Marsden took out an Astobac cigarette and lit up. “She saved my life. Oh, not physically. The medics out in Beta Colony did that. But I was a mess emotionally when I got back Earthside.”
Rayna watched him with interest and waited for him to continue.
“I went through the retraining programs and wound up with all the technical qualifications I needed to make it in a civilian job. But every time I went out on a job interview, I’d look at my face in the mirror, and I’d see this doughy pseudoskin they gave me and the scars on my neck, and....”
He shook his head and took another drag on his cigarette. “Anyway, the day Althea interviewed me, she seemed to recognize what I was going through. She helped me relax, and then she gave me a job. She’s been more than my boss. She’s been my friend.”
Rayna nodded, and they walked on in silence. She led them along a flower-bordered trail toward a small botanical garden at the east end of the park.
“She’ll make a great senator,” Rayna said, more to break the silence than for any other reason.
“Yes,” Marsden agreed, “but she’s not really a politician. She only ran because somebody had to speak up against Rensselaer. He’s so damned smooth. He can make the most outrageous actions sound reasonable and justified. Noble, even. He appeals to the worst instincts in people and gives them the justification they need for acting on those instincts.”
He dropped his cigarette butt and crushed it with his heel. The action released molecular bonds in the Astobac and freed the elements to recycle, clean and refresh the soil and air.
“You figure Rensselaer’s working with Tauber?” Rayna asked him as he lit another cigarette.
Marsden nodded. “I’m sure of it. He’s just Hank’s type—ambitious, amoral and slick.”
Rayna stopped and looked into Marsden’s haunted blue-gray eyes. “There’s something I don’t understand, Derek. You seem like a decent sort of guy. How could you and Tauber have been friends?”
Marsden looked at his shoes. “Hank wasn’t always like this. Oh, he always had this passion for proving his manhood. Back at the Academy, the big game was to beat the system. That seemed fair enough. Everybody likes to beat the system—especially when the system is a relic of the old military academies, where discipline’s the name of the game.”
“But there was more to it, I gather.”
Marsden nodded somberly. “About a year ago, I heard that Hank’s little tricks started turning mean. He especially had it in for any of the rock farmers—the colonists, I mean—he had it in for the colonists who were what he called ‘soft.’”
Rayna nodded. That was consistent with what Keith had told her about the whole thrust of Operation Strong Man.
“Hank used to say they were all just a bunch of fags, so why not have some fun with them. I even went along with him for awhile, I’m ashamed to say. But one of those ‘fags’ was the chief medic who saved my life.”
He paused to puff on his cigarette for a few moments. “There’s nothing like hearing Death knock at your door to make you take another look at your values. I did. And Hank never forgave me for it.”
They continued to walk and talk for the next half hour, occasionally pausing to appreciate the flora in the botanical garden. The setting reminded her of another walk, a walk she’d taken with Keith. She hadn’t heard from him in days, despite her invitation to join her this afternoon, and she was concerned. Still, there was nothing she could do about it now. She decided to visit him this evening and talk things out.
She and Marsden headed back toward the recreation building. As they passed a group of trees along the way, Rayna thought she heard someone calling her name in an urgent whisper, but she couldn’t be certain. Marsden had heard nothing, and when she looked around for a familiar face, the only person she saw nearby was an exceptionally large man with a thick, black beard. The man disturbed her for some reason. He seemed to watch her every move. She shifted positions so that Marsden was between her and the stranger.
Althea Milgrom met her two friends at the door of the recreation building.
“You can watch me from here for a minute,” she said to the guard as she wheeled out of the building to greet Rayna and Marsden. “Whether I’m recognized or not, I need a breath of fresh air!”
***
From his hotel room across the street, Tauber was keeping close tabs on the activity at the park. He was glad he’d thought to pack his telescope. Through it, he could see exactly when Milgrom and her party were in the ideal position for the attack.
He had punched the appropriate codes into the communicator’s keyboard and stored them for remote activation. A mere press of the button in his hand would direct the communicator to send the codes to their destination, zap miner NG-6/3CDA.
