Steel Beach (46 page)

The fact is, I
loved
the news business…  it was the news that had failed me. I should have been born in the era of Upton Sinclair, William Randolph Hearst, Woodstein, Linda Jaffe, Boris Yermankov. I would have made a
great
war correspondent, but my world provided no wars for me to cover. I could have been a great writer of exposés, but the muck Luna provided me to rake was the thinnest of celebrity gruel. Political coverage? Well, why bother? Politics ran out of steam around the time television took over most of our governance—and nobody even noticed! That would have been a good story, but the fact was, nobody cared. The CC ran the world better than humans had ever managed to, so why fuss? What we still called politics was like a kindergarten contretemps compared to the robust, rough-and-tumble world I’d read about in my teens and twenties. What was left to me? Only the yellowest of yellow journalism. Sheer gonzo stuff.

It was these thoughts I carried with me back to the bonfire, where the last of my destroyed cabin was being burned now, and these thoughts I kept chewing over, beneath the outward smiles and warm thank-you’s as people began to drift away. And about the time the last partier climbed boozily back into his wagon I came to this conclusion: it was the world that had failed me.

That was the thought I carried with me into the nighttime hills, toward that arrangement of stones on top of a particular hill where, a little time ago, I had dug a hole. I dug into it again and removed a burlap potato sack. Inside the sack was a plastic bag, sealed tight, and inside the bag was an oily rag. The last thing to emerge from this Pandora’s Sack was not hope, but an ugly little object I’d handled only once, to show it to Brenda, with the words Smith & Wesson printed on its stubby blue-steel barrel.

So take
that
, cruel world.

There was certainly nothing to stop me from blowing my brains out all over the Texas sagebrush, and yet…  

Call it rationalization, but I was not convinced the CC couldn’t winkle me out and cause the cavalry to arrive at the last moment even in as remote a spot as this. Would I point the barrel to my temple only to have my hand jerked away by a previously-unseen mechanical minion? They existed out here.

Texas was too small, ecologically, to take care of itself.

In hindsight (and yes, I did survive this one, too, but you’ve already figured that out) you could say I was afraid it was too sudden for the CC, that he wouldn’t have
time
to get there and save me from myself unless I made the scheme more elaborate and thus more liable to failure. This assumes the attempt was but a gesture, a call for help, and I have no problem with that idea, but I simply didn’t
know
. My reasons leading up to the previous attempts were lost to me now, destroyed forever when the CC worked his tricks on me. This time was the only time I could remember, and it sure as hell
felt
as if I wanted to end it all.

There was another reason, one that does me more credit. I didn’t want my corpse to lie out here for my friends to find. Or the coyotes.

For whatever reason, I carefully concealed the revolver and made my way to an Outdoor Shop, where I purchased the first pressure suit I’d ever owned. Since I only intended to use it once, I bought the cheap model, frugal to the end. It folded up to fit in a helmet the size of a bell jar suitable for displaying a human head in anatomy class.

With this under my arm I went to the nearest airlock, rented a small bottle of oxygen, and suited up.

I walked a long way, just to be sure. I had all Liz’s spook devices turned on, and felt I should be invisible to the CC’s surveillance. There were no signs of human habitation anywhere around me. I sat on a rock and took a long look around. The interior of the suit smelled fresh and clean as I took a deep breath and pointed the barrel of the gun directly at my face.

I felt no regrets, no second thoughts. I hooked my thumb around the trigger, awkwardly, because the suit glove was rather thick, and I fired it.

The hammer rose and fell, and nothing happened.

Damn.

I fumbled the cylinder open and studied the situation.

There were only three rounds in there. The hammer had made a dent in one of them, which had apparently misfired. Or maybe it was something else. I closed the gun again and decided to check and see if the mechanism was working, watched the hammer rise and fall again and the weapon jumped violently, silently, almost wrenching itself from my hand. I realized, belatedly, that it had fired. Stupidly, I had been expecting to hear the bang.

Once more I assumed the position. Only one round left. What a pain in the butt it would be if I had to go back and try to cajole more ammunition out of Liz. But I’d do it; she owed me, the bitch had sold me the defective round.

