but he doesn't have many weaknesses."

"Not even in bed?"

"I've had that pleasure," she said evenly. "Also with Ethridge, Graeme Duff, once even with Howell, which I won't bore you with. I might have it with you, if the occasion ever arises." The spots of color on her cheeks did not suggest that it was very likely.

"Why thank you, Sanger; though I ah," with a dusty cough of self-deprecation, "wouldn't want to bore you with that." Pause. "I'm asking as politely as I can: do you think any of your liaisons — with Quantrill, for example — left emotional bonds?"

She made her laugh loud enough so that it wouldn't come out shaky. "Basic T Section stuff, Lasser!

Going soft on another member of a hit team is a deadly mistake." Her grin was as feral as she could make it: "I don't have many weaknesses either." Sanger, however, knew that her responses to stress were not as controlled as Quantrill's. At the moment she hadn't the strength to kick a sick whore off a bidet and she knew it.

Lasser, studying her, at last said, "Good," and picked up the thick file. "Howell will give you details but I can tell you now that this will be touchy work. You have to take your man out without killing him, if at all possible. We have a lot of questions we need to ask him."

"Soporific slugs? Hypospray?"

"Hypospray might not be fast enough, but you'll get a canister just in case. You'll probably have to use your chiller. Just don't hit a vital spot; they don't care if he loses an arm. He won't be needing it again."

Not worried, but perplexed: "So how do we get a bleeder back here alive?" She was thinking of Calgary.

"Sprint chopper. He doesn't know we're onto him but when he does, you can expect some good moves."

She took the file from Lasser, glanced at the first page, and then realized why that file was so thick, why Howell and Cross were setting up the mission. Seth Howell and Marty Cross had more single combat experience between them than any half-dozen rovers, and they would be her team members. No wonder Lasser had been so gentle, so careful.

The file she held was Ted Quantrills.

CHAPTER 29

So this was the way her world ended, thought Sanger. Inside, she was whimpering. She'd spent far too much time trying to figure a way to warn Quantrill, and not enough time steeling herself for her decoy duties. Quantrill was pulling sprint chopper maintenance at Dugway, on the Utah side of the Nevada border. How simple it might be to ask Control, through her critic, to patch her into Quantrill's head. And how fruitless; for Control would not let her say a dozen words of warning, and she'd be cancelled forever. What would she say anyway? Run for it? They'd only zap him with his critic detonator.

Whatever I must do now, I love you beyond all reason? He probably knew it anyway, and it wouldn't keep either of them alive.

Sanger stared out the polymer port of the sprint chopper, ignoring the wiry half-Cheyenne, Cross, in harness near her. Howell was not as good a pilot as he was a killer — but there was no great hurry as he guided them past the Oquirrh Mountains.

Quantrill had not seen fit to tell her (oh God, why not? Hadn't he known he could trust her?) he'd funked a mission, turned rebel beneath her nose. But neither had she told him the real story about his friend Raima. How Sanger had left a printed warning for Dr. Cathy Palma two hours before she was expected to disappear the woman in Abilene, Texas. God damn that man, refusing to ask her help! Now she could not give it and hope to live. Marbrye Sanger did not want to die, and didn't intend to. The best thing for her was to expunge Ted Quantrill from her memory; to bleed her soul of him. He'd made his single bed and now he could die in it.

CHAPTER 30

Quantrill only half-noticed the approach of Howell's craft as he lay supine on the mechanic's creeper.

Three similar craft squatted outside the maintenance hangar five hundred meters away, and Quantrill lay above hot concrete beneath the nose of the fourth, which Miles Grenier had flown to the alignment pad.

Old-timers still called these secluded spots 'compass roses'. Grenier sat in the cockpit, checking out the avionics and calling out the results of Quantrill's simple remove-and-replace operations with numbered modules. It had never occurred to Quantrill that rovers might be kept deficient in electronic theory.

Perhaps it was the continuing buzz of the distant sprint chopper that first suggested a break in routine.

Usually the pilot set his bird down quickly to avoid spreading dust across the flight line. This one hovered, half concealed by the hangar.

