by Dean Koontz
"And nothing can be done?"
He didn't answer me, aware that it was an unanswerable question. He just drove and looked morose and contributed to my flagging spirits.
This was the age of instant history. More could happen in a week than happened in a year in the previous century. Everything moved, relentlessly, determinedly, and we were all caught up by it, swept along, either to be drowned in the swell or carried to a foreign shore on the wave crests.
I had a feeling I was going to be one of those to drown.
I was valuable to the war machinery. And even when the war was over, I could serve the junta with my esp, help to oppress those at home who would not appreciate the beauty of a military nation. And I didn't know whether I could do that, for I might be one of those rebelling myself. All my life I had been floundering from one emotional disaster to another, drawing in and in and in upon myself. And then I had met Melinda, had been treated by my Porter-Rainey Solid-State headshrinker, and had opened myself to the world for the first time, had tasted pure freedom and enjoyed it. The loss of my sanity within Child's mind and the long attempt to get free of him had interrupted my enjoyment of that new-found peace. And now that I was back, now that Melinda and a pleasant future lay within my grasp, the world was in the hands of the madmen who threatened to tear it apart.
But I couldn't drown. I had to ride those wave crests, had to survive to keep Melinda surviving. Damn them and their bombs and their war lusts!
As we drove, I felt my rage grow, swell, encompass my entire mind. And I realized that it would not be good enough to ride those crests. At most, the two of us would come out alive, washed ashore after the apocalypse, with each other. But our world would be destroyed and useless, and we would have no freedom, then, at all. Life would be a constant battle for survival in a society thrown back to barbarism. No, what I was going to have to do was forget about riding the crests of the waves-and find some way to direct the tides of the entire damn ocean of our future!
"Not that I don't find your company perfectly marvelous," I told Harry, "but could you take me to Melinda's place instead of yours?"
He hesitated before he said it, but he said it just the same. "She isn't at her place, Sim. She's been arrested.
She's a political prisoner."
It took long seconds for the words to sink in. When they did, my rage became godly wrath, and I began to seek someone upon whom to vent it. I was not afraid for her safety. I basked in the certainty of my power. I still did not see that I was bound up in the same flawed philosophy that had brought me to ruin so many times before...
III
I stood by the window of Harry's den, holding a glass of brandy which I had not yet tasted. Beyond the window: a copse of trees, snow-covered grass, white-bearded hedgerows. The stark, wintry vista matched my thoughts, as I considered what Harry had told me on the way over.
Melinda had become engaged in writing pamphlets for some revolutionary group and had been under surveillance. Upon the magazine publication of the first part of her biography of my life-the childhood years in the AC complex-she had been arrested for questioning in connection with the death of a copper and the destruction of a howler some two weeks before. Whether there had been any questioning or not, no one would know; she was still under arrest.
The magazine article had not merely been a biography, but had contained scorchingly anti-military, anti-AC anecdotes which neither of us had decided, before my entombment in Child's mind, whether we should risk using or not. She had risked it.
"When is the trial?" I asked him now. We had postponed further discussion until we were warm and comfortable in his den-at his insistence.
"A date has been docketed before the Military Court of Emergency. Next September."
"Seven and a half months!" I turned from the window, furious, slopping brandy over my wrist.
"When the act is labeled treason, there are laws that permit it."
"What's her bail?" I asked.
"There is none."
"Is none?"
"What I said."
"But the law allows-"
He held up his pudgy hand to stop me. He looked terrible, as if telling me this was worse on him than on me. "This is no longer a republic, remember. It is a military state where men like the junta councilmen decide what laws there shall be. For sedition, they now say, there is no bail, and the rule of preventive detention has been extended indefinitely."
"Fight them!" I bellowed. "You fought them for me when-"
"It's different now," he interrupted. "You still don't grasp the situation. I worked the law on them before to get you free. But now they are the law and they can change it to counter one. It's like dancing on quicksand."
I took a chair, and again I was afraid, just a little, down deep where it hardly showed. This was beginning to feel like the inner world of Child's mind, where everything was solid and tangible, but where nothing could be trusted, where solidity could disappear, where liquid could become solid ground beneath the feet.
"She's not the only one," he said, as if mass suffering made her individual plight less important. It only made it more important.
"Let me have the phone," I said, reaching for it.
"Who?"
"Morsfagen."
"This might be a mistake."
"If the sonofabitch wants my esp, wants my work, then he is just going to have to see that she gets out of the Tombs!"
I found the number in Harry's private directory of unlisted phones, dialed it, and waited while a soldier called a noncom to the phone-while the noncom went and got a major who stuttered-and while the major finally went and summoned Morsfagen.
"What is it?" he asked. Cold. Deadly. Forceful. The sound of the well-trained bill collector.
"There's a girl being kept in the Tombs, charged with sedition, for god knows what reason. She-"
"Melinda Thauser," he said, cutting me short. He seemed to enjoy that. Like putting thumbscrews on me.
"I see you're up on things all around. Well, catch this, then. I want her released, and I want all charges dropped against her."
"That's beyond my control," he said-he did.
