The Alien Years

FIFTY-TWO YEARS FROM NOW

“Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” Andy said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

He didn’t generally expect software to be suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—he could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff, Andy thought.

He stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

“Name, please,” the gatekeeper said, what could have been a century later, in its kludgy robotic gatekeeper voice.

“John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 10432QX.”

He extended his wrist. A moment for implant check. Tick tick tick tick. Then came confirmation. Once more Andy had bamboozled a keeper. The gate opened. He walked into Los Angeles.

As easy as Beta Pi.

He had forgotten how truly vast the wall that encircled Los Angeles was. Every city had its wall, but this one was something special: a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty feet thick, easily. Its gates were more like tunnels. The total mass of it was awesome. The expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle—must have been phenomenal, he thought. Considering that the wall ran completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it was at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep. That was something to think about, a wall that size. So much sweat, so much toil. Not his own personal sweat and toil, of course, but still—still—

What were they for, all these walls?

To remind us, Andy told himself, that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build them, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that.

Just within the wall Andy caught sight of a few Entities walking around right out in the street, preoccupied as usual with their own mystifying business and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were high-caste ones, the boss critters, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. Andy gave them plenty of room. They had a way sometimes, he knew, of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they studied him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. Old Cindy, back at the ranch, had told tales of being snatched up that way right at the beginning of the Conquest.

Andy didn’t think he would care for that. You didn’t get hurt, apparently, but it wasn’t dignified to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles.

His first project after entering the city was to find himself a car. He had driven in from Arizona that morning in quite a decent late-model Buick that he had picked up in Tucson, plenty of power and style, but by now he expected that there were alerts out for it everywhere and it didn’t seem wise to try to bring it through the wall. So, with great regret, he had left it parked out there and gone in on foot.

On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall he came upon a late-model Toshiba El Dorado that looked pretty good to him. He matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to his personal metabolic cues. The previous owner, he thought, must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.

“Pershing Square,” he told the car.

It had nice capacity, maybe 90 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. Andy figured he’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three quick pardons to keep his edge sharp, get himself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. Stay in L.A. a week or so, no more than that. Then head out to Hawaii, maybe. Or down to South America. Meanwhile, L.A. wasn’t such a bad place to be, this time of year. It was the middle of winter, yes, but the Los Angeles winter was a joke: that golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons. Andy was glad to be back in the big town at last, at least for a little while, after five years roving the boondocks.

A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange, traffic suddenly began to back up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock: no way of knowing until he was there. Andy told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.

Slipping through roadblocks could have its scary aspects and even under favorable conditions called for a lot of hard work. He preferred not to deal with them. He knew that he probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you didn’t have to?

After some zigging and zagging, heading basically in the general direction of the downtown towers, he asked the car where he was.

The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. Right at the edge of downtown, looked like. He had the car drop him at Spring Street, a couple of blocks from Pershing Square. “Pick me up at 1830 hours,” Andy told it. “Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill.”

It went away to park itself and he headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.

It wasn’t Andy’s plan to check in with the Mary Canary syndicate. They wouldn’t welcome him very warmly, and in any case he was planning to be in town only a short while, too short for them to be able to track him down, so why split the fees with them? He’d be gone before they ever knew he was here.

He didn’t need their help, anyway. It wasn’t hard for a good freelance pardoner to find buyers. You could see the need in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment at whatever it was that the mindless, indifferent Entity-controlled bureaucracy had done to them. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that told you right away that here was a customer, which meant somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. Andy was in business within fifteen minutes.

The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. Surfing, once such a big thing along the coast, was pretty much extinct, Andy knew. The Entities hadn’t allowed it for ten, perhaps fifteen years—they had their plankton seines just offshore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients that seemed to be their main food, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up.

But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the Earth’s rotation, it was easy to see what an athlete he had been. He sat down next to Andy and began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall-laborer, most likely. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.

Andy got him talking, after a while. A surfer, yes. At least forty years old, and lost in the far-away and gone. He began sighing about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton, the old LACON training base. Sometimes the LACON guards would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his huge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week for the next ten years.”

“Ten?” Andy said. “That’s a shitty deal.”

“You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”

“Some,” he said. “They buy their way out.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“It can be done, you know.”

The surfer gave him a careful look. That was sensible, Andy thought. You never knew who might be a quisling. Collaborators and spies were everywhere. An amazing number of people loved working for the Entities.

“It can?” the surfer asked.

“All it takes is money,” Andy said.

“And a pardoner.”

“That’s right.”

“One you can trust.”

Andy shrugged. “There are pardoners and then there are pardoners. You’ve got to go on faith, man.”

“Yeah,” the surfer said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, right out there on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that would have cost him?”

“About twenty grand,” Andy said.

“Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”

“No guess.”

“Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”

“I’m not. Just visiting.”

“That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”

“I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”

“Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”

“And a seven-year labor exemption.”

“I pulled ten,” he said.

“I can’t get you off a ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? It would draw too much attention if I tried to nix you out of a ten-year term. But seven would work. You’d still owe them three when the exemption was up, but you could get so far from here in seven years that they’d lose you forever. You could goddamned swim to Australia in that much time. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there.”

“You know a hell of a lot.”

“My business to know,” Andy said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”

“I’m worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?”

“Just what I said. Through the wall, and seven years’ exemption.”

“A bargain rate, hey?”

“I take what I can get,” Andy said. “You have an implant?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Give me your wrist. And don’t worry. This part is readonly.”

He keyed the surfer’s data implant and patched his own in. The surfer had fifteen hundred in the bank and a collateral rating of sixteen thou, exactly as he claimed. They eyed each other very carefully now. This was a highly illegal transaction. The surfer had no way of knowing whether Andy was a quisling or not, but Andy couldn’t be sure of the surfer, either.

“You can do it right here in the park?” the surfer asked.

“You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you’re snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I’ll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It’s up to you to make your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits but I’m not a goddamned travel agent. Are we on?”

The surfer put his head back and closed his eyes.

“Go ahead,” he said.

It was fingertip stuff, straight circuit emulation, Andy’s standard hack. He picked up all his identification codes, carried them into Central, found the man’s records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. Andy wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Then he gave him a wall-transit pass, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. The guy didn’t think like a programmer and he didn’t look like a programmer, but the wall software wasn’t going to figure that out.

With these moves Andy had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful who were free to go in and out of the walled cities as they wished. In return for these little favors he signed over the surfer’s entire life savings to various accounts of his, payable as arranged, part now, part later. The surfer wasn’t worth a nickel any more, but he was a free man. That wasn’t such a terrible trade-off, was it?

And it was a valid pardon, too. Andy didn’t intend to write any stiffs while he was here. The guild might require its pardoners to write the occasional stiff, but he wasn’t working with the guild just now. And though Andy could understand the need to fudge up a pardon now and then if you were going to work the same territory for any prolonged period, he had never cared for the idea of doing it. It was offensive to his professional pride. He didn’t plan to be in town long enough, anyway, this time around, for anybody—the Entities, their human puppets, or, for that matter, the guild itself—to be unduly disturbed by the skill with which he was practicing his trade.

The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that Andy thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby blue business suit—her grandfather, perhaps—was trying to comfort her. Public crying was a good indicator, Andy knew, that someone was in bad Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” he said, and they were both so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.

He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which of course wasn’t likely to happen: the assignments were pretty random, but they seemed rarely to be crazy, and what use would a ninety-pound girl be in hauling stone blocks around?

The father-in-law, though, had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. That was bad news. And they had given her a TTD classification. Even worse.

“The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see, right away, she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”

“So you know what Area Five is, do you?” Andy said, surprised.

“The medical experiment place. And this mark here, TTD. I know what that stands for too.”

She began to moan again. Andy couldn’t really blame her. TTD meant Test To Destruction. So far as he understood the TTD program, it had to do with a need the Entities felt for finding out how much physical labor humans were really capable of doing. The only reliable way to discover that, apparently, was to put a sampling of the populace through tests that showed where the endurance limits lay.

“I will die,” the woman wailed. “My babies! My babies!”

“Do you know what a pardoner is?” Andy asked the father-in-law.

Which produced a quick excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. And just as quickly the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.

“They all cheat you,” he said.

“Not all.”

“Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”

“You know that isn’t true. Sometimes things don’t work out, sure. It isn’t an exact science. But everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”

“Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly.

“You know of such a person?”

“For three thousand dollars,” Andy said quietly, “I can take the TTD off her ticket. For five I can write an exemption from service that’ll be good until her children are in high school.”

He wondered why he was being so tenderhearted. A fifty percent discount, and he hadn’t even run an asset check. For all he knew the father-in-law was a millionaire. But no, if that was so he’d have been off long ago cutting a deal for a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this, weeping and wailing in Pershing Square.

The old man gave Andy a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.

“How can we be sure you’ll do what you say you’ll do?” he asked.

Andy might have told him that he was the king of his profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch. Who could slip into any data network there was and get it to dance to his tune. That would have been nothing more than the truth. But all he said was that the man would have to make up his own mind, that Andy couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that he was available if they wanted him and otherwise it was all the same to him if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket.

They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, the old man silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant. Andy keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. He transferred eight of it to his accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Honolulu. Then he took the woman’s wrist, which was about two of his fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life.

“Go on,” Andy said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”

Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow—”

“I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”

“This will work?” the old man asked.

“You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

He didn’t seem convinced. Andy suspected the man was more than half sure that he had just been swindled out of one fourth of his life’s savings. The hatred in his eyes was all too visible. But in a week he would find out that Andy really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he would rush down to the Square to tell Andy how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward him. Only by that time Andy expected to be somewhere else far away.

They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to look back over their shoulders at Andy as if they thought he was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.

In short order Andy had earned enough now to get him through his week in L.A. But he stuck around the park anyway, hoping for a little more. That proved to be a mistake.

The next customer was Little Mr. Invisible, the sort of man no one would ever notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. He and Andy struck up a conversation and very quickly they were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told Andy he was from the Silver Lake neighborhood. That conveyed very little to Andy. Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big LACON building on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. Andy smelled a deal.

Then the gray little man wanted to know where Andy was from—Santa Monica? West L.A.? Andy wondered if people had a different kind of accent on that side of town. “I’m a traveling man,” he said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.”

The little man looked at Andy as though he had said he was planning a voyage to Jupiter.

He knew now, though, that Andy had wall-transit clearance, or else that he had some way of getting it when he wanted it, or at least was willing to claim openly that he did. Which was as good as Andy’s advertising that he was something special. That was what the little man was looking to find out, obviously.

In no time at all they were down to basics.

The little gray man said that he had drawn a new labor ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. Bad news, bad, bad, bad. People died like mayflies out there, Andy had heard. What he wanted, naturally, was a transfer to something softer, like Operations & Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean where the air was cool and clear.

“Sure,” Andy said. “I can do that.”

Andy quoted him a price and the little man accepted without a quiver.

“Let’s have your wrist,” Andy said.

The little man held out his right hand, palm upward. His implant access was a pale yellow plaque, mounted in the usual place but rounder than the standard kind and of a slightly smoother texture. Andy didn’t see any great significance in that. As he had done so many times before, he put his own arm over the other’s, wrist to wrist, access to access.

Their biocomputers made contact.

The moment that they did, the little man came at him like a storm, and instantly Andy knew, from the strength of the signal that was hitting him, that he was up against something special and very possibly in trouble; that he had been hustled, in fact. This colorless little man hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he had been looking for, Andy realized, was a data duel. Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.

It was a long, long time since Andy had ever been involved in something like this. Dueling was adolescent stuff. But back in Andy’s dueling days no hacker had ever mastered him in a one-on-one anywhere. Not a one, ever. Nor was this one going to. Andy felt sorry for him, but not very much.

He shot Andy a bunch of fast stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out Andy’s parameters. Andy caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. His turn to do the testing, now. He wanted the other man to begin to see who he was fooling around with.

But just as Andy began to execute, the other man put an interrupt on him. That was a new experience. Andy stared at him with some respect.

Usually any hacker anywhere would recognize Andy’s signal in the first thirty seconds, and that would be enough to finish the interchange. He would know that there was no point in continuing. But this one either hadn’t been able to identify Andy or just didn’t care, and so he had come right back with his interrupt. Andy found that amazing. The stuff the little man began laying on Andy next was pretty amazing too.

He went right to work, energetically trying to scramble Andy’s architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at Andy up in the heavy megabyte zone.

—jspike. dbltag. nslice. dzcnt.

Andy gave it right back, twice as hard.

—maxfrq. minpau. spktot. jspike.

But the other hacker didn’t mind at all.

—maxdz. spktim. falter, nslice.

—frqsum. eburst.

—iburst.

—prebst.

—nobrst.

Mexican standoff. The gray little man was still smiling. Not even a trace of sweat on his forehead. There was something eerie about him, Andy thought, something new and strange.

This is some kind of borgmann hacker, he realized suddenly. Working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for freelancers like me.

Good as the man was, and he was plenty good, Andy despised him for that. There was just enough Carmichael blood in his veins for Andy to know which side he was on in the Entity-human struggle. A borgmann—now, that was something truly disgusting. Using your hacking skills to help them—no. No. A filthy business. Andy wanted to short him. He wanted to burn him out. He had never hated anyone so much in his life.

But Andy couldn’t do a thing with him.

That baffled him. He was the Data King, he was the Megabyte Monster. All these years he had gone floating back and forth across a world in chains, blithely riding the data stream, picking every lock he came across. And now this nobody was tying him in knots. Whatever Andy gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. The little man was working with an algorithm Andy had never seen before and was having major trouble solving. After a little while he couldn’t even figure out what was being done to him, let alone what he was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so he could barely execute. The little man was forcing him inexorably toward a wetware crash.

“Who the fuck are you?” Andy yelled, furious.

The little man laughed in Andy’s face.

And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of Andy’s implant, going at him down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging his gates, turning his circuits to soup. The computer that had been implanted in Andy’s body was nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So was his brain. If he kept this up the biocomputer would go, and the brain to which it was linked would follow.

This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.

Andy reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages he could invent. Things he had never had to use in his life; but they were there when he needed them, and they did slow his opponent down. For a moment he was able to halt the onslaught and even push the other man back a little, giving himself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of his own. But before he could get them running, the little man shut Andy down once more and started to drive him toward crashville all over again. The guy was unbelievable.

Andy blocked him. He came back again. Andy hit him hard and the little man threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.

Andy hit him again, harder. Again his thrust was blocked.

Then the little man hit Andy with a force that was far beyond anything he had used before, enough to send him reeling and staggering. Andy was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss when he managed, but by no more than a whisker and a half, to pull himself back.

Groggily, he began to set up a new combination. But even as he did it, he was reading the tone of the other man’s data, and what Andy was getting was absolute cool confidence. The little man was waiting for him. He was ready for anything Andy could throw. He was in that realm of utter certainty that lies beyond mere self-confidence.

What it was coming down to was this, Andy saw. He was able to keep the little man from ruining him, but only just barely, and he wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And the little man seemed to have infinite resources behind him. Andy didn’t worry him. The fellow was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all Andy could give and kept throwing new stuff at him, coming at him from six sides at once.

Now Andy understood for the first time what it must have felt like for all the hackers he had beaten over the years. Some of them must have felt pretty cocky, he supposed, until they had run into him. It costs more to lose when you think you’re good. When you know you’re good. People like that, when they lose, they have to reprogram their whole sense of their relation to the universe.

He had two choices now. He could go on fighting until the little man wore him down and crashed him. Or he could give up right now. Those were the only real choices he had.

In the end, Andy thought, everything always comes down to that, doesn’t it? Two choices: yes or no, on or off, one or zero.

He took a deep breath. He was looking straight into chaos.

“All right,” he said. “I’m beaten. I quit.” Words he had never thought he would hear himself say.

He wrenched his wrist free of his opponent’s implant, trembled, swayed, went toppling down on the ground.

A minute later five LACON cops sprang out of nowhere and jumped him and trussed him up like a turkey and hauled him away, with his implant arm sticking out of the package and a security lock wrapped around his wrist, as if they were afraid he was going to start pulling data right out of the air.

Steve Gannett said, coming out on the patio where Anson was sitting in the Colonel’s old chair, “Look at this, will you, Anson?”

He put a long sheet of glossy green paper into Anson’s hand. Anson stared at it uncomprehendingly. It was all arrows and squig-gles, Greek letters, a lot of indecipherable computer nonsense.

“You know that I don’t understand this goddamned stuff,” Anson said sharply. He realized it was wrong to speak to Steve that way; but his patience grew thinner every day. Anson was thirty-nine years old and felt like fifty. He had been full of big plans, once, when he was young and full of juice and certain that he would be the one to free the world from its serenely tyrannical alien overlords; but everything had gone awry, leaving him with a chilly hollow zone within him that was gradually expanding and expanding and expanding until it seemed to him that there was very little of Anson left around it. For years, now—ever since the failure of the great Prime expedition—he had lived a life that felt as though it had neither past nor future. There was only the endless gray present. He schemed no schemes, dreamed no dreams. “What am I looking at, here?”

