The temporary stands that had been erected along the eastern bank of the frozen Connecticut River were jammed with at least ten thousand people, and there were almost as many on the opposite side of the racecourse, camped out in informal mobs behind the bales of straw and the safety fence, wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags and electric comforters. The sky was a cloudless robin’s-egg blue, the snowy landscape sparkled, the air was still, and the temperature was a brisk – 16 C. Vendors of hot food and drink were doing a roaring trade.
“A guy can still get torn to pieces if one of those damned machines rolls over him the wrong way,” the old bookseller growled. “The last thing Marc needs is to float switch-off in a tank of goo for the next eight months growing a new arm and leg just for the sake of a few cheap thrills and a two-bit trophy.”
The gargantuan viewscreen just south of the finish line, which would depict the remote action on the backstretch downriver, was flashing the names of the contestants and their racing accomplishments in alphabetical order. Raucous cheers and occasional catcalls greeted the stalwarts of the Senior Division, who occasionally responded with farspoken yells or epithets of their own. Most of the Juniors were given more decorous applause, but Rogi leapt to his feet and gave out an ear-splitting whistle when the screen announced:
[3J] MARC REMILLARD—ROOKIE
He was rewarded with a wave from a black-and-white-clad figure near the procession’s end.
Dropping back into his seat, Rogi was scowling. “Damn shame Paul couldn’t find time to come. I don’t notice the auras of any of the rest of the high-and-mighty Dynasty, either.”
“There’s a big vote coming up Monday in the Assembly,” Denis said mildly. “Some of the magnates have pushed for the establishment of twenty new ethnic planets for the peoples of Africa and Asia just as soon as the probation period ends in the fall. The bill they want to put before the full Concilium would set aside the Milieu’s usual requirement for twenty-percent operants among the founding population of human colonies. There’s a lot of heat being generated and a lot of lobbying going on among the Assembly magnates, since each of them now carries a hundred-vote equivalency over the elected IAs.”
“I say let the Chinks and the black folks have their planets,” Rogi declared stoutly. “Anybody crazy enough to want to leave good old Earth and pioneer some godforsaken corner of the Galaxy deserves all the help they can get.”
“That’s just the problem, Uncle Rogi. Supporting colonies until they become self-sufficient and eventual economic assets to the Galactic confederation costs a lot of money. The Milieu’s exotic races pay most of the tab, and they have a vested interest in promoting the increase of operant citizenry because of the way Unity works. Nonoperants aren’t particularly desirable as planet colonists because they’re less likely to be highly motivated to follow Milieu statutes and accept its operant-oriented policies. You might recall what a happy shock it was to us back in the early days of the Proctorship that the Human Polity was permitted to have any nonoperant colonists.”
“Since I never considered shipping out, I never really paid much attention to it … Hey! The Juniors are heading for the starting line! And lookit there—Marc’s got a position right in the front row. Hot damn!”
Denis’s face wore a sly, boyish grin. “I. thought you only came here to pray, tu vieux schnoque.”
“Ferme ton clapet, ti-merdeux.” Rogi surged up as the starting pistol fired and the brass section of the band brayed a discordant U.S. Cavalry “charge” call. “They’re off!”
The eighteen riders of the Junior Division, whose post positions had already been determined by time trials held that morning, took off in a scream of turbines and a great smoky cloud of chipped ice. The portion of the outbound course in front of the bleachers featured a short slalom, a single jump, and then a longer slalom. All of the front-runners negotiated these obstacles successfully as the fans yelled and cheered. The rear guard was less lucky. On the second in-and-out, two of the riders collided and slid out of control into the straw bales. Unhurt, they remounted and continued on behind the others.
Once the bikes reached the part of the course beyond the bleachers, called the Long Stretch, the attention of most of the spectators shifted to the big screen and the announcer commenting on the distant action over the PA system. The operant fans having the ability to farsee were able to follow the racers with their mind’s eye, but they tended to zero in on their favorites and ignore most of the rest of the field.
