Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (551 page)

“Bill?”

“Yeah, Bill. The fuckwit. Where is he?”

“ ’E’s away somewhere,” she said. “ ’E was in the loo for a while, then Oi went in the bedroom, and when Oi come out ’e was gone.”

I crossed to the bathroom, hoping to find the charges there. But when the door slid open, I saw only that the floor was spattered with bright, tacky blood; there was more blood in the sink, along with a kitchen knife, matted hair, handfuls of wadded, becrimsoned paper towels. And something else: a thin black disc about the size of a soy wafer. It took me a while to absorb all this, to put it together with Bill’s recent obsessions, and even after I had done so, my conclusion was difficult to credit. Yet I could think of no other explanation that would satisfy the conditions.

“Arlie,” I called. “You seen this?”

“Nao, what?” she said, coming up behind me; then: “Holy Christ!”

That’s his implant, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to the disc.

“Yeah, I s’pose it is. My God! Why’d he do that?” She put a hand to her mouth. “You don’t fink ’e took the charges…”

“The CPC,” I said. “He knew he couldn’t do anything with Mister C along for the ride, so he cut the bastard out. And now he’s gone for the CPC. Jesus! That’s just what we needed, isn’t it! Another fucking maniac on the loose!”

“It must ’ave ’urt ’im somethin’ fierce!” Arlie said wonderingly. “I mean, he ’ad to ’ave done it quick and savage, or else Mister C would ’ave ’ad time to stop ’im. And I never heard a peep.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Bill if I were you. You think twenty dead’s a tragedy? Think what’ll happen if he blows the CPC. How many do you reckon will be walking between modules when they disengage? How many others will be killed by falling things? By other sorts of accidents?”

I went back into the living room, shouldered my pack; I handed Arlie a laser. “If you see anyone coming after us, use it. Burn them low if that’s all you can bear, but burn them. All right?”

She gave a tight, anxious nod and looked down at the weapon in her hand.

“Come on,” I said. “Once we get to the airlock we’ll be fine.”

But I was none too confident of our chances. Thanks to the greed of madmen and the single-mindedness of our resident idiot, it seemed that the chances of everyone on Solitaire were growing slimmer by the second.

* * * *

I suppose some of you will say at this juncture that I should have known bad things were going to happen, and further will claim that many of the things that did happen might have been forestalled had I taken a few basic precautions and shown the slightest good sense. What possessed me, you might ask, to run out of my quarters leaving explosives scattered about the floor where Bill could easily appropriate them? And couldn’t I have seen that his fascination with the CPC might lead to some perilous circumstance? And why had I not perceived his potential for destructiveness? Well, what had possessed me was concern for a friend, the closest to a friend that I had ever known. And as to Bill, his dangerous potentials, he had never displayed any sign that he was capable of enduring the kind of pain he must have endured, or of employing logic sufficiently well so as to plan even such a simple act as he perpetrated. It was desperation, I’m certain, that fathered the plan, and how was I to factor in desperation with the IQ of a biscuit and come up with the sum of that event? No, I reject guilt and credit both. My part in things was simpler than demanded by that complex twist of fate. I was only there, it seems, to finish things, to stamp out a few last fires, and—in the end—to give a name to the demons of that place and time. And yet perhaps there was something in that whole fury of moments that was mine. Perhaps I saw an opportunity to take a step away from the past, albeit a violent step, and moved by a signal of some sort, one too slight to register except in my cells, I took it. I would like to think I had a higher purpose in mind, and was not merely acting out the imperatives of some fierce vanity.

We docked the sled next to an airlock in the administration module, my reasoning being that if we were forced to flee, it would take less time to run back to Administration than it would to cycle the CPC airlock; but instead of entering there, we walked along the top of the corridor that connected Administration and the CPC, working our way along moulded troughs of plastic covered with the greenish-silver substrate left by the barnacles, past an electric array, beneath a tree of radiator panels thirty times as tall as a man, and entered the emergency lock at its nether end. There was a sled docked beside it, and realizing that Bill must have used it, I thought how terrified he must have been to cross even that much of the void without Mister C to lend him guidance. Before entering, I set the timer of one of the charges in the pack to a half-second delay and stuck it in the hip pouch of my pressure suit. I would be able to trigger the switch with just the touch of my palm against the pouch. A worst-case eventuality.

