enough by themselves."
     "Why invade at all? What is this for?"
     "Good question," she said.  "Here's another:  If they  can  genetically
engineer imps and demons, why do they need human zombie-slaves? And why grow
human flesh?"
     "Maybe they want  super-zombies, more powerful than these  dead excuses
for lemmings, but still able to pass among us undetected."
     Arlene yawned, struggling  to show  enthusiasm. "But that may be  their
weakness, Fly. The zombies don't amount to much.  You and I aren't scared by
skulls and evil symbols.  What  if there is  a finite  number  of the actual
monsters and they can't easily  recreate them? What if the monsters  too are
'reworked' from other creatures,  creatures the mastermind has  to breed and
raise?  That  would  mean  every  horrible creature we kill  is one fewer to
invade  Earth if they  can't be replaced. Until the new, improved pod-people
come on-line."
     I  liked it.  "Arlene,  if  you're right, all  we  have to  do is  kill
everything . . . and we end the invasion."
     We didn't have anything for dessert, so we  used imagination to sweeten
the conversation. "I've been thinking about the idea they're using Deimos as
a spaceship," I said. "How can you move something as large as a whole moon?"
     "I was thinking some sort of hyperspace tunnel. Yeah, I know; I've been
reading too much sci-fi, Fly."
     I  didn't  say  it.  At  least it was  something, a  hypothesis. "Maybe
there's some way to break through the tunnel walls?" I asked.
     "Maybe. But it could also kill us. We don't know if 'outside the walls'
has the same physical laws; and even if it does, if there's even any air."
     "It  could  also  disrupt  what's happening, maybe de- stroy Deimos and
everything on it."
     "Including us? But that would throw a monkey wrench  in  their invasion
plans," she said with a smile that turned into a yawn. She wasn't bored. Her
eyelids were heavy from exhaustion.
     "If these creatures run the moon--the ship," I said, "then what horrors
guard the tunnel wall?"
     "Those faces couldn't be real, could they? I  hated those  faces . . ."
Her head nodded forward and she snored. It wasn't a very loud snore.
     The elevator was as  secure a place as we were likely  to  find.  I sat
watch and  let her  sleep.  There was  an eerie silence  despite  the  faint
vibration. After four hours I woke her up.
     "Your turn," she insisted, rubbing pieces of sleep from her eyes.
     "Don't let me sleep more than three hours."
     "Fly, sleep! I command you to sleep," she said, making hypnotic passes.
I  slept. .  .  not  because of  the mystic passes, but  because  of  a  mud
slogger's ability to sleep anywhere.
     I could have done without the dreams.
     The river of  faces touched something deep  in both of  us,  the  place
where you store up all your fears and regrets.  Going to sleep meant sinking
right into that place.
     I was tangled in long, sticky fibers like a giant spiderweb, but at the
center of the web  was a face made of  a hundred  different faces.  I didn't
want to look at it; but the face came closer, slowly rotating like a planet,
showing  different  faces  spread across  its surface,  smiles  melting into
frowns, rows of eyes like so many beads of glass,  noses creating  an uneven
mountain range stretch- ing to the horizon.
     Then the sphere of blue  faces was  pressed right against  mine, and it
had stopped turning. In the center  was the face of my long dead grandfather
as I had seen him in the open  casket. His toothless mouth was working, lips
twisting, but no sounds came out.
     I knew what he  was saying,  though: "Dinna  let them rework me, Fianna
Flynn, me lad . . . dinna never let them rework us all, b'Gad."
     The sticky fibers became tendrils sliding up my nose and into my mouth,
choking me. The truth is out there . . .
     I woke up  in a cold sweat. Arlene was shaking me hard. "Fly,  are  you
okay?"
     "Sleep is  overrated," I gasped. I was just as tired as when I'd put my
head down. Standing,  I felt dizzy. Probably running a fever,  but  I didn't
want to mention it. There was nothing to be done anyway. I pushed the button
back  in to reactivate the power; then  I pushed  the  floor button, and the
elevator continued its trip to the Command Center.
     It was a good thing we'd eaten and tried to  get some rest.  The moment
the doors opened, we were in  another  damned firefight with  zombies, imps,
pumpkins, and a specter.