Rogi stayed with Marc. The boy was in a solid third-place position behind nonoperant Rusty Ragusa, an eighteen-year-old who was last season’s Junior winner, and front-running Miko Kitei, a young female head who was also a rookie and had given the largely male Junior Division a nasty shock when she ranked first in the time trials. The three of them stayed neatly strung out as they took the next pair of single jumps and the first double. Then Marc began to overtake Rusty, and the two of them sailed side by side over the next pile. The fourth-place rider, Augie Schaumberg, then began to come up fast. The next jump was a tricky double humper made of a rather soft snow-ice mixture that Miko had already deeply scored with her spikes. Marc, Rusty, and Augie launched into it almost hip to hip—but Marc, on the outside right, had the misfortune of hitting Miko’s trench. He slewed out, his skid throwing a tall rooster-tail of white, and when he regained control and started into the second slalom series he was a distant fourth, with the rest of the pack howling on his tail.
“Batège,” moaned Rogi. “What a rotten piece of luck!”
“It’s only the beginning of the race,” Denis pointed out. He sipped his container of hot tea and watched the monitor screen, which was now focused on the very difficult triple jump marking the midway point of the Long Stretch. The triple was a frighteningly short distance from the last pole of the slalom, and Miko showed all her skill as she recovered swiftly from the final turn, gunned her bike until it shrieked—and took all three hills in a single soaring vault. The approving yells of the crowd changed to groans of dismay as she landed much too heavily and it seemed that her fishtailing machine would throw her as it veered wildly from side to side. The following drivers altered course to avoid colliding with her, and she managed to recover, but not before Rusty overtook her and seized the lead. Marc had to swerve far out of the way to avoid striking Augie, and this allowed another back-runner, Voli Kotewayo, to shoot past and join the leaders. Over the next sequence of single-single-double-single-single, Marc ran fifth, with Voli, Augie, Miko, and Rusty ahead of him. Two other up-comers were nipping at his heels, and if Marc faltered again he was likely to slip even farther behind.
In the last outbound slalom, Augie hit a pole. It was an automatic penalty, costing him his position, and he was forced to throttle back until both Voli and Marc passed him. Trapped in a cage of hard-chargers behind Marc, he was no longer a threat.
“Allons, allons-y!” Rogi yelled. “Go, Marc!”
Now only a double humper and two singles remained before the sharp turnaround loop at the bottom end of the course. Marc passed Voli on the double and overtook Miko coming off the second bouncer. Rusty, Marc, Miko, and Voli were tightly bunched as they began their controlled skids around the tight curve. Augie and five other racers rode in a close group less than four meters behind Voli. The entire gaggle of ten riders was sliding through different portions of the loop all at once, their spikes flinging up clouds of sparkling ice and their bike engines howling. The small crowd of spectators gathered around the loop was whooping and whistling and getting in the way of the squad of referees and the camera ops who were attempting to record the action for the big screen.
Rogi’s imperfect farsight had lost track of Marc’s snowplastered form in the mêlée. He switched his attention to the monitor screen just in time to see that Marc had gained the lead at last, coming out of the big skid a full length ahead of Rusty.
Rogi was jumping up and down, cheering, when the disaster happened. An unidentifiable bike moved out of th
e pack and traveled at tremendous speed across the loop, apparently out of control, heading directly toward the pair of front-runners. The announcer shouted a futile warning. The spectators in the bleachers began to wail and scream. The bikers at the back of the pack who were just finishing the final jump and about to enter the loop either heard what was happening on their helmet intercoms or saw it with their ultrasenses and hastened to steer for the sidelines even as the referees began to wave the red torches.
The wild bike struck the front wheel of Marc’s Honda, and both machines began to tumble. Rusty and Miko cut sharply left and snowplowed to a stop in the middle of the loop. There was a spurt of flame from the two machines in collision, and the shouting of the fans increased to a bedlam that even drowned out the amplified roaring of the engines. Other turbocycles were crashing, skidding, throwing their riders onto the ice. Referees with red torches darted about in the haze of smoke and icy powder. Rogi was on his feet, his eyes blind, his farsight fixed on the vision of what was taking place two kilometers up the river.