People were beginning to take seats in the open speech area now, although the speech wasn’t scheduled to begin for some time yet. No question about it, Tauber admitted grudgingly, Milgrom’s gaining a following. Most of the park-goers, though, were simply enjoying the day. Well, it would be a day none of them would ever forget. None of those who survived, that is.
He took another look through the telescope and frowned as he spotted Kronis, who was obviously searching for someone.
Stupid bastard! thought Tauber. Do I have to do everything myself? The fact that Daniels had escaped from his make-shift prison would not, at this point, have much practical effect, Tauber realized. Still, he was disappointed. Not only in Kronis, but, more importantly, in Daniels. That’s what you get for thinking you can trust anyone, he chastised himself. Didn’t you learn anything when Derek Marsden turned out to be just another faggot?
As the name formed in his thoughts, Tauber caught a glimpse of Marsden and Rayna Kingman as they emerged from behind a group of trees and headed for the recreation building. Tauber’s jaws clamped shut. He hated Derek Marsden, he realized. At this moment, he hated Marsden more than he’d ever hated anyone or anything. Once, years ago, Marsden had forced Tauber to face a part of himself he’d spent a lifetime denying. Now, the same Marsden was weakening the hand of Operation Strong Man. It was because of Marsden that Milgrom had been able to decipher his code-switching. It was all Marsden’s fault. Tauber’s left hand drew itself into a fist, and the right tightened around the remote call button.
Suddenly aware of the object in his hand, he opened his fist and stared for a moment, then looked through his telescope at the area in front of the recreation building, where Marsden, Milgrom and Rayna were chatting comfortably with the guard.
“Damn him!” he said aloud. “Damn them all!” He ground his teeth together and jabbed the call button forcefully with his thumb.
Almost immediately, a beeper summoned Tauber to the room’s CDN terminal. He stared at the screen in disbelief, an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach:
FROM: THE LATE CHARLES J. WRAGGON
IF YOU’RE READING THIS MESSAGE, THEN I MUST BE DEAD. BUT SO ARE YOU AND MAYBE MOST OF THE WORLD. REMEMBER, I WARNED YOU NOT TO MESS WITH ME. I TOLD YOU I KNEW THINGS ABOUT THE R-4 ROBOTS THAT I DIDN’T TELL YOU.
WHEN MY ROBOTS REPROGRAMMED THE ZAPPERS, THEY INCLUDED A DEAD-MAN’S ROUTINE. WHEN YOU KILLED ME, YOU PREVENTED ME FROM SENDING THE WEEKLY SIGNAL THAT SHIFTS COMPLETE CONTROL OF THE ZAPPERS TO EARTH. WITHOUT THAT SIGNAL, TRIGGERING ANY ZAPPER FOR ANY EARTH-DESIGNATED TARGET WILL AUTOMATICALLY ACTIVATE ALL THE ZAPPERS TO HIT ALL THE PREPROGRAMMED TARGETS. KIND OF MESSES UP YOUR PLANS, DOESN’T IT?
ONE MORE THING, TAUBER. SINCE I KNEW YOU’D BE THE GUY TRIGGERING THE ZAPPERS, I HAD THE ROBOTS PUT IN ANOTHER SPECIAL FEATURE—A FEEDBACK TARGETING MECHANISM. WHEN YOU TRIGGERED THE ZAPPER, YOU SIGNED YOUR OWN DEATH WARRANT. THE ZAPPER WILL HOME IN ON THE SOURCE OF THE SIGNAL AND....
Tauber never finished reading the message. A narrow beam of coherent light angled its way from the sky through the hotel window and neatly severed the hand that still held the remote call button. The next beam narrowly missed Tauber’s head and sent him scurrying for cover as more beams
shot through the windows to fill the room with destruction.
***
“What was that?” Marsden said suddenly, gazing upward. “I thought I saw a flash of light that—look out!” The last comment was muffled as Marsden arched his body over Milgrom’s seated form and reached for Rayna’s hand in an effort to pull her to the ground. A ruby beam of light struck a corner of the recreation building above them, loosening pieces of brick and mortar.
“It’s a zapper attack!” he shouted as more beams struck the building. One beam sliced through the center of the structure. Others melted their way through the windows. Several beams also ignited combustible material inside, and smoke began to seep from under the door. Minutes later, flames were clearly visible through the windows.
