by John Shirley
“Are you quite sure there’s nothing I…can… Help me, get me out, help get me--bring you--please, help--Sir?” The guard fired a minute paralysis capsule into the young woman’s side. She stiffened. Gripping her arms from either side, guards carried her out. The gamblers carefully ignored the entire event.
Ben looked up in time to see Ranger make his bid. He tried to kiss the King of Diamonds. The man slugged the biker in the gut and brought his knee up sharply as Ranger doubled over, coughing, catching him in the jaw. Ranger staggered back, blinking, fumbling in his jacket. Ben started instinctively forward.
There was no silencer on Ranger’s gun. There came five short, vicious explosions.
All five of the cards lay crumpled beside one another, a useless poker hand angrily discarded on a table.
Ranger, eyes flashing, turned to fire another shot into the crowd. Someone screamed. Then the gun was empty. There were five long seconds of silence.
One of the cards whimpered.
Ranger turned the gun around in his hand to use the butt as a club.
The camera guns whirred--but it was the guards in black who dealt with it.
Gloria tried to get in to help her brother. Ben tackled her, felt her fold up under him, aware of her thin boniness. He hoped he didn’t break anything. They hit the floor with a smack, and the wind was knocked out of him. Wheezing, he held Gloria down as five security guards carried Ranger, kicking and shrieking curses, into the nearest elevator.
When they had gone, Ben got slowly to his feet, tried to assist Gloria as she stood, but for the second time that day she shook his hand loose. And this time she slapped him. Twice. Palm first, then backhanded.
He shrugged and pointed at the bodies. Her face red, furious but resolute, she turned to look. One of the men, the nude king who’d been shot through the red diamond-on his chest, was crawling in a pool of his own blood to a side door. The gamblers were gone, except for a young man, flat on his back and dead.
“Ranger did them a favor,” she said, still looking at the dead cards.
“Maybe,” Ben said. “But most of them would have been released from motor-control in a few months--maybe sane. Look, I had to stop you, because if you’d interfered right then it would have got us into the same hole with Ranger and we’d be no use to him.”
“You’re gonna help him?” Gloria turned to him in astonishment.
Ben felt like a fool. The smart thing to do would be to leave Las Vegas. Now.
“Yes. We’re ‘gonna’ help him. Come on. We’ve got to find out where they’ve taken him.”
***
The cells were clean and spacious, the floors well-padded. Ben had seen worse. He had experienced worse.
There were rank on rank of air-conditioned glass cubicles, each with a toilet in one corner, a vitamash dispenser protruding its rubbery white nipple from the back wall. Reclining on the padded floor dozens of young men and women performed the last acts of their own volition until after their terms ran out. Some of them were on indefinite term, which usually meant they’d be used until they collapsed. Now, they sucked listlessly on the feeding nipples or copulated desperately.
Sitting in the middle of the floor, well apart from the others, Ranger stared fixedly into space, his face a taut mask of defiance.
“That him?” asked the guard escorting them. He was an old man with tired brown eyes, brown hair peppered in white, a permanent frown that set the lower part of his face into a gray sag. “Where’s the papers you want him to sign? I’ll take them to him.” Ben fumbled in his shirt, brought out his Las Vegas pass papers, folded so the guard couldn’t see what they were. He handed them over. The old man went to a small unpainted metal box on a white cement wall opposite the cell door. He unlocked the box with a key on a long chain attached to his belt, threw wide the lid, and manipulated a dial. Instantly, the prisoners retreated, reacting with spastic haste, to the rear of the cell. Electric shocks? The pliable floor stuff must be a conductor. Charged, it kept them to the concrete strip at the rear of the cell as the cell door slid open. For the first time Ben noticed that all the prisoners were barefoot. The guard, protected by insulated boots, stepped inside with Ben’s folded papers in his left hand.
The guard left the metal box open behind him. But at regular intervals down the hallway guards stood rigidly, their backs to the wall.
Ben sighed. He would have to test Chaldin’s toy prematurely.
Looking distinctly out of place among the gray-smocked prisoners crowded at the back of the cell, Ranger glared at the approaching guard.
Ben looked around. It was time. He sighed.