A tremendous blossom of orange and black blotted out the place where Marc and the other rider finally slid to a halt, entangled with their bikes. An instant later, the sound of the detonation reached the ears of the spectators in the stands. There was a beat of silent horror, and then the three aid cars and two fire engines that had been parked on the sidelines just beyond the bleachers went into action, tearing down the open shore corridor of the frozen river with their emergency lights flashing and sirens making a banshee din.
“No,” Denis whispered, his farsenses disabled by emotion. “Oh, God, not that.”
“I see him!” Rogi screamed. And he transmitted the vision to his stricken nephew—the wonderful, reassuring sight of a single tall young figure in scorched leather staggering and slipping away over half-melted ice from a flame-girt mass of twisted metal and plass and burning flesh and bone.
Marc! Rogi shouted, wept. Marcareyouallright?
Yes …
With tears streaming down his weathered face, Rogi caught up Denis in a crushing embrace of relief. “He’s all right! Dieu merci, Marc’s all right!”
A black column of smoke rose above the dark evergreens and leafless maples of Pine Park. People were running along the ice toward the accident scene. Denis stood motionless, his face white and his eyes gone hollow and lusterless. “We’d better get down there and see what we can do,” he said. “But first let me farspeak Lucille and the others, so they won’t worry. They may have been watching. The race was scheduled to be broadcast on ESN.”
“And I’ll tell Jack,” Rogi added.
But when he farspoke the child in the hospital, Jack said that he already knew and that he had warned Marc to put on the brakes just in time to avoid being struck squarely in the body by the steel-spiked front wheel of the other turbocycle.
Rogi asked: Who was that other poor devil anyhow? There hasn’t been any announcement.
Jack said: It was Gordon McAllister … Hydra.
Fury cursed. Fury howled like a demented thing. The imbeciles! The stupid fools! Because of their half-baked jealousy, one of their number was dead and the other four in mortal danger.
Oh, Hydra! You were Fivefold and Singular. You were approaching maturity. You were ready to begin the really important work, the elimination of opposing Magnates of the Concilium. Perhaps even ready to bring down Davy MacGregor, the Dirigent himself. And now the great scheme lies in ruins! There are only four of you, and those are shocked and diminished and moaning in fear behind mind-dikes of cowardice. Useless. Worse than that—liabilities! Liable to be found out, to be used as conduits.
Conduits to Fury.
Gordon McAllister’s death would be adjudged a mysterious accident, a piece of adolescent insanity, perhaps envy-fueled. If he had simply attacked Marc and died, the danger would be remote. But Gordo had not died as himself. In the instant before he expired in fiery agony, he had shown his Hydra face—and one of the persons watching in horror had recognized him and would surely deduce the identity of the other four heads of the now whimpering, vitiated monster, knowing that Gordo had been the fifth.
This person, not Davy MacGregor, was now the Great Enemy. He would have to be killed as soon as possible, and the killing would not be easy.
The new enemy was not Marc, who had been too stunned to know who had hit him.
It was Jack.
The Great Enemy. The one Fury would have to kill himself.
41
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH 15 FEBRUARY 2054
MARC SLEPT, WOKE, AND SLEPT AGAIN. HE KNEW HE WAS NOT too seriously injured, knew that he was in the trauma unit of the big Dartmouth Medical Center at the southern edge of town, knew there was an urgent reason for him to stop sleeping, wake up, and take care of some important matter. He fell asleep again anyway.
And had the nightmare of the race again.
His dream bike was a fantastic futuristic machine with wheels as tall as his body and spikes a full 30 centimeters long. The other contestants were all adult humans or exotics, and the things they rode weren’t ice-cycles at all but different kinds of clumsy armored vehicles bristling with weapons. At the starting gun of the race, Marc was off and away like a thunderbolt, leaving the freaks sucking smoked slush and blasting away at him futilely with their zappers while he laughed at them.
