Gauntlet Run: Birth of a Superhero

  The raw overpowering force of the Flyer scared Henty so much it almost overcame her relief at dumping the dangerous Cadillac and escaping from the assassin, so she kept to just over a 100 milesperhour, which she already knew was the Cadillac’s top speed. When she readjusted the mirrors to her satisfaction, she could see the Cadillac, with the banker driving, following her. But that was no problem: she didn’t think he would call up help. He wanted to catch and kill her all by himself. Slowly. She shivered.

  A town appeared on the horizon. The road dipped and then there was, in the dip, a short S-bend. As Henty braked for the S the banker audaciously hustled the big Cadillac through on the inside. It would have been an admirably skilled maneuver in that car even if he had a full steering wheel to control it with: Henty whistled.

  She stopped whistling almost before she started because next he swung the heavy Cadillac over to force her into the side of the cutting. No matter how hard Henty braked she still needed to give way to the left. She was still traveling over eighty, inches from the bare rock face when—

  Neither of them had been looking forward. The banker looked back at the Flyer, half behind the Cadillac. Henty stared in horror at the rock face coming ever closer to her. She concentrated on braking as hard as she could. Neither of them saw the big man drive the bulldozer onto the road and then run away from it.

  Henty looked into the Cadillac for advance warning — a twitch of the banker’s hands on the wheel — when he next tried to push her into the wall. His face was grimly exultant.

  “Watch out!” Henty shouted at him when she saw the bulldozer.

  But he couldn’t hear her and he couldn’t see her behind the smoked glass of the Flyer. He drove into the blade of the bulldozer at 63 milesperhour.

  Henty smacked the Flyer into low gear by brute force and jerked the handbrake on and stood up on the brake so hard her bottom left the seat and spun the wheel at the same time. Then she just sat there and waited to die against the rock as the Flyer spun like a top in the middle of the road between the rock faces.

  Before the Flyer stopped spinning, Henty, without pausing to think, swung the door open, jumped out and ran to the wrecked Cadillac to pull the banker out before it exploded or burst into flames.

  The door was jammed in its bent frame but Henty put her foot against the rear door and the Fist pulled the recalcitrant door right off its hinges. She flung it aside and pulled the banker out. She ran a little way with him before the Cadillac exploded behind them, flinging them to the ground.

  “Shooooo!” Henty said, half in relief at being alive, half as the wind was driven from her. She rolled over next to the banker. He was still alive. She raised his head so he could breathe. “Goddamn amateurs,” he said.

  “Don’t speak,” Henty said, alarmed at the blood that came out of the corner of his mouth together with the words.

  “Always getting the wrong man,” he said. “Thanks for pulling me out.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I’ll tell you something in return. They won’t get you.”

  “I hope not,” Henty said.

  “Not the amateurs, they won’t get you. But the professionals will, they’ll get you.”

  “The bounty hunters?”

  “No. The Syndicate.”

  Henty nodded. “Sure. I got a deal with them to cash in my chips in front of the Mint in ’Frisco in return for them letting my Petey go.”

  “That’s where they’ll betray you.”

  “Huh? I got a deal with them!”

  “You reckon they’ll let Petey and that surgeon live to tell how the Syndicate fixes the Gauntlet Run? You can’t be that stupid.”

  “I just haven’t thought about it.”

  “You don’t need to think about something like that. You know it.”

  “Well, thanks. Now, no more talk.”

  “You should've stuck to chicken farming.” More blood flowed over his lips and his eyes opened to stare forever skywards.

  Henty put his head gently on the ground and tried to close his eyes but the lids flew open again. A big man and a smaller man headed for her.

  “Get that dozer off the road,” she shouted at them. One jumped on it and moved it. The other one danced a gleeful jig until he noticed Henty’s left hand — the Fist — and stopped dead.

  “Hey, Little John!” he shouted at the one on the bulldozer, his voice wavering. “We got—”

  “You killed a vice-president of the Chaser Organ Bank of Manhattan, which is a charter member of The Caring Society,” Henty said, raising her voice a little to shut him up. “You’re guilty of a very serious crime. You'd better think carefully about that before you phone ahead that I’m coming, otherwise how will you explain what you know?”

  Henty climbed into the Flyer and drove off westwards.

  CHAPTER 59

  We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true. — James Fenimore Cooper

  It is probably too late to prevent further nuclear proliferation. It is even possible, indeed, that nuclear weapons may become available to private criminals, instead of (as up to now) merely to public ones. — D J Goodspeed

  Hunger was killing Henty, so she stopped at a roadhouse. She kept her left hand low down by her side so the carhop didn’t see it. There was a Watcheye scanning the parking lot but it didn’t bother her. By now she had the hang of it: the Watcheyes fed their responses to some kind of a record that wasn’t checked constantly and continually, otherwise they would've killed her a long time ago. By the time this Watcheye’s records were checked (at the local cops? in the State Capital? in Washington? Henty didn’t know) she would be long and far gone. In the last hour she had covered a hundred-and-twenty miles. If there was any money left after paying for Petey’s treatment and paying off the mortgage on the farm, she'd buy herself her own Zuffhausen Flyer. And she wouldn’t convert it into a morguemobile... She found a shroud in the back and tore a piece off it to wrap around the Fist and to make a sling like her arm was hurt.