"It better not be."
"It is."
"It better not be, because you've just lost yourself an esper if it is."
"Services that can be commandeered in time of warlike an esper's services-are never lost," he said. Color him infuriatingly calm, cool, and collected. I wanted to kick his damned teeth in. He probably would still have smiled at me with that smile.
"Services cannot be commandeered unless the craftsman can be found," I said.
"Is this a threat to withhold services from the government in a time of national crisis?" he asked, smiling through every word. Snapping turtle mouth there, looking for one of my incautious fingers.
"Look," I said, trying another tack, "suppose we let the charges ride for the time being. Suppose the only thing that you concede is the bail. A low bail, but she'll still stand trial."
"Out of my control," he said again. But the tone of his voice said that nothing was ever out of his control.
"Like hell!"
"I'm not on the junta, you know."
"Look, Morsfagen, suppose she also destroys the damn book. Now it's the book she's in trouble for, isn't it? The first part of it?"
"With or without the book," he said, "the trouble remains for us. The danger does not lie within the printed page, but within the mind of the man setting words to paper. Or woman, as the case may be. But there isn't any use discussing it. I haven't any say about it. Besides, I've seen her picture, and I'm certain you can wait seven months for that kind of stuff." Voice of the obscene telephone caller, yet still authoritarian. In the back of his throat: unvoiced laughter that will explode when I hang up.
"I know why you're in the military now," I said, my voice deceptively neutral.
"Why is that?" he asked, walking into it.
"When your own manhood is negligible, a gun must
at least be a little consolation." And I hung up on the creep.
"That was definitely a mistake," my mentor said.
I picked my coat up and worked into it. "Maybe."
"No maybe about it. Where are you going now?"
"Home, pack some things, and get out. Look, I'll get a message to you so you'll know where I'm at. Wait. Scratch that. I've got a key to Melinda's apartment. If it's still unoccupied, I'll stay there. They'll check hotels right away, so maybe her place is safer. Maybe I'm not as potent a wedge as I think I am. Maybe they really don't need my esp. But I rather think they'll come crawling after a while; it's the only way I can help her."
"You love her?" he asked.
I nodded. I couldn't really say it. Maybe it was still a hangover from my delusions of godhood. Or maybe I was just afraid that her affection did not run as deep as mine.
Perhaps, in a month, she had forgotten me.
"Then hurry," he said. "You might not have much time."
I left his Tudor home under the trees, took one of his two hovercars, and pressed the accelerator half through the floor on the way home. The craft veered from one side of the road to the other as clouds of snow kicked up and stuttered through the blades of the air cushion mechanism, but I didn't hit anyone.
Perhaps the sole reason for Melinda's arrest was her own actions. But I thought not. It seemed too clever a hook in my side to hold me should I ever return from the noman's-land inside of Child. Melinda was the perfect insurance policy, they must have thought, against my temper and foolishness.
I parked the car on my patio and entered the house through the double glass doors, packed two suitcases, and folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one government could not much affect its value. I took two game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and put everything in the car.
As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.
IV
I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching vehicles, three in all: the howler which I had first seen, a crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the development, and knew the hovercar would never hold up on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.
And if I went back, there was only my house to take refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it was working against me.
The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the damn thing and didn't understand its purpose. It was no more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to rock my own hovercar.
Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt that I would work for them, and there was no chance that I could stir up any sort of hornet's nest about Melinda Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded me into the howler and took me quietly away.
But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it that easy for them.
Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the time, under my breath, was "fool" and "congenital idiot" and "raving madman," but that is neither here nor there.
Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler, I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.
The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate dandelion fluff-which turned abruptly into a lump of lead and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.
I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back against full stop so that none of the power could be used to drive the craft forward or backward-it all went straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.
The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the story would have ended much differently indeed.
The last thirty feet, the building column of air under the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise somewhere below, but it could not be that serious if the car still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceleration, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.
Taking the car out next to the curling waves that foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the cliff to see what was transpiring there-and was just in time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush to follow me.
Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev four times faster than a small car's blades ever can; extra compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim to add extra boost if the time should come when they are needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundredfoot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge howler fell like a mountain.
In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed and force that the blades at full and the compressed air jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.
The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn't want to see what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted to.
Down...
And down...
Sand exploded upward as the howler reached the beach.
But the thing wasn't slowed.
It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound, with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.
At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of ignition.
On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere, burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.
They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific impact of the crash.
Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.
The howler's descent, however, had been a good object lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.
I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the city, where I knew I could regain the highway before long.
In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn't it true that every citizen who roots for "our side" to "kill the gooks" is as responsible for every death as the man wielding the gun? Isn't it true that none of us can escape responsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we constantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?
Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses behind.
As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with themand yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself, time to make my anger into something more formidable than emotion.
I was superman, and it was time to act like one.
Or so I thought and so it seemed to be...
V
In the large apartment complexes such as the one in which Melinda maintained her home, there is every convenience of modern living that one could wish for-all under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hovercars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restaurants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved chemical stimulants.
