Deathworld

Chapter 8

Nick looked for Charlie at school that day but missed him at lunch again, and wasn't able to track him down between classes. He had things on his mind, and he really wanted to talk to Charlie about them.

His last-period class had been canceled, so Nick stopped by the wing of the school where he knew Charlie sometimes had a late upper-level biology class. But it had been relocated or rescheduled-the room was locked and empty. Nick let out an exasperated breath and started to walk home.

His path took him by the NetAccess center as usual, and there Nick paused by the door and took out the last commcard he had left, the one he had fished out of his bottom drawer in his bedroom several days earlier, having forgotten that it was there in the first place. Nick looked at the card and sighed. He was woefully short of cash, now there wouldn't be any more allowance money until Friday, and this was only Tuesday. Yet at the same time he wanted to give Charlie the opportunity to walk through Deathworld with a friend at his side, not only for enjoyment, but now, after his conversation with Khasm and Spile, for security as well.

And there were other matters on his mind. A random thought, something about the various lifts he had brought back from Deathworld with him, had been obsessing Nick for the past couple of days. The Eighth Circle was proving difficult to crack-and it's gonna be impossible, without some more money to spend some more time there, Nick thought. But he was noticing that the hints and whispers he had been expecting from "plants" in the Circle had been very few. He had been wandering around in those stony tunnels and up and down the Escheresque stairways for days now and had come up against-he smiled wryly at the expression-a stone wall.

Yet there had been more lifts available than usual, so many that his pocket lift carrier couldn't handle them all anymore, and Nick had to load them in and out of the storage area in his public server. Most of them were different versions of songs Nick already had lifts of. Only a collector, an aficionado, or a raving completist would feel the need to have them all. But Nick certainly fitted into the last category, at least, and it was while he was listening to some of the "alternate" versions in bed a few nights ago that he had noticed some of the lifts were alternates in other ways as well. They had lyrics that other versions of the songs didn't have-

He shook his head and went into the access center. "Hey, Nick," the guy behind the front counter said. "Early today-"

"Yeah, well, you might not see me for a few days," Nick said. "Running out of green…" He slapped the commcard up onto the reader plate.

"You're okay," said Dilish, the guy behind the counter. "Got a couple of hours left on that one."

"That much? Super! My usual one open?"

"No, there's someone in there, take Eight… I'll reroute your server info over there."

Nick went back to the booth and closed himself in, locking the sliding door and sitting down in the implant chair. A moment later he was standing in the usual white space, and he got up and reached into his pocket, coming up with the key that "remembered" his location from the last visit.

"Deathworld access," Nick said. The door in the air opened, a black rectangle in all that whiteness, and the copyright notice began rolling by. Is it an illusion, he wondered, or does that thing actually get longer every time? Finally it vanished, and Nick went through into the dimness of the Dark Artificer's Keep, entering into the dark stone corridor where he had been standing when he last exited.

Nick needed somewhere with a little more room for what he had in mind, so he backtracked through the tunnels to where they widened out into a round cavern, something like fifty meters across, that Eighth-Circle Banies referred to as the Bubble. Only a few people were there at the moment, passing across the empty stone space on their way to somewhere else. When they were gone, Nick said, "Sound management system…"

"Ready."

"Access lift library."

"Got it."

"Play `Strings5.' "

Music and image faded in, and suddenly Joey Bane was there some meters away, alone and spotlighted in the darkness, sitting on the four-legged bar stool he used for these performances one of many. It, like every other inanimate object onstage but Camiun, always wound up getting broken at the end of "Cut the Strings." It was last summer's concert in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, and Joey was sweating. Even the Bowl's slightly cooler position in the mountains was no defense against the heat wave the L. A. basin had been suffering that week. Joey was looking out at the crowd with half a smile, letting them settle, and finally he touched Camiun's strings and sang:

"I ran into Astraea with her veil on, sneaking out the party's back door: I stopped her right there and I got her a chair, asking what she was leaving for:

`The party's just getting started, my lady; what's the rush to leave us today?'

And the goddess she looked at me and she said, `There's nowhere left for me to stay…' "

Quietly the rest of the band came in, in that deceptively soft and easygoing introduction, as the Goddess of Virtue explains that the day she's feared has come, the day when the human race is at last entirely wicked, when she must finally hide her face and leave the world to its fate forever, and Joey responded to the news"… Nothing left to live for, nothing left to give for, nothing left to care about:

Nothing left to cherish, all hopes left to perish, Nowhere to go but out!

