Caird-Duncan and Snick had left the apartment via the roof-hatchway of the hangar room before the organics arrived and burned open the only door to the suite. Caird-Duncan apparently notified the organic officer of the murders because he wanted us to get our hands on a still-alive Immerman-Ananda. He must have expected that we would TM his grandfather and then be forced to reveal to the world the tremendous deception wrought by a World Councillor.
He should have known better. The truth behind this plot is being hushed up as much as possible. In any event, General Kowatt was apprised that Carebara and Immerman-Ananda must die in the hospital reserved for organics, or shortly afterwards. He will be well rewarded for his discretion and prompt carrying out of orders.
The “murders” of World Councillor Ananda and Carebara have been announced (Wednesday). Caird-Duncan and Snick are blamed for their deaths. So far as the organic department can determine, there is no public suspicion that the news-channel stories re the deaths are anything but as reported. The ID of Ananda as Immerman will not be disclosed for reasons I do not have to explain.
The search for Caird-Duncan and Snick continues. We have no idea, at the moment, where they are. After they committed the amazing megacrimes of destoning all the citizens of Los Angeles at the same time, then destroying its electric power distribution center, and then, a few hours later, successfully destroying the thermionic converter and distributor for the entire West Coast, they managed to get away and hide.
They have created a vast amount of confusion, chaos, and major inconvenience for the citizens of these political departments. World-wide publicity re these events has been unavoidable.
Caird-Duncan and Snick must be captured—very soon. No doubt, they plan more attacks against the Commonwealth and hope to stir up an unstoppable storm of dissension, perhaps even rebellion, I recommend that the two arch-criminals be killed when they are located if circumstances permit. If no civilian witnesses are present, Caird and Snick must be terminated immediately. If civilian witnesses are present and the two criminals submit to arrest peacefully, then the two should be taken to the nearest precinct station. A trusted general will be authorized by us to take charge of the personnel and to arrange a “killed while attempting to escape” report.
END OF COMMUNICATION.
ERASE AFTER ASSIMILATION.
5
Duncan was seldom taken off guard. That Panthea Snick would attack him was unthinkable.
He had located the entrance of a cave in the side of a mountain. The airboat moved out of the driving rain through the ten-foot wide mouth into a hollow. After about forty feet, the downward slope of the rock roof forced the boat to scrape against the floor. But it squeezed through the low and narrow hole into another chamber. There he turned it until it was against a sidewall.
Their flashlights lit up a hollow shaped like the inside of a box that had been stepped on by a giant. The stone floor was littered with old bones, mostly of deer and rabbit. A faint catlike odor suggested that panthers had once laired here. He and Snick removed from the rear storage compartment the lantern taken from the gank office, two inflatable mattresses, and two snapout blankets. While they were arranging these on the floor near the boat, he said, “We’ll sleep as long as we wish, and…”
“Oh, no, we won’t!” she said.
The lantern filled the hollow with a light such as a fish in a bowl might swim in. Snick had stripped off her uniform and stood in her utilitarian underwear, a light purple T-shirt and bikini panties. Her straight dark sleek hair shone like a seal’s fur, and her dark brown eyes seemed to glow. Almost—it was his imagination, of course—the delicate high-cheekboned skull beneath the smooth bronze flesh seemed to flash forth. It was a beautiful skull, if skulls could be said to be beautiful.
She raised her arms and pulled the T-shirt off. Her breasts were small perfect globes with huge rose-red nipples. Then she pulled away the velcro ends of her panties and revealed the unusually thick pubic hair, dark and shining.
She leaped at Duncan like a panther. He went back under her attack, not resisting, and fell onto the inflated mattress with her on top of him. Though he was fully dressed, he did not take long getting his clothes off with her help.
“I never expected…” he said.
“Shut up!”
Her mouth closed on his lips.
Afterward, lying with her head on his chest, his right arm about her, he thought about why she had, literally, jumped him. She had never said or done anything to make him think that she cared for him in any way sexually. His own attitude toward her had been somewhat shadowy. At first, he had thought he was in love with her. For all he knew, that might have been because he had loved her in his previous personae. He did not remember them. But her bloodthirstiness had somewhat repelled him and he had decided that he could not love her. As if a mental decision had anything to do with an emotional decision. But his response to her now had been more than a desire to expend his lust. He had melted with her into that ecstatic feeling that only love, not lust, could give.
Both of them had been so filled with frenzy because of what they had done today that sex was the only thing that could burn away the high charge in their nerves.
That that had not succeeded, that they were still highly, deeply charged, soon became evident. Snick began kissing him everywhere, and it was not until they coupled four more times that they were utterly empty. They finally lay quietly, though breathing hard, covered with sweat.
After a while, Duncan went out into the rain and stood in it, wincing at the cold water but feeling happy and cleansed. After a moment, Snick joined him. The lightning bolts nearby lit them fitfully. She yelled her exultation and grabbed him again. They sank to the cold hard ground and proved that they were not as empty as they had thought.