In the dream, Marc left the outdistanced hostile pack far behind. His two-wheeled juggernaut hissed and roared alone down a deserted, moonlit course with jumps as high as hills. Chomping up the ice as he approached each obstacle, he would rev the bike to the max and shoot into the dark sky at the crest like a rocket, trailing diamond crystals. When he landed he touched down feather-light and charging. The monster bike was under perfect mental control, for he wore his CE helmet. After taking an awesome triplehumper that was as high as Mount Washington, he reared back and pulled a triumphant wheelie and saw the whirling spikes flash above his head in the light of the moon, clean and sharp and deadly and ready for any opponent rash enough to threaten him for the lead.
The dream replayed itself each time he drifted back into sleep, and the frustrating climax of the race was always the same.
An old black BMW T99RT coming out of nowhere behind him, looking small and ridiculous, but still gaining on him steadily. The voice in the CE helmet circuitry warning him that the upcoming rider would beat him. Would win the race if he didn’t—if he didn’t—
At that point in the dream Marc’s tall, invincible bike vanished. He was aboard his Honda again. The other rider, crouched low over the handlebars of the Beemer, drew closer, closer, until the Fury-voice was frantic and the spectators in the stands were going wild and the finish line was just ahead. The other bike came up beside him, its rider unarmored, wearing ordinary riding apparel, but enveloped in an impervious thought-screen. And now in the last seconds the rival was beginning to pull forward. Beginning to win. Would win, unless—
Fury shouted and Marc obeyed, wrenching his own bike viciously toward the enemy, smashing into him, riding over him, leaving him spinning, bleeding, torn hideously by the spikes, his face behind the helmet visor contorted in pain, incredulous, unable to believe what Marc had done.
The face. Somebody unfamiliar and familiar. Somebody Marc ought to know. Someone he couldn’t recognize, had to recognize before he woke up and then slept again and the dream replayed forever …
“Marc. Can you hear me? Marc?”
He heard the voice, felt the gently coercive mental touch, opened his eyes. Saw the bronzed, high-cheekboned face of Tukwila Barnes, the longtime family friend who was now the Director of the Department of Metapsychology at the Ferrand Mental Science Center. It was Tucker who was prodding him awake, closing off the too tempting sleepway with its nightmare that still beckoned. Marc was aware of another operant, a woman in a white coat, who was doing something redactive to support Barnes. Marc knew her, too. It was Dr. Cecilia Ashe, Maurice’s wife, his aunt. Marc gave up fighting against the pair o
f them. The dream faded, forgotten, and he remembered the other urgent matter and tried to struggle upright in the bed.
Tucker and Aunt Cele restrained him easily. “Whoa. Stay down. Give yourself a minute or two. Or three.” Tucker was smiling, projecting vibes of relief. “We’ve got a few tubes and dinguses hooked onto you. Don’t disturb them yet. If you’re really coming out of it, we’ll get you free in a little while.”
Marc finally relaxed. Cecilia tossed an indecipherable telepathic query at Barnes and then hurried out of the room.
“Tucker?” Marc’s voice was an anxious whisper. “What day is it?”
“The day after,” said Barnes. “Sunday evening, 1840 hours, the fifteenth of February, Earth reckoning.”
“Is Jack all right?”
The metapsychologist was thrown for a momentary loss by the question. “Jack …? His condition is unchanged. Don’t you care about yourself?”
Marc managed a small smile. “Okay, what kind of shape am I in?”
“You’ve got a few third-degree burns, a sprained left wrist, and a small subdural hematoma—a little blood clot on the brain caused by landing smack on the top of your head when you were thrown from your bike. Your hard hat absorbed most of the shock, and the clot will go away by itself. None of your injuries will keep you down for more than a week or so. You were in shock. Now you’re out of it. You’ve got a tube up your nose giving you a little extra oxygen, and a couple of needles in your bad arm giving you sugar and water and stuff and monitoring your blood, and a catheter where you’d rather not have it collecting precious bodily fluids, and a batch of electrode bugs clinging to various other parts of your anatomy. Apart from that, you’re in good condition.”