"I'm not a , crusader, ZeeZee. " Carl was feeling harried. He had expected gratitude from his friends, not demands.
"We're not asking you to quell our riots for us," Zeke clarified. "But with your imp card, you could defuse the riots at their source. You could fill in the economic gaps that have frustrated millions."
"Yeah, and I'll probably wind up destabilizing the whole world market," Carl added.
"Don't play God, Carl," Caitlin warned. "You're right to know that no good can come of that."
"Let the scientists see your lance and your card, Sheelagh suggested. "They could learn about stuff they never thought existed."
"Nah," Zeke objected. ":Too many cooks and we'll lose our soup. We have to work secretly."
"Satan works in secrecy," Caitlin admonished.
Carl got up and went to the window to stare across at the riverlit cliffs: His friends continued their debate behind his back.
Their voices sloshed around him abstractly, for he was listening to them the way a Foke would, hearing English voices as boiling sounds, meaningless. Outdoors, the burning zero of the sun hung over the boxes where people lived in this world. The narrowness of those boxes and the sharp heat from the blinding pan of light in the sky choked him with strangeness.
He wanted to go home.
The Decomposition
Notebook
A great battle raged against the twilight. Above a stand of palms, the bluebright strokes of tracer bullets lanced the darkness, sparking from the hulks of two hovering Hueys. A 2.5 rocket streaked from one of the helicopters and exploded in the bamboo.
The red flash eeried the landscape, revealing the long body of a river.
By the fireflash, the enemy could be seen splashing through the milky water, driving a herd of water buffalo before them. The cattle bellowed with terror as the 20mm fire from the helicopters pounded into them. White phosphorus grenades glared with hurting brilliance among the advancing buffalo, and instantly the battle was cut into diamond clarity.
PFC Zeke Zhdarnov hunched deeper into the slick mud beneath the riverbank's root-tangle. The M-16 he clutched wobbled with his fear as he witnessed the immensity of the assault. Beyond the onrush of the
black herd, a battalion of NVA crowded the streambed. Dozens of them were climbing the glacis, scrambling up the side of the hills, clutching their SKS carbines with bayonets fixed. Zeke turned a frantic glance to the RTO sitting above him in the root-tangle.
'They're outflanking us! Let's get out of here."
But the radio operator sat unmoving.
Zeke twisted about on the mudbank and, pulled himself upward by the loops of vine and root. The PRC-25 on the operator's back was smashed, and by the echolight of the phosphorus, he saw death in the man's face. From somewhere above, a familiar voice was shouting: "Get the cows!"
Two bullets sucked past Zeke's head and made the RTO's body jump with their impact.
"Medic! Medic!"-the cries arose out of the dark, and Zeke lurched over the rootweave toward them. -The air was blue with bullets. Buffalo cried, and men screamed. The roar of the choppers narrowed closer.
Zeke bellycrawled into a foxhole. "RT's dead and there's a whole battalion coming down the river," he chattered to the field officer there.
"Get hold, soldier," the sergeant barked into his face, seizing Zeke's trembling shoulders. "The choppers will break the assault."
He spun Zeke about: "Now get up and fire."
The rattle of a .50 machine gun sluiced from close by but Zeke forced himself into a standing position and opened up with his M-16, firing into the blackness of the river.
At the far end of the stream, sunset illuminated the water with blood colors. Earlier that day, Zeke had helped to shovel a ton of rice from a captured VC cache into the river. Now, that rice had swollen and dammed the waterflow. In the glare of mortars, he could see the corpses of cows and soldiers bobbing in the swollen stream. Fifty black-clad figures were rushing along the bank where the command post had been.
"CF's down!" Zeke cried to the sergeant behind him.
"Charlie's all over it."
"1 know that, son. We're alone up here."
"Christi" The word was brittle with the shakes from his ,gun. The enemy were mounting the rootweave where he had just been. In moments, he would be overrun.
Then, the sky shook. Both Hueys made a run over the bamboo, the M-79 grenade launchers in their noses blasting a hundred rounds into the mudbanks.
"Sergeant let's go!" Zeke bawled against the thunder of the explosions.
The sergeant shook his head. "They'll chew us up in the bambool Stay low. Wait for the choppers."
Zeke fired a stream of bullets into the nightshadows before his rifle clip was empty. His cartridge belt was also exhausted, and he unholstered his .38 revolver.
The night curdled bright and hot, and the men looked up to see that one of the Hueys had been hit by a rocket. Its tail burst into an orange fireball, and the body of the ship careened wildly into the, dark bamboo field. A wall of flame erupted, and its ghastly glow silhouetted the advancing enemy.
The second Huey pulled upward, veered away, and barreled into the night.
The sergeant cursed. "We're on our own, soldier.
Scramble." He heaved out of the foxhole, and Zeke hustled right behind him. Bullets buzzed in the air. They dashed ten feet, and a volley splattered the sergeant's head into gravel.
Zeke dropped to his belly and writhed hard and fast toward the tall grass, the earth kicking up all around him.
When he rolled into a cane brake, he wiped the sergeant's blood off his face. Terror made his
breathing ache. He was going to die. He thought of Eleanor, the woman he had left behind in New York. Her gray eyes watched him sadly. NVA shadows flickered over the foxhole he had deserted and loomed closer.
Zeke convulsed awake. He trembled with the cold current of the nightmare and stared about the dark room for something familiar. He saw the light-flaked skyline of Manhattan, and he remembered that this was the apartment Carl had purchased on the Upper West Side. Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the colorless hulks of furniture and the smeared light from the windows facing the Hudson.
He sat up and rubbed the tension out of his face. The war nightmares had begun after Carl had gotten him out of the asylum. Carl said they were Zeke's memories from his duty tour of Southeast Asia on war-hunted earth-one. Zeke had shaved his beard and clipped back his long white hair to the close lines of a Marine cut, hoping to ground those night terrors in the peaceful earthtwo of his awake world.
Zeke's personal memories of Vietnam were serene. He, like most able-bodied world citizens, had served with the COW, the Corps of Workers that had begun upgrading global living conditions seventy years before and was going strong under World Union leadership. He had been stationed in Jakarta and had been transferred to the Mekong Delta to help with flood relief during the monsoons. He recalled a land of mosquitoes, stone lanterns, and an industrious, sylvan-thin people. They had appreciated his help, and they had shared their traditions with him. So why did he dream of spraying liquid fire on them and counting their charred bodies?
Carl had tried to explain earth-one to him-a war-world fragmented by battlelines called borders, a world of fantastic death machines and immense plunder where corporations amassed billions of dollars in profits by exploiting undeveloped nations and natural resources while in less organized regions millions of people starved to death continually. Carl had tried to explain capitalist economy and the motivations of self-interest as well as the tyrannical failure of socialist societies, but that made little sense to Zeke's earthtwo mind. Economy to him and in his world was based on human interest, not personal or social interest. Capitalism and communism were both wrong.