He walked casually to the metal box and switched the dial. The electricity died. Ranger had been watching him. His lips skinned back over his teeth in a beastlike approximation of a grin and he dived at the guard, had him flat on his back in seconds. He yanked the gas-gun from the guard’s belt, racked him unconscious with the butt, and sprang up and through the door. The guards down the hall were sprinting toward them, tugging their weapons free.
Ben set himself into a berserker trance: instantly, he saw the world as a flow of antagonism, every inch of the environment transformed through the attenuated lens of paranoia into hostility.
He transmitted these sentiments to the guards moving toward them and to the prisoners in the open jail cell. The exciter amplified the anger in everyone it reached:
The guards began to babble and turn their gas-guns on one another; they floundered and blundered together as they ran, angering, flaring into fist-fighting. The gas-guns hissed and the paralyzed guards fell. The Transmaniac device was powerfully effective.
The prisoners poured out of the cell, rushing between the guards and Ben.
Ranger and Gloria preceded him up the stairs and out to the jail’s front desk. Behind them, the inflamed prisoners were turning on one another and the remaining guards, a riot that cut off pursuit. Ben quickly directed an excitement of fear at the officers who were sitting at the front desk. They threw themselves flat, whimpering. Running out the revolving door into the crowded corridor, Ben reflected that the gamblers and guards made excellent subjects for the experiment: They were living batteries of hostility and fear. Directed at a man without hostility, without a reservoir of fear, the exciter would have no effect; it merely expanded on negative emotions that were already there.
An alarm bell was clanging somewhere, and black-and-silver guardsmen—faces set into a determination that barely concealed their fears—poured out of adjacent doorways, their guns ready, searching for the leaders of the jailbreak. The central monitoring computer had already pinpointed and described Ben, Gloria, and Ranger.
Ben slipped into trance and excited the hair-trigger gambler’s anticipation, the gut fear that was ever present among the Las Vegas crowds. He amplified the ambience of despair and resentment. The corridor was crowded; there was much jostling and accidental nudging—in Ben’s newly hyper-charged atmosphere a jostle became an aggressive jab, a nudge seemed more like a vicious shove. Tempers flared into fury, fists swung, concealed weapons emerged to speak in hisses and roars.
Ranger fired the gas-gun into the ranks of the terrified guards. The weapon had two settings: the first, an injection of temporary paralysis toxins, the second, glass pellets of a volatile gas that exploded a split second after penetrating flesh, sending shards of glass to tear through the victim’s innards. Ranger had set his gun at the second mode. Coughing blood, exploding from within, the wounded guards clawed at their unhurt companions who beat them frantically, turning their weapons hysterically on one another.
Everywhere faces writhed with animal snarls, spittle and blood from lips torn by insanely gnashing teeth spewed into the air, eyes glazed like the eyes of kittens held underwater and drowning.
The exciter’s emanations radiated an invisible fanning beam from Ben’s eyes. He was careful to avoid looking at Ranger and Gloria.
He slipped from the berserker trance and they ran for the escalator,
pressing sideways through a violent human tide, receiving their own shares of flesh-wounds and bruises. They reached the escalator, sprinted up to the first level, and left the wails and screams of the mob behind them. The hostility would continue to spread like fire, feeding on long-repressed fear and anger, subconscious tinder, until it peaked out in twenty to thirty minutes—depending on the size of the crowd. Ben didn’t care to consider how many might be dead half an hour from now.
They reached the hangar floor, one level beneath the desert sands. Ben rushed into the hangar control booth, struck the operator unconscious from behind. He threw the release switches for their bay, and two of the metal gates in the checkerboard overhead rumbled away, throwing light from inside the hangar upward to overwhelm the moonlight. Ranger and Gloria were already in the nulgrav car. Ben dashed between the beetle-like vehicles, crawled under the fly, scrambled up the ladder, and threw himself into the pilot’s seat. He threw the switches; the fly hummed, fell silent, then suddenly shot straight up. The guards had found the unconscious booth operator, and the hangar doors were closing. But they clanked shut a scarce three feet below the fly-car. The stars welcomed them home to the sky.
Ben let out a breath and wondered how long he’d been holding it. He was dizzy.
He halted their ascent and came about, then set a course for Lenny’s ranch.