He heard Grenier's audio buzzer. From sheer curiosity he pushed the stowed nose flotation bag aside; listened through the thin inner bulkheads. Grenier spoke normally at first. After a pause he spoke more quizzically but Quantrill could not hear what he said. The rover wiped late morning perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his odorous work coverall. He had time to damn the heat of the turbines whistling in the fuselage; they weren't loud but while checking the bird out you wanted them idling.

A vagrant breeze wafted warm exhaust back to Quantrill, pungent with expensive fuel. Quantrill decided Grenier was going to take all day on his comm set, cursed, rolled back on his creeper and slapped the nose hatch shut before sitting upright. The hovering sprint chopper in the distance, he noticed, backed from sight without landing.

Quantrill was only a little surprised to hear the turbine whine rising, but very much so to see the wingtip shrouds swivel into takeoff position. If that goddam Grenier was heading back for an early lunch he wasn't going to leave Quantrill to leg it alone back to the hangar.

He lay back on the creeper, grasped handholds and shot himself backward to the belly hatch, punching the skin detent as he passed it. The hatch opened and Quantrill snagged internal handholds, legs driving him vertically as the craft began to lift and turn.

"What is this, Grenier; trick or treat?" Quantrill lay on the narrow walkway and stared angrily forward at the pilot.

Grenier did not hear him over the turbine scream, but evidently heard something in his headset. He chopped back the power too quickly, flicked off all systems while struggling up from his seat. And the glance he flicked at Quantrill was rich with fear and suspicion.

"Abandon ship," Grenier shouted, waving Quantrill out the still-gaping belly hatch, and following him with almost a rover's speed. Grenier backed away, not looking at the aircraft but at the rover. "Quantrill, get away," shouted the pilot. "We've got a problem with the bird!"

Quantrill trotted after the taller man, saw past him to the flight line. Five minutes before, there'd been several people currying their birds. Now the place was deserted. At the periphery of his vision was a charcoal-black mass, skating ten meters over the deck, and now Miles Grenier was running like a deer.

The hurtling mass was a sprint chopper, arcing in between the two men. Isolate your hit, said a well-remembered voice in his memory. The voice had been that of Jose Marti Cross, the same man that Quantrill now saw peering from a side port in the approaching aircraft.

Quantrill dropped to one knee, slapped at his armpit for a chiller that wasn't there. The face of Marty Cross vanished from the port and with that simple reflexive act, Cross said it all: combat stations.

Give the pilot credit, thought Quantrill; he horsed his craft around while masking Grenier from a man who, if armed, might well shoot him or take him hostage. But Quantrill was sprinting too, now, and a precious few seconds are required to stop and then accelerate six thousand kilos of Loring sprint chopper.

In those seconds Quantrill crossed fifty meters of level concrete toward the craft he had so recently abandoned. Then Howell surged forward, coming out of the sun, high enough to clear his quarry's head, low enough so that his shrouded propwash would knock a horse sprawling.

Any watcher would know by now that Quantrill was unarmed. But Cross sat with feet braced against the padding of the open belly hatch, both hands steadying his chiller between his thighs, waiting for Quantrill to come into view. He was almost too close to miss — but also too low to see Quantrill until a second before the Loring passed over him. It should have been enough, with a chiller.

Because the sun was high, Quantrill saw the big shadow almost too late. He saw a tuft of grass that might serve as a shoving-off point, kicked away against it in an abrupt change of direction, rolled. He saw three puffs, hairbreadth misses by Cross, of dust as he came up squatting in a welter of pebbles at the concrete's verge. The Loring continued, levitated over its abandoned twin, prop shrouds gimbaling as Howell turned, virtually hidden from Quantrill as if seeking cover. Which he was, for a vital five seconds.

Then Howell leapfrogged the abandoned Loring again, this time slowly dropping to a meter off the deck.

Now between Quantrill and his goal, Howell stopped the Loring. Quantrill feinted, started to run, then slowed as he saw the legs of Cross swing from the belly hatch. Quantrill dropped his pumping arms then, a gesture full of defeat.

