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."
57
The Colorado Infestation
"Bad luck is universal. Don't take it personally."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Lizard reached overhead and unlocked a red cover marked CAMERA. There were three bars in the panel. She pressed the first one, and something in the belly of the chopper went rrrrr-THUNK! It sounded heavy.
Lizard pointed to the second bar. "See that? When I tell you to, hit that button."
"Right. Anything else you want me to do?"
"Enjoy the ride. I should warn you though, it's going to be a little bumpy."
"What is all this anyway?" I gestured to indicate the chopper controls and included some of the equipment stashed in the back. "I don't recognize half of this."
"Okay," she said, "that first cabinet is an industrial memory. We've got four high-speed, high-res stereo cameras hanging from the belly of this ship. We've got enough memory there to store about five minutes of input. We're shooting five times normal speed, so that uses up bytes in a hurry."
"Oh, "
"Those two big tanks-those'll release a spray of hot metal shavings to confuse any tracking devices on the ground or in the air. Actually, it's mostly a decoy, because we'll be detonating everything that's carrying a U.S. chip. We're putting out an angled beam. Only those weapons in an arc directly behind and beneath us will go off. That way, any observers will assume it's the result of some direct-action weaponry we're carrying.
"Those other two tanks are carrying bug spray. It's a pretty potent mix, with a six-day half-life. We still don't know what kind of vectors it'll produce though, so we're limiting its use to heavy infestations like the one we're about to hit.
"Hanging under the wings and belly, I've got thirty-four cluster missiles. Incendiary warheads. They'll come apart in midair and scatter every which way. Have you ever seen a Madball-VI in operation? No? Well, you will. Those things bounce and skitter like water on a hot griddle, leaving fires everywhere they touch. We're carrying five thousand of them."
"Sounds like the army isn't missing a trick."
"You haven't heard it all. That radar chaff we're dropping-it includes all kinds of things that will make this area unpleasant for days. There are these little nerve-gas tipped burrs which will kill anything that steps on them. No matter how they fall, there's always a point sticking up. Really cute. The bug spray-that's laced with isotopes. If the spray doesn't stop 'em, we'll know by the isotope concentrations in any worms we kill later on which sprays didn't work. Oh, yeah; we're also spraying napalm." She pointed at a locked switch on her board. "That's the master fire control. We hit that and it starts the whole party. It knows when to fire or release every single piece of ordinance this ship is carrying. The whole job will take less than thirty seconds. We fly directly across the worm camp only once and we leave a swath of destruction a kilometer wide. At least."
"That wide? You'll take out the whole encampment."
"Hmp," she said. "You think so?"
A warning chime went off, and the computer said quietly, "Three minutes to target."
She looked at me. "Strap yourself in, Jim."
I fumbled with the harness, adjusted it, and clipped it shut across my chest. Lizard was looking at me oddly.
"Is something wrong?"
"I'm wondering if I can trust you."
"Huh?"
"The thought has crossed my mind that you might actually have turned renegade."
"I haven't," I said.
"I can take your word for that, huh?"
"I thought you said you knew what happened at Family."
"Right. Sorry." She turned back to her controls. "Force of habit. I don't trust anything anymore."
She didn't say anything after that. Neither did I. I stared out the windshield at the ground rolling beneath us. Almost all the greenery had been replaced by dark patches of purple and occasional blossoms of red. Here and there were clusters of pink fuzzy things. They looked like balls of cotton candy.
Family was coming back to me again, flooding in like a firestorm. Whatever that pink stuff had been, it was wearing off. The walls were disintegrating fast.
Or maybe I was deciding that it was all right to hurt again. That wauld be nice.
Because maybe it meant that I wanted to trust Lizard.
I looked over at her. She was just letting go of her controls. They continued moving without her, as if they had a mind of their own. The autopilot was running this mission. She reached past the regular controls and unslung a pair of extra joysticks-auxiliary weapon controls. She would be adding her input to the targeting computer, picking out targets she especially wanted to hit.