The lightning, he thought, is not as wild as we are.
Shivering, they went back into the cave. With towels taken from the storage compartment, they rubbed themselves dry. They smeared their knees, rubbed raw on the rocky ground, with an ointment from the first-aid kit. Then they ate voraciously, she talking merrily most of the time. That was a switch. Usually, he did the talking.
“We showed them, the bastards!” she said. “And we’ll show them some more! They won’t ever forget us!”
“That’s for tomorrow,” he said. He crawled onto the mattress and wrapped himself up in the very thin but warm blanket. “Do you want to get in with me?”
“I can’t sleep when somebody else is in the bed,” she said.
She bent down and kissed him lightly and went to her own mattress. She must have fallen asleep almost at once, though he thought he heard her mumble, “…all the way up theirs.”
That was the difficult thing to understand about her. She hated those who had framed her and would not hesitate to kill those directly responsible if she had the chance. But she was not a genuine revolutionary. To her, the living-one-day-a-week and governmental systems were not wrong. She just wanted to rip out the bowels of the corrupt officials who had spit at her loyalty and faith to the system.
That did not matter, he told himself. What she was doing was for the cause of revolution, and she might help bring about the breakup of the dayworld.
Late that morning, stiff and sore, he got out of bed. Snick slept, her head sidewise on the pillow, mouth open. He got a can out of storage, tore off the lid attached to it, and watched the water within the can blacken and boil. Then he went outside while he drank the coffee. When he returned, Snick was awake but not out of bed. He opened a can and handed it to her. She sat up while drinking it, the blanket over her shoulders. When she was finished, she said, “Now?”
“It’s stopped raining, but the cloud cover is heavy and blacker in the west than the east. Looks like another thunderstorm coming. If it does, we move out. We’ll have about ten miles of open ground before we get to the forest. We’ll be O.K. while we’re exposed unless a patrol flies by.”
She agreed that that seemed feasible. Nor
did she argue when he proposed that they return to the La Brea Complex Tower.
“We can take to the wilds and maybe not get caught for a long time,” he said. “But we won’t be doing anything to bother them. They won’t expect us to go back to the same place from which we fled.”
“Then we play it by ear?”
He did not reply. Her question was rhetorical.
They whiled away the time by exercising for an hour. By then the wind, relatively mild when he had awakened, was whistling outside the mouth of the cave. In another hour, the rain drove into the opening. Thunder boomed, its sound amplified by the echo-chamber effect of the cave. Lightning struck nearby, and a tree, riven, toppled with a crash only faintly heard.
“I doubt the patrols will even be out,” he said.
They were in luck unless the lightning hit them.
The observation satellites would have been set by now to detect the e-m field of any airboats the size of Duncan’s. Their locations and courses would be matched with those of authorized craft. The moment the detection equipment noticed an unauthorized boat, it would transmit this to the nearest gank stations. While the organic boats swarmed out to intercept the suspicious craft, the satellite would continue tracking it.
However, Duncan and Snick were safe during the storm. The electrical disturbances would thwart the detectors.
Sometimes, Duncan believed that he was one of those rare persons whose “personal magnetism” attracted tychenons. These were the wave-particles postulated by such nonscientists as astrologers and metaphysicians and named after Tyche, the ancient Greek goddess of Chance and Fortune. Tychenons were supposed to collect around certain individuals like iron filings on a magnet and thus increase the probability of good fortune or good luck for them. It was sheer superstition, of course.
Nevertheless, his luck had been very good. So far.
A thousand obyears ago, all this area had been barren desert. It had taken three hundred obyears for the New Era to pulverize the rock and make new soil, seed it with worms and other forms of soil-building life, and plant trees. Riverbeds had been dug, and water brought down from the mountains. Now, where once had been thousands of square miles of dry and lifeless land, trees and bushes greened the eye.
It was under these trees that the airboat moved in a more or less straight line toward Los Angeles State.
By three that afternoon, Duncan parked the craft under the branches of a large conifer on the slope of a mountain. They cut branches and piled them over the boat, leaving a tight path to it. A little way up the slope was an overhanging ledge with a recess beneath it, the shadows of which would hide them. Here they would stay until tomorrow when it was near dawn.
Meanwhile, they had a good view of the towers of L.A. and the water and air traffic.
They spent part of the day sitting in the boat’s cockpits and watching the news channels on the auxiliary screens. The newsheads had lost their professional cool, though they were trying very hard to restrain their agitation and indignation. They reported that the two criminals (sometimes they called them supercriminals), Duncan and Snick, were responsible for the attacks against the Organic Commonwealth of Earth and the West Coast States and Los Angeles State in particular.
Equipment had been flown in late Tuesday morning by nuclear-powered dirigibles and giant airboats from San Diego State and Sacramento State. The replacements had been installed by late Tuesday afternoon. But power had not been available until the destroyed equipment at the thermionic center had been replaced. Not until 11:00 p.m. had power been restored to the West Coast.