“Andy’s fingerprints, I think.”

“His fingerprints?”

“His on-line coding profile. His personal touch. You could compare it to a person’s fingerprints, yes. Or his handwriting. I think this is Andy’s.”

“Truly? Where’d you get it from?”

“It came out of Los Angeles, picked up by a random line scan by one of our stringers down there. It’s new. If he’s there, he must have gone back there quite recently.”

Anson examined the printout again. Arrows and squiggles, still. A hopeless maze. Something was beginning to throb within him that he had not felt in years, but he forced it back. He shrugged and said, “What makes you think this is Andy’s?”

“Intuition, maybe. I’ve been looking for him for five years, and by now I think I know what to expect. This sheet yells ‘Andy’ to me, somehow. He used to use codes like these when he was a kid. I remember his explaining them to me, but I never had a clue about what he was trying to say. That was when he was ten, eleven years old. I have a feeling he’s started falling back on this stuff in the time that he’s been on the run. Reverting to his own private lingo. We’ve gone back in and set up a trace for it, and now we see that whoever’s been using it has been moving steadily westward across the country all year, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona. And now L.A. The hacker whose codes these are is working as a pardoner down there right this minute. A freelancer, operating outside the guild, from the looks of things. I’m sure it’s Andy.”

Anson looked up into his cousin’s round, sincere, pudgy face. There was an expression of complete conviction on it. Anson was surprised to find himself swept by a sudden rush of admiration, even love, for him.

Steve was fifteen years his senior and should have been the leader of the clan by now. But Steve had never wanted to be a leader. He wanted only to keep on plugging away at the things that mattered to him, sitting there in the communications center all day and half the night, pulling in data from everywhere in the world.

Whereas he himself—

The throbbing inside him was growing stronger, now. It would not be suppressed.

“Tell me this,” Anson said. “Do you think you actually could track him down, on the basis of this stuff?”

“That I can’t say. Andy’s very, very tricky, you know. I hardly need to tell you. He moves around fast. Simply picking up his trail gives us no guarantee that we could catch up with him. But we can try.”

“We can try, yes. Christ, let’s give it a try, all right? Find him, bring him here, put him to use. That crazy mutant son of yours.”

“Mutant?”

“A wild man. Undisciplined, amoral, self-centered, egomaniacal—where did he get that stuff from, Steve? From you? From Lisa? I doubt it. And certainly not from the fraction of him that’s Carmichael. So he has to be a mutant. A mutant, yes. With enormous special skills for which we happen to have a great need. A gigantic need. If only he would deign to employ them on our behalf.”

Steve said nothing. Anson wondered what Steve was thinking; but he had no reading, none at all. His mild chubby face was utterly blank. The silence stretched uncomfortably, and stretched some more, until it became unbearable. Anson rose and walked to the edge of the patio, gripping the rail and staring out into the great green gorge below. And found himself beginning to tremble.

He knew what had happened. The grand old ambition had started suddenly to rise up in him again, the glorious dream of leading a successful crusade against the aliens, striking down Prime and shattering their dominion with a single blow. Ever since Tony’s ill-fated trip to Los Angeles, Anson had had all that locked away in some storage vault of his soul. But now it had broken loose, somehow; and with it, now, came fear, doubt, dark gloom, an agonizing shaft of fresh guilt over the way he had sent Tony foolishly to his death—a whole host of pessimistic self-accusing bleaknesses.

He stood there, taking deep, slow breaths, trying to calm himself as he looked out into the tangled post-Conquest wilderness that had grown up, over the years, between the ranch and the town down there. And a strange vision suddenly went swirling through his mind.

He saw a domed building that looked like a beehive, but of white marble: a shrine, a temple, a sanctuary. A sanctuary, yes. Prime lay within it. Prime was a great bloated pallid slug-like thing, thirty feet long, encased in mechanisms that supplied it with nutrients.

And now Anson saw a human figure approaching that dome: an enigmatic figure, slender, calm, faceless. It might almost be an android. Andy Gannett, sitting before his terminal with a diabolical look in his eyes, was guiding it by remote control, furiously feeding it data that he had pulled out of the sealed archive of Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. The faceless assassin stood before the door of the sanctuary, now, and Andy gave it mysterious digital commands that it transmitted to the sanctuary’s gatekeeper, and instantly the door slid open, revealing another beyond and another, and another, until at last the faceless killer stood within the sacred hiding-place of Prime itself—

Raising a weapon. Calmly firing. Prime bathed in blue flame. Sizzling, charring, blackening.

And in that same moment the Entities everywhere on Earth magically shriveling, withering, dying—the sun rising the next day on a world set free—

Anson looked back toward Steve, who was leaning against the wall of the house, watching Anson in an oddly placid way. Anson managed a pale smile and said, “You know, don’t you, that I haven’t given much of a shit about the whole Resistance thing since Tony died? That I’ve just been going through the motions?”

“Yes. I know that, Anson.”

“This might change things, though. If you could only find your damn renegade mutant genius son, finally. And if you can make him crack open the Borgmann archive. And if the Borgmann stuff should give us some clue to the nature and whereabouts of Prime. And if we can then insert a properly programmed killer who—”

“I’d say that’s a hell of a lot of ifs.”

“It is, isn’t it, cousin? Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. What do you say? Let’s wrap up the Resistance once and for all, acknowledge that the world is going to belong to the Entities until the end of time, shut down the entire underground network that you and Doug and Paul spent the last thirty years putting together, and just go on peacefully sitting on our asses up here, living our quiet little lives the way we’ve been living them all along. What do you say, Steve? Shall we give up the tired old pretense of a Resistance at last?”

“Is that what you want, Anson?”

“No. Not really.”

“Neither do I. Let me see what I can do about finding Andy.”

Where they took him, wrapped and trussed as he was, was LACON headquarters on Figueroa Street, the ninety-story tower of black marble that was the home of the puppet city government. They sat him against the wall in a cavernous, brightly lit hallway and left him there for what seemed like a day and a half, though he supposed it was really no more than an hour or so. Andy didn’t give a damn. He was numb. They could have put him in a cesspool and he wouldn’t have cared. He wasn’t physically damaged—his automatic internal circuit check was still running and it came up green—but the humiliation was so intense that he felt crashed. He felt destroyed. The only thing he wanted to know now was the name of the hacker who had done it to him.

He had heard a lot about the Figueroa Street building. It had ceilings about twenty feet high everywhere, so that there would be room for Entities to move around. Voices reverberated in those vast open spaces like echoes in a cavern. As he sat there he could feel inchoate streams of blurred sounds going lalloping back and forth all around him, above, below, fore, aft. He wanted to hide from them. His brain felt raw. He had never taken such a pounding in his life.

Now and then a couple of mammoth Entities would come rumbling through the hall, tiptoeing on their tentacles in that weirdly dainty mincing way of theirs. With them came a little entourage of humans, bustling along on every side of them like tiny courtiers hovering around members of some exalted nobility. Nobody paid any attention to Andy. He was just a piece of furniture lying there against the wall.

Then some LACON people returned, different ones from before.

“Is this the pardoner, over here?” someone asked.

“That one, yeah.”

“She wants to see him now.”

“You think we should fix him up a little first?”

“She said now.”

A hand at Andy’s shoulder, rocking him gently. Lifting him. Hands working busily, undoing the wrappings that bound his legs together, but leaving his arms still strapped up. They let him take a couple of wobbly steps. He glared at them as he worked to get the kinks out of his thigh muscles.

“All right, fellow. Come along now: it’s interview time. And remember, don’t make any trouble or you’ll get hurt.”

He let them shuffle him down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office that had a ceiling high enough to provide an Entity with all the room it could possibly want. He didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk down at the far end, about a mile away from him. In that colossal room, it looked like a toy desk. She looked like a toy woman. The LACONs pushed him into a chair near the door and left him alone with her. Trussed up like that, he didn’t pose much of a risk.

“Are you John Doe?” she asked.

“Do you think I am?”

“That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”

“I give lots of names as I travel around. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”

“Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”

“You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”

“Please,” she said. “This’ll be easier if you cooperate. The accusations against you include illegal entry, illegal seizure of a vehicle, and illegal interfacing activity—specifically, selling pardons. Do you have a statement?”

“No.”

“You deny that you’re a pardoner?”

“I don’t deny, I don’t affirm. What’s the goddamned use?”

She rose and came out from behind the desk and very slowly walked toward him, pausing when she was about fifteen feet away. Andy stared sullenly at his shoes.

“Look up at me,” she said.

“That would be a whole lot of effort.”

“Look up,” she said. There was a sharp edge to her voice. “Whether you’re a pardoner or not isn’t the issue. We know you’re a pardoner. I know you’re a pardoner.” And she called him by a name he hadn’t used in a very long time. “You’re Mickey Megabyte, aren’t you?”

Now he looked at her.

Stared. Had trouble believing he was seeing what he saw. Felt a rush of memories come flooding up out of long ago.

The fluffy red hair was styled differently, now, clinging more tightly to her head. The five years had added a little flesh to her body here and there and some lines in her face. But she hadn’t really changed all that much.

What was her name? Vanessa? Clarissa? Melissa?

Tessa. That was it. Tessa.

“Tessa?” he said hoarsely. “Is that who you are?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s who I am.”

Andy felt his jaw sagging stupidly. This promised to be even worse than what the hacker had done to him. But there was no way to run from it.

“You worked for LACON even then, yes. I remember.”

“That pardon you sold me wasn’t any good, Mickey. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, someone who was important to me, but when I tried to get through the wall they stopped me just like that, and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then Bill and I would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat. Instead he went without me. I never saw him again. And it cost me three years’ worth of promotions. I was lucky that that was all.”

“I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” Andy said.

“Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”

Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. It wasn’t easy for him to look into them.

“You still feel like killing me?” Andy asked. “Are you planning to have me executed?”

“No and no, Mickey. That isn’t your name either, is it?”

“Not really.”

“I can’t tell you how astounded I was, when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe, new in town and working the Pershing Square area. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. That’s what they reassigned me to, after my hearing: dealing with pardoners. Isn’t that cute, Mickey? Poetic justice. When they first assigned me to this job I used to wonder if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, no, not a chance, he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they pulled in this John Doe, and I went past you in the hall and saw your face.”

There was no hiding from the vindictive gleam in those gray eyes.

This called for desperate measures.

“Listen to me, Tessa,” Andy said, letting a little of that useful hoarseness come back into his voice. “Do you think you could manage to believe that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s God’s own truth.”

“Right. My heart goes out to you. I’m sure it’s been years of unending agony for you.”

“I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted, Tessa. You’re the one I’ve regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”

She considered that. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him even for a fraction of a second, but he could see that she was considering it.

“Why did you do it?” she asked, after a bit.

“I stiff people because I don’t want to seem too perfect,” he told her. “You have to stiff the customers once in a while or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous. You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. One out of every five, approximately. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

“You deliberately cheated me.”

“Yes.”

“I thought that it must have been deliberate. You seemed so cool, so professional. So perfect, except for that dumb try at making a pass at me, and when you did that I just thought, oh, well, men, what can you expect? I was sure the pardon would be valid. I couldn’t see how it would miss. And then I got to the wall and they grabbed me. And then I thought, that bastard purposely sold me out. He was too good just to have flubbed it up by accident.” Her tone was calm but the anger was all too evident in her eyes. “Couldn’t you have stiffed the next one, Mickey? Why did it have to be me?”

He looked at her for a long time, calculating things.

Then he took a deep breath and said, putting all he had into it, “Because I had fallen for you in a big way.”

“Bullshit, Mickey. Bullshit. You didn’t even know me. I was just some stranger who walked in off the street to hire you.”

“That’s just it. It happened just like that.” He felt an inspired improvisation coming on, and went with it. “There I was full of all kinds of crazy instant lunatic fantasies about you, all of a sudden ready to turn my nice orderly life upside down for you, write exit passes for both of us, take us on a trip around the world, the whole works. But all you could see was somebody you had hired to do a job. I didn’t know about the guy from San Diego. All I knew was that I saw you and you were gorgeous and I wanted you. I fell in love with you right then and there.”

“Yeah. Fell in love. That’s very touching.”

So far, not so good. But you can do this, he thought. Just let it come rolling out and see where it goes.

He said, “You don’t think that’s love, Tessa? Well, call it something else, then, whatever you want. It was something that I had never let myself feel before. It isn’t smart to get too involved, I always thought, it ties you down, the risks are too big. And then I saw you and I talked to you a little and right away I thought something could be happening between us and things started to change inside me, and I thought, Yeah, yeah, go with it this time, let it happen, this may make everything different. And you stood there not seeing it, not even beginning to notice, just jabbering on endlessly about how important the pardon was for you. Cold as ice, you were. That hurt me. It hurt me terribly, Tessa. So I stiffed you. And afterwards I thought, Jesus, I ruined that wonderful girl’s life and it was just because I got myself into a snit, and that was a fucking petty thing to have done. I’ve been sorry ever since. You don’t have to believe that. I didn’t know about San Diego. That makes it even worse for me.”

She had not said anything all this time. Her implacable stony stillness began to get to him. To puncture it Andy said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: who was he?”

“He wasn’t anybody,” she said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“He isn’t a who. He’s a what. An it. An android, a mobile anti-pardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Santa Monica. Something new that we have going around town looking for people like you.”

“Oh,” Andy said, stunned, as if she had kicked him. “Oh.”

“The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”

“It gave me one too. Turned my brain half to mush.”

“There was no way you could have beaten it. You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned ace of a hacker, you know that? Yes, of course you do. Of course.”

“Why do you work for them?” Andy asked.

She shrugged. “Everybody works for them, one way or another. Except people like you, I guess. Why shouldn’t we? It’s their world, isn’t it?”

“It didn’t used to be.”

“A lot of things didn’t used to be. What does that matter now? And it’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for TTD.”

“No,” he said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for TTD?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”

“To whom?”

“The network always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive, even from the outside. You’ll work for us.”

“You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” Andy said, astonished.

“It beats TTD.”

She couldn’t possibly be serious, he thought. This was some game she was playing with him. They would be fools to trust him in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to give him any kind of access to their net.

“Well?” she said, when he remained silent. “Is it a deal, Mickey?”

He was silent a little while longer. She was serious, he realized. Handing him the keys to the kingdom. Well, well, well.

They must have their reasons, he supposed. He’d be the fool, if he said no.

He said, “I’ll do it, yes. On one condition.”

She whistled. “You really have balls, don’t you?”

“Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. Okay?”

“You aren’t in any position to lay down conditions, you know.”

“Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t make me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”

She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”

“Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”

“You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”

“Let me find that out.”

“But what’s the point?”

“Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” Andy said.

It surprised him tremendously that she would go along with it. But she did. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and got off some orders, and pretty soon they brought in the android he had encountered in the park, or maybe another one that had the same bland face, the same general nondescript gray appearance. It looked him over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.

Someone came in and took the security lock off Andy’s wrists and fastened his ankles together with it, and left again. Tessa gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to him and they made contact. And Andy jumped right in.

He was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but he knew what he needed to do and he knew he had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a terminal, it was just a unit—and go for what lay behind it. He would offer no implant-to-implant access this time. No little one-on-one courtesies at all. Quickly he bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. Moving intuitively and instantaneously, because he knew that he was finished if he stopped to spell things out for himself, he leaped right over it while the android was still setting up its combinations, piercing its borgmann interface and diving underneath it before the android could do anything to stop him. That took him instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level, which was a machine of unthinkably enormous capacity, and as he arrived he gave the monster a hearty handshake.

There was a real thrill in that.

For the first time Andy understood, truly understood, what old Borgmann had achieved by building the interface that linked human biochips to Entity mainframes. All that power, all those zillions of megabytes squatting there, and he was plugged right into it. He felt like a mouse hitchhiking on the back of an elephant, but that was all right. He might be only a mouse but that mouse was getting a tremendous ride. Quickly he found the android’s data chain and tied a bow-knot in it to keep it from coming after him. Then, hanging on tight, he let himself go soaring along on the hurricane winds of that colossal machine for the sheer fun of the ride.

And as he soared he ripped out chunks of its memory by the double handful and tossed them to the breeze.

Why not? What did he have to lose?

The mainframe didn’t even notice for a good tenth of a second. That was how big it was. There was Andy, tearing great blocks of data out of its gut, joyously ripping and rending. And it didn’t even know it, because even the most magnificent computer ever assembled is nevertheless stuck with the necessity of operating at the speed of light, and when the best you can do is 186,000 miles a second it can take quite a while for the alarm to travel the full distance down all your neural channels. That thing was huge. Andy realized that it was wrong to think of himself as a mouse riding on an elephant. Amoeba piggybacking on a brontosaurus, was more like it.

But of course the guardian circuitry did cut in eventually. Alarms went off, internal gates came clanging down, all sensitive areas were sealed away, and Andy was shrugged off with the greatest of ease. There was no sense staying around waiting to get trapped in there, so he pulled himself free.