No one left to bring to, no pure heart to sing to, What's the point of hanging on?

When the reason in the rhyme's all been eaten by crime, when the last joy's finally gone?"

and then the great chorus of rage and desperation, crashing down in chord after chord as Camiun and Joey Bane together, full-throated, shouted down the blasting band behind them:

"Then cut the strings-let's be done with it. If the last night's here, then let's be one with it.

If the songs all die, if the music's all gone, If the night's come crashing on the last free dawn, what possible point is there in carrying on? Cut-the-strings!"

Nick stood listening for enjoyment's sake, but his mind was on the lyrics, especially the very first verse, which he was now sure was not the usual one. Joey would sometimes play with the middle verses, inserting something cruelly topical that suited the venue or the world situation of the day, but Nick had never heard him vary the first verse. Now he glanced over his shoulder for a second, thinking of the "front hall" upstairs, before you ever got into the Maze, ever came close to the tunnels or the Stairways to Nowhere-and Nick started to wonder about a faint noise that he'd heard from behind one of those doors that led off the front hall…

The sound of the audience's upscaling howl of excitement brought Nick around again. Bane had stood up at the first chorus-no one could sing that sitting down, not and do it justice-but now, two choruses further along, he turned around, and as always, Camiun was gone. None of the concert virteos, no matter how you studied them, ever shed much light on how that happened. Maybe it was an illusionist's brand of magic, maybe it was something more obscure. But speculation always got lost in the wake of what always happened next, which was Joey Bane snatching yet another of Wil Kersten's unfortunate guitars out of his hands and smashing it to smithereens on the floor, or on some other piece of equipment that happened to be at hand. Off he went on his expected rampage, the crowd screaming noisy approval in the background, and the concert dissolved in a shriek of tortured amplification equipment and other shattered impedimenta.

Nick let it play itself out, and when the clip finally faded into darkness, he stood there a moment later in the Bubble, with the torches flickering around him from their iron grips in the wall, and considered what to do next.

Upstairs. I want to check that door. I don't want to stay too long… gotta save a little time on this commcard for later in the week.

But first let's see if I can find Charlie…!

Charlie made his way home to find the house empty again-his mom wasn't back from the hospital yet-and, waiting for him in his workspace, bobbing gently up and down in the air, was the virtmail message he'd been hoping for. He made his way down the stairs of the lecture hall to it, and looked the little glowing sphere's exterior shell over to see if it was "canned" or "live"-some mails, when touched, would link live to the person who had sent them if he or she was available online.

No use taking chances, Charlie thought, even though he couldn't see anything to suggest a live linkage. "Workspace management," he said.

"Here, Charlie."

"Implement stealth routine one."

The interior of the Royal Society's lecture room went away, to be replaced by a plain white plain with blue "sky," a mimicry of a public-access space. Charlie looked at his hands and arms and saw that his workspace had settled a copy of his "Manta" seeming about him. He could see it, thinly, over his skin, transparent.

Satisfied, he reached out and touched the mail. A moment later Shade was standing in front of him, surrounded by a little halo of darkness. The message had been sent from somewhere in Deathworld.

"Manta," she said, "I got in touch with Kalki. He'll be in the World tonight around ten eastern. He really wants to see you and talk to you. Let me know if you can make it."

The image paused, waiting for Charlie to activate the reply function. For a moment he stood there looking at her earnest face, and chewed his lip.

Mark did say to give it a rest for a day or two… Yet at the same time, the thought kept coming up in the back of his head: It's May. Early in May… And every day lost meant the chance that someone else might die. If one of these people are involved with the "suicides," and I lose the chance to get close to them while Mark's playing with his programming…

Still. He was pretty definite.

Charlie sighed. "Start reply."

"Ready."

"Shade, thanks, but listen, I-" He stopped himself in the middle of saying "I can't make it." Do you dare not take the chance? The risk was just too great. In his mind's eye Charlie could just see the blurred look on some innocent kid's face as the drug took them, left them defenseless-"I might be a little late," he said, "but I'll be there. Thanks for letting me know. End."

The workspace collapsed the message down into a smaller sphere. "Ready to send?" it said.