“Let’s get away from here,” Marsden said, pushing Milgrom’s wheelchair ahead of him.
Rayna followed numbly, looking around her in horrified fascination. The sky twinkled with light as the ZAP miner strafed the park like a Japanese Zero in some old World War II movie. One beam cut through the base of the woodstone lectern on the open-speech stage and sent it toppling over atop a worker who had been setting up the sound system. In blind panic, people ran mindlessly about the park trying to avoid the deadly rays from the sky. As Rayna watched, a terrified child ran directly into the path of a beam. It cut him in two.
“There must be something we can do,” Milgrom said, activating her mini-terminal. “If the zapper shots don’t interfere with the radio signals that tie me to CDN headquarters, then maybe I can—” But Marsden just shook his head. “All we can do is try to keep out of the line of fire.”
As if to reinforce Marsden’s comment, a beam hit the grass next to his foot and etched a deep line across the lawn and into a nearby group of trees.
“Oh my God!” Milgrom said, intent on the terminal screen despite the chaos around her. “It’s not just here! We’re getting reports from London, Paris, Caracas, Jerusalem, Cairo, Nairobi, Beirut—it’s all over the world!”
Rayna’s stomach heaved. How could this be?
“Rayna!” a distant voice called out.
She barely heard her name above the screams around her, but she thought she recognized the disheveled man emerging from the trees just as a severed branch crashed down upon him. Keith? she wondered, heart pounding. Could it be Keith?
The trees were ablaze now, and people who had been walking peacefully along the shaded paths only minutes before were rolling on the ground trying desperately to smother the flames of their own clothing.
Rayna headed for the man on the ground, bumping into men and women who were rushing in the other direction.
“Rayna!” This time she was sure she heard it. But it wasn’t Keith’s voice. It was Marsden. “Help me!” he yelled.
Milgrom’s wheelchair was on the ground, and Marsden was struggling to right it and get the CDN director back into it before a zapper beam could catch her where she lay, unprotected and unmoving, on the grass. For a moment, Rayna was frozen with indecision. Then, without warning, she felt her eyes roll back in her head. Every nerve in her body seemed to tingle, and she felt a powerful surge of energy explode outward from a place inside her that she never knew existed. At last, she slumped to the ground, unconscious, as millions of subatomic particles began to vibrate in unison, singing a song that instilled their rhythm in the harmonic oscillations of other particles and wrote their own definition of reality.
Chapter 28: What Things May Come
The first thing Rayna saw when she awoke in the hospital was the full size holovision stage in the center of the ward. She couldn’t very well miss it. The figures on the stage seemed to be talking directly to her.
“Miss Kingman!” a plump, middle-aged nurse with a kind face greeted as she approached Rayna’s bed. “We’re so glad to have you back with us!”
“How long have I...?”
“It’s been six days, Miss Kingman.” The nurse checked the readings on a biomonitor next to the bed and tapped in a notation that would be recorded on Rayna’s medical chart for future reference. “Your parents will be furious with us for sending them away now that you’re finally awake. But we just didn’t know when you’d be coming around. Doctor finally got them to go home around 10 o’clock last night. They’ve been practically camping out in the waiting room since you were brought in from the park.”
Rayna nodded at the nurse dully and inhaled the scent of hospital disinfectant.
“You seem to be fine, Miss Kingman. Fortunately, the zapper beams didn’t get you when you passed out. There was no indication that anything fell on you, either. Do you remember being hit by anything?”
“Well, no, I....”
The nurse screwed her face into a puzzled frown.
“Is something wrong?” Rayna asked.
“Oh—no.” the nurse answered quickly. “We’ve just been wondering what put you into that coma in the first place. Your bioreadings have all been basically normal, and there was no indication of any head trauma. Some unusual brain activity for a little while, but everything’s been completely normal for the last 11 hours.”
A sudden movement drew Rayna’s attention back to the holovision stage.
“...and he will be brought before a court martial to answer for his deeds,” a heavy-jowled, silver-haired man in the uniform of a retired Merchant Fleet admiral was saying.