“Heyyyy, that was pretty good, pretty-boy,” Gloria said, half-mocking as she settled down beside him. “You ought to get a hawg of your own.”
“Yeah,” Ranger called from the rear cabin, “get that mother a bike! Hey—I want my bike. Hey, Ben, my man, how about we go back to Denver and kill that asshole Chaldin and get our bikes?”
“No,” said Ben with finality. “It’s a miracle we got out of Vegas, the way you botched things for us. I’m not going to climb down the shark’s throat just to get a couple of swallowed-up Harleys. Forget it. We’d never make it.”
“Yeah, but did you see what happened back there? Man, you laid ’em to waste. They didn’t know what hit ’em. It was beautiful. You could do anything.”
Beautiful? It was beautiful?
He remembered the guards dying on the floor, writhing around the glass shards in their torn-up bellies. “Sure. Beautiful.” He chuckled acidly. “We were lucky, Ranger. It could have turned against us. I don’t know how to control this thing, really. It’s going to take a lot of careful testing. It could have hemmed us in. Those people could have torn us to pieces. You can do without your mechanical phallus. I’m not going to provoke Chaldin. Not any further than I have.”
‘Yeah, well fuck you, man,” Ranger growled. “Christ, I don’t even have any goddamn shoes anymore.”
“The Transmaniacon…does it work for…any emotion?” Gloria asked softly.
Ben frowned. Then he understood. “You mean love? Would it amplify positive emotions? As far as Lenny can tell it isn’t tuned that way. The trouble is, love is a sort of…elusive thing. It’s rarer. This thing seeks out manias of hate, anger, fear, frustration—things that are stored up in the human brain like electricity in a battery. Then it releases them, amplifies them. There isn’t enough love in most people to store up, I shouldn’t think. Love is more spontaneous. If it exists at all.”
“Yeah, if it exists at all,” Gloria said. “I don’t think it’s real. But I don’t think anything’s real. I’m still frozen. I’m still dead.”
Also histrionic in your subdued fashion, Ben thought. But aloud he said, “Chaldin is no fool. Maybe it would be possible to build a device that works on love as this one works on the darker manias. But he wouldn’t play around with something as volatile and altogether dangerous as love. He could get himself killed that way,” Ben was speaking sardonically but Gloria nodded as if it were gospel.
The wasteland exposed itself in rolling measures beneath them; the occasional ravines exuded menace. The moon was only a curved sliver like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.
“Why’s Las Vegas underground?” Gloria asked.
“Protection against the things that wander this desert, defense against Chicago and Detroit. Thinking ahead.”
“That’s Lenny’s place there, isn’t it?” Gloria said, indicating a glow to the right. Ben nodded. He slowed the fly-car, wheeled her about, descending in a spiral, his eyes searching the U-shaped compound of buildings. A searchlight on a wooden platform swung around the perimeter of the fences; floodlights threw stark shadows over the courtyard. All seemed to be in order. A single light burned in the lab window at the rear of the ranch house. Ben dropped another fifty feet and set her down.
He sat for a moment watching the house. No movement. Ranger was already climbing down the ladder.
“Man, I’m hungry,” he mumbled.
Gloria was about to follow, but Ben, alerted by an ineffable something, pushed roughly ahead-of her and climbed down, scuttling out into the courtyard. _
“Come back here, Ranger,” he whispered.
Ranger either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He was stepping onto the front porch. The searchlight swung down and hit Ben full in the eyes, momentarily blinding him. He heard Ranger shout, but couldn’t make out the words. There was a gun shot.
Ranger stumbled backwards, holding his belly. Seeing through a white mist, Ben looped an arm through Ranger’s armpit and began to drag him back into the shelter of the fly-car. He couldn’t see the house for the glare of the searchlight. He blinked, glimpsed a dark figure at the open door, a glint of metal in one hand. Gloria crawled up from behind. She took Ranger from Ben, laboriously dragged him up the ladder.
Ben crouched behind the meager cover of the fly’s lower mandible, squinting to see the porch.
“We’ve got the cannon ready, Rackey.”
Ben didn’t have to see to know whose voice it was.
“What are you going to do with it, Fuller?” he called. “It’s behind the house, you going to shoot through the house to get at us? Where’s Lenny?”