This time I heard it, by God, and I got to see a sight few humans ever have: what it looks like to have a lead projectile blast from the muzzle of a gun and come directly at your face. I didn’t see the bullet at first, naturally, but after my ears stopped ringing I could see it if I crossed my eyes. It had flattened itself against the hard plastic of my faceplate, embedding in a starred crater it had dug for itself.

It had never entered my mind that would be a problem. The suit was not rated for meteoroid impact. Sometimes we build better than we know.

There was a curious thing. (This all must have happened in three or four seconds.) The faceplate was now showing a spidery network of small hexagons. I had time to reach up and touch the bullet and think
just like Nirvana
and then three small, clear hexagonal pieces of the faceplate burst away from me and I could see them tumbling for a moment, and then the breath was snatched from my lungs and my eyes tried to pop out and I belched like a Texas Mayor and it started to hurt. That old boogeyman of childhood, the Breathsucker, had moved into my suit with me and snuggled close.

I fell off the rock and was gazing into the sun when suddenly

a hand came out of nowhere and slapped a patch over the hole in my faceplate! I was jerked to my feet as the air began to hiss back into my suit from the emergency supply. Then I was (emergency supply? never mind) running, being pulled across the blasted landscape like a toy on the end of a string being held by a big guy in a spacesuit to the sound of brass and drums. My ears were pounding. Pounding? Hell, they rang like slot machines paying off, almost drowning out the music and the sounds of explosions. Dirt showered down around me (music? don’t worry about it) and I realized somebody was shooting at us! And suddenly I knew what had happened. I’d fallen under the spell of the Alphans’ Stupefying Ray, long rumored but never actually used in the long war. I’d almost taken my own life! Hypnotized by the evil influence, robbed of my powers of will and most of my memory, I’d have been dead meat except for the nick-of-time intervention of of of of of (name please) Archer! (thank you), Archer, my old pal Archer! Good old Archer had (stupefying ray? you can’t be serious) obviously come up with a device to negate the sinister effects of this awful weapon, put it together, and somehow found me at the last possible instant. But we weren’t out of the woods yet. With an ominous chord of deep bass notes the Alphan fleet loomed over the horizon.
Come on, Hildy
, Archer shouted, turning to beckon me on, and in the distance ahead I could see our ship, holed, battered, held together with salvaged space junk and plastigoop, but still able to show the Alphan Hordes a trick or two, you betcha. She was a sweet ship, this this this (I’m waiting)
Blackbird
, the fastest in two galaxies when she was hitting on all thrusters. Tracer bullets were arcing all around us as we (back up) Good old Archer had modified the
Blackbird
using the secrets we’d discovered when we unearthed the stasis-frozen tomb of the Outerians on the fifth moon of Pluto, shortly before we ran afoul of the Alphan patrol (good enough). Tracer bullets were arcing all around us as we neared the airlock when suddenly a bomb exploded right underneath Archer! He spiraled into the air and came to rest lying against the side of the ship. Broken, gouting blood, holding one hand out to me. I went to him and knelt to the sound of poignant strings and a lonely flute.
Go on without me, Hildy
, I heard over my suit radio.
I’m done for
. (Tracer bullets? Pluto? Oh the hell with it) I didn’t want to leave him there, but bullets were landing all around me—fortunately, none of them hit, but I couldn’t count on the Alphan’s aim staying lousy for long, and I was running out of options. I leaped into the ship, seething with rage.
I’ll get them, Miles
, I told him, in a determined voiceover that rang with resolve, brass, and just the slightest bit of echo. Oh, sure, he’d had his shortcomings, there’d been times I’d almost wanted to kill him myself, but when somebody kills your partner you’re supposed to do something about it. So I slammed the
Blackbird
into hyperdrive and listened to the banshee wail as the old ship shuddered and leaped into the fourth dimension. What with one thing and another, mostly adventures even more unlikely than my escape from the Stupefying Ray, a year went by. Well, sort of a year, though my ducking in and out of the fourth dimension and hyperspace royally screwed all my clocks. But somewhere an accurate one was ticking, because one day I looked up from my labors deep in the asteroid belt of Tau Ceti and suddenly a non-Alphan ship was coming in for a landing. It wasn’t setting off any of my alarms. By that I mean it triggered none of the Rube Goldberg comic-book devices I’d ostensibly constructed to alert me to Alphan attack. It rang plenty of alarms in the small corner of my mind that was still semi-rational. I put down my tools—I’d been working on a Tom Swiftian thingamabob I called an Interociter, a dandy little gadget that would warn me of the approach of the Alphans’ dreaded Extrogator, a space reptile big enough to (hasn’t this foolishness gone on long enough?)…  I put down my tools and stood waiting and watching as the small craft roared in for a landing on this (oh brother) airless asteroid I’d been using as a base of operations. The door hissed open and out stepped The Admiral, who looked around and said,