     The ambush trapped us in the lift. We used the lift doors for cover.
     By the  time  we worked  our way  out, we'd  cleaned  a huge room  with
stairways  at either  end,  leading up  to  a  split-level.  There were  six
pillars; each had its designated nasty hiding behind it.
     Pushing  through  a  door at  the top of the split-level,  we  found  a
gigantic  indoor garden or arboretum. The air  was thick with pollen  from a
jungle of fleshy plants overgrowing  where some breed  of computers used  to
be.
     Arlene sneezed repeatedly. I lucked out.  I was so exhausted that maybe
I wasn't breathing as deeply. "You can say one thing for the greenhouse,"  I
observed. "Plants are plants here, and not combined with ma- chines."
     Blowing her nose--allergies--Arlene added: "And men are men, and so are
the women." All that was missing was a handsome horse and blazing six-guns.
     The  absence of monsters  was  reason enough to  ex-  plore.  We  could
breathe later.  The primary motif  seemed to be  a  blackish, oily wood that
sure as hell never originated on the old home planet. Periodically, the wood
bubbled and popped,  like  ulcerated sores in what- ever monstrous trees had
produced  it.  I imagined  a three-headed Paul  Bunyan  with ax-handle hands
cutting the planks.
     The ground squished underfoot as we walked; I looked  closely  and  saw
incredibly long, wafer-thin insects  scoot- ing out from  under our feet. We
finally reached the end  of the arboretum and the vegetation ran out against
puke- green marble, just as we'd seen back in the warehouse.
     "Will  you look  at that?" said Arlene, pointing at red-orange curtains
of  fire  crackling beyond the high walls, at a sufficient  distance that we
weren't roasting.
     "Now that's bad taste," I said. "Next they'll have  Lieutenant Weems in
a red devil suit pop out of a cake."
     "Complete with pointy tail?" she asked wryly.
     "You have a twisted mind, PFC Sanders."
     The better to explore with, I  added  mentally. I hoped  this situation
wasn't like those  science fiction  stories where the terrifying menaces are
taken telepathically from the greatest fears of  the human  beings involved.
My worst fears couldn't be this corny!
     Arlene found a switch that opened a hidden room; we went with the flow.
Entering  the chamber, we marveled at  how different it  was from what  we'd
seen before. The entire room was constructed of that black,  oily,  ulcerat-
ing  wood. There was one object  in the room, placed at dead  center:  a bas
relief of a demonic monster more horrible, or more ridiculous, than any we'd
fought. Every physical attribute of  the  thing was  exaggerated so that  it
almost seemed to be  a cartoon.  The  largest protuberance  of all  was  its
penis, sticking out at a 45-degree angle.
     "They've got to be kidding," said Arlene.
     "I  hate  to bring it  up,  but  that's  probably  another  switch,"  I
suggested.
     "I've handled worse," she admitted.





     24




     As she  flipped the  switch, we  heard familiar heavy,  grinding sounds
outside  in the  marble chamber. Being nearer the door, I took a look-see. I
wasn't  the least bit surprised  to see  a set  of stairs  rising  up in the
marble room  leading straight up to one of the walls  of fire. Arlene joined
me in pondering this new development. Neither  of us seemed to be in a great
hurry to run up those stairs.
     "Do you feel fireproof?" she asked me.
     "I left my asbestos pajamas back on Earth."
     "Maybe there's an opening we can't see from down here."
     "We can only dream,"  I sighed. I went  first. She  was  close  behind,
though. As soon  as  it became too hot, I had every intention of stopping. I
didn't feel any heat at all.
     Arlene  noticed  as well.  "This isn't a bit like Campfire  Girls," she
said.  "By now, all  the marshmallows in my pocket  should be screaming out:
'Put me on a stick!'"
     "You have marshmallows?"
     "No."
     "I don't think it's a real flame. Wait here, Arlene. If I catch on fire
or  die of  heat stroke,  you'll  know  there was  something wrong  with  my
theory."  Another ten steps up the stairs convinced me that I was definitely
on to  something. Ten more steps and I was becoming certain.  I still wasn't
hot  as I  walked right up to the curtain of seething flame  and very slowly
put my hand out.