"Send."

It vanished. Charlie looked at the empty air where it had been. Then, "Restore normal environment," he said.

The lecture hall came back. Charlie glanced around it, and at the six sets of images which had been restored to their original locations, and then headed off for Mark's workspace to collect the Magic Jacket.

Some hours later he was standing by the front doors of the Dark Artificer's Keep, waiting. There was a fairly steady stream of Banies coming in and going out, and demons stood by the doors on either side, at attention, looking like doormen at some expensive apartment building. Manta stood there off to one side in his floppy shirt and old worn black slicktites, twitching slightly, looking nervously around him. None of the Banies paid him the slightest attention.

"Waiting long?"

He didn't have to fake being startled. Manta turned hurriedly and saw a tall shape looming over him, somewhat indistinct in the darkness.

"You Manta?" he said.

"Uh, yeah. I don't-"

"I'm Kalki," the guy said. "Come on. Who can see anything here? Let's get a little closer to the doors." He took Manta's shoulder in a friendly way and guided him over that way.

Manta shivered a little. Allowing people he didn't know well to touch him had always come hard to him. It was something left over from his distant childhood he didn't readily discuss. As they got closer to the doors, and the light of the great chandelier spilling out of them, he got a better sense of what Kalki looked like. He was slender, about eighteen, and not wearing a seeming-or at least not an unusual one. He wore street clothes, just neos, a slipshirt, and a "bomber" jacket. His face was unusually handsome, with high cheekbones and eyes that drooped down at the corners a little, a look that would have been humorous if it wasn't so sad. A seeming after all? Manta thought. Or am I just unusually paranoid?

"Shade couldn't make it," Kalki said. "Some family thing came up, she said. She told me about you… " "Not too much, I hope," Manta said.

Kalki looked at him thoughtfully. "Come on," he said, "we can go in here and talk."

They went in through the Front Hall, and Manta looked up at the great black and gray chandelier, casting its cold light. "It gives me the creeps," he said softly.

Kalki chuckled. "You want creepy, you should try Nine," he said. "That'll raise the hair on your head, all right."

"You've been down to Nine?"

They headed off to the side of the huge space, where there were some benches faired into the stone of the massive walls. "I've been through the gates," Kalki said, sounding bored. "It looked so much like the beginning of Eight, to me, that I decided not to bother. They've gone to so much trouble, hiding the lifts down there, I wonder whether they're worth it… after all, the stuff I've found on Eight so far hasn't been so great. Sometimes I think it's just a ploy by the management to get everyone real excited about substandard stuff."

"The more I see of down here," Manta muttered, "the less excited I am about it."

"Yeah?" They sat down on one of the carved benches, watching people come and go through the great doors. "Shade told me," Kalki said, "that you were pretty sad about things. I see she wasn't exaggerating… "

"Yeah." Manta looked out into the darkness, and then after a moment said, "She said you'd felt this way… "

Kalki nodded. "A while ago now," he said. "It can be pretty tough when you're right down in the middle of it."

"I left some messages in the 'board' area," Manta said softly. "Just to try to get someone to talk to me. No one answered."

"Hey," Kalki said, "life does stink, doesn't it? The trouble is that people bring the outside reality in here with them. Here, you can change things… but out there, no one does anything about the nature of reality, the way people interact with each other. Or don't. No one listens to anything Joey's saying. And why should they? To do that, they'd have to admit the world stinks, in the first place."

"I don't have any trouble admitting that," Manta said. "It's been a waste of my time since I first started noticing things. Now…" He shook his head. "It's like every breath hurts. I'm tired of breathing:"

Kalki let out a long breath. "You have folks?" he said.

This was the painful part, the lying. "My mom," he said. "But she's a druggie. The guy she's seeing…" He shook his head. "We don't see eye to eye. And they're a long-term thing. I'm gonna be 'phased out.' I can see it coming. She's gonna farm me out to some cousin of hers." Manta bowed his head, unable, unwilling to look up to see how Kalki was taking this.

"Sounds rough," Kalki said. "Look, Manta… you've got to believe it. It can get better. Without warning, sometimes."