  The doors were marked Hawks and Peacocks. Henty grimaced and went into the Peacocks. “Don’t they know it’s only the male peacocks that’re colorful?” she asked a woman washing her hands inside. “The females are just drab.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m from LA,” said the woman.

  “Oh,” Henty replied, as if being from LA explained everything.

  “Yes. We've come up here to get a baby, my husband and me, we haven’t got any children.”

  “Hey, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,” Henty said. “Diapers, feeding times. But it’s good once they grow up a little.”

  “How many've you got?”

  “Only the one.”

  “Hey, you wanna come help me choose mine?”

  “Well, I have to be—”

  The woman’s face fell in disappointment. “Come on, it won’t take more'n ten minutes.”

  “All right then,” Henty agreed.

  The woman and her husband led in their car and Henty followed in the Flyer. They came to a parking lot and parked. Henty walked with them towards the lines of babies lying squealing in the blistering sun. Between the babies were neat paths and along these men in loudly checked sports jackets walked, making notes in their books.

  A woman in the pink of The Caring Society spied them as strangers and came up to them.

  “Are you betting or taking?” she asked.

  The woman said, “We'd like a baby.”

  The pink woman smiled. “Okay, like the President said, people are our cheapest asset. You can’t have one if you have two or more children, you know that don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, we know. But we haven’t got any at all.” The woman held out some papers. “We filled in all the forms and got them verified and stamped at your LA office.”

  “Good-oh, I wish everybody was so considerate. Well, you choose your baby.”

  “That one will do,” the woman said
. She bent to the little crib, then remembered she had brought Henty for advice and looked up at Henty, her eyes appealing to Henty not to say no to this one.

  Henty smiled. “A baby’s a baby and that one looks good except for a bad case of sunburn.” The woman gathered the baby up in her arms. “Thank you,” she said to Henty, and to the woman in pink, “I don’t know how we can ever thank The Caring Society for giving us a child.”

  “Lots more where that one came from,” the pink woman said jovially.

  Henty saw something cross the face of the husband as he looked at the other babies. He said. “In that case, we’ll have another one as well.”

  “You can’t,” said the pink woman firmly.

  “But we’re entitled to two children and—”

  “That’s right. A year after yoa second one.”

  “But by then they’ll all b—”

  “Now don’t make trouble,” the pink woman said, her voice no longer friendly. “I can still decide you're not fit persons and take that one back.”

  “No!” said the new foster mother. “We won’t make trouble. Come on, Gene, let’s go!” She hugged the baby tightly and walked backwards towards the exit and their car, watching the pink woman for any sign that the woman would try to take the baby back, her eyes saying she'd fight to the death to keep it.

  The husband tried once more. “Have a heart,” he said softly.

  The pink woman shook her head. “Listen, just about everybody asks me to break the rules. Regulations are made to be kept, you know, even if I agreed with you, which I don’t.”

  “Gene!” his wife called, fear rising in her voice. “Don’t rile her!”

  Defeated, the husband turned away to follow his wife.

  Henty didn’t follow them immediately. “Why don’t you cover these babies?” she asked the pink woman.

  The woman shrugged disinterestedly. “They'd only last longer.”

  CHAPTER 60

  “What do you mean?” Already a small horror was nagging at the back of Henty’s mind.

  “And I can tell you something else,” the woman from The Caring Society said. “The Syndicate will howl like hell.” She indicated the men in the check sports jackets. “They like a quick turnover. I mean, people who bet on how long some little fellow is going to last don’t want to sit in front of their vidi for days waiting to see if they won their bet, do they now?”

  Henty looked up and saw the cameras. “You mean these babies are exposed to die and people take bets on how soon they die?”

  “Why yes,” said the pink woman. “It’s another service of The Caring Society to those States where abortion and child euthanasia is illegal. And to Catholics who don’t believe in birth control. And to women who want the experience of childbirth but not the bother of bringing them up. You know how it is.”

  “I don’t,” Henty said stoutly. But the woman seemed not to have heard her. “And a service to everybody who agrees with the President that we can’t keep up our living standards if we just keep breeding and breeding until our families are too large to keep in the style to which we are accustomed. ZPG.” She said it like a mathematician might say QED about something that needs no explanation at all because it’s so obvious to all right-thinking people.

  Henty had to stop and think about ZPG. Then it came to her: Zero Population Growth.

  Henty was horrified. “But there are lots of childless couples!” Henty exclaimed. “They go to jail for buying babies illegally. Why don’t you just tell them they can get a baby here for free for asking?”

