"Dad says you're still researching suicide."
Charlie nodded.
His mother looked slightly resigned. "It has a kind of horrible fascination, I'll admit," she said. "Especially when life seems good, and it's difficult to understand how anyone could want to end it."
"Yeah," Charlie said, thinking of the six sets of images in his workspace, people he was not convinced had unanimously intended to end anything. "What's your schedule like today?"
His mother raised her eyebrows at him, plainly noticing the change of subject, but declining for the moment to comment. "The usual day shift, barring emergencies." She looked slightly relieved. "Though you know how it is trying to predict those. You?"
"School as usual," Charlie said. "Nothing exciting."
"Sounds wonderful," his mom said, finishing her coffee. "Look, Dad picked up some ribs last night, I was thinking of doing that thing with the hot sauce again for dinner."
"Yes, please!"
She grinned at him, rinsing out the coffee cup and leaving it to drain, then picking up her work-satchel from where it sat on one of the kitchen chairs. "Okay. Dinner around six, then. See you later, sweetie… "
School went uneventfully. Charlie had left a message with Nick's mom that he wanted to get together with him for lunch, but at lunchtime Nick was nowhere to be found. The most highly developed communications systern in history, Charlie thought ruefully as the afternoon went by, and we're still playing Net Tag with each other. Oh, well… I could always drop by his place. It's not that much out of my way home…
He finished his afternoon bio class and headed home after hanging around a little while to see if Nick surfaced. There was no sign of him, so Charlie strolled in an absentminded way through the sweet spring-afternoon, considering neurotransmitter chemistry and the prospect of his mom's hot and spicy ribs. There had been some discussion a week or so ago into exactly why the capsiacin molecule was able to fool mouth tissue into thinking it was injured, and trigger the release of endorphins. Charlie's bio teacher had suggested that there might be some fake neurotransmitter "key" involved. Doesn't sound genuine to me, Charlie thought. If it were, there would be a-
The sound of a car slowing down close to him when all the rest of the traffic was doing forty or better made Charlie turn his head. A big car had slid up beside him, and just as his head was turning its door popped open and someone lunged out, reached out toward him-
It was only the reflexes of the nascent street kid Charlie had once been that now saved him, the thing that even these days sometimes made it hard for him to hold still and let his mom hug him. Don't let them touch you! Touch is control-
He twisted away and plunged off down Morrison Street, away from the car. Charlie heard the whine of the sonic going off behind him, someone actually trying to stun him into collapse-but he was just out of range, and his legs were moving faster than his brain for once. They remembered fear more clearly and immediately than he did, and while the intellectual constituent of the fear was still working its way down from his brain to his adrenals Charlie was already running, running as if the Devil himself was after him, down the street, turn the corner, down the side alley that served that block of Morrison, turn another corner in the opposite direction, run, run He barely felt the concrete beneath his feet, he was running so hard, and though his body was panting with terror and exertion already, Charlie's brain was running ahead of him, planning his escape.
It's a one-way street. They can't get down here easily. And I know this area-
He ran. His lungs started burning, and he ignored them. I thought they were in a hurry. I was right. Too right. Charlie gulped for air as he ran. If they're ready to try a snatch in broad daylight, they're really serious. Got to get online right away. Got to get help. The cops-or better still, Net Force For the cops didn't know him. Net Force did. He needed Mark Gridley, or James Winters, just as fast as he could get to one or the other of them.
Is it the killer himself Charlie thought, or an accomplice? Does it matter? They're right behind me-For he could hear an engine, getting closer. He didn't bother looking behind him. He turned immediately right and plunged across a brownstone's front yard, down the driveway beside it, heading into its paved backyard. There was a Dumpster up against the brick back wall. Charlie blessed its name and that of District Recycling Company, whoever they were. He went up onto the top of it in a rush and from there jumped up to grab the top of the wall, having already seen as he was going up that there was no broken glass embedded in it. Charlie went over the wall into the yard of the brownstone on the other side, paused for just a second to take it in-blind dirty windows, all with security shutters or shades down, another Dumpster, a couple of parked cars- I know where I am, he thought as he plunged out of the yard, into the brownstone's driveway and down to the wall in front of the building and the driveway's open gate. He looked up and down the street. I can't let them catch me out here, where they have the advantage-size, weapons, mobility. If there's going to be a chase, let it be where I have a chance. Not out here!
He ran like a sprinter, terrified that as he got to the corner he would see that car in front of him. Dark blue, a glossy new Dodge sedan of some kind, one of those big ones, they keep changing the names, recent model, Virginia plates- But it didn't materialize. Some kindly fate gave him the few seconds he needed to fly in the door of the WorldGate public Net-access place on the corner. He stood there panting at the front desk, and the guy who manned it straightened up from taking something out of the shelves behind the desk, looked Charlie up and down with an expression of complete boredom, and said, "Yeah?"
"I need a booth!" Charlie said.
The behind-the-counter guy looked at him with a total lack of urgency. "Cash or credit?"
Charlie fumbled in his pocket and came up with, to his shock, not one of the family commcards, but something he had grabbed off the hall table that morning on his way to school, thinking that he might as well use up a little of whatever comm time was on it: a public access commcard. Gulping, Charlie slapped it down on the reading plate on the counter. The guy behind the counter read what the plate and the commcard had to say to each other, and pushed Charlie's card back toward him. "Only got fifty-five minutes on that," he said.
Charlie swallowed. "Which booth?" he said.
"Six-"
He ran down the hallway between the booths, found Six, slid the curved booth door shut behind him, then palmsealed it locked. There he stood for a moment, breathing hard, and then flung himself into the implant chair which was the room's only furnishing. He leaned back, sweating, lined his implant up with the chair's pickup, closed his eyes-
Charlie opened them again on whiteness, and jumped up out of the chair. He was standing on an infinite white plane with a featureless blue "sky" above it, empty of everything except a voice that said, "Welcome to a WorldGate public Net-access facility. Instructions, please?"
The terrible thing about it all was that the one place where Charlie would have felt safe and at least slightly in control, his own workspace, was the one place he couldn't now go. There was a better than even chance that it had been tampered with somehow, that his accessing it would trigger some tracing facility that would betray his presence here. And that door would only be closed for fifty-five minutes. Charlie had almost no cash on him to buy more time. After that he would have to go out the door, and if they had been able to track him down, one way or another, the people hunting him would be waiting there with some plausible story-
Then it was all too plain what would happen to him, what had happened to the others. If not today, then some other time real soon, at an unguarded moment, he would be snatched. Someone would stuff him full of scorbutal cohydrobromate, either with a FasJect or even just out of a spray can, the aerosol method. And when the drug took, in a matter of a few minutes, when he could not resist, Charlie would be spirited away into some private spot, a hotel room, say, and his "suicide" would be set up. Possibly even with his own cooperation, but in any case, he certainly wouldn't be in any condition to resist. And even bearing in mind what Mom said… in this case, the odds are better than fifty-fifty that they can make you do something you wouldn't normally do. Think of what Nick said about Jeannine and Malcolm…