Manta's laughwas bitter. "Is that the best you can come up with? That just maybe things might get better? The only way that's going to happen to me is if all this stops, if the hurting, and the yelling, and the pushing around, if it all just stops. I've had it. I don't mind being worthless, being in everybody's way, no use for anything, I can deal with that if I'm just left alone. But when they make you that way, and then they yell at you for it, when they take everything away from you and then scream at you for not acting normal, for letting them down-" The words choked off. "I couldn't even give stuff away, gave some of my stuff to the kids at school, the few things I had. They even yelled at me for that." He laughed, that harsh sound again. "It doesn't matter. Those things are safe now."

"You gave stuff away?"

Manta was silent for a moment. "When I realized my mom was going to send me off to Philly or wherever it is her cousin lives," he said, "and I wasn't going to be able to see my friends anymore…" He trailed off. "I knew she was gonna just throw all my stuff away… "

He listened hard to Kalki's silence. His mom had been pretty clear that suicidal people sometimes gave personal possessions away to friends in anticipation of the act itself.

Kalki shifted, and as Manta glanced back at him, he thought Kalki looked uncomfortable. "Look, Manta," Kalki said at last, "this isn't the best place to be having this conversation. You're talking about the most real thing there is… your own existence. But places like this are instead of reality. They can be really attractive, or interesting, but they're not real contact, with real people." He shook his head, glancing around them. "So much of the uncertainty in the world, the pain… I think it comes of there not being enough genuine contact."

He looked down at Manta. "We should get together and have this out," Kalki said. "Not here. Contact between human beings shouldn't have to be mediated by electrons." His voice was suddenly pained. "Or snatched in the few minutes between online experiences and virtual appointments… "

"For what?" Manta said. "This is real enough. You don't have anything to say that's going to convince me. If you did, you'd have said it already." He got up. "Thanks, but-the talking time's over. I know what I need to do."

He took off across the huge "front hall."

"Manta, wait!" Kalki yelled after him, and came after, but Manta broke his connection to Deathworld, and vanished into the darkness.

A moment later Charlie was standing in his workspace again, slightly out of breath, not from any exertion, but from nerves. He glanced over at the readout connected to Mark's "trip wire" routine: glowing letters and numbers hung in the air, zeroed out, showing no attempts to access his space in any way.

Okay, Charlie thought, the trap's baited. Now let's see what happens…

The next morning he came down from the den, yawning, feeling somehow faintly disappointed. Despite the fact that people seemed to have been reading "Manta's" messages on the Deathworld message facility, there were no answers to any of them. And no follow-through from Shade or Kalki. I wonder if I overreacted a little, he thought. Scared Kalki off…

This time his mother was in the kitchen, pouring coffee from a freshly filled pot, and the sound of the front door shutting told him that he had just missed his father. "You're up early," she said, turning as Charlie yawned again.

"Yeah," he said.

"Want some?" his mom said.

"Uh, you don't think it'll stunt my growth?"

She gave him a look. "Nah. That's just a matter of time. I doubt much of anything could do that at this point."

From the cupboard she got down the mug with the double duck on it and the motto EIDER WAY UP, filled it and handed it to him.

"Thanks…" he said, and flopped into one of the kitchen chairs.

They both drank coffee in silence for a moment. Then, "A lot of late nights, the last week or so," his mom said. "Yeah."

"Dad says you're still researching suicide."

Charlie nodded.

His mother looked slightly resigned. "It has a kind of horrible fascination, I'll admit," she said. "Especially when life seems good, and it's difficult to understand how anyone could want to end it."

"Yeah," Charlie said, thinking of the six sets of images in his workspace, people he was not convinced had unanimously intended to end anything. "What's your schedule like today?"

His mother raised her eyebrows at him, plainly noticing the change of subject, but declining for the moment to comment. "The usual day shift, barring emergencies." She looked slightly relieved. "Though you know how it is trying to predict those. You?"

"School as usual," Charlie said. "Nothing exciting."

"Sounds wonderful," his mom said, finishing her coffee. "Look, Dad picked up some ribs last night, I was thinking of doing that thing with the hot sauce again for dinner."

"Yes, please!"