The android, he saw, had crumpled to the carpet. It was nothing but an empty husk now.

Lights were flashing on the office wall.

Tessa looked at him, appalled. “What did you do?”

“I beat your android,” he said. “It wasn’t all that hard, once I knew the scoop.”

“I heard an alarm. The emergency lights went on. You damaged the main computer!”

“Not really. Not in any significant way. That would have been very hard, staying in there long enough to do anything important. I just gave it a little tickle. It was surprised, seeing me get access in there, that’s all.”

“No. I think you really damaged it.”

“Come on, Tessa. Now why would I want to do that?”

She didn’t look amused. “The question ought to be why you haven’t done it already. Why you haven’t gone in there somehow and crashed the hell out of their programs.”

“You actually think I could do something like that?”

She studied him. “I think maybe you could, yes.”

“Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. I doubt it, myself. But I’m not a crusader, you know, Tessa. I like my life the way it is. I move around, I do as I please. It’s a quiet life. I don’t lead uprisings. I don’t like to be out there on the firing line. When I need to gimmick things, I gimmick them just enough, and no more. And the Entities don’t even know I exist. If I were to stick my finger in their eye, they’d cut my finger off. So I haven’t done it.”

“But now you might,” she said.

He began to get uncomfortable. “I don’t follow you.”

“You don’t like risk. You don’t like being conspicuous. You keep yourself out of sight and all that, and don’t start trouble just for the sake of making trouble. Fine. But if we take your freedom away, if we tie you down here in L.A. and put you to work, you’d strike back one way or another, wouldn’t you? Sure you would. You’d go right in there, and you’d figure out a way to cover your tracks so the machine didn’t know you were there. And you’d gimmick things but good. You’d do a ton of damage.” She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said. “You really would. You’d do such a job on their computer that they might have to scrap it and start all over again. I see it now, that you have the capability and that you could be put in a position where you’d be willing to use it. And so you’d screw everything up for all of us, wouldn’t you?”

“What?”

“If we let you anywhere near the Entity Net, you’d make such a mess of it that they’d feel obliged to do some sort of punitive strike to get back at us, and everybody in LACON would get fired, at the very least. Sent out for TTD, more likely.”

She was overestimating him, Andy saw. The machine was too well defended for anyone, even him, to damage it that way. If he got back inside he could make a little mess here and there, sure, a mouse-mess, but he wouldn’t be able to hide from the guardian circuitry long enough to achieve anything important.

Let her think so, though. Being overestimated is a hell of a lot better than being underestimated.

“I’m not going to give you the chance,” she said. “Because I’m not crazy. I understand you now, Mickey. It isn’t safe to fool around with you. Whenever anybody does, you take your little revenge, and you don’t give a damn what you bring down on anyone else’s head. We’d all suffer, but you wouldn’t care. No. Uh-uh, Mickey. My life isn’t so terrible that I need you to turn it upsidedown for me. You’ve already done it to me once. I don’t need it again.”

She was looking at him steadily. All the anger seemed to be gone from her and there was only contempt left.

But he was still a prisoner in this place with his ankles fastened together, and she still had total jurisdiction over him. He said nothing and waited to see what would happen next. She studied him for a moment without speaking.

Then she said something completely unexpected. “Tell me, can you go in there again and gimmick things so that there’s no record of your arrest today?”

Andy couldn’t hide his surprise. “Are you really serious about that?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t. Can you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose I could.”

“Do it, then. I’ll give you exactly sixty seconds to do whatever it is you have to do, and God help you if you do anything else while you’re in there, anything harmful. This is your dossier, here. Get rid of it.” She handed him a printout. “And once you’ve wiped out your record, get yourself going, fast. Out of here, away from Los Angeles. And don’t come back.”

“You’re actually going to let me go?”

“I actually and sincerely am.” She made an impatient gesture, a shoo-fly gesture.

He wasn’t able to believe it. Was there some catch? He couldn’t see one. She genuinely appeared to be releasing him, just to get him out of her sight, evidently, before he could cause any trouble here that ultimately would come down on her own head.

He was so astounded that he felt he had to make some corresponding gesture, some kind of repayment, and suddenly a torrent of inane words came gushing from him. “Look, Tessa, I just want to say—all that stuff about how guilty I’ve felt, how much I’ve regretted the thing I did to you back then—it was true. Every word of it.” It sounded foolish even to him.

“I’m sure that it all was,” she said dryly. The gray eyes rested mercilessly on him for a long moment, shriveling him down to an ash. “Okay, Mickey. Spare me any further crap. Do your gimmicking and edit yourself out of the arrest records and then I want you to start moving. Out of the building. Out of the city. Okay? Do it now, and do it real quick.”

Andy hunted around for something else to say. Anything. Couldn’t find a thing.

Quit while you’re ahead, he thought.

She gave him her wrist and he did the interface with her. As his implant access touched hers she shuddered a little. It wasn’t much of a shudder, but he noticed it. She hadn’t forgiven him for anything. She just wanted him gone.

He went in and found the John Doe arrest entry right away and got rid of it, and then, since he still had about twenty seconds left, he picked her I.D. number off his dossier and searched out her civil service file and promoted her up two grades and doubled her pay. His own outburst of sentimentality flabbergasted him. But it was a nice gesture, Andy thought. And he never could tell when their paths might cross again someday.

He cleaned up his traces and exited the program.

“All right,” he said. “It’s done.”

“Fine,” she said, and rang for her cop squad. “This is the wrong man,” she told them. “Clean him up and send him on his way.”

One of the LACONs muttered an apology, more or less, for the case of mistaken identity, and they showed him out of the building and turned him loose on Figueroa Street. It was early afternoon. There were clouds overhead, and the air was cool with the kind of easy coolness that was typical of a Los Angeles winter day.

Andy went to a street access and summoned the Toshiba from wherever it had parked itself.

It came driving up, five or ten minutes later, and he told it to take him north, up the freeway, out of the city. He wasn’t sure where he would go. San Francisco, maybe. It rained a lot in San Francisco in the winter, Andy knew, and from all he had heard it was colder than he liked a place to be. But still, it was a pretty town, and a port city besides, so he could probably arrange to get himself shipped out there to Hawaii or Australia or someplace like that, where it was warm, where he could leave all the tattered fragments of his old life behind him forever.

He reached the wall at the Sylmar gate, some fifty miles or so up the road. The gate asked him his name. “Richard Roe,” he said. “Beta Pi Upsilon 1047QX. Destination San Francisco.”

Implant reading, now. He provided access. No problem. All cool.

The gate opened and the Toshiba went through, easy as Beta Pi.

The car went zooming northward. It would be about a five-hour drive, maybe six, Andy guessed, to Frisco. The freeway here seemed to be in unusually good shape, all things considered.

But then, when he was less than half an hour beyond the Sylmar gate, an idea came to him, an idea so strange and unexpected, so surprising and bewildering, that Andy couldn’t quite make himself believe that he had actually thought of it. It was a crazy idea, absolutely crazy. He brushed it aside for the craziness that it was; but it had its hooks in him and would not release him. He struggled with it this way and that for about five minutes. And then he surrendered to it.

“Change of plan,” he told the Toshiba. “Let’s go to Santa Barbara.”

“Someone at the gate,” Frank said, as the honking sounded. “I’ll get it.”

It was a mild January day, getting toward evening, everything very green, the trees glistening from a recent drizzle. The weather had been very rainy lately; and more rain would be here before dawn, Frank figured, judging by the fishbelly clouds in the sky to the north. He grabbed the shotgun and went loping up the hill. He was a slender athletic young man, now, just on the cusp between adolescence and manhood, and he ran easily, gracefully, untiringly, in long loose strides.

The car sitting out there was an unfamiliar model, fairly new as cars went these days, very fancy. Looking through the bars of the gate, Frank was unable to make out the driver’s face. With a wave of the shotgun he signaled to the man to get out of the car and show himself. The driver stayed where he was.

Suit yourself, Frank thought, and started to turn away.

“Hey, fellow—wait!” The car window was open, suddenly, and the man’s head was sticking out. A strong face, just a little jowly, dark eyes, heavy frowning eyebrows, tough, scowling expression. The face looked familiar, somehow. But for a moment Frank wasn’t quite able to place it. Then he gasped in astonishment as the click of recognition occurred.

“Andy?”

A nod and a grin from the man in the car. “Me, yes. Who are you?”

“Frank.”

“Frank.” A moment’s pause for contemplation. “Anson’s Frank? But you were just a little kid!”

“I’m nineteen,” Frank said, not troubling to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “You’ve been gone better than five years, you know. Little kids grow up, sooner or later.” He pressed the button that opened the gate, and the bars slid back. But the car stayed where it was. That was puzzling. Frank said, frowning, “Look, Andy, are you coming in or aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. That is, I’m not really sure.”

“Not sure? What do you mean, not sure?”

“I mean that I’m not sure, is what I mean.” Andy scrunched his eyes closed for a moment and shook his head, like a dog shaking off raindrops. “—Shut up and let me think, will you, kid?”

Andy stayed put inside the car. What the hell was he waiting for? A little drizzle began to come down again. Frank began to fidget. Then he heard Andy say something in a low voice, obviously not intended for him. Speaking to the car, apparently. A model this recent would have a voice-actuated drive. “Come on, will you?” Frank said, getting really irritated now, and beckoned once more with the shotgun. But then, grasping at last the fact that Andy had changed his mind about being here and was about to take off, he strode quickly out through the open gate and pushed the gun through the car window, right up against the side of Andy’s jaw, just as the car began slowly to move in reverse along the muddy road. He kept pace easily with the vehicle, jogging alongside, holding the shotgun trained on Andy’s forehead.

Andy gave the muzzle of the gun a pop-eyed disbelieving side-wise stare.

“You aren’t leaving here,” Frank told him. “Just forget about that idea. You’ve got about two seconds to put on the brakes.”

He heard Andy tell the car to stop. It came abruptly to a halt. “What the fuck,” Andy said, glaring out at him.

Frank did not pull the shotgun away from the window. “Okay, now get out of the car.”

“Listen, Frank, I’ve decided that I don’t feel like visiting the ranch after all.”

“Tough. You should have decided that before you drove up the hill. Out.”

“It was a dumb idea, really. I never should have come back. Nobody here wants to see me again and there’s nobody here I want to see. So would you very kindly get that goddamn cannon out of my face, please, if you don’t mind, and let me move along?”

“Out,” Frank said once more. “Now. Or I’ll blow the hell out of your car’s computer and you won’t go anywhere at all.”

Andy gave him a surly look. “Come on.”

“You come on.” Motioning with the gun.

“All right, kid. All right! I’m getting out. Cool down a little, okay? We can both ride down to the house together. It’ll be a lot quicker. And I wish to hell you’d stop pointing that gun at me.”

“We’ll walk,” Frank said. “It’s not that far, really. Let’s go. Now. You’re capable of walking, aren’t you? Move it, Andy.”

Grumbling, Andy pushed the car door open and stepped out.

This was very hard to believe, Frank thought, that Andy was actually here. For the past couple of weeks Steve and Paul and all the other computer people at the ranch had been doing all sorts of on-line gymnastics, trying to trace this man’s trail in Los Angeles, and here he was, turning up here all on his own. Operating under some confusion, apparently, about whether he should have come; but he was here. That was what mattered.

“The gun,” Andy said. Frank was still holding it at the ready. “It really isn’t necessary, you know. I’d like you to realize that it makes me very uncomfortable.”

“I suppose it does. But there’s just the two of us up here and I don’t know how dangerous you are, Andy.”

“Dangerous? Dangerous?”

“Walk on ahead, please. I’ll be right behind you.”

“This is very shitty, Frank. I’m your own cousin.”

“Second cousin, I think. Come on. Keep it moving.”

“You taking me to your father?”

“No,” Frank said. “Yours.”

“Where is he?” Steve asked.

“In the library,” said two of Anson’s boys, speaking at the same time, as Anson’s boys tended to do. Martin said, “My brother Frank’s keeping watch over him there.”

“He’s got the shotgun on him,” added James, the other one. They both looked very pleased.

Steve hurried down the hall. In the library, a dark low-roofed room with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with hundreds and hundreds of rare and learned books on various Oriental cultures that had belonged to the Colonel and had not been looked at by anyone in fifteen or twenty years, a most unscholarly tableau was on display. Frank was leaning casually against a bookcase to the left of the door, with the shotgun that everyone carried when going up to the gate resting lightly across his left forearm. It was pointing in the general direction of a tense, scowling, heavyset man in loose-fitting denim trousers and a plaid flannel shirt on the other side of the room. An angry-looking stranger, whom Steve recognized, after a moment, as his son Andy.

“We probably don’t need to hold him at gunpoint, Frank. Do we, Andy?”

“He seems to think so,” Andy said balefully.

“Well, I don’t. Is that all right with you, Frank?”

“Whatever you say, sir. Do you want me to leave the room?”

“Yes. I think I do. Don’t go very far, though.”

As Frank went out, Steve looked toward Andy and said, “Am I safe with you?”

“Don’t talk crap, Dad.”

“I can’t be sure. You’re a strange one, you are. Always were, always will be.” Andy had put on more than a little weight, Steve noticed. And his hair was beginning to recede. The Gannett genes rising up in him. How old was he, anyway? Steve had to count it up. Twenty-four, he decided. Yes. Twenty-four. He looked considerably older than that, but then Steve reminded himself that Andy had always had looked older than his years, even when he was only a little boy. “A strange one, yes, indeed, that’s you. Anson said he thought you were a mutant.”

“He did? Look, Dad. Five fingers on each hand. Only one head. Only two eyes, on different sides of my nose, the way they’re supposed to be.”

Steve was only faintly amused. “Nevertheless,” he said, “a mutant. A mutant personality, is what Anson meant. Someone who’s not at all like any of us.—Here, look at it this way: I’m a nerdy sort of guy, Andy. Fat and slow and cautious. Always have been, always will be. I don’t mind being like that. But I’m also a decent and responsible and hardworking citizen. So tell me this: How did I raise a criminal like you?”

“A criminal? Is that what I am?”

“Too harsh a word, is it? I don’t think so. Not from the things I’ve heard. Why did you come back here, Andy?”

“I’m not sure. A touch of homesickness, maybe? I can’t say. I was on my way to Frisco and suddenly something came over me and I thought, Well, what the hell, I’m driving up that way anyway, I think I’ll go to the dear old ranch, I’ll see the folks again, good old Mom and Dad, good old tight-assed Anson, good old red-hot La-La.”

“La-La, yes. She prefers to be called Lorraine now. That’s her real name, you may remember. She’ll be glad to see you. She can introduce you to your son.”

“My son.” Not a flicker of animation appeared on his chilly face.

Steve smiled. “Your son, yes. He’s five years old. Born not too long after you skipped out of here.”

“And what’s his name, Dad? Anson?”

“Well, actually, you’ll be surprised to learn that it is. Anson Carmichael Gannett, Junior. Wasn’t that sweet of Lorraine, naming him after you, all things considered?”

It was Andy’s turn not to seem amused. He gave Steve a long, steady, sullen look. In an absolutely flat, cold voice he said, “Well, well, well. Anson C. Gannett, Junior. That’s very nice. I’m terribly, terribly flattered.”

Steve chose to take no notice of Andy’s mocking tone. Smiling still, he said, “I’m glad to hear it. He’s a really lovely child. We call him ‘Anse.’—And just how long are you planning to stay with us, son, now that you’re here?”

“As least as long as Frank is sitting out there in the hall with his shotgun, I guess.”

“I’m sorry about the gun. Frank overreacted a little, I think. But he didn’t know what to expect from you. We know that you’ve been living on the edge of the law ever since you left here. Working as a pardoner, right?”

Stiffly Andy said, “The laws that pardoners break are Entity laws. The things that pardoners do save people from Entity oppression. I could make out a case for looking upon pardoner activity as being one aspect of the Resistance. A kind of freelance Resistance effort. Which would make me just as decent and law-abiding a citizen as you claim to be.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Andy. Even so, the fact remains that pardoners live a kind of shady underground existence and not all of them are completely honest. I like to think that you were more honest than most, though.”

“As a matter of fact, I was.” There was a crackle in Andy’s voice and a glint in his eye that led Steve to think that he might actually be telling the truth, for a change. “I wrote a few stiffs, yes—you know what those are?—but only because the pardoner guild told me I had to. Guild rules. Most of the time I played it straight and did the job right. A matter of professional pride as a hacker. I got to know the Entity net inside and out, too.”

“That’s good to know. We rather hoped you had. That’s why we’ve been looking all over for you, all these years.”

“Have you, now? What for?”

“Because we’re still running the Resistance up here, and you have unique skills that could be of service to us in a major enterprise that we’ve been working on for a long time.”

“And what kind of enterprise might that be? Let’s get down to it, all right? Just what do you want from me, Dad?”

