"The system worked perfectly," Lizard said. "We were able to track whole divisions of the enemy by nothing more than routine queries of the field weapons in the hands of the infantry. It was a flawless demonstration." She looked positively cheerful as she recounted. "The problem was, we couldn't use the intelligence without the risk of exposing the whole game. So we never released any of that intelligence except when we had confirmation from an additional source, say a satellite photo. And most of our spy satellites were being knocked down as fast as we were putting them up. So we couldn't use that intelligence. It was too big a secret," Lizard said. "We had to save it for a war that directly endangered the existence of the United States. It was that powerful a strategic advantage."
"Um," I said. Then, "You said it isn't a secret any more. What happened?"
"Oh, about three months ago, some of our Fourth World allies tried to land some divisions in the Gulf of Mexico. Near Houston. They called it an army of Economic Liberation."
"Huh? I never heard about it."
"Not too many people did. A very funny thing happened. Their rifles blew up. Their boats sank. Their planes came apart in the air. Their missiles exploded. Their tanks melted. Their communications failed. There weren't too many survivors."
"Huh?"
"That was the rest of the secret. If you can program a chip to identify itself when it receives a specific signal, you can also program it to destroy itself when it receives another specific signal. We've had the ability for twenty years to disarm or disable at least a third of-the world's military equipment-any individual weapon or any category of weapon, worldwide or limited to a specific area.
"We didn't dare use the system offensively before, because we couldn't risk damaging our national reputation for zero-defect weaponry. We didn't dare risk our intelligence advantage either. But this was the first time that foreign troops were landing on our shores, and that was what the system had been designed for. It worked perfectly." She looked as proud as if she'd designed it herself. I wondered just how important she really was. Was her rank of colonel just another cover? I didn't know what to believe about the United States government any more. Nothing in it was ever really what it was supposed to be.
"So my van . . . ?"
"Right. I had your code all along. We could have blown you up any time."
I said, "Oh, shit."
She said, "Uh-huh."
I said suddenly, "Why didn't you?"
"We were giving you a chance to surrender peacefully."
"You knew it was me?"
"Oh, no; you could have been any jackass. I was going to pick you up for questioning and find out why human beings were delivering weapons to the worms. When I saw it was you, I hit you with the wake-up hypo instead of the sleepytime one."
"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!"