* * *
“They took him? Took him where?” Danny’s confusion was typical of his recent behavior. Dorinda had noticed him becoming increasingly distracted during the two hours it had taken them to fly the helium airship up to the dam. She’d finally been forced to take the controls from him while he rummaged through the glove box and under all the seats looking for kweesh.
“He’s been taken to WMTC headquarters in Grissom City,” replied the uniformed security guard in a disapproving tone of voice. “Apparently, he was caught trying to sabotage the dam’s diversion systems.” The deeply tanned fellow wore a rust red coverall (a popular color since it hid the dust) with a prominent Western Mountain Terraforming Corporation logo on the left breast pocket. He looked like he spent all day every day sitting in his little glass cubicle, baking in the sun and guarding a mostly empty parking lot. Behind him was a small cinder block building set beside the yawning chasm of the Cooper Dam. Beyond that, the Cooper Reservoir gleamed silver in the sun, stretching for miles. That much surface water was a sight rarely seen back then on Mars.
Dorinda gave the guy one of her looks. Then she turned to Danny, who still looked confused.
“Go back to the ship and get ready to go. I have a few questions for the Dam Supervisor.” By the way she said it, it wasn’t clear whether she was cursing out the individual in question or just identifying him, but she was surely not pleased. She stalked across the parking lot.
Danny stepped closer to the guard, his hand twitching. “Got any kweesh, man?” At the guard’s negative head shake and disapproving look, his shoulders sagged. He made his dejected way back to the ship, tied up at its tether.
Meanwhile, Dorinda got her claws into the hapless fellow and got enough information out of him for her to make a decision. She returned to the airship, eyes blazing and jaw set.
“Fire it up, Danny. We’re going to Grissom City. The WMTC’s central computer decided that the food production regions need water more than we do, and they’ve cut off everything but the potable water allowance for our region. When Daddy tried to reprogram the dam’s irrigation parameters, they arrested him.”
Danny fumbled with the keys a few times before she shouldered him aside and did it herself. He was pretty shaky by then, sweatin’ bullets. He plopped himself down in the copilot’s seat, popped in his earbuds, and stared out the window. When he didn’t even seem curious about where they were going and why, she got worried. Once she got them aloft and figured out how to set the autopilot for the Grissom City aerodrome, she sat back and looked him up and down. He was staring out the window, pale and perspiring, with a spaced out look on his face.
“You sick, Danny?” He turned to her with one of his goofy grins, looking half-stoned, even though she knew he hadn’t had any kweesh at all.
“Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi….” he crooned in a dreamy voice, nodding his head to music only he could hear. She reached over and pulled his earbuds out of his ears, but it didn’t help much. He kept singing, staring off at nothing with a vacant smile on his face. “Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-ho…”
“You okay, Danny?” she shouted. Danny blinked and finally focused on her.
“Oh, hi, Dorinda,” he said, as if he’d just noticed she was there. His face screwed up for a second like he was thinking hard. Then the question he wanted to ask occurred to him. “You got any kweesh?”
Danny had always been the smartest of the Mackenzie boys, or at least Dorinda thought so. Growing up, she’d been schooled with all of them at one point or another, and it seemed to her that long about 14 or 15 years old, all of them turned into slow witted idiots more interested in beating each other up than in doing anything useful. She’d chalked it up to his brothers’ influence when she’d noticed the same thing happening to Danny lately, but it was obvious now that this was something much more serious.
“How much kweesh are you doing, Danny?” she probed. Dorinda herself rarely indulged. Kweesh fogged the brain and interfered with clear thinking, and she hated not being able to think straight. Dorinda liked being in control. She was that kind of a girl.
Danny considered her question with great seriousness. After some seconds he replied, “Not more’n five or six joints a day, I wouldn’t think. Is that a lot?” In reward for his great mental effort he got another one of Dorinda’s looks. She turned back to the controls, shaking her head.
For just a few seconds, she allowed herself to be scared, and her stomach clenched. She was a fourteen-year-old girl headed toward a showdown with the evil computer overlord of the largest corporation on Mars, and all she had for help was a kweesh junkie in the first stages of withdrawal. Then she got her act together, grabbed a blanket from the back seat, and tucked it around Danny where he sat shivering.
“Go to sleep, Danny. You’ll feel better when you wake up.” She was that kind of a girl, too.