“To begin with, your cooperation on a little hacking project of critical importance, one that happens to be too tough even for me, but which I think you can handle.”

“And if I don’t cooperate?”

“You will,” Steve said.

Andy was astonished. The Borgmann archive! Well, well, well.

He remembered having gone looking for it once or twice or thrice—when he was fourteen, fifteen, somewhere back there. Everyone did. It was like looking for El Dorado, King Solomon’s mines, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The legendary Borgmann data cache, the key to all the Entity mysteries. — But the quest had brought no payoff for him, and he had lost interest quickly enough, once it started petering out into useless trails. You went sniffing up this promising pathway and that one, and for a time you were sure that you actually had found the way to reach the goodies that the sly and malevolent Borgmann had stashed away for his own private amusement in some unspecified zone of memory in somebody’s computer somewhere on Earth. And then just as you were pounding down the road to success and had worked up a really good sweat you discovered that you had been turned around without noticing it and were disappearing up your own anal orifice, so to speak, and the ghostly cackle of Borgmann’s laughter was resounding in your ears. Andy had decided, after a few such experiences, that there were better things in life for him to be doing.

He told all that to Steve and Anson, and to Frank, who had accompanied them on the way over to the communications center. Despite his tender years, Frank seemed to have become very important here during Andy’s absence.

“We want you to give it another try,” said Anson.

“What makes you think I’m going to get anywhere now?”

“Because,” said Steve, “I’ve got a data path here that I don’t think anybody’s ever traveled up before, not very far, anyway, and I’m convinced it leads right to Borgmann. I’ve known about it for years. I fool with it, every once in a while. But there’s a lock across it that I can’t get through. Perhaps you can.”

“You never told me anything about it. Why didn’t you bring me in on it then?”

“Because you weren’t here. You chose to head out for Los Angeles the very night I stumbled on it, my friend. So how was I going to tell you?”

“Right,” Andy said. “Right. And if I do get in there now, what is it that I’m supposed to find for you, pray tell?”

“The location of Entity Prime,” said Anson.

Andy turned and stared at him. “You still hung up on that bullshit, are you? I heard about Tony, you know. Wasn’t getting Tony killed enough for you?”

He saw Anson flinch, as though Andy had gone at him with his fist. And for a moment Andy almost regretted having said what he had said. It was a dirty shot, he knew. Anson was too vulnerable in that area. Even more so than he had been before, possibly. Something had changed in Anson during the years Andy had been gone, he realized, and not for the better. As though some key part had broken inside him. Or as though he had aged thirty years in five. All those deaths hitting Anson one after another: his wife, his father, then his brother. The pain of all that must still be with him.

Still, Andy had never liked Anson much. A stuffed shirt; a fanatic; a pain in the ass. A Carmichael. If he was still hurting for people who had died five or ten years ago, too bad. To hell with him and his tender feelings, Andy thought.

Anson said, obviously keeping himself under tight check, “We still believe that there is such a being as Entity Prime, Andy, and that if we can find him and kill him we’ll do tremendous damage to the whole Entity control structure.” He clamped his lips tightly together for a moment, a thin straight line. “We sent Tony, but Tony wasn’t good enough, somehow. Somehow they caught wise to what he was going to do, but they let him plant the bomb anyway, because we had the wrong place. And then they grabbed him. The next time, we need to have the right place. Which we hope you can find for us.”

“And who’s going to be the next Tony, if I do?”

“Let me worry about that. Your job is to go into the Borgmann archive and tell us where Prime is and how we can get access to him.”

“What makes you so sure I’ll find any such material?”

Anson shot an exasperated look at Steve. But otherwise he continued to hold himself under steely control.

“I’m not in any way sure of that. But it’s a reasonable assumption that Borgmann, considering all that he achieved and the degree of authority that he was able to attain under the Entities in the earliest days of the Conquest, had found some way of making direct contact with the Entity leadership. Which we define as the creature we call Entity Prime. It’s reasonable to believe, therefore, that Borgmann’s protocols for approaching Prime are archived somewhere in his files. I don’t know that they are. Nobody does. But if we don’t go in there and look, Goddamn it—”

Anson’s forehead and cheeks, seamed and corrugated by lines of stress that Andy did not remember, now had begun to turn very red. His left arm was shaking, apparently uncontrollably. Frank, looking worried, moved closer to Anson’s side. Steve gave Andy the most ferocious look of rage that Andy had ever seen to cross his father’s bland, plump face.

“All right,” Andy said. “All right, Anson. Show me the stuff and I’ll see what I can do.”

It was a little before midnight. They sat side by side, Steve and Andy, father and son, in the communications center with Anson and Frank standing behind them. Steve had one screen, Andy had another. As Andy watched, abstract patterns began to stream across his father’s screen, the fluid lines of data trails that had been converted into visual equivalents.

“Give me your wrist,” Steve said.

Andy looked at him uneasily. It was a long, long time since the two of them had done any implant stuff with each other. Andy had never had any trouble with making biocomputer connections with anyone before, but suddenly he felt himself hesitating at opening his biochip to Steve, as though even a mere interflow of data was too terrifying an intimacy.

“Your wrist,” Steve said again.

Andy stretched forth his arm. They made contact.

“This is what I think might be the Borgmann access line,” Steve said. “This, this here.” Data began to cross over from father to son. Steve pointed to nodes in the picture on Andy’s screen, whorls of green and purple against a salmon-toned background. Andy cut his bioprocessor into the system and began to manipulate the data that had come to him by way of his father’s implant. What had seemed abstract, even formless, a moment ago now began to have meaning. He followed along, nodding, humming, murmuring to himself.

“And here,” Steve said, “is where I ran into the blockage.”

“Right. I see. Okay, Dad. Everybody all quiet now, please.”

He leaned into the screen. He saw nothing else but that glowing rectangular surface. He was alone in the room, alone in the world, alone in the universe. Anson, Frank, Steve, were gone from his perceptions.

Some mainframe in Europe was welcoming him on-line, Andy clicked himself into it.

Where was he? France? Germany? Those were only names. All foreign places were mere names to him. Though he had traveled hither and yon across what had once been the United States of America, he had never been outside its former boundaries.

Prague, I want. Which is in Czech-land. Czechia. Whatever the hell they call the place. Click, click, click. Give me Prague, Prague, Prague. Prague. Borgmann’s hometown. Is that it? Yes. That’s it. The city of Prague, in Czecho-whatever.

The patterns on the screen looked very familiar. He had been down this trail once before, he realized. Long ago, when he was a boy: this narrowing tunnel, this set of branching forks. Yes. Yes. He had entered it and hadn’t even known where he was, how close he stood to the pot of gold.

But of course he had lost his way, then. Would he lose it now?

He was starting to get verbals. Words in some foreign language floated up to him. But which language? He had no idea. There must have been some reason why his father had thought this path was the way into Borgmann’s files, though. Well, Borgmann had been a Czech, hadn’t he? So maybe this language was Czechian, or whatever it was that they spoke in the Czech country. Andy called up a translator file and asked it to do Czech, and got an error message back. He told the translator to run a linguistic scan for him. Mystery language, here. What is it?

Deutsch.

Deutsch? What the fuck was Deutsch? The language of Czechia? That didn’t sound right. Whatever Deutsch was, though, Andy needed it translated. He gave the translator a nudge and told it to do Deutsch. Ja-wohl. It did Deutsch for him.

Dirty Deutsch, at that. A spew of filthy words such as startled even Andy went rocketing across the screen. Whoever had written that file was foaming at the mouth at him across the decades, really running berserk, welcoming him to this sealed archive with an unparalleled stream of derisive muck.

Yes. Yes. Yes. This had to be the Borgmann trail, all right!

He went a little deeper, down that tunnel of forking paths.

“And now,” Andy said, talking entirely to himself, because there was no one left in the universe except him, “I should hit the lock that Steve ran into, right—around—here.”

Yes.

It was a real lulu, that lock. On the surface it was very innocent. It looked like a friendly invitation to go forward. Which Andy proceeded to do, knowing full well what would happen, and carefully marking his position before it did. Onward, onward, onward. Then one step too many, and he found himself crashed. There was nothing he could have done to save himself. The trapdoor had opened in a billionth of a nanosecond and that was that, whoosh, gonel Goodbye, chump.

Right. If this lock had defeated a hacker like Steve, again and again over the past five years, it had to be something special. And it was.

Andy got himself back to his marker and started again. Down the tunnel, yes, take this fork, take that one. Yes. There was the lock coming into view a second time, so beguilingly telling him that he was going the right way, urging him to continue moving ahead. Instead of moving ahead, though, Andy simply looked ahead, sending a virtual scout forward and watching through the scout’s eyes until he could see the pincers of the lock coyly waiting for him at the edges of the data trail a short distance onward. He let them grab the scout and backed up once again to his point of entry.

Slowly, slowly. This thing could be beaten.

His many trips through the Entity mainframes in the course of his pardoning work had taught him how to deal with stuff of this kind. You don’t like one route, just carve yourself another.

There’s plenty of megabytage in here to work with. Call in assistance if you need it; link yourself up with other areas of the operation. Tunnel around the block. Borgmann had been one clever cookie, that was clear, but a whole lot of interfacing had gone on since Borgmann’s day, and Andy had the benefit of everything that had been learned about the Entity computers in the past quarter of a century.

He came at the Borgmann data sideways. He routed himself through computers in Istanbul, in Johannesburg, in Jakarta; and also he went through Moscow, through Bombay, through London, simultaneously tiptoeing up on the Czecho data cache from any number of different directions. He built a double trail for himself, a triple trail, letting himself seem to be in all sorts of places at once, so that nobody could possibly could track him to any one point in his journey and come along in back of him and short him out. And finally he shot into the Prague mainframe through the back door and went whizzing toward the Borgmann cache hind-end first.

He could see the lock, shining bright as daylight, up there in the tunnel waiting for new patsies to show up. But he was behind it.

“Hello, there,” he said, as the secret files of Karl-Heinrich Borgmann came swimming up into his grasp like so many friendly little fish asking to be tickled.

It was amazing, even to Andy, how disgusting some of Borgmann’s stuff was.

Layer after layer of porno, stacked a mile high. Videos of naked European-looking women with hairy armpits and spread crotches, staring into the camera lens in sullen resignation as they went through curious and, to Andy, highly non-enthralling movements of a blatantly sexual nature.

Andy didn’t have any particular problem with the sight of naked women. But the sullen looks, the barely concealed anger of these women, the absolutely unavoidable sense that the camera was raping them—all that was very distasteful. Andy could imagine, easily enough, what must have gone on. Borgmann had been the boss puppet-master, hadn’t he, the voice through which the Entities made known their commands to the conquered planet? The Emperor of Earth, pretty much, the highest authority in the world below Entity level. He had been that for a while, anyway, until that woman had walked into his private office—she had been someone he must have trusted, it would seem—and put the knife into his guts. With the powers he held he could have made anybody do anything he wanted, or else they would face the worst of punishments. And what Borgmann had wanted, evidently, was nothing more profound than for women to take off their clothes in front of him and follow his loathsome instructions while he made videos of them and filed them in his permanent archive.

There was other stuff here, too, that indicated that Borgmann had done even creepier things than making unwilling women gyrate on command while he sat there drooling and took movies of them. Borgmann had been a secret voyeur, too, a peeping Tom, spying on the women of Prague from afar.

Moving deeper, Andy found whole cabinets of video documents that could only have been made by snaking spy-eyes into people’s houses. These women were alone, unsuspecting, going about their business, changing their clothes, brushing their teeth, taking baths, sitting on the john. Or making love, even, with boyfriends or husbands. And all the while there was sweet lovely Karl-Heinrich gobbling it all up by remote wire, taping it and stashing it away where it would eventually be found, twenty or thirty years later, by none other than Anson Carmichael ("Andy") Gannett, Senior.

They went on and on and on, these porno films. Borgmann must have had half the city of Prague wired up with his spy-eyes. No doubt he had put the cost of it all into the municipal budget as necessary security monitoring. But the only thing he had monitored, it seemed, was female flesh. You didn’t have to be any kind of puritan to find the Borgmann files repellent. Moving swiftly from cabinet to cabinet, Andy felt his eyes glazing over, his head beginning to throb. How many breasts could you stare at before they came to lose all erotic value? How many crotches? How many waggling fannies?

Sick, he thought. Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.

But there was no way to get to the Entity material he was looking for, it appeared, except by wading through these mountains of muck. Perhaps Borgmann himself had had an automatic jump-command that took him past them, but Andy didn’t see any quick and convenient way of looking for it and was unwilling to try anything that might deflect him from the main path. So he went on slogging inward the old-fashioned way, file by file by file, through mountains of flesh, tons of tits and ass, hoping that there would indeed be something in this much-sought-after archive of Borgmann’s beside this unthinkable record of the invasion of the privacy of hundreds and hundreds of girls and women of a bygone era.

He got past the porno levels, an endless time later.

He thought for a while that he never would. But then, abruptly, he found himself among files that had an entirely new inventorying system, an archive buried within the archive, and knew, after a few minutes of poking around, that he had hit the jackpot.

It was awesome, how thoroughly Borgmann had infiltrated himself into the Entities’ mysterious data systems, starting absolutely from scratch. How much he had perceived, and achieved, and squirreled away under lock and key right there in one of the main machines of the Entities’ own computational network, there to rest undisturbed until Andy Gannett came chopping his way in to find it. He had been a creep, old Borgmann had been, but he also must have been a supreme master of data-handling to have penetrated this deeply into an alien code system and learned how to deal with it. In the midst of his distaste for the man Andy could not help feeling a certain degree of reverence for the great master he had been.

There was plenty here that would be useful to the Resistance. The record of all of Borgmann’s one-on-one dealings with the occupying administration of Central Europe. His interfacing lines, the ones that had enabled him to communicate with the high Entity offices. His lists of useful channels to use when relaying data to them. His classified set of Entity decrees and promulgations. Best of all, here was his digital dictionary, Borgmann language lined up against Entity language, the whole set of code equivalencies—the key to full translation, perhaps, of the secret Entity communications system.

Andy didn’t stop to make any sort of detailed investigation of this material. His job now was just to collect it and make it accessible for later study. Working quickly, he lassoed great gobs of it, anything that seemed even halfway relevant, copied it file by file and kicked it on through his parallel data chains, Moscow to Bombay to Istanbul, Jakarta to Johannesburg to London, letting the chains snarl and overlap and become corrupted beyond anybody’s comprehension, human or Entity, while at the same time coding them to reconstruct themselves in some mysterious midpoint zone where he could find them and bring them up again right here at the ranch. Which he did. One by one, everything useful that he could find, neatly carried around Borgmann’s nasty little lock into an open file so that it would not be necessary for anyone ever again to go through all that Andy had gone through this night.

He looked up at last from his screen.

His father, red-eyed and bleary-faced, still sat beside him, watching him in undisguised astonishment. Frank leaned yawning against the wall. Anson had fallen asleep on the couch near the door. Andy heard the patter of rainfall outside. There was a gray light in the sky.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Half past six in the morning. You haven’t stopped going for a moment, Andy.”

“No. I guess I haven’t, have I?” He rose, stretched, yawned, pressed his knuckles against his eyeballs. He felt creaky, tired, hungry, empty. “I think I’d like to pee, now, okay? And then maybe somebody could bring me a cup of coffee.”

“Right.” Steve gestured to Frank, who got up immediately and left. As Andy, still yawning, started to amble toward the washroom, Steve said, making no attempt at concealing his eagerness to know, “Well, boy, any luck? What did you find in there?”

“Everything,” Andy said.

So it had worked out after all, their long shot. The unfindable Andy had returned to the ranch and entered the unenterable archive for them, and now they had confirmation of the unconfirmable Prime hypothesis. Looking in wonder and jubilation through the synopsis that Steve had prepared for him from Andy’s early analysis of his preliminary tour of the Borgmann file, Anson felt the burdens dropping away from him, that leaden weight of grief and regret and self-denunciation. All of that had turned him into an old man for the past five years, but now he was miraculously rejuvenated, full of energy and dreams, ready once more to rush forth and rescue the world from its conquerors. Or so it seemed to him just now. He hoped the feeling would last.

He paged through the glossy, neatly printed sheets for three or four minutes, while the others watched without speaking. Then he looked up and said, “How soon can we get moving on this, do you think? Do we have enough information to move against Prime yet?”

With him in the chart room were Steve Gannett, and Steve’s wife Lisa, and Paul’s oldest son Mark and Mark’s sister Julie, and Charlie Carmichael with his wife Eloise. The inner circle, pretty much, of the family now, everyone but Cindy, the ancient and ageless, the matriarch of the clan, who was somewhere else just then. But it was Steve to whom Anson looked for most of his answers now.

And the answer that Steve gave him was not the one he wanted to hear.

“Actually,” Steve said, “we’ve still got quite a bit of work ahead of us first, Anson.”

“Oh?”