The cameras inside the CPC were functioning, but since there were no security personnel in evidence, I had to assume that the automatic alarms had failed and that—as usual—no one was bothered to monitor the screens. We had not gone twenty feet into the main room when we saw Bill, dressed in a pressure suit, helmet in hand, emerge from behind a plastic partition, one of many which—as I have said—divided the cavernous white space into a maze of work stations. He looked stunned, lost, and when he noticed us he gave no sign of recognition; the side of his neck was covered with dried blood, and he held his head tipped to that side, as one might when trying to muffle pain by applying pressure to the injured spot. His mouth hung open, his posture was slack, and his eyes were bleary. Under the trays of cold light his complexion was splotchy and dappled with the angry red spots of pimples just coming up.

“The explosives,” I said. “Where are they? Where’d you put them?”

His eyes wandered up, grazed my face, twitched toward Arlie, and then lowered to the floor. His breath made an ugly glutinous noise.

He was a pitiable sight, but I could not afford pity; I was enraged at him for having betrayed my trust. “You miserable fucking stain!” I said. “Tell me where they are!” I palmed the back of his head with my left hand; with my right I knuckled the ragged wound behind his ear. He tried to twist away, letting out a wail; he put his hands up to his chest and pushed feebly at me. Tears leaked from his eyes. “Don’t!” he bawled. “Don’t! It hurts!”

Tell me where the explosives are,” I said, “or I’ll hurt you worse. I swear to Christ, I won’t ever stop hurting you.”

“I don’t remember!” he whined.

“I take you into my house,” I said. “I protect you, I feed you, I wash your messes up. And what do you do? You steal from me.” I slapped him, eliciting a shriek. “Now tell me where they are!”

Arlie was watching me, a hard light in her eyes; but she said nothing.

I nodded toward the labyrinth of partitions. “Have a fucking look round, will you? We don’t have much time!” She went off, and I turned again to Bill. “Tell me,” I said, and began cuffing him about the face, not hard, but hurtful, driving him back with the flurries, setting him to stagger and wail and weep. He fetched up against a partition, eyes popped, that tiny pink mouth pursed in a moue. “Tell me,” I repeated, and then said it again, said it every time I hit him, “Tell me, tell me, tell me…” until he dropped to his knees, cowering, shielding his head with his arms, and yelled. “Over there! It’s over there!”

“Where?” I said, hauling him to his feet. “Take me to it.” I pushed him ahead of me, keeping hold of the neck ring of his suit, yanking, jerking, not wanting to give him a second to gather himself, to make up a lie. He yelped, grunted, pleaded, saying, “Don’t!” “Stop it!” until at last he bumped and spun round a corner, and there, resting atop a computer terminal, was one of the charges, a red light winking on the timer, signalling that it had been activated. I picked it up and punched in the deactivation code. The read-out showed that fifty-eight seconds had remained before detonation. “Arlie!” I shouted. “Get back here! Now!” I grabbed Bill by the neck ring, pulled him close. “Did you set all the timers the same?” He gazed at me, uncomprehending. “Answer me, damn you! How did you set the timers?” He opened his mouth, made a scratchy noise in the back of his throat; runners of saliva bridged between his upper and lower teeth.

My interior clock was ticking down, 53, 52, 51…Given the size of the room, there was no hope of locating the other three charges in less than a minute. I would have risked a goodly sum on the proposition that Bill had been inconsistent, but I was not willing to risk my life.

Arlie came trotting up and smiled. “You found one!” “We’ve got fifty seconds,” I told her. “Or less. Run!” I cannot be certain how long it took us to negotiate the distance between where we had stood and the hatch of the administration module; it seemed an endless time, and I kept expecting to feel the corridor shake and sway and tear loose from its fittings, and to go whirling out into the vacuum. Having to drag Bill along slowed us considerably, and I spent perhaps ten seconds longer opening the hatch with my pass key; but altogether, I would guess we came very near to the fifty-second limit. And I
am
certain that as I sealed the hatch behind us, that limit was exceeded. Bill had, indeed, proved inconsistent.