And of misdirection. He could see Howell in the cockpit, grinning, knowing he could slam a six-ton hammer into his victim. He saw Cross hit and roll. And he saw that he was no more than twelve meters from the nearest wingtip shroud. His high overhand toss seemed a ridiculous empty gesture until Howell, with a spurt of pure horror, saw the glitter of small objects in the sun.

The handful of broken concrete half-fell, was half sucked into the circular shroud as Quantrill raced toward that wingtip, ignoring Cross who was up in a crouch below the fuselage, steadying his aim for a kneecapper.

Quantrill could not possibly sprint quickly enough to reach the shroud before its fiberquartz prop blades ingested those jagged chunks of concrete. He counted on that fact. With a shrill series of reports like small-arms fire, the concrete hunks shrieked through polyskin, some whining as ricochets into the distance, some shrapneling the fuselage behind Howell's bubble. Neither Howell nor Cross was hit but before either could make a patterned response, the Loring — as Quantrill had known it must — responded on its own.

The balance of a twin coleopter craft depends greatly on the shape of those prop blades, and their proximity to the airfoil surface in the shroud. Hammer a few dents into a shroud, especially near those prop tips, and its efficiency will plummet. Blow a dozen jagged holes in it while the props eat hardware, and you will see a coleopter go bonkers.

Quantrill had that pleasure.

The upward-slanting shroud was only a meter from concrete at its trailing edge when Quantrill committed his act of classic sabotage. It faltered, fell, scraped concrete, and became a sliding pivot as the other wingtip lifted as if to cartwheel the entire vehicle. Howell reacted almost quickly enough. A thorough pro, Cross sidestepped to get a shot at Quantrill who in turn kept himself masked by the nearer shroud. Cross took Howell's expertise for granted, and had no warning when the fuselage sideswiped him across his back and shoulders.

The craft was settling. Quantrill, flinging his other handful of gravel into the face of the falling Cross, cleared the halfbreed's fire pattern in a running leap. Still, he was lucky; one round blew a hunk from the heel of his work boot and spoiled his landing, so that his kick took Cross in the right shoulder instead of his face.

Both of Quantrill's hands closed on the chiller, pressing on Cross's fingers to squander the rest of the magazine in one sputtering burst. He'd learned that ploy before they ever put the critic in his head.

When Control spoke to him, it was obvious that someone — Howell? — was describing the action. Except that Howell was still up forward in the cockpit while the sprint chopper wailed down to quiescence, a bird with only one good wing. "Q, you're over-reacting." said the quasifeminine voice in his mastoid. "It's still not too late to save yourself. We need to talk to you, Q. Why don't you just—"

"Control, why don't you just go fuck a duck?" He had longed to say that for years. "I've got my signet ring garrote wire snugged under Cross's adam's apple. Maybe I won't jerk and cut his head off when you pull my plug. But can you risk it?"

It was a lie but Quantrill was making it true, first ‘passing his arms under Cross's to deploy his wire.

Cross, the master of stealth, was no master of defense against the impacts that had stunned him at temple, scapula and groin. Quantrill's standard-issue signet ring was the only weapon he'd worn that day — even though he wasn't supposed to wear it while doing mechanic's chores. The filament-thin wire was hardly more than a meter long but with the signet in one hand and the ring on his other, he soon had the loop pressed around the throat of his old instructor, his new hostage.

Barely conscious, smaller than Quantrill, Cross grunted as raw bone edges grated in his right shoulder.

The renegade rover lifted Cross bodily under the arms, both hands at shoulder height, bright sun glinting from the loop of wire. Howell popped his canopy and swung down to concrete, his own chiller drawn as he watched Quantrill move backward with his burden, facing Howell.

Seth Howell's bandy long legs could have carried him around Quantrill to balk progress toward the intact sprint chopper which Grenier had abandoned, but Howell had made other plans. The big man had no mastoid critic but with his headset still in place his every word could still be monitored by Control.