  The woman shook her head sadly. “You really aren’t very bright. Why do you think it is illegal to adopt a child except through us? Why do you think this place is so remote from everywhere? We'd spoil all our good work if we let people know where we are, won’t we?”

  “I think it’s— it’s—” Words failed Henty. She gagged.

  One of the men in loud sports jackets came up. “When did twelve-eighty-nine croak?” he demanded from the pink woman.

  The caring Society functionary pointed to the couple settling the baby into their car. “Didn’t croak. Got adopted.”

  The man in the loud check jacket cursed foully. Henty swtared at the little metal number plate above the crib: 1289. A number, not even a name. She swallowed the bile back in her throat.

  “Look here,” the loud sports jacket said to the pink woman. “There’re a lot of bets riding on that one. If you get him back — tell those people to choose another one — I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Henty brought up the meal she ate not quite half an hour before.

  “Something wrong?” asked the pink lady.

  “Yes,” Henty said. “You. You’re disgusting.”

  “I’ll go offer them some money to bring that one back, let him croak and take another one,” the loud sports jacket said and started running to the car park. “They won’t mind. One baby is as good as any other baby.”

  Henty’s foot shot out almost of its own accord to trip him. He fell with a crunch. “I saw what you did,” the pink woman said nastily.

  The death’s head bookmaker rolled over and up and swung at Henty: she blocked with her right hand and struck out for his chin with her other hand, forgetting that she had wrapped the Fist to cover it. It burst out of the sling she carried her forearm in, and out of the shroud-bandages around it. It also burst the bookie’s chin rather conclusively.

  The pink woman screamed and pointing at the sky.

  Henty saw the insignia first: US Air Force. 87th First Strike Squadron.

  She saw the rockets leaving their pods where the wings joined the fuselage of the plane. The rockets headed straight for her. Nobody mentioned the Fist.

  CHAPTER 61

  But the Fist had been noticed, in Washington, by its signal broadcast to the many cameras around the baby-arena. In fact, Henty had not been in view of the cameras more than three seconds before the Pentagon computer, tied in for this operation to the computer of The Caring Society, flashed her up in close-up on no fewer than six screens on the wall of the Pentagon Operations Room. A Signals colonel murmured into a telephone to the room above The Pit where the Joint Chiefs sat in easy chairs, seeing everything through their glass wall.

  “We can scramble 87th First Strike and hit her four-thirty­ seven from now, sir.”

  “Do it,” the Air Force general who answered the phone said without hesitation, and returned to listening to an admiral describing how he shot a birdie at Burning Tree.

  CHAPTER 62

  Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, Henty looked at the rockets, standing rooted to the spot, hypnotized by the next plane and the next and the next breaking off from the formation to follow the first down so that from her foreshortened perspective it looked like a universe of planes all diving at her in a solid black line.

  She had seen rockets before.

  And what rockets could do.

  Henty grabbed a baby under each arm and ran hell-for-leather for the car park.

  Behind her she heard bookmakers scream, the pink lady scream even louder, the crack! of each succeeding plane firing its rockets. Henty did not look behind her. If she did, a rocket would come and turn her into a pillar of salt, she thought. And then she thought, No that’s not right, a pillar of fire.

  The happy new parents were just about to drive off with their child.

  “Here,” Henty passed the babies one by one through the window to the woman, who sat in the back seat. “Here’s two more for you.”

  “Why, thanks! Both for me?”

  “Sure.”

  A rocket hit the Flyer and exploded it. Henty ducked. “Give you a ride?” the husband asked.

  “Thanks,” Henty said as she slammed the door behind her. They drove off in a hurry.

  CHAPTER 63

  A major in The Pit called The Royal Box. “Sir,” he said to the Air Force general, “we could sterilize the area nuclearwise.”

  The general thought briefly. “
What’s the likely body count?”

  “It’s in the middle of the desert,” said the major. “There’s a roadhouse and a baby farm. Maybe a coupla hundred if you don’t count the babies.”

  The general was half listening to an army general telling a smutty story about his secretary which was just coming to the climax. “Okay, Major. Go!”

  CHAPTER 64

  The pilot who dropped the small nuclear bomb nudged the co-pilot/bombardier but the other man kept his eyes on the mushroom still growing to port and below them.

  “On the nose,” the bombardier enthused. “Look at that mushroom grow!”

  “C'mon, you seen mushrooms before. But look at the blast rock that Beetle!”

  Reluctantly the bombardier tore his eyes away from the devastation he had wrought to the elderly VW flying through the air beside the road, touching here and there in the barren landscape, driven by the successive shock-blasts that always follow explosion as Nature tries to fill the vacuum the explosive leaves.

  “Hey!” the bombardier laughed, “If we dropped that baby fifteen seconds earlier they would've had it.”

  “Yeah,” the pilot agreed. “But on that rollercoaster they're riding now. I bet they’re wishing they bought it instantly instead, huh?”

  CHAPTER 65