     The hand went  right through  the fire,  disappearing from view without
causing Yours Truly  the least discom- fort. I didn't  even  get  a blister.
"Arlene," I called out, "the fire is an illusion. Come on up."
     I walked right through, then turned around where the fire should be ...
and there was nothing there but  the welcome sight of  Arlene  coming up the
stairs. "Arlene, can you see me?" I asked.
     "No," she answered, staring right at me. "You've disappeared behind the
fire."
     "For my next  illusion,"  I  announced  with  my  best stage magician's
voice,  and  stepped back  through where  the  curtain had to  be,  "I  pull
something cool out of my hat."
     "Like  a beer?" she asked, taking  the  last steps two at a time  so we
stood on the same level.
     "No beer,  but I do have a surprise." She  was curious, and I bent from
the  waist,  gesturing  through the curtain.  She  preceded  me  to  the big
surprise.
     "Oh, no," she said, "not another teleporter."
     We were both pretty worn-down by this point, but a new teleporter meant
we had to  make a decision. What we needed was a map to show us the location
of  all the  frying pans and fires.  "So should we bother  with this  one or
not?"
     She sighed. "We'd better try it, Fly. We've got to  find a way off this
moon, and this is pretty carefully hidden away. Let's give it a shot, hon."
     "Who's first this time?" I asked.
     She hooked her arm in mine. "Let's do it together again."
     Weapons out, we stepped aboard. With a  flash of light,  we zapped to a
huge room shaped like the spokes of a wagon wheel.
     Six hell-princes surrounded us.
     Six monstrous mouths opened.
     Six monstrous throats emitted guttural screams.
     Twelve angry, red eyes burned at us in the dim light.
     The  hell-princes  were  not  the  only  ones screaming.  Arlene  and I
screamed, too.  This  was a sight to make anyone  howl at  the moon. As  the
green fireballs began  exploding all around us,  we simply lost  it--running
around like chickens  with their  legs cut off,  shooting wildly. There  was
nowhere to run, but we sure as hell tried!
     "Duck!" we shouted at each other at about  the same  time. The balls of
energy made  fireworks over our heads.  Our gunfire was nothing more than  a
quiet popping in that chaos, mild raindrops, but we kept firing,  me with my
shotgun and Arlene with her AB-10.
     I found  a  door  by pure,  random  chance. Praying  for a  miracle,  I
hollered for Arlene and yanked the  door open . . . and now I was surrounded
by a dozen floating pumpkins! Frying pans and fires--definitely  frying pans
and pumpkins.
     Arlene screamed something from the chamber with the hell-princes, but I
couldn't hear her over my  own  screaming. This  situation was fast becoming
unaccepta- ble.
     There were too many pumpkins even to think about shooting; death, doom,
and destruction from all direc- tions!  I ran as fast as I could . . . right
back into the room with the hell-princes.
     I wasn't thinking very clearly, but  Arlene  still had her head screwed
on. Her hand snaked out and grabbed me. She'd stepped inside  another of the
spoke-chambers and  now hauled me  inside with  her. I imagined wall-to-wall
demons waiting for  us, zombies  stacked like cordwood  to the ceiling,  imp
tartare ..  . but inside, for the moment, was nothing  but Arlene and  Yours
Truly.
     She held a finger against her lips; I braced myself for the Bad Guys to
come after us and imagined the absolute worst. A tidal wave of sound crashed
on us--roaring, screaming, crashing. But all that  came through that doorway
was sound. The pumpkins  and the hell-princes collided in a torrent of blood
and vengeance.
     There were so many monsters that they took a long time to die. At least
fifteen minutes Arlene and I crouched in  our little closet of safety as the
pumpkins splattered themselves against the horned heads of the hell-princes.
Blue balls of energy evaporated against lethal lightning bolts. Blood flowed
thick on the floor. We stayed right where we were.
     Finally, there  was beautiful silence. We heard each other's breathing.
"Who goes first?" Arlene whispered.
     "What do you mean?"
     "Who takes a peek?"
     I raised my hand as if I were back in grade school. Cautiously I  poked
my head outside the star-pointed hideaway. A single  hell-prince remained on
its feet. I pulled back inside our hideaway and reported.