"You're no pilot, Quantrill," he said, pacing his quarry, holding eye contact. "You'll sit in that Loring 'til you broil. Cut your losses, man."

Quantrill, still backing, let his fists move apart. "Stop right there, Howell, or I'll bleed your bunkie a little."

Howell stopped. Quantrill was now virtually in the shadow of the Loring's wing, ignoring the calm pleas of Control that continued in his ear. Howell stepped first to one side, then the other, compelling his attention. The big man had trouble keeping his gaze on the rover's; his temptation was to study the progress of Marbrye Sanger, coming up from under the fuselage behind Quantrill.

CHAPTER 31

The first thing Sanger did after dropping from Howell's craft was to stand motionless, hidden by the second Loring while Howell passed over it again. Then she moved to the fuselage, put one foot into a maintenance toehold, and grasped an air intake duct so that she could peer over the craft, to study Quantrill's desperate ploy with only two handfuls of broken concrete.

Sanger grinned as she exchanged the chiller's explosive rounds for a magazine of ball ammo. They wanted the man alive and, with a target as quick as Quantrill, you couldn't depend on the exact placement of a round. That was one rationale, anyway…

"Howell's lost control," she murmured through her critic. "Subject is going mano-a-mano with Cross."

Pause. "But Howell told me to stay behind this chopper and wait for an opening. You countermanding?"

Another pause. "I concur with Howell. Why not patch me into his headset? I can't tell what the hell is going on." She nodded to herself as she heard Howell's voice in her head.

After a few moments she could report Quantrill's stolid progress as he moved backward toward her with Howell in careful pursuit. "For God's sake don't risk hitting me, Howell," she muttered, and dropped silently to the concrete. On all-fours she could see Quantrill half-dragging Cross, whose struggles were weak, and she moved as if unaware that she was lining up with quarry and stalker. She refused to think about the likelihood that Howell might shoot anyway.

Crabwise, Sanger passed under the fuselage, then stood directly behind the panting Quantrill. She waited until he stopped, hardly more than arm's length away. She could have hacked at the juncture of his neck and shoulder with the barrel of her chiller, but Howell muttered into his headset, "He's got to let go of that fucking garrote wire."

She waited.

"Don't get your hopes up," Quantrill called. "The loop is still in place." With that, he let his right hand drop the signet, still holding the wounded Cross as a shield, and reached back to feel for the starboard hatch release. Instead he felt a chiller's muzzle in his right armpit, an arm against his left elbow. Her position violated Sanger's training but under the circumstances she had no choice.

"I can't miss, Quantrill," she said as he froze. "Think very carefully before you jerk that wire." Then, as he slowly swiveled his head, she pressed the chiller flat against his ribcage, loosening her grip, her unseen fingers splayed apart so that he could feel them. "Very carefully," she said again.

"I have him, Control." Thirty meters away, Seth Howell stood in an approved crouch, both hands steadying his weapon.

Quantrill thought about it until Howell took that first step nearer. Then his backward-extended right arm swept down an infinitesimal instant before his knees flexed to drive him backward against Sanger. He dipped, still holding onto Cross, rammed his free elbow lightly into Sanger's midriff, her sidearm clattering to the concrete. She rebounded from the Loring's fuselage, clutching her belly, and fell to her knees.

Howell resolved his dilemma when he saw the chiller drop; began to lope intending to pistol-whip Quantrill. The doughty Howell had not believed it possible that a garrote wire could slice lightly, be unlooped, then re-employed around a second hostage in the time it took for him to run twenty paces. In that brief instant, Howell became a believer.

Quantrill squatted beneath the Loring and behind Sanger, his garrote loop against her elegant throat.

Marty Cross sat before them, right arm useless, and stared at the blood that dripped from his clutching left hand to pool between his legs.

"We can all stand here ‘till he bleeds out," Quantrill called, "or you can try me again and lose this bitch, too. Or you can drop the chiller and go back to your parking problem."

Howell glanced at his sidearm. "No way." But he began walking backward, pausing to shout, "Marty!

Can you breathe? Can you hold?"