“O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”

“How dare you quote Shakespeare on this shoddy stage?”

“All the world’s a stage, and—”

“—and this show closed out of town. Will you quit wasting my time? I assume you’ve already wasted several ten-thousandths of a second and I don’t have a lot to spare for you.”

“I gather you didn’t like the show.”

“Jesus. You’re incredible.”

“The children seem to like it.”

I said nothing, deciding the best course was to wait him out. I won’t describe him, either. What’s the point?

“This kind of psychodrama has been useful in reaching certain types of disturbed children,” he explained. When I didn’t comment, he went on. “And a bit more time than that was involved. This sort of interactive scenario can’t simply be dumped into your brain whole, as I did before.”

“You have a way with words,” I said. “ ‘Dumped’ is so
right
.”

“It took more like five days to run the whole program.”

“Imagine my delight. Look. You brought me here, through all this, to tell me something. I’m not in the mood for talking to shitheads. Tell me what you want to tell me and get the hell out of my life.”

“No need to get testy about it.”

For a moment I wanted to pick up a rock and smash him. I was primed for it, after a year of fighting Alphans. It had brought out a violent streak in me. And I had reason to be angry. I had
suffered
during the last subjective year. At one point a “safety” device in my “suit” had seen fit to bite through my leg to seal off a puncture around the knee, caused by an Alphan bullet passing through it. It had hurt like…  but again, what’s the point? Pain like that can’t be described, it can’t really be remembered, not in its full intensity. But enough
can
be remembered for me to harbor homicidal thoughts toward the being who had written me into it. As for the terror one feels when a thing like that happens, I can remember that quite well, thank you.

“Can we get rid of this wooden leg now?” I asked him.

“If you wish.”

Try that one if you want to sample weirdness. Immediately I felt my left leg again, the one that had been missing for over six months. No tingling, no spasms or hot flashes. Just gone one moment and there the next.

“We could lose all this, too,” I suggested, waving a hand at my asteroid, littered with wrecked ships and devices held together with spit and plastigoop.

“What would you like in its place?”

“An absence of shitheads. Failing that, since I assume you don’t plan to go away for a while, just about anything would do as long as it doesn’t remind me of all this.”

All that immediately vanished, to be replaced by an infinite, featureless plain and a dark sky with a scattering of stars. The only things to be seen for many billions of miles were two simple chairs.

“Well, no, actually,” I said. “We don’t need the sky. I’d just keep searching for Alphans.”

“I could bring along your Interociter. How was that going to work, by the way?”

“Are you telling me you don’t know?”

“I only provide the general shape of a story like this one. You must use your own imagination to flesh it out. That’s why it’s so effective with children.”

“I refuse to believe all that crap was in my head.”

“You’ve always loved old movies. You apparently remembered some fairly trashy ones. Tell me about the Interociter.”

“Will you get rid of the sky?” When he nodded, I started to outline what I could recall of that particular hare-brained idea, which was simply to take advantage of the fact that the Extrogator had long ago swallowed a cesium clock and, with suitable amplification, the regular tick-tick-ticking of its stray radiation could be heard and used as an early warning…  

“God. That’s from
Peter Pan
, isn’t it,” I said.