"I could have blown you up! I had my finger on the button! I had antiaircraft missiles!"
"But you didn't fire, did you?"
"No. I didn't know who you were, but I knew you didn't miss by accident. You could have hit me if you'd wanted to. So I knew those had to be warning shots. You wanted me to stop. My daddy used to say, never argue with a loaded gun. Of course, he was talking about the realities he used to write-there's always a better solution-but the same principle applies in the real world. At least, I hope it does."
"It does. Your daddy was real smart. It's a good thing you listened to him. If you had returned fire, using any weapon system in that van, you'd have blown yourself up. I'd already sent a coded signal from a hundred kilometers away. You were the trigger. The self-destruct was armed and waiting. Whether you returned fire or not determined if it went off. I've seen three vans blow up that way. I have to admit, I expected to see yours go off too."
I remembered just how close I'd come to pushing that button. I'd been terrified of that chopper when it buzzed me. For half a second, I'd considered hitting the button and sending a Sidewinder-6 up her tail.
What I'd told Lizard hadn't been entirely accurate. I hadn't held my fire because of any rational assessment of the situation. There hadn't been time to stop and realize that she'd missed deliberately. I'd held my fire because . . . I'd held my fire. I looked at the memory and all I could see was myself holding back and saying, "No!" I didn't know why I'd held back at all.
I wondered for a moment if it was that I just didn't have the nerve. Had I been that rattled? Or that scared?
No, that wasn't it either.
I could still see the van exploding in a ball of flame, the frame instantly buckling, breaking in half, walls blowing outward, pieces of metal tumbling upward and skittering sideways, hurled by the force of the blast. Then the blossom of flames exploded again as the armaments went off, and the pieces disappeared inside a larger, still-growing fireball-that could have been me!
I went back to the beginning of the memory: the chopper coming out of the sky behind us, strafing low over the van-me pulling myself into the turret, doing something with the controls, automatically, almost like a machine myself-my finger poised over the fire control-the explosion behind me!-the computer asking, "Shall I return fire?"-"No!". . . .
I held onto that moment and looked at that "No!" as hard as I could. That was it, there! Why had I shouted no?
I kept on looking at the moment, recreating it, replaying it over and over in my head, obsessively examining it. This was the answer that I needed, right here-inside this memory.
And suddenly it popped into focus. I knew why I hadn't fired. I grinned with the surprise of it.
"What's so funny?" Lizard asked.
"I am," I said. "Do you know what a jerk I am?"
"Yes," she said. "But you can tell me anyway."
"I've been running because I'd thought I'd fallen off the deep end. I'd thought I'd lost all perspective on human life."
"If you mean that little incident at Family," she said quietly, "I know all about it. No court in the country would convict you. You were very careful. Everything you did was legal." She glanced over at me. "Are you all right?"
"No," I said. There was a terrible buzzing in the space between my ears. "I don't want to talk about Family. It makes my head hurt. It makes my stomach hurt." The wall between me and my memories was starting to crumble. I was starting to feel the pain again. I ground the heels of my palms into my eyes, trying to rub the visions away.
She looked at me, curiously.
"I have this noise going on inside my head." I tried to explain. "It's all mixed up again. As long as I don't think about what happened at . . . as long as I talk about other things, I'm okay."
"You were telling me why you didn't pull the trigger on the chopper," she prompted.
"It's all part of the same thing." It was hard to say, and it was easy too. Once I got started, the words babbled out of me as if of their own volition. "I don't know who I am, Lizard. And I'm so afraid that I'm starting to turn into . . . something like somebody I used to know. That's why the incident at . . . That's why I-I drove out here to die, but I didn't want to die; but at the same time I couldn't think of anything else to do. I was so sure that I'd become someone who's lost all sense of the-the what?-the sacredness of human life.
"But-this is the good part. What I've just realized is that I didn't fire at the chopper because I couldn't. I mean, I wouldn't. I almost did. For a moment there, all I saw was the chopper, and I almost pressed the button-but I didn't. Somehow, I knew that you really didn't want a firefight. I just knew it. You didn't want to kill me. So you weren't my enemy. That's why I didn't fire. I didn't have to. That's what's so wonderful. If I had really turned into some kind of monster, I'd be dead now. I mean . ." I started giggling. "This is terrific! I feel a thousand years younger! Because I've found out that I'm not quite as bad as I was afraid I was. That's very important for me to know. Really!"
Lizard was smiling gently. She reached over and patted my knee. It seemed almost an affectionate gesture. "That's quite a thing to learn," she said. "For some of us- " She stopped herself in mid-sentence.
"No, go on!" I said.
She shook her head. "It's not important." Then she looked at me. "Just know this, Jim. You're not the only one who has to carry these questions around with him."
I thought about it. "No, I guess not. I guess I've been kind of stupid, haven't I? I thought it was just me."
Lizard sighed. For a moment, she sounded tired. "There's a whole operation at Denver aimed at keeping us sane. You can't make the decisions we have to make day after day after day and remain human. But somehow we have to-or we'll lose what we're fighting for. We're just beginning to get a sense of the size of that problem now, Jim. It's the biggest problem we've got. If anything's going to defeat us, it'll be our own failure to take responsibility for what's going on inside our heads."
"Um," I said.
"What's that about?" she asked.
"It's nothing."
"That was a very loud nothing."
"It's just that . . . taking responsibility for what's going on inside my head is how I got into this mess."
Lizard was studying her controls. I thought she hadn't heard me, but abruptly she said, "Well, think about this. How big a mess would it be if you hadn't taken responsibility?"
Yes. There was that.
We flew in silence for a while. There was something else, she'd said
In fact, she'd said it twice! "Wait a minute! You said, 'weapons to the worms.' "
"Uh-huh." She indicated the map on the screen, tapped one of the color squares on the bottom. "See those blue spots? Those are the locations of United States military equipment-inside known worm infestations."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Oh, we've had some scattered cases for over a year, but suddenly in the past two, three months, it's been exploding all over the map. As near as we can tell; there are renegade humans cooperating with the worms. It's as if somebody somehow made a treaty. We want to know how-and why. That's why we want to capture a renegade alive." She frowned. "Maybe next time."
I studied the map. There were too many blue spots speckling the red swatches. "Why don't you just blow up the weapons?" I asked.
"Oh, we will," she said. "You'll see in a few minutes." She pointed to the spot of light that indicated the chopper. It was very close to the target. "We're almost there."