Worlds

21. Behind the Scenes

After the others had left, the blind man sat alone, reading. A door opened silently and Will stepped in. “Interesting?”

“Except for the diagrams.”

“Not the book, those two new ones.”

“Ah. Yes, they were interesting. I think we’d better keep a tag on Benny for a while.”

“No problem. How about O’Hara?”

“I’m bothered by her necessary lack of commitment. We’d better keep her well insulated from the expediting level. Benny, too, until she leaves.”

“True. Want to go upstairs?”

He got up. “No harm in being early.”

When the elevator came, Will inserted a key and pushed the button marked “Penthouse.”

“MacGregor thing set up?”

Will nodded. “Tonight, if everything goes smoothly.”

They stepped out into the penthouse suite. There were five people sitting around a long table. Four of them were cleaning weapons. They saluted, right fist striking chest, and the two men returned the salute.

Katherine looked expectantly at Will. He nodded. “Tonight.” She finished assembling the palm-sized oneshot laser, put it in her purse, and left.

Will walked along the wall, running his fingers down the stocks of the dozens of long guns racked there: lasers as well as gunpowder and CO2 weapons. At the end of the rack, he picked up a practice rifle and aimed it at the man-shaped target across the room. The target had light-sensing devices at head and heart Will squeezed off five shots in rapid succession; a bell rang five times.

James smiled, took a long-barreled sniper’s rifle off the rack, and sat down to disassemble it He was the best marksman in the room.

(The next morning’s papers would report that Senator William MacGregor had died in his sleep, of a cerebral hemorrhage. They wouldn’t mention that he wasn’t sleeping alone, or that the hemorrhage was caused by a point-blank laser blast to the base of the skull, or that there was a printed manifesto pinned to the blood-soaked pillow.)