“The honcho Entity that Borgmann was dealing with—and we can assume, I think, that that really was the one we call Prime—was based in Prague, in a big castle that they have there up on a hill. As you already know, I think, we believe that the Prague headquarters was de-emphasized quite some time ago, and that Prime was moved to Los Angeles. But we need to confirm that, which I intend to have Andy do for us as soon as he’s worked out the access path. Once we’ve pinned down the location of Prime, we can start thinking of ways to take him out.”

“What if Andy should decide to vanish again?” Anson asked. “Will you be able to come up with the necessary data yourself, Steve?”

“He won’t vanish.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“I think he genuinely wants to be part of this, Anson. He knows how essential he is to the project. He won’t let us down.”

“All the same, I’d like to keep your son under twenty-four-hour-a-day guard. To insure that he sticks around until he’s finished massaging the Borgmann data. Is that very offensive to you, Steve?”

“It’s certainly going to be offensive to Andy.”

“Andy has let us down before. I don’t want to take any further risks of losing him. I suppose I might as well tell you: I’ve asked Frank and a couple of my other boys to take turns guarding him while he’s here at the ranch.”

“Well,” Steve said, letting some displeasure show. “Whatever you want, Anson. Especially since you seem already to have done it. My opinion about the need for treating him like a prisoner is on record.”

“Lisa?” Anson said. “He’s your son. How do you feel about this?”

“I think you should watch him like a hawk until you get what you need from him.”

“There you are,” said Anson triumphantly. “Watch him like a hawk! Which Frank will do. Which he is doing right at this very moment, as a matter of fact. Martin and James are going to take turns with him, eight hours per day each. That much is settled, all right?—Steve, how soon are you likely to have anything hard concerning Prime’s location?”

“I’ll have it when I have it, okay? We’re making it our highest priority.”

“Easy. Easy. I just wanted an estimate.”

“Well,” Steve said, seeming almost to be pouting, “I can’t give you one. And I don’t think putting Andy under round-the-clock guard is going to improve his motivation for helping us, either. But let that pass. Maybe he’ll be willing to cooperate anyway. I certainly want to think so. Once we do get you your information, incidentally, what method do you have in mind for taking Prime out?”

“We’ll do it the way we did before. Only better, this time, I hope.—Hello, Cindy,” Anson said, as she came into the room. She moved serenely across it with the stately grace of the frail old woman that she was, eyes bright as ever, head held alertly forward, and took a seat next to Mark. “We’re talking about the assault on Prime,” Anson told her. “I’ve just explained to Steve that I intend to carry it out pretty much the same way as the first time, sending someone in to plant a bomb right against the side of Prime’s house. Or even inside it, if we can. This time Andy should be able to provide us with the precise location of Prime, and also the right computer passwords to get our man through Entity security.”

Mark said, “Do you have anyone in mind for the job yet, Anson?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. My son Frank.”

That was something Anson hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Frank, until this moment. The uproar was instant and vehement. They all were talking at once right away, yelling, gesticulating. In the midst of the sudden chaos Anson saw Cindy, sitting bolt upright, as rigid and gaunt and grim-faced as the mummy of some ancient Pharaoh, staring at him with a look of such wholehearted truculent violence in her intense and glittering eyes that it struck him with an almost tangible force.

“No,” she said, a deep icy contralto that sliced through the din like a scimitar. “Not Frank. Don’t even think of sending Frank, Anson.”

The room fell silent, and stayed that way until Anson could find his voice.

“You see some problem with that, Cindy?” he asked, finally. “Five years ago you sent your only brother down there to die. Now you want to send your son? Don’t tell me that you have three more in reserve, either. No, Anson, no, we aren’t going to let you risk Frank’s life on this thing.”

Anson pressed his lips into a thin, tight line. “Frank won’t be at risk. We know what mistakes we made the last time. We aren’t going to repeat them.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“We’re going to take every precaution. Don’t you think I’ll do everything in my power to see to it that Frank gets safely through the mission? But this is a war, Cindy. Risk is inevitable. So is sacrifice.”

But she was inexorable. “Tony was your sacrifice. You aren’t required to make a second one. What kind of crazy demonstration of macho toughness is this, anyway? Do you think we don’t know what you’ve already given, and how much it cost you? Frank’s the hope of the future, Anson. He’s the next generation of leadership here. You know that: everyone does. He mustn’t be wasted. Even if there’s only one chance in ten that he wouldn’t come back, that’s too much of a chance.—Besides, there’s someone else at the ranch who’s far better fitted for the job than Frank is.”

“Who’s that?” Anson demanded harshly. “You? Me? Or do you mean Andy, maybe?”

“Talk to Khalid,” Cindy said. “He’s got someone who can do this job just fine.”

Anson was mystified. “Who? Tell me. Who?”

“Talk to Khalid,” she said.

“I would want certain safeguards for him,” Khalid said. “He is my eldest son. His life is sacred to me.”

He stood before them straight as a soldier on patrol, as cool and self-possessed as though he and not Anson were in charge of this meeting. Only in the moment of entering the chart room had Khalid betrayed a touch of uneasiness, seeing so many family members gathered there, like a court in session with Anson as the high judge; but that had very quickly passed and his normal aura of preternatural calm had reasserted itself.

Khalid was an unfamiliar figure here. He was never present at any of the chart room meetings; he had amply let it be known years ago that the Resistance was no concern of his. Indeed he very rarely had been in the main house at all in recent years. Khalid spent most of his time in and about his little cabin on the far side of the vegetable patch, with the equally reclusive Jill and their multitude of strange, lovely-looking children. There he carved his little statuettes and the occasional larger work, and raised crops for his family, and sat in the wonderful California sunlight reading and rereading the Word of God. Sometimes he went roving along the back reaches of the mountain, hunting the wild animals that had come to flourish there in these days of diminished human population, the deer and boars and such. His son Rasheed occasionally went with him; more usually he went alone. He lived a private, inward life, needing very little beyond the company of his wife and children, and often content to hold himself apart even from them.

Anson said, “What safeguards do you mean, specifically?”

“I mean I will not let you send him to his death. He must not perish the way Tony perished.”

“Specifically, I said.”

“Very well. He will not go on this mission unless you prepare the way fully for him. What I mean by that is that you must be altogether sure that you are sending him to the right place, and when he gets there, the doors of it must be open to him. He must know the passwords that will admit him. I understand about these passwords. He must be able to walk into the place of Prime in complete safety.”

“We have Andy working on extracting the location of Prime and the password protocols right this minute. We won’t be sending Rasheed until we have them, I assure you.”

“Assurance is not enough. This is a sacred promise?”

“A sacred promise, yes,” Anson said.

“There is more,” said Khalid. “You will see to it that he comes safely back. There will be cars waiting, several cars, and care will be taken that confusion is created so that the police do not know which car he is in, and so he can be returned to the ranch.”

“Agreed.”

“You agree very quickly, Anson. But I must be convinced that you are sincere, or otherwise I will see to it that he does not go. I know how to make a tool, but I know how to blunt its edge, too.”

“I lost my brother to this project,” Anson said. “I haven’t forgotten what that felt like. I don’t intend to lose your son.”

“Very good. See to that, Anson.”

Anson made no immediate reply. He wished there were some way that he could transmit telepathically to Khalid his absolute conviction that this time the thing would be done right, that Andy would find in Borgmann’s archive every scrap of information that they would need in order to send Rasheed to the true location of Prime and to open all the hidden doors for him, so that Rasheed could carry out the assassination and make good his escape. But there was no way for Anson to do that. He could only ask for Khalid’s help, and hope for the best.

Khalid was watching him calmly.

That cool gaze of Khalid was unnerving. He was so alien, was Khalid. That was how he had seemed to the sixteen-year-old Anson on that day, decades ago, when he had turned up here out of the blue, traveling with Cindy; and after all this time, he was alien still. Even though he had lived among them for so many years, had married into their family, had shared in the splendor and isolation of their mountaintop existence as though he were a born Carmichael himself. He still remained, Anson thought, something mysterious, something other. It wasn’t so much that he was of foreign birth, or that he had that strange, almost unearthly physical beauty, or that he worshipped a god named Allah and lived by the book of Mohammed, who had been a desert prince in some unimaginably alien land thousands of years ago. That was part of it, but only part. Those things couldn’t account for Khalid’s formidable inner discipline, that granite-hard calm of his, the lofty detachment of his spirit. No, no, the explanation of his mystery must lie somewhere in Khalid’s childhood, in the very shaping of him, born as he had been in the earliest and harshest years of the Conquest and raised in a town infested by Entities, under hardships and tensions whose nature Anson could scarcely begin to guess at. It was those hardships and tensions that must have led to his becoming what he was. But Khalid never would speak of his early years.

“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” Anson said. “If you have so little desire to place Rasheed at risk, why did you give him the same assassin training you gave Tony? I remember very clearly the time you told me that you didn’t give a damn about killing Prime, that the whole project was simply no concern of yours. So surely it wasn’t your intention to set up Rasheed as someone to be put into play if Tony failed.”

“No. That was not my intention at all. I was training Tony to be your assassin. I was training Rasheed to be Rasheed. The training happened to be the same; the goals were different. Tony became a perfect machine. Rasheed became perfect too, but he is much more than a machine. He is a work of art.”

“Which you now are willing to place at our service for a very dangerous mission, knowing that we’re going to do everything we can to protect him, but there’s going to be some element of risk nevertheless. Why? We would never have known what Rasheed was, if you hadn’t happened to say to Cindy that you felt he could handle the job. What made you tell her that?”

“Because I have found a life here among you,” said Khalid unhesitatingly. “I was no one, a man without a home, a family, an existence, even. All that had been stripped from me when I was a child. I was merely a prisoner; but Cindy found me, and brought me here, and everything changed for me after that. I owe you something back. I give you Rasheed; but I want you to use him wisely or else not at all. Those are the terms, Anson. You will protect him, or you will not have him.”

“He’ll be protected,” Anson said. “We aren’t going to repeat the Tony event. I swear it, Khalid.”

“Are you getting anywhere?” Frank asked, as Andy looked wearily up from the screen.

“Depends how you define ‘anywhere.’ I’m discovering new things all the time. Some of them are actually useful.—Would you mind getting me another beer, Frank? And have one for yourself.”

“Right.” Frank moved hesitantly toward the door.

“Don’t worry,” Andy said. “I’m not going to jump through that window and run away the moment you leave the room.”

“I know that. But I’m supposed to be guarding you, you know.”

“You think I’m going to try to escape? When I’m this close to breaking through into the most secret Entity code?”

“I’m supposed to be guarding you,” Frank said again, patiently. “Not thinking about what you might or might not do. My father would roast me alive if I let you get away.”

“I would work much better if I weren’t so thirsty, Frank. Get me a beer. I’m not going anywhere. Trust me.” Andy smiled slyly. “Don’t you think I’m a trustworthy person, Frank?”

“If you do go anywhere, and I don’t get roasted alive because you do, I’ll personally hunt you down and roast you myself,” Frank said. “I swear that by the Colonel’s bones, Andy.”

He went down the hall. When he returned, about a minute and a half later, Andy was bent over the computer screen again.

“Well, I escaped,” Andy said. “Then I thought of a new approach I wanted to try, and I decided to come back. Give me the goddamned beer.”

“Andy—” Frank said, handing the bottle over.

“Yes?”

“Look, there’s something I’ve been intending to tell you. I want to apologize for all that shotgun stuff, the day you arrived. It wasn’t very pretty. But I knew what my father and Steve would say if they found out you had been here and I had let you go away again. I couldn’t take the chance that you would.”

“Forget it, Frank. Don’t you think I understand why you pushed that gun in my face? I’m not holding any grudge.”

“I’d like to believe that.”

“You might just as well, then.”

“Just why did you come back here?” Frank asked him.

“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer. Part of it was just a wild impulse, I guess. But also—well—look, Frank, I’ll kill you if you say anything about this to anybody else. But there was something else going on in my mind too. I did some shitty things while I was wandering around the country. And when I headed north out of Los Angeles I found myself thinking that maybe I just ought to stop off here and make myself of some use to my family, if I could, instead of acting like a selfish asshole all of the time. Something like that.”

“You almost turned right around and left again, though. Before you were even inside the gate.”

Andy grinned. “It isn’t easy for me not to act like a selfish asshole. Don’t you know that about me, Frank?”

Eleven at night. No moon, no clouds, plenty of stars. Frank was off duty now; Martin had taken over the job of guarding Andy. Frank stood outside the communications center, looking up into the darkness, thinking about too many things at once.

His father. This mission, and whether it would achieve anything. Andy, about whom so many terrible things had been said, suddenly becoming so repentant, sweating away in there to find the secret that would let them overthrow the Entities. And how wonderful everything would be if by some miracle they did overthrow the Entities and regain their freedom.

He closed his eyes for a moment; and when he opened them again, the blazing stars arrayed in that great arch above him seemed to engulf him, to draw him up into their midst.

Cindy knew all their names. She had taught them to him long ago, and he still remembered a great many of them. That was Orion up there, an easy one to find because of the three stars of his belt.

Mintak, Alnillam, Alnitak, they were. Strange names. Who had first called them that, and why? The one in the right shoulder, that was Betelgeuse. And there, there in the warrior-god’s left knee, that was Rigel.

Frank wondered which star the Entities had come from. We’ll probably never know, he thought. Were there different kinds of Entities living on the different stars? Might there be a world of Entities greater than our Entities somewhere, beings that would conquer ours someday, and devour their civilization, and set free their slaves? Oh, how he hoped that would happen! He loathed the Entities for what they had done to the world. He despised them. He envied Rasheed for being the one who had been chosen to kill Entity Prime, a task he had desperately wanted for himself.

Stars are suns, he told himself. And suns have planets, and planets have people.

He wondered what kept the stars from falling out of the sky. Some of them did, he knew. He had seen it happen. Often on August nights they would go streaking across the sky, plummeting toward doom somewhere far away. But why did some fall, and not others? There was so much that he didn’t know. He would have to ask Andy some of these questions, one of these days.

Maybe the Entities’ star was one of those that had fallen. Was that why they went around to other stars and stole the worlds of those who lived there? Yes, Frank thought, that must be it. The Entities’ star has fallen. And so have the Entities, in a way: they have fallen on us. Looking up into the dark glittering beauty of the night sky, Frank felt a second fierce surge of hatred for the conquerors of Earth who had come out of that sky to steal Earth from its rightful owners.

One day we’ll rise up and kill them all.

It felt very good to think that, even though he had trouble making himself believe it ever would happen.

He glanced toward the communications center, and wondered how Andy was coming along in there. Then Frank looked up at the stars one last time; and then he went off to get some sleep.

Andy worked through the night, which was the way he preferred to do things, and put the last pieces of the puzzle together at the very moment when the sun was coming up. It was the time of the changing of his guard, too, James’s shift ending and Martin’s beginning.

Or perhaps it was the other way around, Martin going off duty and James arriving. Andy had never been very good at telling them apart. Frank stood out from the others to some degree—there was an extra spark of intelligence or intuition somewhere in him, Andy thought—but the rest of Anson’s kids all seemed interchangeable, like a bunch of androids. It was mostly that they all looked alike, poured from the same mold: that awesome Carmichael mold that never seemed to relinquish its grip on the family protoplasm. Glossy blond hair, chilly blue eyes, smooth even features, long legs, flat bellies—the entire crowd of them here at the ranch had been like that, boys and girls alike, decade after decade. Martin and James and Frank and Maggie and Cheryl in this generation; La-La, Jane, Ansonia, that whole bunch, too, just the same; Anson and Tony before them, and Heather and Leslyn, Cassandra and Julie and Mark, Jill and Charlie and Mike; and, even further back, the Colonel’s three children, Ron and Anse and Rosalie. And the near-mythical Colonel himself. Generation after generation, going back to the primordial Carmichael at the beginning of time. Outsiders might come in, Peggy, Eloise, Carole, Raven, but the genes of most of them were gobbled up, never to be seen again. Only the Gannett input, the genes for brown eyes and too much weight and brown hair that went thin early, had somehow persevered. And, of course, so had Khalid’s, in spades; Khalid’s huge brood only too plainly bore the mark of Khalid. But Khalid was truly an outsider, so thoroughly non-Carmichael that his genetic heritage had succeeded in dominating even that of the indomitable Colonel.

Andy knew that he was being unfair: they must really be very different inside, Martin and James and Maggie and all the rest of the tribe, actual separate persons with individual identities. No doubt they would be indignant at being clumped together like this. So let them be indignant, and to hell with them. Andy had always felt overwhelmed by them all, outnumbered, outblonded. As his father also had been, Andy was sure. And probably his grandfather, also, Doug, whom he only faintly remembered.

“Tell your father I’ve finished the job and I’ve got the stuff he wants,” Andy said to Martin, or perhaps it was James, as the young man went off duty. “The whole business, every parameter lined up just right. No question of it. If he’ll come over here, I’ll lay it all out for him.”