She grinned at him, rinsing out the coffee cup and leaving it to drain, then picking up her work-satchel from where it sat on one of the kitchen chairs. "Okay. Dinner around six, then. See you later, sweetie… "

School went uneventfully. Charlie had left a message with Nick's mom that he wanted to get together with him for lunch, but at lunchtime Nick was nowhere to be found. The most highly developed communications systern in history, Charlie thought ruefully as the afternoon went by, and we're still playing Net Tag with each other. Oh, well… I could always drop by his place. It's not that much out of my way home…

He finished his afternoon bio class and headed home after hanging around a little while to see if Nick surfaced. There was no sign of him, so Charlie strolled in an absentminded way through the sweet spring-afternoon, considering neurotransmitter chemistry and the prospect of his mom's hot and spicy ribs. There had been some discussion a week or so ago into exactly why the capsiacin molecule was able to fool mouth tissue into thinking it was injured, and trigger the release of endorphins. Charlie's bio teacher had suggested that there might be some fake neurotransmitter "key" involved. Doesn't sound genuine to me, Charlie thought. If it were, there would be a-

The sound of a car slowing down close to him when all the rest of the traffic was doing forty or better made Charlie turn his head. A big car had slid up beside him, and just as his head was turning its door popped open and someone lunged out, reached out toward him-

It was only the reflexes of the nascent street kid Charlie had once been that now saved him, the thing that even these days sometimes made it hard for him to hold still and let his mom hug him. Don't let them touch you! Touch is control-

He twisted away and plunged off down Morrison Street, away from the car. Charlie heard the whine of the sonic going off behind him, someone actually trying to stun him into collapse-but he was just out of range, and his legs were moving faster than his brain for once. They remembered fear more clearly and immediately than he did, and while the intellectual constituent of the fear was still working its way down from his brain to his adrenals Charlie was already running, running as if the Devil himself was after him, down the street, turn the corner, down the side alley that served that block of Morrison, turn another corner in the opposite direction, run, run He barely felt the concrete beneath his feet, he was running so hard, and though his body was panting with terror and exertion already, Charlie's brain was running ahead of him, planning his escape.

It's a one-way street. They can't get down here easily. And I know this area-

He ran. His lungs started burning, and he ignored them. I thought they were in a hurry. I was right. Too right. Charlie gulped for air as he ran. If they're ready to try a snatch in broad daylight, they're really serious. Got to get online right away. Got to get help. The cops-or better still, Net Force For the cops didn't know him. Net Force did. He needed Mark Gridley, or James Winters, just as fast as he could get to one or the other of them.

Is it the killer himself Charlie thought, or an accomplice? Does it matter? They're right behind me-For he could hear an engine, getting closer. He didn't bother looking behind him. He turned immediately right and plunged across a brownstone's front yard, down the driveway beside it, heading into its paved backyard. There was a Dumpster up against the brick back wall. Charlie blessed its name and that of District Recycling Company, whoever they were. He went up onto the top of it in a rush and from there jumped up to grab the top of the wall, having already seen as he was going up that there was no broken glass embedded in it. Charlie went over the wall into the yard of the brownstone on the other side, paused for just a second to take it in-blind dirty windows, all with security shutters or shades down, another Dumpster, a couple of parked cars- I know where I am, he thought as he plunged out of the yard, into the brownstone's driveway and down to the wall in front of the building and the driveway's open gate. He looked up and down the street. I can't let them catch me out here, where they have the advantage-size, weapons, mobility. If there's going to be a chase, let it be where I have a chance. Not out here!

He ran like a sprinter, terrified that as he got to the corner he would see that car in front of him. Dark blue, a glossy new Dodge sedan of some kind, one of those big ones, they keep changing the names, recent model, Virginia plates- But it didn't materialize. Some kindly fate gave him the few seconds he needed to fly in the door of the WorldGate public Net-access place on the corner. He stood there panting at the front desk, and the guy who manned it straightened up from taking something out of the shelves behind the desk, looked Charlie up and down with an expression of complete boredom, and said, "Yeah?"

"I need a booth!" Charlie said.

The behind-the-counter guy looked at him with a total lack of urgency. "Cash or credit?"

Charlie fumbled in his pocket and came up with, to his shock, not one of the family commcards, but something he had grabbed off the hall table that morning on his way to school, thinking that he might as well use up a little of whatever comm time was on it: a public access commcard. Gulping, Charlie slapped it down on the reading plate on the counter. The guy behind the counter read what the plate and the commcard had to say to each other, and pushed Charlie's card back toward him. "Only got fifty-five minutes on that," he said.

Charlie swallowed. "Which booth?" he said.