At 10:00 p.m. this Wednesday morning, order had been restored in Los Angeles. The destoned of all days except Wednesday had been sent back into their cylinders. The citizens had been shocked, confused, and panicky when they found themselves destoned all at once and in a dark city. Los Angeles had been literally a madhouse, and its citizens had gone through the worst experience of their lives. The great majority had been unable to leave their apartments. The electrically operated locks on the doors would not open. The dwellings, designed to hold only the tenants of one day at a time, had been jammed with people who did not have the slightest idea of what was occurring.
The cutoff of air-conditioning had stopped the inflow of fresh air into the apartments. The apartments were now filled with additional people who had rapidly burned up the available oxygen. The ganks had been forced to cut out the locks in the doors to release the tenants. This had been a very slow procedure, though all the city workers had been pressed into service. There were still not enough proguns available to speed up the cutting, but organics and workers from San Diego and Santa Barbara had been flown in with guns.
Even so, it had been a genuine hell, and the cases of mental breakdown reported were in the hundreds.
The city was still in turmoil. Though the citizens had been told to report to work, they were too shaken to conduct business as usual.
Every ten minutes, the newsheads told the viewers that they should ignore the lies on the printouts issued by the infamous and sociopathic criminals, Duncan and Snick. They should destroy these at once.
“Fat chance of that,” Duncan said. “They’ll be too curious not to read them.”
The newsheads also reported that the criminals were still at large. But their arrests would occur soon. Meantime, all citizens should keep watch for the two. If a citizen observed them, he was not to attempt to restrain them. Duncan and Snick were armed and dangerous and murderers. The citizens who saw them should notify the organics, who would take over from there.
There were also short reports on the deaths of David Jimson Ananda, the World Councillor, and the others who had been massacred in Ananda’s apartment on the 125th level.
“They’ve killed him!” Duncan said softly. He was not surprised. But how much had they gotten out of him by TM before they had murdered him?
So far, the newsheads had said nothing about why a World Councillor whose residence was in Zurich, Switzerland, had come unannounced to Los Angeles.
“There you are,” Duncan said. “The whole city is open to us. It’ll be a long time before the locks are all replaced. We can walk into any apartment.”
“With the ganks and the citizens knowing what we look like?”
Their screens were displaying the icons of himself and her while their biodata were being displayed in the lower part.
“We’ll find a place to hide quickly. Damn quickly!”
Late that afternoon, they were sitting side by side on their mattresses under the ledge. They had been silent for some time, during which he had been summoning his nerve to speak about what had occupied his mind much of the day.
He said, “I’m not shy, Thea. I’ve been wondering… I might as well get it out… I have to know.”
“Know what?” she said. She had swiveled around on her buttocks to look at him. He turned his head to look at her face. Her expression showed that she might be anticipating his question.
6
“Do you love me?”
She winced, but at least she did not laugh.
“I don’t know. I… What is love?”
“It may be difficult to define love,” he said. “However, most humans know when they’re in love.”
She was sitting beside him on her mattress. Now, she stood up and got in front of him, then squatted.
“I admire and respect you greatly,” she said. “Probably more than any man I’ve ever known, and I’ve known many. I trust you completely, and I would never betray you. Would I sacrifice my life for yours? I don’t know. If willingness to give up your life for the beloved’s is the true test of love, then… I just don’t know. I’ll place my life in danger for you. In fact, I’ve done that many times and will undoubtedly do it again.”
She was silent for a moment. A bluejay’s raucous scream came from somewhere near, and he could see a hawk wheeling on the wind.
“You’re certainly more than just satisfactory in bed. But there’s mor
e to love, real love, than that. You know that. Would I want to live with you for the rest of my life and bear our child?”
Again, she was silent. She chewed on her lip, then said, “I don’t think so. I’m certainly not obsessed with the idea, and I’m realistic enough to know that a normal domestic life as wife and mother would…well, if it didn’t drive me up the wall, it would make me unhappy. But…”
He waited a few seconds, then said, “But what?”
She shrugged. “I just don’t know. Being in love means being crazy about somebody else, possessed, I think. I know that that feeling usually goes away after a long companionship and is replaced by a quiet sort of love. Being comfortable with your partner, missing him when he’s gone for a while, so on. Just now… I’m not possessed. What about you?”
“I could be happy.”
“Arc you possessed?”
“I don’t think that’s part of love.”
She rose, turned, and looked out over the valley.
“I do,” she said. “But I’m not crazy about you in the way I said. The idea of living with you all my life doesn’t thrill me, it’s not something I can’t bear to live without.”
She turned swiftly to look down at him.
“I hope I haven’t hurt you. But I wouldn’t be honest if I said I did love you in the way you mean. To tell the truth, Duncan, if I’m in love with anything, it’s my work. I mean the work that I had until those reptiles took it away from me. That was what I loved, that was what really made me happy. I’ve lived off and on with men, but it never worked out. They interfered…they wore thin.”
“I won’t speak of this again,” he said.
She squatted down again before him and held his big hand between her small hands.