The Media Candidate (33 page)

It seemed to be getting into position just as
the little car this morning had done before firing at him. He
remembered the tree bark shattering inches from his head. He heard
the clatter of eight feet behind him and the crash of the spider
monster into the glass door.

Then a vision of Guinda’s body lying silently in
her bed with a single puncture wound in her throat engulfed him.
They’d gone so far together in such a short time. Now he must see
it to the end. He stared at the obstacle in his path and knew there
would probably be others ahead; but he had to conquer his fear,
because fear could cause him to make a mistake, to misjudge, to
miss the obvious.

His heart beat wildly as his foot made the
decision to go. Now Elliott was operating on instinct. He was no
longer calculating the probability that he had somehow not blinded
his adversary, nor determining what the capability of his foe might
be if it were operating only with its IR imager. The pickup shot
down the hill under the command of Elliott’s foot.

Near the end of the driveway, Elliott saw the
turret on top of the little car. Now his hands joined the team as
they whipped the steering wheel viciously to the left causing the
pickup to rip through a median filled with bushy geraniums, bounce
over a curb, tear through a newly planted lawn, continually
changing course and accelerating toward their joint victim, which
sat motionless, only its turret tracking the pickup’s trajectory. A
bullet shattered the windshield, but Elliott was aware of only one
thing now. In that last second before the impact, the inside of the
pickup was filled with the cry of the attacker, “Señor Bull, meet
Elliott Townsend!”

There was the briefest of silences before the
crash of the large pickup into the side of the little car. The car
caved in and careened across the street, rolling over twice, and
coming to rest on its side against an oak tree. The pickup
ricocheted out of control, spinning around, slamming against the
opposite curb blowing one tire, and coming to rest in the parking
lot of a computer distributor. Its front end was severely damaged
and the windshield was mostly gone, however the electric drive
train was operational.

Elliott sat dazed and motionless for some time
with a collapsed airbag in his lap. He seemed unaware of the
emergence of a pair of legs from the partially open rear hatch of
the little car. A spider-like creature proceeded to creep out
through the narrow aperture, not as a Chinese acrobat gracefully
negotiates a tiny opening between a pair of teammates, but as a
red-nosed clown stumbles through the window of a Volkswagen. It
stood, unsure of itself, testing its environment in every direction
with exploratory taps. It walked slowly in the direction of the
pickup, stopping frequently to test the ground before it with an
extended leg—tap, tap, tap. Then more steps and more taps. It
stopped as if confused about its environment and the description of
its victim. It stood there, tapping in every direction with its
perfect tentacles as if trying to restore some order to this
puzzle.

Elliott watched unresponsively. His mind was
only slowly returning to the moment. Finally he understood the
scene. He watched with pleasure as the spider, only about a hundred
feet away, struggled with its blindness. A smile overtook him, but
he quickly reminded himself that this spider, this thing, was
incapable of suffering. Elliott wished he had the power to breath
into it a soul. If only he could be God for just a minute, he would
create in that spider a creature of extreme sensitivity, a creature
that would be devastated by its disability, a creature that would
agonize over its loss.

In lieu of such a reality, he fantasized it, the
fantasy giving it meaning. He pointed the truck at the spider and
accelerated toward it in uneven thumps. The spider reached out with
one tentacle toward its attacker just before the truck crushed it
against the remains of the little car. The one tentacle remained on
the hood of the pickup and slowly curled inward until it became
motionless. The fantasy was complete.

Elliott stood behind a clump of pampas grass
examining Guinda’s house. He had begun a new life there such a
short time ago. Today’s few hours had been so jammed with a
lifetime of trials that he hadn’t paused to consider the toll on
his body—and on his mind. His physical agony clawed to the front
now that he had lost the momentum of dueling with assassins for his
next breath.

This was the letdown, both physical and mental.
The battles for his life, and for whatever he believed in, lay in
the swirling eddies at his stern. Before him lay a fog. And a
gnawing guilt.