“Yes,” said James, or perhaps it was Martin, with absolutely no inflection in his voice. He showed hardly any more comprehension of what Andy had just told him than if Andy had said to him that he had discovered a method for transforming latitude into longitude. And off he went to bear the news to Anson.

“Good morning, Andy,” the newly arrived brother said, settling in for his shift.

“Morning, Martin.”

“I’m James.”

“Ah. Yes. James.” Andy acknowledged the correction with a nod and turned his attention back to the screen.

The yellow lines cutting across the pink field, the splashes of blue, the burning scarlet circle. It was all there, yes. He felt no particular sensation of triumph: a little of the opposite emotion, perhaps. After days and days of rummaging through the foul sewer that was the Borgmann archive, and then a gradual direct thrust through the area of essential Entity-relationship files, and now this sustained ten-hour burst of drilling down into the core of the matter, he had laid bare everything that Anson had asked him to find. Anson now could go out and strike the blow that would win his war against the Entities, and hoorah for Anson. What Andy was thinking in the moment of glorious attainment, mainly, was that now they would let him have his life back.

“I hear you’ve got some great news for us,” said a voice from the door.

Frank stood there, beaming like the newly risen sun.

“I was expecting your father,” Andy said.

“He’s still asleep. He’s been feeling poorly lately, you know. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Andy decided not to stand on ceremony. If they didn’t feel like sending Anson over, well, he would explain things to Frank, and so be it. During the search Frank had appeared to understand more of what he was doing than Anson, anyway.

“Here,” Andy said, “this is where they keep Prime.” He indicated the scarlet circle. “Downtown Los Angeles, in the strip between the Santa Ana Freeway and the dry bed of the old Los Angeles River. That’s just a couple of miles south and east of the place where my father thought he was being kept at the time of the Tony episode. I tracked down an ancient city gazetteer that says the neighborhood is a warehouse district, but of course that was back in the twentieth century, and things may have changed a lot. The Entities’ own digital code for Prime translates out to Oneness, so our name for him was pretty damned close.”

Frank’s grin grew broader. “That’s terrific. What kind of security arrangements do they have for him?”

“A ring of three gates. They work just like the gates in the city walls, with biochip-driven gatekeepers.” Andy sent two clicks along the line that connected him to the computer and a batch of code jumped out into a window on the auxiliary screen. “These are access protocols, which I’ve derived from stuff that Borgmann had collected and stashed away in Prague. They were operative when Prime was being kept in the castle there, and I think they’ll still be good. From what I can tell, they don’t seem to have changed any of the numbers after the move to L.A. The protocols will take your man through the gates one by one, pretty much as far as he wants to go, and his mission ought to seem perfectly legitimate to the security screens.”

“What about the centrality of Prime to the Entity neural framework?” Frank asked. “Do you see any sign of a communal linkage?”

Those were fancy words. Andy gave him a quick look tinged with new respect. “I can only offer you an informed guess about that,” Andy said.

“Okay.”

“In Borgmann’s time, all the lines of communication, everywhere around the world, ran to Prime’s nest in Prague. I’m talking about computer access. There’s a similar heavy convergence on the Los Angeles nest today. Which is a good argument for the centrality of Prime to their computer system, but it doesn’t prove anything about the supposed telepathic linkage between Prime and the other Entities that Anson believes exists, and which I gather is critical to the whole assassination plan. On the other hand, if there’s no such telepathic linkage I think there would have to be a great many more strands of on-line communication than I’ve been able to find. And that leads me to think that a portion, perhaps the greater portion, of the communication between Prime and the lesser Entities must be carried out by some form of telepathy. Which, of course, we aren’t capable of detecting.”

“This is all a guess, you say.”

“All a guess, yes.”

“Show me Prime’s nest again.”

Andy brought the scarlet circle onto the screen once more, standing out brightly against the gray backdrop of a Los Angeles street map.

“We’ll blow him halfway to the moon,” said Frank.

Rasheed had no implant, and Khalid didn’t want him to have one installed. Implants, Khalid said firmly, were devices of Satan. Since Andy saw no way to carry out the Prime mission other than by moving Rasheed through the Entity security lines by remote-control online impulse, this created a certain problem, which required weeks of negotiation to resolve. In the end Khalid backed off, after Anson convinced him that the only way to bring Rasheed back alive from the venture was to guide him via an implant. Without an implant it became a suicide mission or no mission at all, and, faced with that choice, Khalid opted to let the Devil’s gadget be inserted into his eldest son’s forearm, with the proviso that the dread thing be taken out again once the mission had been carried out. But by the time all that was agreed on, it was June.

Now the implant had to be put in, which was done by the man from San Francisco who had built the one for Tony. Rasheed’s was of similar but improved design, with all the tracer features that its predecessor had had, but a wider and more versatile range of audio signals by which the remote operator—Andy, that would be—could guide Rasheed through his tasks by wireless modem, or, if need be, by direct vocal instruction. Another three months went by while the implant was constructed and installed and Rasheed went through the necessary period of healing and training.

Andy was impressed by the swiftness with which Rasheed learned how to interpret and act on the signals he received from his implant. Rasheed, who was twenty years old, slender and fragile-looking and taller even than his long-shanked father, had the shy, alert look of some delicate forest creature that was always ready to break into flight at the crackling of a twig. To Andy he was an enigma of the most profound sort, elusive and remote, indeed virtually unreachable. Rasheed could easily have been something that had descended from space with the Entities. He hardly ever spoke, except in answer to a direct question and not always even then; and when he did respond it was inevitably with a parsimonious syllable or two uttered just at the threshold of audibility, rarely anything more. The extraordinary grace and beauty of his appearance, verging on the angelic, contributed to the extraterrestrial aura that forever cloaked him: the great dark liquid eyes, the finely chiseled features, the luminous glinting of his skin, the swirling halo of glowing hair. He listened gravely to everything that Andy had to tell him, filing it all away in some retentive recess of his inscrutable soul and giving it back perfectly whenever Andy quizzed him on it. That was very impressive. Rasheed had the efficiency of a computer; and Andy understood computers very well. Yet Rasheed was more than just a mechanism, Andy sensed. There seemed to be a person inside there, an actual human being, shy, sensitive, perceptive, highly intelligent. One thing Andy understood above all else about computers was that they were not intelligent in the least.

At the end of November Andy pronounced him ready to go.

“In the beginning, you know, I thought that this was an absolutely crazy plan,” he said to Frank. Andy and Frank had become friends, of a sort, lately. Andy was no longer under round-the-clock guard; but Frank was with him much of the time, simply to keep him company. They had both become accustomed to that. “I didn’t see, from the moment when Anson and your father first explained it to me, how it could possibly have any chance of succeeding. Send your assassin into a den of telepathic aliens and expect that he’d go unnoticed? Lunacy, is what I thought. Rasheed’s mind will be broadcasting his lethal intentions at every step of the way, and the Entities will pick up on them before he ever gets within five miles of Prime. And as soon as they decide that this is something serious, not just some deranged joke, they’ll give him a Push—hell, man, they’ll fucking give him a Shove—and it’ll be goodbye, Rasheed.”

But that, Andy went on, had been before his first meeting with Rasheed. He knew better now. His months with Rasheed had brought him to an awareness of Rasheed’s special skill, the great thing that Rasheed had learned from his equally mysterious father: the art of Not Being There. Rasheed was capable of disappearing totally behind the wall of his forehead. His training had taught him how to reduce his mind to an absolute blank. The Entities would find nothing to read if they turned their telepathy on Rasheed. It was Andy himself, far away, who would be the true assassin. Do this, do that, turn right, turn left. All of which Rasheed would do, without thinking about it. And even the Entities would have no means of picking up Andy’s remote-control computer commands with their telepathy.

Anson, who had kept out of the picture all summer long, now emerged from his seclusion to issue the final directives. “Four cars,” Anson said crisply, when all the relevant personnel had gathered in the chart room, “will be dispatched to Los Angeles at intervals of ten to fifteen minutes. The drivers are to be Frank, Mark, Charlie, and Cheryl. Rasheed will ride with Cheryl at the outset, but somewhere around Camarillo she will drop him off to be picked up by Mark, and Mark will hand him off to Frank in Northridge—”

He shot a glance toward Andy, who was sitting slouched at his keyboard, languidly bringing all this stuff up in three dimensions on the big chart-room screen as Anson laid it out.

“Are you getting all this, Andy?” he asked, using the hard, crisp tone that everyone at the ranch thought of as the Colonel-voice, though the Colonel himself might have been surprised to know that.

“I’m right with you, commander,” Andy said. “Just keep on rapping it forth.”

Anson glowered a little. He looked haggard and there were dark rings under his eyes. In his left hand he held a zigzaggy walking-stick that he had carved some time back from the glossy red wood of a manzanita branch, and he was tapping it steadily against his left boot, as though to keep his toes awake.

“Well, then. To continue. Over in Glendale Frank gives him to Charlie, and Charlie takes him on eastward and then down through Pasadena and gives him back to Cheryl near the Monterey Park Golf Course. Cheryl is the one who’ll take him on through the wall, by way of the Alhambra gate, as we’ll discuss in a moment. Now, as for the explosive device itself,” Anson said, “which has been produced at the Resistance factory that’s located in Vista, in northern San Diego County, it will be brought up to Los Angeles in a nursery truck loaded with poinsettia plants for sale as Christmas decorations—”

So, then. The big day. Second week in December, bright and clear and warm in Southern California, a little high cloudiness, no rain in the offing. Andy in the communications center, wearing a headset with one earpiece and a throat-pad microphone, with a phalanx of computers all around him. He was ready to go to work. He was going to become a great hero of the Resistance today, if he wasn’t one already. Today he was going to kill Entity Prime by proxy, reaching out across some hundred fifty miles to do the job as puppet-master for Rasheed.

Andy would, in fact, be controlling everyone involved in the mission, guiding them into position, moving them about from place to place as things unfolded. His hour of glory; his greatest hack ever.

Steve was sitting beside him, ready to take over if he should grow weary. Andy didn’t expect to grow weary. Nor did he think that Steve, or anyone else except himself, would be capable of managing an operation that involved maintaining constant simultaneous contact with four vehicles plus an ambulatory assassin, and auxiliary spotter input besides. But let him stay, if he liked. Let him get a good look at what kind of hacker he had brought into the world. Eloise was there, too, and Mike, and some of the others, a constantly shifting crew. La-La for a while, with little Andy Junior in tow to stare at his still unfamiliar daddy. Leslyn. Peggy. Jane. People came and went. Nothing much was happening yet, anyway. Anson, though he was nominally in command of the mission, was in and out every half hour or so, very fidgety, unable to remain in one place for very long. Cindy stopped in for a while to watch things too, but likewise didn’t stay.

The first of the four cars, Charlie’s, had set out at eight that morning, with the others leaving soon after. Two had gone by the coast road and two the inland route, all of them zigging and zagging like Anson’s walking-stick to get themselves around the various blockages and pitfalls that the Entities, over the years, had whimsically established on the highways linking Santa Barbara with Los Angeles. Andy had each driver pegged on the screen. The scarlet line was Frank; the blue one, Mark; the deep purple, Cheryl; the bright green, Charlie. Whichever car was currently carrying Rasheed got a halo in crimson around it. Right now Rasheed was traveling with Frank, in the San Fernando Valley, heading around the northern side of the Los Angeles city wall toward his rendezvous with Charlie far to the east in Glendale.

There was no indication of unusual activity on the part of the Entities or the LACON police. Why should there be? At any given moment there might be half a million cars in motion in and around the Los Angeles area. What reason was there to think that some villainous conspiracy had been launched, aimed at taking the life of the supreme Entity himself? But Andy had spotters located all around the periphery of the L.A. wall, Resistance people from the subsidiary organizations down there, just in case. They would let him know what was going on, if anything did.

“We are approaching the next Rasheed rendezvous now,” Andy announced grandly. “Frank and Charlie, West Colorado Street at the corner of Pacific.”

Did those street names mean anything to any of them? Probably not, except maybe to Cindy, if at her age she could still remember anything about her life in Los Angeles. Or Peggy, perhaps, though the years had made her mind pretty foggy too. But Andy had actually been in Glendale within the past five years. Had known a reasonably amusing woman there, for a time, in his pardoner days. Had in fact set foot once or twice on Colorado Street. Whereas these others had lived their lives out hidden away safely here at the ranch, largely ignorant of the world beyond.

Anson was getting edgy again. He went out for another walk.

“Coming up on Rasheed transfer,” Andy said, as the crimson halo left Frank’s car and shifted to Charlie’s. Andy, who was in touch with everyone by audio as well as on-line, sent a couple of quick impulses down to Frank to tell him to get over to the Glendale gate and wait there for further instructions, now that he had dropped off his passenger. Mark, his morning’s work also behind him, was already parked outside the Burbank gate. Cheryl was still in motion, well east of Charlie’s position, making her southward journey around the city through Arcadia and Temple City and looping upward toward her rendezvous with Charlie in Monterey Park. They were nearly four hours into the mission.

That was interesting, Andy thought, that Anson would have given the key assignment to Cheryl. Andy could remember some cheery romps with her when he was in his mid-teens and she a year or two older; but mostly what he remembered was that she had kept her eyes open even when she was coming. Those big blue Carmichael eyes, with nothing much behind them. It had never seemed to Andy that there was anything to her, except, of course, a trim and pleasantly rounded body that she had used skillfully but without much imagination in their sporadic encounters in bed. And now here she was getting the job of taking Rasheed right into Los Angeles, delivering him to the very perimeter of the Objective Zone, and getting him out of there again after the assassination. You never could tell about people. Maybe she was smarter than he had supposed. She was the daughter of Mike and Cassandra, he reminded himself, and Mike was a capable guy in his way, and Cassandra was the closest thing to a doctor they had here.

“Approaching acquisition of explosive device,” Andy said loud and clear, since no one in the room except, perhaps, Steve would be capable of making sense out of the scrambled macaroni on the screen without Andy’s verbal guidance. His audience just now, a quick glance over his shoulder told him, consisted of his sister Sabrina and her husband Tad, Mike and his sister-in-law Julie, and Anson’s sister Heather. Cindy had returned, also, but she already seemed to be on her way out the door again, walking in that painfully slow but fiercely determined way of hers.

A dotted yellow line marked the progress of the nursery truck that was bearing the bomb up from the factory in Vista. Nestling among the poinsettias, it was, tucked away amid all that gaudy red holiday foliage. He liked that idea. A sweet little premature Christmas present for Prime.

The nursery truck was in Norwalk, now, chugging up the Santa Ana Freeway toward Santa Fe Springs. Andy got in touch with the driver by audio and told him to get a move on. “Your client is heading toward the depot,” Andy said. “We don’t want to keep him waiting.”

Charlie, with Rasheed aboard, had reached Pasadena, and was moving south on San Gabriel Boulevard toward Monterey Park. It was in Monterey Park that the transfer of the explosive device to Rasheed was supposed to take place, just before Charlie handed him over to Cheryl.

Dotted yellow line, moving faster now.

Green line with crimson halo, traveling toward rendezvous.

Deep-purple line heading in the same direction from the opposite side.

Dotted yellow converging with green. The signal coming from Charlie: successful acquisition.

“Rasheed’s got the bomb, now,” Andy announced. “Going on to rendezvous with Cheryl.”

This is easy, he thought. Fun, even.

We should do one of these every day.

Half an hour later. Deep-purple line bearing crimson halo now approaches great black slash that represents the Los Angeles wall on Andy’s master screen. Shimmering vermilion chevrons indicate the Alhambra gate. On audio Andy asks Cheryl for confirmation of position and gets it. All is well. Cheryl is about to enter the city, with Rasheed sitting quietly beside her and the bomb reposing in his backpack.

Andy listens in. Gatekeeper stuff going on. Routine demand for identification.

Cheryl must be making her reply, now, sticking out her implant to be scanned by the gatekeeper. A pass number has been provided for her use. It is, in fact, the pass number of one of the LACON men who had so unkindly trussed Andy in that straitjacket on that bad day on Figueroa Street. Will it work? Yes, it works. The Alhambra barrier opens. Cheryl passes unchallenged through the wall.

Beaming in satisfaction, Andy glances up and around at the current group of onlookers in the communication center: Steve, Cindy, Cassandra, La-La, and the wide-eyed little boy. Why aren’t the rest of them here, all of them, now that the big moment is practically at hand? Aren’t they interested? Especially Anson. Where the fuck is Anson? Off playing golf? Is the suspense too much for him?

To hell with Anson.

“Rasheed is now within the wall,” Andy says, resonantly, majestically.

The crimson circle has separated from the deep-purple line and is moving at a nice steady clip through the shabby streets of the Los Angeles warehouse district. Andy brings up the resolution on his street-map underlay, and sees that Cheryl is parked just east of Santa Fe Avenue near the old and rusting railway tracks, and that the street along which long-legged Rasheed is currently briskly striding is Second Street, heading toward Alameda.

Andy lets five minutes more elapse. According to the screen, Rasheed now is practically on the threshold of Prime’s snug little hideout. Time for one final bit of voice-to-voice confirmation.

