“I’d like to call this whole thing off right now,” Barbeau stated. “I made a mistake, Steve—back at the Philly airport. I’m sorry for that and I want to apologize. I don’t want to kill you now. Listen to me. You can see that I wouldn’t want such a thing any more. I had no idea how much you’d—changed.”
Ha! Good to have him sweating it now. He’d never have chosen a place like this for our confrontation had he realized what I could do with the machines. And I had just taken away his helicopter so that he couldn’t flee easily. I’d bet he’d like to have me back on his side.
“…Surely you can see that I want you alive now,” he continued. “It would be impossible for me to want you otherwise, under the present circumstances. Especially now that Ann’s been lost to us. You’ve got a really good future waiting for you with Angra…”
I coiled into his computer again—a rush of colored lights—and I refrained from using the CRT display on which he was seeking me on grid after grid—apparently as yet unaware that I had knocked out his sonar eye—for purposes of transmitting an overprinted obscenity I had strongly in mind. Instead, I sought after any building that was heavily monitored. There was such a place, and I plunged into its systems.
CORA. She had entered her name into the local unit through which she must communicate with her captors. Of course, it was enough. She must know something about my abilities now, doubtless a result of many questions she had been asked. I wondered what her mind now held concerning me. It came to me as a real shock then, how much I must have changed during the past few days. For me it was simply remembering, but—I realized that I was no longer the man she had known down in the Keys. He had been something of a vegetable so far as I was now concerned, but a fraction of myself. I was smarter and tougher and—probably somewhat nastier. Would she still care about me if she knew what I was really like? It mattered, quite a bit, for I realized that, if anything, I cared even more for her now.
Tentatively, with something like fear, I took over control of the home unit with the tv screen which seemed there to entertain her and through which she was watched. The overprint trick I had almost used to swear at Barbeau served me then.
CORA. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? DON, I caused it to display.
It was almost a minute before she noticed it, during which time I was subjected to more of Barbeau’s pleas that I listen to reason, that I rejoin the team…
When she spotted my message she activated the keyboard through which she controlled the environment of her prison, requested special programming, communicated with her captors…
YES, she typed. WHERE ARE YOU?
SOMEWHERE NEAR, I THINK. WHERE ARE YOU?
She typed:
TEST RANGE. SOLAR-POWER LASER PERIMETER DEFENSE. LOTS OF SLAG HEAPS.
HANG IN THERE, I answered. I MAY BE A WHILE. AUFWIEDERSEHEN.
I checked through the main computer’s catalog of ongoing projects, learning what some of those bizarre structures in the distance were.
“…At a substantial pay increase,” Barbeau was saying.
“Where’s Cora? I want to talk to Cora!” I called out, for I had checked and I knew that the PA system worked both ways.
I knew that I was giving away my position for the moment, but at this point it didn’t matter to me. I wanted his reaction.
“Steve!” came the reply. “She’s here. She’s all right. In fact, she’s really frightened at what you might be going to do.”
“Let me talk to her then.” I had to ask that I didn’t want him guessing that I’d already been in touch with her.
“In time, in good time,” he said. “But first—”
“I’ll wait,” I said, and I took off running.
I had been able to check while he was talking, and I knew now where the solar-powered laser perimeter defense test area was located. I also had a picture of what the thing was: It was a military research project, where laser power packs were charged by the sun. Apparently, the accumulated energy could be released like a lightning bolt. Details. Deal with that later…
I ran toward that no man’s land with the strange structures. She was back there in a furnished observer’s hut in the test range area. Dirt roads with names like St. James Place, Park Place, Baltic Avenue and Boardwalk twisted through the lunar landscape over gray and white, limestone and fossil soil, where the tough, enduring vegetation looked three-quarters dead in the dry heat. There was wealth here—oil under the earth, and potash—and there was stored nuclear waste buried in ancient salt beds not far away, I remembered. I recalled the irony in what seemed the company’s namesake, which I had once looked up—Angra Mainyu, in Persian mythology, was in the final analysis an anti-sun deity, a corrupter of that which he touched, the destroyer of the tree of life. When I pointed this out to Barbeau, he just laughed and said no, it stood for Allied Naturally Generated Radiation Assets and one shouldn’t waste time looking for paradoxes and subtleties where simple answers suffice.
The sun beat down fiercely as I passed among experimental solar-electrical pilot plants of various kinds. There were vats and towers and pyramids and banks of slanted sheets. There were structures with slowly turning paddles, emulating leaves I supposed. Some of them I’d never even heard of. And out farther—“near the slag heaps”—was Cora’s prison.
“…We’re going to have to come to terms, Steve,” Barbeau’s voice said, from a dusky Christmas tree of a structure off to my left. “We need each other…”
I turned at the corner of Mediterranean and Ventnor Avenues. I met her under a solar mirror. She was wearing a long black robe with a golden dragon on the breast.
“Ann!”
“I have found strength,” she said, a little less flatly than on recent occasions. “They are coming for you now—the three men from the other house. One of them, their point man, is very near.” She turned her head and I followed her gaze toward a low building bristling with antennae over on Marvin Gardens. “Do you know what ‘kinetic-triggering’ means…?”
I saw nothing in that direction and when I turned back again Ann was gone.
I took off toward that crouched porcupine of a structure, all of my senses alert. I thought that I knew what she meant. I’d read about research on a computerized laser hand weapon. It could be set to fire automatically at fast-moving objects. It was said that it could even be set to shoot down in flight an ordinary bullet aimed at its holder. The thing could also be used in conjunction with a helmet-headband, adjusted to fire at the point where its operator fixed his gaze. All of which meant that I was a dead man as soon as a line of sight opened between us…
So… I coiled, seeking that electronic viper-brain somewhere ahead.
Tzzz…
… It was moving slowly, stage right, along the far side of the porcupine. But no computer, no laser beam performing its deadly dance. I turned it off and held it that way. I kept running.
When the man stepped into view, I saw that he was holding what looked like an oversized harmonica in a vertical position in his right hand. He wore a metal headband about his dark locks, and there was some sort of lead running from it to a power pack on his belt, another from that unit to the thing in his hand.
After several moments his face fell and he began to shake the weapon. He slapped at the power pack.
He tried to use the thing as a club when I closed with him. I parried the blow and caught him on the temple with one knuckle, hard. He fell.
I stripped off his weapon gear and donned it myself. I reactivated the little computer as I took hold of the grip at the rear of the harmonica. Then I moved to the side of the porcupine and was about to seek the other two units.
The thing vibrated almost imperceptibly in my hand and I heard a cry.