Trembling legs were the first sign of what was
happening to his whole body. Some benches stood in the garden and
beckoned him. One was partially hidden from direct view of the
second floor deck that adjoined Guinda’s living room. He moved
painfully toward that bench, instinctively looking around to see if
anyone, or anything, was watching. The truth, in fact, hid well
beyond such a token security check. A silent and nearly invisible
sentinel lurked behind a bush on Guinda’s front porch at her
downstairs entrance.

It had watched him since he entered the garden,
moving like a jackal, always stealthy, always shadowed. It could
wait like a practiced sniper. It could observe endlessly with a
patience and a vigilance that few humans could even comprehend.

Elliott plopped down on the bench and surprised
himself with a guttural sigh. The sentinel edged further out from
behind the bush to a better position. Its interest in Elliott was
as intense as Elliott’s interest in Guinda, but of a profoundly
different nature. Its interest was based on a voluminous data set
created by a bureaucrat motivated only by getting a paycheck. All
that effort was being expended on Dr. Elliott T. Townsend,
anarchist.

Elliott tried to relax those battle-weary
muscles, but anxiety wouldn’t allow it. His focus was stuck on
Guinda and his role in whatever had happened to her.
Was I
attracted to her just as a woman?
he wondered.
Or as a
comrade in some struggle, this silly adventure we cooked
up.

He shook his head. It wouldn’t clear.
An
adventure. Is that all this is? But it’s gone so wrong.

He studied the windows and the French door to
the deck for some clue.
I have to do something. Can’t just give
up now. But what? Just go to the front door and knock? Call the
police? Something.

“What if they haven’t killed her yet?” he
mumbled to himself. He bolted upright in his seat. “What if … what
if she’s a prisoner? But what if that wasn’t Guinda I talked to
this morning? That’s for sure. I don’t know who, or what. But it
wasn’t Guin.” He stared at the deck, but with just a glimmer of
hope.

Suddenly a figure appeared at the window.
Elliott crouched. He couldn’t tell much about the man at the window
except that he was smoking a pipe.

“Sherwood,” he muttered.

Elliott could tell he wasn’t speaking, just
standing and blowing great clouds of smoke against the glass where
it mushroomed. Then a moment later he disappeared. Elliott stood up
and took a step toward the house before pain stopped him.

As he moved, the sentinel stepped forward, ready
for a confrontation, but still hidden from view. It lowered its
body like a stalking cat, processing and measuring, not quite
thinking. Each time Elliott took a step forward it inched its body
closer and lower, always keeping its cover, always coming closer to
that instruction buried deep in it’s operating program. One line of
computer code would change it from surveillance mode to attack
mode—a simple one-line instruction that meant life or death to
Elliott.

The window again went blank. Elliott’s torment
surged. He weighed his options. The answer was inside that
house.

“I’ve got nothing to lose,” he whispered. “I’ll
just go up to her front door. It’s still her door. She still lives
there. If I do nothing, they’ll just track me down and kill me, and
I’ll never know.”

He began to take another step toward the door
and the waiting sentinel, but he was interrupted by the French
doors swinging open. A wave of smoke broke over the threshold.
Slowly a figure emerged with the escaping flood. It wasn’t the same
figure he just saw at the window. Elliott first squinted and then
rubbed his eyes imploring them to work younger.

“Guin!” he shouted taking a painful step
forward, a step mimicked by the sentinel.

Guinda looked down into the garden and had no
trouble recognizing the figure. She also had no trouble seeing the
object slowly creeping down the steps from her front porch.

Elliott took more steps toward her shouting,
“Guin, I thought you were dead!”

The sentinel’s intentions became obvious to her.
She watched each painful step Elliott made toward her, and she
watched the sentinel reach the bottom step, creeping lower to the
ground, waiting for the proper time to spring. It stopped and
waited as Elliott repeated each agonizing step that brought the
spider closer to its attack sequence.

“Guin, are you okay?” came the cries from
Elliott as he reached the center of the garden.