“Rasheed?” Andy says, via the audio channel.

“I am here, Andy.”

“Where is that?”

“Perimeter of Objective Zone.”

Rasheed’s voice, tiny in Andy’s headphone, does not waver in the slightest. To Andy he sounds marvelously cool, calm, completely serene. Pulse rate normal, absolutely unhurried, no doubt. All quiet within Rasheed, quiet as the grave. That boy is a wonder, Andy thinks. He is a superhuman. Walking right up to that building with a bomb on his back and he’s not even perspiring.

“This is our last audio contact, Rasheed. Everything digital from here on. Acknowledge digitally.”

A trio of pulses light up Andy’s screen. Rasheed’s implant is operating properly, therefore. So is Rasheed.

Steve reaches over, just then, and lets his hand rest lightly on Andy’s forearm, only for a moment. Offering reassurance? Making a show of confidence in Andy’s capabilities? In Rasheed’s? All three, maybe. Andy gives his father a quick smile and goes back to his screens. The hand is withdrawn.

Crimson circle advancing unmolested. Rasheed must be almost at the first checkpoint. He will be moving with a sleepwalker’s ghostly tranquillity, untroubled in any way by thoughts of the thing he has come here to do, because that is what his training has equipped him to do. Andy sees to it that his own breathing is slow and regular, his heartbeat normal. He will never have the same kind of supernatural bodily control that Rasheed has achieved, but he wants to keep himself as calm as he can, anyway. This is not the moment to get overexcited.

Checkpoint.

Rasheed has halted. Implant access is being provided. The password-protocol code that Andy has dredged up out of Borgmann’s antiquated files, and refreshed by a probe only yesterday through the interface into the heart of the Entity security spookware, will be tested now.

A long moment slides by. Then the crimson circle begins moving forward again. Password accepted!

“In like Flynn,” Andy says, speaking to no one in particular.

He wonders what the phrase means. But he likes the sound of it. “In like Flynn.”

Checkpoint Number Two.

Where the hell is Rasheed now, actually? Andy can’t even imagine what sort of lair they might keep Prime in. A pity that there’s no video on this linkup. Well, Rasheed can tell us all about it afterward. If he survives.

Is he moving between rows of lofty gleaming marble walls? Or, Andy wonders, circling past some fearsome ring of fire behind which the overlord of overlords reclines in splendor? Are there subordinate Entities sitting around casually in there, sipping soft drinks, playing pinochle, amiably waving their tentacles at Rasheed as the unflappable human intruder, rock-solid in his serenity of soul, equipped with all the right passwords and broadcasting not one telepathic smidgeon of his sinister purpose, goes deeper and deeper into the inner sanctum? And, Andy supposes, there are some humans in there too, Entity slaves, humble servants of the great monarch. Borgmann’s files had indicated that that was the case. They would pay no attention to Rasheed, naturally, because he would not be in here unless it was all right for him to be in here, and therefore it was all right for him to be here. The slave mentality, yes.

The Checkpoint Number Two password is requested. Rasheed obliges, giving implant access.

Streams of digits provided by Andy flash from Rasheed to whatever kind of thing is guarding the door at this checkpoint.

Password accepted.

Once again, crimson circle goes forward.

Sixty seconds elapse. No further news from Rasheed. But he’s still moving. Eighty seconds. One hundred. Andy stares and waits. Blue shadows surround his master screen. The faint hum of the equipment starts to turn into a tune, something out of grand opera, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi.

No news from Rasheed. No news. No news. De-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dah.

Andy wonders how long it actually takes for Rasheed’s coded messages to travel up to him across the 150 miles that separate him from Los Angeles. Speed of light: fast, but not instantaneous. He divides 186,000 miles per second by 150 miles, which is easy enough to do, somewhere about 1200, but when he tries to convert that result into the appropriate fraction of a second that is the actual lag his mental arithmetic fails him. He must be doing this all wrong, he decides. Maybe he should have divided 150 by 186,000. Usually he’s better at stuff like this. Difficult to concentrate. Where the hell is Rasheed? Has someone caught on to the fact that this big-eyed and elongated young human has no business being where he is?

Impulse from Rasheed arrives. Thank God.

Checkpoint Number Three.

Okay. This is a major decision point, and only Rasheed can make the decision. Perhaps he’s far enough inside the Objective Zone now so that he can plant the bomb right where he is. Or perhaps he needs to go through one more checkpoint. Andy can’t tell Rasheed what to do; Andy has no way of seeing what’s actually there, no idea of the distances involved, and Rasheed can’t describe anything except by audio, which now is too dangerous to use. Rasheed will have to use his own judgment about whether to continue on through Checkpoint Three. But these password protocols come without guarantees. Two have worked, but will the third? If Rasheed tries it and it bounces, they will grab him with their nasty elastic tongues and stuff him into a gunnysack and haul him away for interrogation, and God help us all.

Andy has one fallback, if that happens. He can detonate the bomb while it’s still in Rasheed’s backpack, which would not be very nice for Rasheed, but which might just get Prime as well, even as Rasheed is being spirited off for questioning. Rasheed is aware of this option. Rasheed is supposed to send the appropriate signal to Andy if it should become necessary to make use of it.

But that is very much a last resort.

Andy waits. Breathes. Counts heartbeats. Tries to divide 150 by 186,000 in his head.

Rasheed is offering the password for Checkpoint Number Three. He has decided, evidently, that he is not yet sufficiently close to Prime’s personal place to plant the bomb.

Andy realizes that he has stopped breathing. No heartbeat to speak of, either. He is suspended between one second and the next. Through Andy’s mind race, over and over, the combinations that will trigger the fallback detonation. A mere quick twitch of his fingers will set them up. All Rasheed needs to do is send him the one despairing signal that means he has been caught, and—

Crimson circle starting to go forward again.

Rasheed has passed through Checkpoint Number Three.

Andy resumes regular breathing patterns. Time begins moving along once more.

But Rasheed isn’t telling him anything as the moments go by. The only information Andy has is that crimson circle gliding across his screen—the symbol for Rasheed, coming to him by telemetry. Tick. Tick. Ninety seconds. Nothing happening.

Now what? An unsuspected fourth checkpoint? Some formidably efficient security device that has instantaneously and fatally taken Rasheed out of the picture, before he could even sound a distress signal? Or—surprise!—Rasheed has discovered that Prime has gone on vacation in Puerta Vallarta?

Signal coming through now from Rasheed.

Andy, his senses phenomenally oversharpened by all this, experiences an interval of about six years between each incoming digit.

Is Rasheed telling him that he has been caught? That he has lost his way? That this is the wrong building altogether?

No.

Rasheed is saying that he has reached the Objective.

That he has taken the bomb from his backpack and is sticking it to the wall of wherever-he-is, neatly affixing it in some nice snug insignificant place. That he has done his job and is coming out.

The whole thing unwinds in reverse, now. Rasheed is heading back toward Checkpoint Three. Yes. There he goes, right through it. All is well.

Checkpoint Two. Crimson circle moving nicely.

Checkpoint One. Will they collar him here? “We’re very sorry, young man, we simply can’t permit you to plant bombs within this area.” Zap!

No zap. He’s made it. He’s outside Checkpoint One. Outside the sanctuary entirely. Leaving the Objective Zone quickly, not running, of course, oh, no, not cool calm Rasheed, just moving along through the streets with his usual long-legged stride.

Andy is dealing with four people at once, now, shooting a welter of coded messages to them. At Andy’s command Cheryl has left her parking spot and is coming forward to collect Rasheed as he moves eastward toward her. She will try to get out the Alhambra gate, the same one through which she entered. Charlie is parked outside that gate and will take Rasheed from her, assuming she can get through. Frank, at the Glendale gate, and Mark, at Burbank, are the fallback drivers if for some reason the Alhambra gate has been closed to vehicular traffic; if that is the case one or the other of them will enter the city, if they can, and rendezvous with Cheryl at a point to be determined by Andy, if it can be managed, and take Rasheed from her and spirit him back out through some gate or other, whichever one they can. If. If. If. If.

Andy wants to ask all sorts of questions, now, but he doesn’t dare use the audio line. Too easy to intercept that; this all has to be done by coded impulse, cryptic blips coursing along the electronic highway between the ranch and the city. Sparks seem to fly on the screen as the colors dance. Andy leans forward until his nose is practically touching the screen. His fingers caress its cool plastic surface as though he has abruptly decided to conduct the rest of this operation in Braille.

Crimson circle is now a halo around the midsection of the deep-purple line. Cheryl has picked up Rasheed. Heading for Alhambra gate.

The moment has arrived when the greatest of this series of gambles must be played out. Detonation has to wait until Rasheed is safely through the gate. They will surely close all the gates the moment the bomb blows. Rasheed needs to be outside the wall first: there’s no choice about that. But what if Andy waits too long to give the detonation signal, and Prime’s attendants notice the bomb? It is inconspicuous but definitely not invisible. If the Alhambra gate is shut down and he has to futz around with arranging a second rendezvous, bringing Rasheed out through Burbank or Glendale, and meanwhile they find the bomb and are able to defuse it—

If. If. If. If.

But Alhambra is open. Crimson halo passes to green line. Rasheed is safely outside the wall, and he is in Charlie’s car now. Using five hands and at least ninety fingers, Andy sends simultaneous signals to all parties concerned.

Frank—Mark—head homeward right away.

Charlie—get your ass up toward the 210 Freeway and cruise toward Sylmar, where you will rendezvous with Cheryl and give Rasheed back to her.

And you, Cheryl—shadow Charlie on the freeway, just in case he runs into a roadblock, in which case you can grab Rasheed and dart off in the other direction with him.

Plus one message more.

Hey—Prime! Here’s something for you! Andy grins and keys in the detonator code.

There was no way for him to feel the explosion from 150 miles away, no, sirree. Except in his imagination. In Andy’s imagination, the whole world shook with the force of a Richter Ten, the sky turned black with red streaks, the stars began to run backward in their courses. But of course it was impossible really to know, at least not right away, what had actually happened in Los Angeles. The bomb was a potent one but it hadn’t been Anson’s plan to blow up the whole city with it. Most likely it hadn’t been noticed even in places as close to the site as Hollywood.

But then a voice in Andy’s headphone said, “I’m just off Sunset Boulevard, not far from Dodger Stadium. Two Entities just went by in a wagon, and they were, like, screaming. Shrieking. You know, like they were in the most extreme pain. The explosion must have, like, driven them out of their minds. The death of Prime.”

“Who is this, please?” Andy said.

“Sorry. This is Hawk.”

One of the spotters, that was. Andy said, “You can see the Figueroa Street headquarters from where you are, can’t you? What’s happening there?”

“Lights blinking on and off all over the upper stories. It seems pretty frantic. That’s all I can see, the upper stories. I hear sirens, too.”

“You felt the explosion?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. Most definitely. And, like—”

But another of the Los Angeles spotters had begun to signal for his attention. Andy cut over to him. This one was Redwood, calling in from Wilshire and Alvarado, the eastern side of MacArthur Park. “There’s an Entity keeled over at the edge of the lake,” Redwood said. “It just fell right down the minute the bomb went off.”

“Is it alive?”

“It’s alive, all right. I can see it writhing. It’s lying there hollering blue murder. You have to cover your ears, practically.”

“Thank you,” Andy said. He felt a wild surge of joy go running through him like an electrical jolt. Writhing. Hollering blue murder.

Music to his ears. Grinning, he switched to another line, and it was Clipper, calling in from far-off Santa Monica with news of great confusion there, and Rowboat waiting right behind him with a similar report from Pasadena. Someone had seen an Entity that seemed to be lying unconscious in the street, and someone else had seen four greatly agitated aliens of the Spook variety running around in mindless circles.

Andy felt a nudge from Steve, beside him. “Hey, tell us what’s going on.”

He realized that for the past couple of minutes he had been in Los Angeles in his mind. Los Angeles, with its writhing, shrieking Entities, was more vivid to him than the ranch. It was a serious effort for him to bring the scene in the communications center back into focus. Faces peered into his. Anson stood beside him now, and Mike, Cassandra, half a dozen others. Even Jill had turned up, though not Khalid. Staring eyes. Tense faces. They had figured out something of what had taken place by listening to his audio exchanges with the spotters within the city, but they only had part of the story, and now they wanted the rest of it, and they were all yelling questions at him at the same time.

Andy began yelling answers back at them. Telling them that Rasheed had done it, that the bomb had gone off, that Prime was dead, that the Entities were crazy with shock, that they were falling down in the streets and moaning—no, shrieking—shrieking like lunatics, all of them going berserk down there and probably all around the world too, a single great shriek coming out of every Entity at once, everywhere, a terrible sound that rose and fell like a siren, yow wow wow wow yow—

“What? What? What? What are you trying to say, Andy?”

A ring of baffled faces confronted him. He suspected that he wasn’t getting the information to them quite in the right order, that carts were being put before horses, that he might in truth be babbling a little. He didn’t care. He had been in six places at once all morning, six at the very least, and now he just wanted to go off somewhere quiet and lie down for a while.

He wished he could hear that shriek, though. The stars themselves must be shrieking. The galaxies.

“We did it,” he blurted. “We won! Prime’s dead and the Entities are going nuts!”

That got through to them, all right.

Steve began to drum jubilantly on the table. Mike was dancing with Cassandra. Cindy was dancing with herself.

But Anson wasn’t dancing. He was standing all by himself in the middle of the room, looking a little dazed. “I just can’t believe that it worked,” he said wonderingly, slowly shaking his head. “It’s almost too good to be true.”

In one ear Andy heard his father telling Anson not to be such a goddamned pessimist for once, and in the other ear, the one that had the earpiece over it, he heard the spotter called Redwood, the one out by MacArthur Park, clamoring for his attention, begging for it. Telling him something very peculiar now was going on, that the Entity who had fallen down at the edge of the lake now was upright again and starting to move around pretty vigorously; and then Hawk was trying to cut in with some bulletin from his district, unsettling news from that quarter also, a few Entities apparently beginning to get themselves back together after that little fit that they had had. Two or three of the other spotters were trying to get through to Andy too, lighting up his whole switchboard. “LACON,” someone was saying. “LACON guys all over the place!”

Something fishy very definitely was occurring. Andy shook his hands furiously in the air. “Quiet, everyone! Quiet! Let me hear!”

The room was suddenly silent.

Andy listened to Hawk, listened to Clipper, listened to Rowboat and the rest of the spotters down there in Los Angeles. He cut from line to line, saying very little, just listening. Listening hard. No one around him said anything.

Then he looked up, at Anson, at Steve, at Cindy, Jill, La-La, going one by one around the room. All those inquiring eyes, pleading for information, staring at him, reading his face. Pins could drop and the sound would be like thunder. They all could tell from his expression, Andy knew, that the news was ungood. That some unexpected extra factor had entered the equation, something they had not in the least reckoned on, and the situation was not quite as satisfactory as had been thought. Might, in fact, be suddenly starting to look pretty disastrous.

“Well?” Steve asked.

Andy slowly shook his head. “Oh, shit,” was all he could bring himself to say. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Frank had left the freeway in favor of a surface-streets route that would take him around the place where the northernmost bulge of the city wall bisected Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Now, as he was moving quickly through the town of Reseda in the San Fernando Valley, he glanced at his rearview mirror and saw a great pillar of black smoke rising into the sky behind him.

That puzzled him at first. Then he realized what it probably was, and the excitement that he had felt ever since Andy had sent word of the successful detonation, the wild euphoria that had been powering him for the last forty minutes, evaporated faster than snow in July.

“Andy?” he said, on the audio channel to the ranch. “Andy, listen, there’s a big fire, or something, going on somewhere around Beverly Hills or Bel Air. I can see the smoke coming right up over the top of the hills, a huge plume rising, out there on the far side of Mulholland Drive.”

There was no immediate reply from the ranch.

“Andy? Andy, are you receiving me? This is Frank, at Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way.”

He got back only crackling noises. The continued silence was unsettling. The column of smoke behind him was still rising. It looked to be half a mile high. Frank thought he heard the sound of distant explosions, now.

“Andy?”

Another minute or so, still no Andy.

Then: “Sorry. That you, Frank?” At last. “I’ve been busy. Where did you say you are?”

“Heading northward across the Valley along Reseda Boulevard. There’s a tremendous fire happening behind me.”

“I know. There are a lot of fires. The Entities are hitting back, doing reprisals for killing Prime.”

“Reprisals?” The word went ricocheting around in Frank’s head, pummeling his brain.

“Damn right. LACON planes are bombing the shit out of everything all over town.”

“But the mission was successful,” Frank said uncomprehendingly. “Prime is dead.”

“Yes. Apparently he is.”

“And half an hour ago you told me the Entities all over the world were going completely around the bend from the shock of his death. That they were crazed and staggering, berserk with pain, falling down all over the place. They were finished, you said.”

“I did say that, yes.”