“What’s that all about?” Rayna asked the nurse, who continued to monitor the bioreadings.
“Hmmm? Oh, that. It’s Ethan Rensselaer. They arrested him last night.” She stepped back and clucked to herself. “Ethan Rensselaer a traitor! And I was going to vote for him for senator! Guess you never really know about people.” She shook her head and resumed checking bioreadings. “The whole thing was so bizarre, anyhow. I mean, the way everything just stopped all of a sudden.”
The blood froze in Rayna’s veins.
“Turns out Rensselaer was involved in some kind of plot to start a war with the colonies. Rensselaer and some ex-Merchant Fleet officer. I can’t remember his name. They found him dead in a hotel room across from the park. The other guy, I mean, not Rensselaer. A zapper got him right through the window, they say.”
The nurse’s expression turned hard. “Got just what he deserved, far as I’m concerned. We had 123 casualties right here from the Roberts Park attack, including everybody on this ward.”
Rayna shifted her body for a better look at her fellow patients, about a dozen of them in beds arranged, horseshoe-like, around the holovision stage.
“Only 19 deaths, thank God,” the nurse continued, “but altogether, over 10,000 people dead or hurt badly enough to be hospitalized. And all from just a few minutes of shooting.”
Rayna waited expectantly as the nurse adjusted various tubes and connections, but apparently the time for explanations was over. “Doctor will be in to see you later. If you need anything, just press this button.”
Rayna watched the receding, white-clad figure for a moment, then glanced back toward the holovision stage. She wasn’t prepared for what she saw. There, speaking calmly before the holovision audience, was an obviously fit Derek Marsden.
Rayna’s gasp had been one of surprise, but her next breath was one of exultant relief. Tears welled up in her eyes and eased their way down her cheeks as Derek filled in some of the details of the past few days: Like Derek, Althea had survived attack. Then, with the cooperation of the colonial CDN’s Juan Laguna, they had been able to reestablish authentic communications with the colonies, using an experimental hyperwave system. Good thing, too, because the colonies also had been receiving faked messages calculated to stir up hostilities. A little longer, and Tauber’s effort to provoke a war might well have succeeded.
As the holovision broadcast turned to other matters, Rayna looked in vain for a tissue, finally drying her eyes on a corner of the sheet that covered her. The HV sounds were an unheeded cushion of protective background noise. Her mind urged her body to relax, but the harder she trie
d, the more her muscles resisted the effort.
Come on! She knew now that Althea and Derek were safe. Tauber’s would-be war and all his Operation Strong Man plans were as dead as he was. Everything seems to have turned out all right. So what am I worried about?
Despite herself, she stiffened even more at the unspoken question. She knew precisely what she was worried about. She had suspected it from the moment the nurse mentioned her “unusual brain activity,” knew it with absolute certainty from the first reference to the mysteriously sudden cessation of zapper fire.
Alec Zorne’s book explained some of it: Genetic mutations in certain individuals had given them psychic abilities that were generally unrecognized in homo sapiens. “The next step in the evolution of humanity,” Zorne had called it. But Zorne didn’t have to live with it.
She wondered if her grandfather ever felt this way as he quietly went about shaping reality—the only reality Rayna had ever known. Yes, indeed, she was Al Frederick’s granddaughter. She shivered.
It was clear that she was responsible for stopping the zapper attacks. While that result certainly pleased her, the power was terrifying. What else has changed? I was out for six days! What was my unconscious doing all that time? She remembered Al’s tale (an old television program, he’d said) of a man whose psychic energy was released and channeled by his uncontrolled emotions, with devastating results. Is that going to happen to me? Do I really know myself well enough to be sure about the kind of reality my unconscious might create?
“Knowledge is the principal enemy of fear.”
How many times had she repeated the adage to her students? Often enough for them to complete the phrase by rote as soon as she uttered the first two words. Now she had to apply it. Somehow, she would have to make sense of what had happened and come to terms with what that would mean for her future. It was a challenge. The technical details of Zorne’s research were hard to follow, and she was no physicist.
Keith could help. With his physics background, he would.... She cut off the thought that had quickly started to turn her stomach into Mount Vesuvius and forced herself back into a more analytical frame of mind.
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