Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D VIIs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.
The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply—and stalled, too low to pull out in time.
A stack of silver dimes was scooped up.
The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.
“Way to go, Tiny!” The kickers closed in around the table.
Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.
FRANK’S TRUCK STOP was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank’s, there was nobody to doubt that he’d come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn’t tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS & FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the magnet—which the cops in D.C. hadn’t even bothered to confiscate—across the universal security strip.
On the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.
HE CHOSE A highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he’d used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.
The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the wafer pack.
There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of saline paste, and a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS & FOKKERS, FOKKERS & SPADS. Red or blue. He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.
He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep. He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no up and down, and never a green field to crash into.
HE WOKE TO a rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who’d like to score a programming unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE’S A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the “space colony” that had been under construction since before he was born. LET’S GO, the poster said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.
He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girlface. “Yeah?”
“You’re going to think this is stolen.” He passed the programmer from hand to hand. “I mean because it’s new, virtual cherry, and the bar code’s still on it. But listen, I’m not gonna argue the point. No. I’m gonna let you have it for only like half what you’d pay anywhere else.”
“Hey, wow, really, no kidding?” The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. “Lookahere!”
There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small red lights. Rat’s eyes. They scurried toward him—growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped for his face.
He screamed, throwing hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattering under him.
Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt—it hurt very badly indeed.
“Oh, my God!” Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. “Here, listen, come on.” She dangled a blue hand towel. “Grab on to this and I’ll pull you up.”
He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle (fuzzed, he saw, with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. “That sucker was gonna be my dinner,” he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.
She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. “Let me make it up to you,” she said. “You want some food? It was only a projection, okay?”
He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap.
“HOLY SHIT,” DEKE said, “this is real cheese. . . .” He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle-deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up—Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers—was straight out of the Arabian Nights.
“Hey,” she said. “We know how to treat a prole boy right, huh?” Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs—greedy buggers—and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English. “I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?”
He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn’t see it, really; it was just a swell in the ground cover. “It’s not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.”
“Like what?” She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.
“Well . . . did you ever see the—” his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words—“Washington Monument? Like at night? It’s got these two little . . . red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I . . .” He started to shake.