Even while holding the edges of his throat together, Jose Marti Cross refused to shame his Cheyenne mother. But when he nodded his head, his entire upper torso nodded too.

"Yes, the motherfucker has Sanger now," Howell raged into his headset as he loped away, reseating his chiller. "All right, we all underestimated him! Who is this? Salter? Get a meat wagon out here on the triple for Cross. What? She didn't have a chance, you gotta see this sonofawhore to believe him. He's hauling her into that chopper and he can't fly it — I don't think. Control, do you have any kind of video on us? I'm getting tired of being your eyes…"

Quantrill pocketed Sanger's weapon using the garrote one-handed as a leash, then rolled carefully into the side hatch. Sanger needed no encouragement to follow with the loop around her neck. In seconds they were lost from view, re-emerging in the cockpit. For a man who didn't know how to fly a sprint chopper, Howell admitted into his headset, the little shit was doing a lot of things right — and one-handed at that.

The turbines were still warm, tanks nearly full; in another twenty seconds the props were skating the craft away while Cross went into a bloody fetal crouch. In the distance a crash crew sped toward the injured man. Howell: "He's getting it up, Control. Better pull his plug now; Sanger's as good as dead if he crashes!"

He heard the response in his headset, cursed, drew his chiller, and fired his entire magazine toward the rapidly dwindling aircraft in the futile hope of damaging it. Howell was beginning to think Lon Salter needed that little turncoat alive for interrogation more than he needed Cross and Sanger. Behind him, two of the parked sprint choppers were whistling to life. But both were dead cold — and Ted Quantrill's vehicle was already disappearing to the East. If he was smart, he'd keep low over urban areas as long as possible. It gave Control one more reason not to pull his plug until they'd played the other options out.

CHAPTER 32

"So you'll have to check out the Schreiner ranch for me," Mills said. "Do some of your patent screened interviews on old-timers. Take a look at their books; you're good at that, Eve. I wouldn't put it past Blanton Young to steer us into an operation that spends more than it makes on food for giraffes and other exotic animals. If it looks good to you, I'll go down later and take a second look."

Eve Simpson gnawed her upper lip, studying Mills carefully, nodding only to purchase a few seconds for evaluation. When he came to her office, it was always to study some new media magic — or when he was too agitated to wait for her motorized chaise. Did he have some ulterior motive? For instance, sending her out to a goddam dude ranch to ensure her absence from her own office on some specified day? Well, she could cut those odds. "I'll have to judge my schedule and let you know when," she said agreeably. If he demanded some rigid schedule of his own, she would elevate her suspicions another notch.

But: "No big hurry. In fact, first we've got to let a gaggle of earth scientists scratch around nearby and decide whether to discover oil or a gravel mine," he sighed. "I'd say no less than two weeks nor over a month." Impeccable in summer tans, Boren Mills strode near the great window of Eve's office. It was nearer the street than his own office and gave a more detailed view. Rocking on his heels, stroking his chin: "I'd go myself if I could afford to leave while Chabrier's juggling his priorities on me. Some things require face-to-face negotiating right here."

"With IEE's board, or with the Lion of Zion?"

"Both, maybe. I talk to Young nearly every day just to make sure he's still," — a finger circling like a drill at his temple—"among us. Today he's all excited about his S & R people."

"Who've they assassinated now," she said, yawning.

"Nailed one of their own rovers," Mills said, amused. "Young wants to be at the control center when — good God!"

During his previous few words, a faint whistle had become a bellow outside. He threw his hands up, ducked and whirled away from the window as the source of the noise thundered past. Eve saw the huge window bow inward, crazing the faint reflection of Mills before it reflexed, returned to normal. Even with the insulation in the IEE tower they were momentarily deafened by the catastrophic roar as a sleek black something missed the tower by scant meters.

"God almighty, what was that?" Mills was erect again, hands pressed against the window, straining to see while the thundering wail was still audible.

"I don't know, but it was below this floor," Eve said in awe.

Then, "I see it," he said, and chuckled shakily. "Must be a victory pass or something. It's an S & R sprint chopper, going like a tracer bullet!"