“So who ordered the reprisals?” Frank asked, pushing his words out slowly and thickly, as though trying to speak through wads of cotton.

“The Entities did.” Andy sounded tired, terribly tired. “They seem to have picked themselves up somehow and put themselves back together again. And they’ve sent out a whole armada of LACON people and other assorted quislings to make air raids, pretty much at random, from the looks of it, by way of showing how annoyed they are with us.”

Frank leaned forward over the steering wheel, breathing slowly in and out. It was hard, very hard, assimilating all this. “Then it was just a waste of time, everything we just did? Knocking out Prime didn’t really achieve anything?”

“For about ten minutes, it did. But what it looks like is that they have backup Primes. Which is something that Borgmann’s files didn’t tell me.”

“No! Oh, Jesus, Andy! Jesus!”

“Once I got the picture of what was going on in Los Angeles,” Andy said, “I went back in and hunted around and discovered that there’s evidently another Prime in London, and one in Istanbul, and the original one still in Prague. And more, maybe. They’re all interchangeable and linked in series. If one dies, the next one is activated right away.”

“Jesus,” Frank said again. And then, anguishedly: “What about Rasheed? And the others.”

“All okay. Rasheed’s currently riding with Charlie, traveling westward on the Foothill Freeway, somewhere near La Canada. Cheryl’s coming right up behind him. Mark’s on the Golden State Freeway in the vicinity of Mission Hills, heading north.”

“Well, thank God for that much. But I thought we had them beaten,” Frank said.

“Me too, for about five minutes.”

“Finished them all off at once, with one big bang.”

“That would have been nice, wouldn’t it? Well, we gave them a pretty good hit, anyway. But now they’re banging us back. And then, I guess, everything will go on pretty much as before.” The sound that came over the line from Andy was one that Frank interpreted as laughter, more or less. “Makes you feel like shit, doesn’t it, cuz?”

“I thought we had them,” Frank said. “I really did.”

A sensation that was entirely new to him, a feeling of utter and overwhelming hopelessness, swept through him like a cold bitter wind. They had been so completely absorbed in the project for so long, convinced that it would bring them to their goal. They had given it their best shot: all that ingenuity, all that sweat, all that bravery. Rasheed walking right into the lion’s den and sticking the bomb to the wall. And for what? For what? There had been one little fact they didn’t know; and because of it they hadn’t accomplished a damn thing.

It was maddening. Frank wanted to yell and kick and break things. But that wouldn’t make anything any better. He drew a deep breath, another, another. It didn’t help. He might just as well have been breathing ashes.

“Goddamn it, Andy. You worked so hard.”

“We all did. The only trouble was that the theory behind what we were doing didn’t happen to be valid.—Look, kiddo, just get yourself back to the ranch, and we’ll try to figure out something else, okay? I’ve got other calls to make. See you in about an hour, Frank. Over and out.”

Over, yes. Out.

Try not to think about it, Frank told himself. It hurts too much to think. Pretend you’re Rasheed. Empty your mind of everything except the job of getting home.

That worked, for a while. Then it didn’t.

And then, about an hour later, he had something new to think about. He was far up the coast, just past Carpinteria, practically on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, when he saw strange streaks of light in the sky ahead of him, something that might have been a golden comet that exploded into a shower of green and purple sparkles. Fireworks? He heard muffled booming sounds. A moment later the dark slim shapes of three swiftly moving planes passed overhead, high up, heading south, back toward Los Angeles.

A bombing mission? All the way up here?

He told the audio to kick in.

“Andy? Andy?”

The crackle of static. Otherwise, silence.

“Andy?”

He kept trying. No reply from the ranch.

He was past Summerland now, past Montecito, moving on into downtown Santa Barbara. The familiar hills of home rose up back of the city. Another couple of miles up the freeway and he would be able to see the ranch itself, nestling high on its mountain among the folded canyons that sheltered it.

And now Frank saw it. Or the place where he knew it to be. Smoke was rising from it, not a gigantic black pillar like the one he had seen when leaving Los Angeles, but only a small spiraling trail, wisping out at its upper end and losing itself in the darkening late-afternoon sky.

Stunned, he traversed the city and made his way up the mountain road, keeping his eyes on the smoke and trying to make himself believe that it was coming from some other hilltop. The road twisted about so much as it ascended that perspectives were tricky, and for a time Frank actually did believe that the fire was on another hill entirely, but then he was on the final stretch, where the road hooked around and leveled out on the approach to the ranch gate, and there could be no doubt of it. The ranch had been bombed. All these years it had been sacrosanct, as though exempt by some special sanction from the direct touch of the conquerors. But that exemption had ended now.

He gave the signal that would open the gate, and the bars went sliding back.

As he drove in, down the little road, Frank could see that the main house was on fire. Flames were dancing across its rear facade. The whole front of the building looked to be gone, and the tiled roof over the middle section had fallen in. There was a shallow crater behind the house, where the path to the communications center had been. The communications center itself was still standing, but it had taken some damage, and appeared to have been knocked off its foundation. Most of the other structures, the minor outbuildings, looked more or less intact. Little fires were burning here and there in the trees behind them.

Through the haze and smoke Frank saw a small figure wandering about outside, moving as though in a daze. Cindy. Ancient, tottering little Cindy. Her face was smudged and blackened. He got out of the car and ran toward her, and embraced her. It was like clutching a bundle of sticks.

“Frank,” she said. “Oh, look at everything, Frank! Look at it!”

“I saw the planes leaving. Three of them, I saw.”

“Three, yes. They came right overhead. They fired missiles, but a lot of them missed. Some didn’t. The one direct hit, that was a good one.”

“I see. The main house. Is anyone else alive?”

“Some,” she said. “Some. It’s bad, Frank.”

He nodded. He caught sight of Andy, now, standing in the skewed doorway of the communications center. He looked about ready to drop from exhaustion. Somehow, though, he managed a grin, the smirking one-side-of-the-mouth Andy-grin that always looked so sneaky and false to Frank. But that grin was a welcome sight now.

Frank went trotting over to him.

“You okay?”

The grin became a weary smile. “Fine, yes. Real fine. A little concussion, is all. Not too serious. Slight dislocation of the brain, nothing more. But the whole communications system got wrecked. If you were wondering why I’ve been off the air, now you know.” Andy pointed to the crater on the path. “They didn’t miss by much. And the main house—”

“I can see.”

“We were leading a charmed life up here for a hell of a long time, boy. But I guess we tried one little trick too many. It all happened very fast, the raid. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, blam, blam, blam, and they were here and gone. Of course, they might come back and finish the job half an hour from now.”

“You think?”

“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

“Where are the others?” Frank asked, glancing around. “What about my father?”

Andy hesitated just a moment too long. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Frank. Anson was in the main house when the bomb hit it.—I’m very sorry, Frank. Very sorry.”

A dull thudding sensation was all that Frank felt. The real shock, he suspected, was going to hit later.

“My father was in there with him,” Andy added. “My mother, too.”

“Oh, Andy. Andy.”

“And also your father’s sister.” Andy stumbled over the name. “—Les—Leh—Lesl—” He was right at the edge of collapse, Frank realized.

“Leslyn,” Frank supplied. “You ought to go inside and get off your feet, Andy.”

“Yes. I really should, shouldn’t I?” But he stayed where he was, bracing himself against the frame of the door. His voice came to Frank as though from very far away: “Mike is okay. Cassandra, too. And La-La. Lorraine, I mean. Peggy was pretty badly hurt. She may not pull through. I’m not sure what happened to Julie. The whole ranch-hand compound got smashed. But Khalid’s place wasn’t even touched. It’s the infirmary for the survivors, right now. Mike and Khalid went into the main house and brought out anybody who was still alive, just before the roof fell in. Cassandra’s looking after them.”

Frank made a vague sound of acknowledgment. Turning away from Andy for a moment, he stared across the way, toward the burning building. Through his numbed mind went the thought of the Colonel’s books, of the maps and charts in the chart room, of all that history of the vanished free human world going up in flames.

He wondered why he should think about anything as irrelevant as that just now.

“My brothers and sisters?” he asked.

“Most of them okay, just shaken up. But one of your brothers died. I don’t know if it was Martin or James.” Andy gave him a sheepish look. “Sorry about that, Frank: I never could keep them straight in my head.” In a mechanical way he went on, now that Frank had started him going again: “My sister Sabrina, she’s okay. Not Irene. As for Jane—Ansonia—”

“All right,” Frank said. “I don’t need to hear the whole list now. You ought to get yourself over to Khalid’s house and lie down, Andy. You hear me? Go over there and lie down.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “That sounds like a good idea.” He went lurching away.

Frank glanced up and off toward the left, where the road that came from town could be seen, snaking along the flank of the mountain. The other cars would be arriving soon—Cheryl, Mark, Charlie. Some splendid homecoming this would to be for them, too, after the excitement of the grand and glorious expedition to Los Angeles. Perhaps they already knew of the mission’s failure. But then, to learn of the raid on the house, to see the damage, to hear of the deaths—

Rasheed was the only one who would ride with the blow, Frank suspected, out of the entire group that had gone to Los Angeles. The strangely superhuman Rasheed, who had been designed and constructed by his father, the equally strange Khalid, to handle any kind of jolt without batting an eye. That eerie detachment of his, the otherworldly calm that had allowed him to venture right into the den of Entity Prime and fasten a bomb to the wall: that would carry him through the shock of returning to the gutted ranch without any difficulty at all. Of course, Rasheed’s mother and father and brothers and sisters hadn’t been touched. And he might not have given a damn about the success or failure of the mission in the first place. Did Rasheed give a damn about anything? Probably not.

And very likely that was the attitude they would all need to cultivate now: detachment, indifference, resignation. There was no hope left, was there? No remaining fantasies to cling to now.

He walked slowly back toward the parking area.

Cindy was still standing by his car, running her hands over its sleek flanks in a weird caressing way. It occurred to Frank that the frail old woman’s mind must be gone, that she had been driven insane by the noise and fury of the bombing raid; but she turned toward him as he approached, and he saw the unmistakable clear, cool look of sanity in her eyes.

“He told you who the dead ones are?” she asked him.

“Most of them, I guess. Steve, Lisa, Leslyn, and others, too. One of my brothers. And my father, too.”

“Poor Anson, yes. Let me tell you something, though. It was just as well, I think, that he died when he did.”

The casual brutality of the remark startled him. But Frank had seen on other occasions how merciless the very old could be.

“Just as well? Why do you say that?”

Cindy waved one claw-like hand at the scene of destruction. “He couldn’t have lived with himself after seeing this, Frank. His grandfather’s ranch in ruins. Half the family dead. And the Entities still running the world, despite everything. He was a very proud man, your father. All the Carmichaels are.” The hand swiveled around and came to rest across Frank’s forearm, grasping it tightly. Her eyes glittered up into his like those of a witch. “It was bad enough for him when Tony was killed. But Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day if he had survived this. Knowing that his second great plan for ridding the world of the Entities had been an even bigger failure than the first—that it had ended by bringing all this wreckage upon us. He’s a lot better off not being here now. A lot better off.”

Better off? Could that be true? Frank needed to think about that.

He disengaged his arm and took a few steps away from her, toward the jumble of blackened granite and flagstone that was the smoldering house, and dug the toe of his boot into the heaps of charred wood scattered along the path.

The bitter smell of burning things stung his nostrils. Cindy’s harsh words sounded and resounded in his ears, a doleful clamor that would not cease.

Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day—a thousand deaths—a thousand deaths—

His great plan a failure—

A failure—

A failure—

Failure—failure—failure—failure—

After a few moments it seemed to Frank that he could almost agree with her about Anson. He could never have withstood the immensity of the fiasco, the totality of it. It would have wrecked him. Not that that made his death any easier to accept, though. Or any of the rest of this. It was hard to take, all of it. It stripped all meaning from everything Frank had ever believed in. They had made their big move, and it had failed, and that was that. The game was over and they had lost. Wasn’t that the truth? And now what? Frank wondered.

Now, he supposed, nothing at all. No more great plans. No grand new schemes for throwing off the Entity yoke with a single dramatic thrust. They were finished with such projects now.

A strange dark thought, that was. For generations now his whole family had channeled its energies into the dream of undoing the Conquest. His whole life had been directed toward that goal, ever since he was old enough to understand that the Earth once had been free and then had been enslaved by beings from the stars: that he was a Carmichael, and the defining trait of Carmichaels was that they yearned to rid the world of its alien masters. Now he had to turn his back on all that. That was sad. But, he asked himself, standing there at the edge of the rubble that had been the ranch, what other attitude was possible, now that this had happened? What point was there in continuing to pretend that a way might yet be found to drive the Entities away?

His great plan—

A failure—a failure—a failure—

A thousand deaths a day. A thousand deaths a day. Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Cindy said.

He managed a feeble smile. “You really want to know?”

She didn’t even bother to answer. She simply repeated the question with her unrelenting eyes. He knew better than to refuse again. “That it’s all over with, now that the mission’s failed,” he said. “That I guess we’re done with dreaming up grand projects for the liberation, now. That we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that the Entities are going to own the world forever.”

“Oh, no,” she said, astounding him for the second time in the past two minutes. “No. Wrong, Frank. Don’t you dare think any such thing.”

“Why shouldn’t I, then?”

“Your father’s not even in his grave yet, but he’d be turning in it already if he was. And Ron, and Anse, and the Colonel, in theirs. Listen to you! ‘We just have to resign ourselves.’”

The sharpness of her mockery, the vehemence of it, caught Frank off guard. Color came to his cheeks. He struggled to make sense of this. “I don’t mean to sound like a quitter, Cindy. But what can we do? You just said yourself that my father’s plan had failed. Doesn’t that end it for us? Is it realistic to go on thinking we can defeat them, somehow? Was it ever?”

“Pay attention to me,” she said. She impaled him with a stark, unanswerable glare from which there could be no flinching. “You’re right that we’ve just proved that we can’t defeat them. But completely wrong to say that because we can’t beat them we should give up all hope of being free.”

“I don’t underst—”

She went right on. “Frank, I know better than anyone alive how if far beyond us the Entities are in every way. I’m eighty-five years old. j I was right on the scene, the day the Entities came. I spent weeks aboard one of their starships. I stood right before them, no farther from them than you are from me, and I felt the power of their minds. They’re like gods, Frank. I knew that from the moment they came. We can hurt them—we just demonstrated that—but we can’t seriously damage them and we certainly can’t overthrow them.”

“Right. And therefore it seems to me that it’s useless to put any energy into the false hope of—”

“Pay attention to me, is what I said. I was with the Colonel just before he died. You never knew him, did you?—No, I didn’t think so. He was a great man, Frank, and a very wise one. He understood the power of the Entities. He liked to compare them to gods, too. That was the very term he used, and he was right. But then he said that we had to keep on dreaming of a day when they’d no longer be here, nevertheless. Keeping the idea of resistance alive despite everything, is what he said. Remembering what it was like to have lived in a free world.”

“How can we remember something we never knew? The Colonel remembered it, yes. You remember. But the Entities have been here almost fifty years. They were already here before my father was born. There are two whole generations of people in the world who never—”

Again the glare. His voice died away.

“Sure,” Cindy said scornfully. “I understand that. Out there are millions of people, billions, who don’t know what it ever was like to live in a world where it was possible to make free choices. They don’t mind having the Entities here. Maybe they’re even happy about it, most of them. Life is easier for them, maybe, than it would have been fifty years ago. They don’t have to think. They don’t have to shape themselves into anything. They just do what the Entity computers and the quisling bosses tell them to do. But this is Carmichael territory, up here, what’s left of it. We think differently. And what we think is, the Entities have turned us into nothing, but we can be something again, someday. Somehow. Provided we don’t allow ourselves to forget what we once were. A time will come, I don’t know how or when, when we can get out from under the Entities and fix things so that we can live as free people again. And we have to keep that idea alive until it does. Do you follow me, Frank?”

She was frail and unsteady and trembling. But her voice, deep and harsh and full, was as strong as an iron rod.

Frank searched for a reply, but none that had any logic to it would come. Of course he wanted to maintain the traditions of his ancestors. Of course he felt the weight of all the Carmichaels he had never known, and those that he had, pressing on his soul, goading him to lead some wonderful crusade against the enemies of mankind. But he had just returned from such a crusade, and the ruins of his home lay smoldering all around him. What was important now was burying the dead and rebuilding the ranch, not thinking about the next futile crusade.

So there was nothing he could say. He would not deny his heritage; but it seemed foolish to utter some noble vow binding him to make one more attempt at attaining the impossible.

Abruptly Cindy’s expression softened. “All right,” she said. “Just think about what I’ve been saying. Think about it.”

A horn sounded in the distance, three honks. Cheryl returning, or Mark, or Charlie.

“You’d better go up there and meet them,” Cindy said. “You’re in charge, now, boy. Let them know what’s taken place here. Go on, will you? Hurry along. See who it is.” And as he started up the path to the gate he heard her voice trailing after him, a softer tone now: “Break it to them gently, Frank. If you can.”