As I stepped in through the inner hatch, I found that Admin had been transformed into a holographic rendering of a beautiful starfield spread across a velvety black depth in which—an oddly charming incongruity—fifteen or twenty doors were visible, a couple of them open, slants of white light spilling out, it seemed, from God’s office space behind the walls of space and time. We were walking on gas clouds, nebulae, and constellate beings. Then I noticed the body of a woman lying some thirty feet away, blood pooled wide as a table beneath her. No one else was in sight, but as we proceeded toward the airlock, the outlines of the hatch barely perceptible beneath the astronomical display, three men in black gear stepped out from a doorway farther along the passage. I fired at them, as did Arlie, but our aim was off. Strikes of ruby light smoked the starry expanse beside them as they ducked back into cover. I heard shouts, then shouted answers. The next second, as I fumbled with the hatch, laser fire needled from several doorways, pinning us down. Whoever was firing could have killed us easily, but they satisfied themselves by scoring near misses. Above Bill’s frightened cries and the sizzle of burning metal, I could hear laughter. I tossed my laser aside and told Arlie to do the same. I touched the charge in my hip pouch. I believed if necessary I would be able to detonate it, but the thought made me cold.

A group of men and women, some ten or eleven strong, came along the corridor toward us, Samuelson in the lead. Like the rest, he wore black satin trousers and a blouse of the same material adorned with badges. Creatures, it appeared, wrought from the same mystic stuff as the black walls and ceiling and floor. He was smiling broadly and nodding, as if our invasion were a delightful interlude that he had been long awaiting.

“How kind of you to do your dying with us, John,” he said as we came to our feet; they gathered in a semi-circle around us, hemming us in against the hatch. “I never expected to have this opportunity. And with your lady, too. We’re going to have such fun together.”

“Bet she’s a real groaner,” said a muscular, black-haired man at his shoulder.

“Well, we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” said Samuelson.

“Try it,” said Arlie, “and Oi’ll squeeze you off at the knackers!”

Samuelson beamed at her, then glanced at Bill. “And how are you today, sir? What brings you along, I wonder, on this merry outing?”

Bill returned a look of bewilderment that after a moment, infected by Samuelson’s happy countenance, turned into a perplexed smile.

“Do me a favour,” I said to Samuelson, moving my hand so that the palm was almost touching the switch of the charge at my hip. “There’s something I’ve been yearning to know. Does that gear of yours come with matching underwear? I’d imagine it must. Bunch of ginger-looking poofs and lizzies like you got behind you, I suppose wearing black nasties is
de rigueur.”

“For somebody who’s ’bout to major in high-pitched screams,” said a woman at the edge of the group, a heavyset blonde with a thick American accent and an indecipherable tattoo on her bicep, “you gotta helluva mouth on you, I give ya that.”

“That’s just John’s unfortunate manner,” Samuelson said. “He’s not very good at defeat, you see. It should be interesting to watch him explore the boundaries of this particular defeat.”

My hand had begun to tremble on the switch; I found myself unable to control it.

“What is it with you, Samuelson?” said the blonde woman. “Every time you chop someone, you gotta play Dracula? Let’s just do ’em and get on with business.”

There was a brief argument concerning the right of the woman to speak her mind, the propriety of mentally preparing the victim, of “tasting the experience,” and other assorted drivel. Under different circumstances, I would have laughed to see how ludicrous and inept a bunch were these demons; I might have thought how their ineptitude spoke to the terminal disarray back on Earth, that such a feeble lot could have gained so much power. But I was absorbed by the trembling of my hand, the sweat trickling down my belly, and the jellied weakness of my legs. I imagined I could feel the cold mass of explosives turning, giving a kick, like a dark and fatal child striving to break free of the womb. Before long I would have to reveal the presence of the charge and force a conclusion, one way or another, and I was not sure I was up to it. My hand wanted to slap the switch, pushed against, it seemed, by all the weighty detritus of my violent life.

Finally Samuelson brought an end to the argument. “This is my show, Amy. I’ll do as I please. If you want to discuss method during Retreat, I’ll be happy to satisfy. Until then, I’d appreciate your full cooperation.”

He said all this with the mild ultra-sincerity of a priest settling a squabble among the Ladies’ Auxiliary concerning a jumble sale; but when he turned to me, all the anger that he must have repressed came spewing forth.

“You naff little scrote!” he shouted. “I’m sick to death of you getting on my tits! When I’ve done working over your slippery and that great dozy blot beside you, I’m going to paint you red on red.”