Sherwood joined Guinda on the deck and watched
the melodrama unfold. Guinda looked at the spider below. It was
ready. She looked at the battered man dragging himself across the
garden toward her and toward it. Her face showed no emotion. She
stepped to the railing and shouted, “Townsend, stop!”

At the sound of his name, he stiffened. “What?”
he shouted back.

“Stop where you are.”

“What’s the matter, Guin?” Elliott said as he
managed two more steps toward her.

The sentinel’s fang now throbbed, and its body
was fully crouched. Its eight feet were dug into the flowerbed
beneath the bush. It waited and watched and calculated.

“You’re in great danger here, Townsend,” she
said with precision. “You’ll be killed if you come any closer. If
you value your life, stop where you are.”

The footprint of her words pierced his brain and
then ripped into his heart, but he reacted only to the latter. “I
want to make sure everything is okay, Guin. I’m coming up.”

Sherwood stepped forward. “Burns was speaking
the truth when she said you are in very grave danger, Townsend. You
better stop where you are. The next step might be your last.”

“I’ve come this far, and I’m not leaving until I
come up there and see Guinda!” He took his last step forward.

“Stop, Townsend! I don’t want you to come up.
Don’t be a fool! Listen to Sherwood!” She turned abruptly and
disappeared inside.

Elliott froze as he watched her vanish. When he
first saw her in the doorway, his sense of danger evaporated
because they once more owned that danger together. As the precision
of her command crystallized, he realized that
he
now owned
the danger alone. The empty space beside Sherwood attested to this
new reality. But it was new only to Elliott. He’d converged on
Guinda with the values of a bygone era. He’d embraced her as a
woman, as a peer, and interpreted her acceptance of him in the
light of that same lost age. The fossilized values of a dead
century had blinded him to the exigencies of today. She was a child
of the media and may have questioned that parentage but could never
reject it. This congruence burst upon him. Guinda had never been a
part of his world.

The loss of Guinda collapsed his view of this
game. He suddenly lost interest in pursuing it to a solution. He’d
once more betrayed himself. The memory of Ms. Dobbs’ eyes piercing
his soul competed with the loss of Guinda Burns. But the reality of
his present position could not be denied. He stared at the grass
before him and reprimanded himself for being such a fool—such an
old
fool.

“Go sit on your park bench, Townsend, and I will
come out and talk to you,” Sherwood said.

Elliott slowly obeyed. He had nothing left now
but a blunted craving. Guinda had been his partner in the most
exciting excursion of his life. But there was more. He was
devastated by her betrayal of her principles—or were they his
principles? In a sense, she had remained more faithful to her
principles than he to his. No, it wasn’t just principles and
adventures. He felt foolish, like a high-school boy who finds that
his secret love has other interests. Could it simply be adolescent
jealousy?

Sherwood descended the stairs and walked
gingerly past the sentry, maintaining eye contact with it. Although
he surmised it had been programmed specifically to keep Elliott
out, he felt vulnerable as he passed within inches of it. He
envisioned the sequence of integrated-circuit triggers as the
spider achieved the optimal orientation, as it charged the plunger
capacitor, as it commanded the needle to penetrate and the
force-sensor feedback circuits stopped the penetration at the
optimal depth, as the plunger injected the deadly load, and as the
command for withdrawal brought the glistening needle back to
storage. He feared its effectiveness with pride.

Sherwood joined Elliott on the bench, glancing
back over his shoulder several times. They sat beside each other
for some time in silence. Elliott leaned forward with his elbows on
his knees, his hands folded in front of him. Sherwood initially
wanted to dispose of him like an annoying mosquito. But the fact
that Elliott was sitting there beside him was an outstanding feat,
for he knew of COPE’s plans to eliminate Elliott that morning.
Elliott must have some exceptional qualities to be able to outwit
such opponents as COPE would throw against him. Beneath his Don
Quixote exterior there must beat the heart of a formidable
adversary. He wondered just what kind of a man Elliott might
be.