"Six-"

He ran down the hallway between the booths, found Six, slid the curved booth door shut behind him, then palmsealed it locked. There he stood for a moment, breathing hard, and then flung himself into the implant chair which was the room's only furnishing. He leaned back, sweating, lined his implant up with the chair's pickup, closed his eyes-

Charlie opened them again on whiteness, and jumped up out of the chair. He was standing on an infinite white plane with a featureless blue "sky" above it, empty of everything except a voice that said, "Welcome to a WorldGate public Net-access facility. Instructions, please?"

The terrible thing about it all was that the one place where Charlie would have felt safe and at least slightly in control, his own workspace, was the one place he couldn't now go. There was a better than even chance that it had been tampered with somehow, that his accessing it would trigger some tracing facility that would betray his presence here. And that door would only be closed for fifty-five minutes. Charlie had almost no cash on him to buy more time. After that he would have to go out the door, and if they had been able to track him down, one way or another, the people hunting him would be waiting there with some plausible story-

Then it was all too plain what would happen to him, what had happened to the others. If not today, then some other time real soon, at an unguarded moment, he would be snatched. Someone would stuff him full of scorbutal cohydrobromate, either with a FasJect or even just out of a spray can, the aerosol method. And when the drug took, in a matter of a few minutes, when he could not resist, Charlie would be spirited away into some private spot, a hotel room, say, and his "suicide" would be set up. Possibly even with his own cooperation, but in any case, he certainly wouldn't be in any condition to resist. And even bearing in mind what Mom said… in this case, the odds are better than fifty-fifty that they can make you do something you wouldn't normally do. Think of what Nick said about Jeannine and Malcolm…

Charlie swallowed. "Workspace access," he said. "Address 77356936678822-847722-"

He rattled the number off as fast as he could, having to stop once or twice, because it wasn't one he normally had to remember. The whiteness around him flickered-

Charlie found himself standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal in New York. This was his father's desperate joke about the state of his own schedule, which he described as being like living in Grand Central, though without being able to go downstairs to the Oyster Bar whenever he liked. The terminal's great main concourse was gloriously lit, with sun pouring down in great diagonally striking rays from the tall windows on the Vanderbilt Avenue side. But there were no people in it… and more to the point, to Charlie's despair, his father wasn't in it, either. Normally he had a big desk, made of the same creamy polished terrazzo of the floor, standing just west of the circular information kiosk with its polished brass knob-clock, but the desk was missing.

"Damn," Charlie whispered to himself. There was no point in leaving a message, no time "Home system," Charlie said. "Workspace, new access, address, 77356936678822-8472086633-"

Another flicker. A second later Charlie was standing in his mother's space, which for reasons she had not explained to him was currently a huge stretch of sand just east of the Pyramids. The view was spectacular, until you turned around and saw that the suburbs of Cairo were directly behind you, and in fact you were standing in someone's backyard, with a picnic table and a swingset off to one side, and a lawn that was scrubby not for lack of water, but because some kids and an overenthusiastic dog or two had dug or worn it nearly flat. Charlie looked at the picnic table and saw a scatter of his mother's paperwork all over the top of it, stuff from the hospital, her computer pad, a bunch of flowers stuck in a crude vase that Charlie had made her from clay a long time ago. "Mom?" he said softly.

Her simulacrum appeared immediately. "Hi, honey," she said, but Charlie let out a breath of pure desperation, for she was canned. "Guess what? The best-laid plans have ganged agley after all. I'm going to be late again tonight, sorry… they needed some more warm bodies down in ER, they were short of staff. When you get home, be a sweetie and put some more white wine in the marinade for the ribs, okay? Otherwise, if you need me for something, call the hospital and have them page me, they '11-"

Damn. "Home system," Charlie said, racking his memory, and then shaking his head in frustration, for he couldn't remember James Winters's commcode or the code for his office. "Emergency call. Net Force headquarters-"

Suddenly he found himself looking at a uniformed lady, a cool-looking blonde, sitting behind a desk. "Net Force. How can I help you?"

"This is an emergency," Charlie said. "My name is Charlie Davis. I am a member of the Net Force Explorers. I need to talk to James Winters immediately!"