“Lenny’s dead. An’ our friend wants you back. No hard feelings. He needs your cooperation. He won’t punish you. Everything’ll be as it was before, an’ you’ll get the money. Or…”
Ben was tempted. Chaldin might just keep his word, if he needed Ben Rackey. Ben couldn’t be forced to use the exciter properly, so Chaldin would need his cooperation. But, no. Gloria. The sea. “We threw the exciter away,” Ben lied.
“If it’s true, it don’t matter. Join jus. We’ve got some handsome plans. Good things ahead for people on our side of the fence. The stars compel the Order. It’s time to move. Big advantage for those who get in on it early in the game.”
“I’m considering it,” Ben called. “Give me a minute to think about it.” He looked over his shoulder, estimating the distance. He began to inch backwards, toward the ladder in the belly of the fly-car.
“I can see you, Rackey. Don’t move again or I’ll pull this trigger. Guess where I’ve got the sights aimed.”
All at once the fly-car lurched forward, wavering a foot off the ground, under the control of an unpracticed hand, and Ben had to roll to keep from being flattened by the open hatchway. Lying on his back, he lashed out with his right hand and caught the ladder’s bottom rung as it passed him--and was dragged twenty feet through sand as the fly-car barreled directly at the front porch of the ranch house.
Fuller fired three times. Ben heard bullets bouncing off the fly’s plasglass eyes. Abruptly, narrowly missing the porch-roof, the fly-car cut upward and rose swiftly, leveled off at thirty feet and did a U-turn that almost wrenched Ben from his precarious hold on the ladder. The fly-car swung away from the house, high enough to leap the fences, low enough to thwart Lenny’s cannons. They shot over the fences, Ben dangling from the ladder, his wrists aching, the air rushing past his face.
Out of the range of the searchlight the fly-car slowed until Ben could pull himself up the ladder. He climbed into the cabin and threw himself onto a cushion, breathing hard. When the dizziness left he forced himself to rise and, rubb
ing aching wrists, he went to the control cabin. Gloria was in the pilot seat. Ranger lay sprawled face down over the chair beside her. Ben examined him. He was dead. Ben carried Ranger to the rear, covered his staring, angry eyes with his leather jacket, then returned.
Wordlessly, she rose and took the seat to the right. Ben assumed the pilot’s seat. He took them up, killed the running lights, setting the course for Detroit. After a while Gloria said, “He was always pissed off. He was mad right up to the end. He got pissed off at me for carrying him up here instead of laying him down in the back.”
“How did you…?”
She shrugged; her profile blanched, her eyes empty. “I watched you drive this thing, it wasn’t hard.”
She got up, went to the rear of the vehicle. Ben heard her dragging Ranger’s body to the entry, heard a sliding sound as she dropped him through. Like a burial at sea, Ben thought. He heard a creaking as she cranked the hatch shut. There was the sound of air rushing by the fly-car which suddenly ceased as the hatch sealed. He heard her going to the rear cabin, then the subdued sound of her sobbing.
Hearing these things he thought: Now she knows it’s real.
CHAPTER THREE
Zero Times Zero
Gloria stayed drunk until early the next morning, when the liquor ran out. She was a sodden lump beside the opened hatchway, occasionally drooping an arm through to feel the wind between her fingers. Finally, she slept.
The landscape became rugged, pine-thatched mountains rolled below, and the early morning light gleamed on the pristine mountain lakes. It was on the shore of one of these lakes that Ben found a small band of regressives. As the fly-car circled their camp, he watched with amusement as they ran from their tents to hide, gesturing fiercely up at him with their spears, and scrambling to keep the shadow of the vehicle from falling over them.
“Are they Indians?” Gloria asked from behind.
Ben jerked a bit in his chair. He hadn’t heard her come up behind. She had a way of sneaking up and looking over his shoulder, of making unexpected comments. Slightly annoyed, he turned to look at her. She was haggard, the circles had deepened under her eyes, and she was trembling. She steadied herself with one hand on the back of the seat beside him. She needed food. That clinched his decision to land. “No,” he said at last, turning back to the window. “They’re not Indians. Most of the Indians were killed right before the civil war. The second civil war.”