She smiled at him, an understanding expression, and Charlie was instantly angry enough to spit, for the look was that of someone humoring a child. He then instantly felt guilty for his anger, for there were thousands of Explorers scattered all over the North American continent, and there was no reason for this woman to believe that he had anything important going on in his life at all. "I'm sorry, but he's not available right now-"

"Then let me leave a message for him," Charlie said. "Please tell him that I have the data he asked me to correlate for him, but if I don't hear from him shortly, the body count may have increased by one. Tell him he can reach me here for the next fifty minutes-" And he rattled off the address of the Net center and of the present workspace. "Thank you! Workspace, new access address, 8846396677336-"

This number he knew well enough from having to input it about thirty times two weeks ago, when his address-filing facility had developed a fault that it took him the better part of an afternoon to put right. Charlie gulped, and then let out a breath of pure relief as the sunlight spilling in through the roof of the VAB appeared all around him, but grayed out, as if through a veil. "You are entering a restricted space," a harsh robotic voice said. "Access is forbidden. Track and trace protocols are in operation."

"Mark, it's me, it's Charlie!"

Thegrayness vanished immediately. He rushed out into the sunlight across the concrete, looked around him. The Rolls-Skoda was sitting in the middle of the floor. High above him, he heard the buzzards softly squeaking and cheeping to one another as they worked the in-building updraft. "Mark?" he shouted, and to his embarrassment his voice broke in mid-word.

"Jeez," Mark said, though Charlie couldn't see from where, "what's up with you? You sound like a chicken."

There were about ten possible answers to that. "Mark, where are you? I'm up the creek!"

Mark appeared immediately in the middle of the floor, over by the Rolls. "Sorry, I was doing some maintenance," he said, heading over to Charlie. "What's up?"

"I'm stuck in a public access near the Square," Charlie said, "and somebody just tried to grab me off the street!"

"I'll call the cops," Mark said.

"Don't!"

Mark looked at him as if he was nuts. Charlie could entirely understand why. "You do that," Charlie said, "the minute they turn up there, whoever tried to grab me will just play it innocent and vanish, and we'll be no better off than we have been-either they'll come after me again later, at a better time, or else some other poor kid's gonna get grabbed instead. And probably killed! We've got to do something now. But we've got to keep whoever's chasing me on the hook, until the Net. Force people can catch up with him, with me-"

"I'll hit the panic button," Mark said. Immediately the whole space filled with an astounding howl of klaxons. He looked around him with intense satisfaction.

"It's not going to help," Charlie said, "Winters isn't available!"

"I bet my dad is, though," said Mark. "He'll call the cavalry." He looked around him, then, with some concern, because nothing but the klaxon seemed to be happening. "Or he would if he was in his office-" he muttered.

"Mark, we have to do something now!"

"That'll go through to his pager," Mark said. "No point in us sitting around waiting."

"The guy chasing me," Charlie said, "it's a fair bet he'll realize what I've done. If he has any brains at all, he'll be in some other Net access place right now, trying to find out where I am online. Then he'll try to trace me-and I'm on limited time, all I had was a valuecard. I only have about forty-five minutes now before the door of my booth opens up-"

"Then we'd better get where you're expected to be," Mark said, "and stall."

Charlie stared at Mark. "You mean Deathworld-"

"Where else? How else is he going to track you if you're in a public access except by your Deathworld ID? And you've got a hot-pursuit situation, haven't you? Well, you don't want to lose the guy, do you? You just said you didn't want him to go to ground! He will, if he loses you." Mark looked at him, a challenging kind of look. "You've got to keep him chasing you until the cavalry comes over the hill, Charlie!"

Charlie gulped.

"But you won't be alone," Mark said. "Come on, Charlie… the game's afoot. And it's us. But we won't be the ones who get caught. Let's go where you're expected to go when you panic."

"My workspace."

"From in here, not direct from your access." Mark picked up the Magic Jacket from where it had been draped over the chair behind his "desk" and threw it at Charlie. "He, she, or they won't expect that. My antitrace protocols outside this space will at least slow them down. And then we'll get into Deathworld. But on the way, you think we might pick up someone else who knows his way around there…?"

Charlie gulped, and began to see how it could go. And slowly he started to smile. It was still dangerous, and he was still scared. But this was exactly what he had been working toward. And he now had someone on his side.

"Nick," he said. "Yeah. It's worth a try. Come on, Mark, let's go…!"