     "Then why isn't he at the doorway threatening to rip our lungs out?"
     I looked past her.  The hell-prince loomed in the  doorway,  waiting to
...
     It looked like yesterday's lunch today. Arlene saw my face, followed my
eyes and saw it.
     I   grabbed  for  my  rocket  launcher,   but  it  was  gone  from  the
webbing--dropped in panic in one of the two rooms, of course!
     Arlene pointed her AB-10. "That  won't  work," I shouted.  A peashooter
against the most powerful mon- ster we'd run into! Had she gone insane?
     She pulled the trigger three times, and thrice the hammer clicked on an
empty chamber.
     She  stared  as  the  mauled,   bloody  beast  staggered  forward  like
Frankenstein's monster, clutching at her. Winding up like the Mud Hens' star
pitcher, she  heaved the  gun into the minotaur's  ugly face.  Good God. I'm
watching an old episode of Superman! I thought.
     It blinked. The horned head shook slowly back and forth, left to right,
as if trying to remember something.
     Then it fell, straight as a toppling redwood, to the cold marble--dead.
     "And I didn't even know he  was sick," said  Arlene. We both burst into
hysterical laughter--stress released.
     The floor was slippery with  slick, tacky pumpkin juice, and  we almost
slipped several  times. Clambering across  the  body of another hell-prince,
Arlene pushed into the pumpkins' room and shouted, "You won't believe this!"
     "What?" I was hunting for my good pal, Mr. Launcher.
     "Get your  butt in here! Um,  please get your butt in  here, Corporal."
There it was! I snagged it and clambered after her.
     The light was flickering, but I could see well enough. Crucified on the
walls were the mutilated bodies of four hell-princes, with spidery trails of
dried blood extending from their hands--if  those hams with claws on the end
could be called hands.
     "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What the  hell is  going on here?" Blasphemy!
chanted my memory-nuns. . . demons crucified in mockery of Our Lord.
     The hell-princes were killed a long time  ago; the  dried blood told us
that much. We made a circuit  of the  chamber and found plastic spheres with
cracks so that they could  swing open  or  close as  easily. All the spheres
were empty. . . but they were just the size to hold pumpkins.
     "Pumpkin nests," said Arlene.
     I stared awhile longer at  the four crucified  bodies of the minotaurs.
"My God, it must have been the damned pumpkins themselves put the princes up
there! They must hate them worse than they do us."
     It was a religious  revelation  for both of us. "No wonder it's so easy
to  pit them  against each other,"  said  Arlene in awe.  "They despise  and
loathe  each  other  so  much,  they  proudly  display each  other's  ripped
carcasses." She looked  up at me,  face lighting up. "Jesus, Fly, we  have a
chance to win!"
     I saw where she was headed. I had  thought that the monster-aliens were
simply so bad-tempered  that when a  zombie  stumbled in  the  way of an imp
fireball, or  a demon  took a  bullet  meant for one of us, they lost  their
concentration and turned on each other with mindless ferocity.
     But   "mindless  ferocity"  didn't  explain  the  cold,   delib-  erate
crucifixion of hell-princes by pumpkins, did  it?  Such  a contemplative act
required  a  deep,  abiding  ani-  mosity  or hatred,  and the single-minded
determination to torture.
     Something,   the   "mastermind,"  held  them   together;  but  left  to
themselves, the natural inclination of each  monster  would be to  hunt down
all the other kinds and kill them.
     The thought certainly suggested our tactic: kill the damned mastermind,
and let nature take her course!
     Now the only question was where in this hell that mastermind was.
     We continued searching the pumpkin room. We found it stuffed with ammo,
everything from rockets to shells to rounds for Arlene's depleted AB-10; the
various firefights had run us dry. After loading  up, we pushed past  one of
the crucified hell-prince  bodies and checked  out  the  rest  of  the wagon
wheel.
     Not a creature was stirring, not even a zombie.
     "Shall we teleport?" asked Arlene.
     "After what happened the last time we teleported?"
     "We going to spend the rest of our lives on this karmic wheel?"
     "Apres vous, Bodhisattva."
     We teleported together. Appearing on a platform in a metallic  room, we
saw a door with blue trim that  sure  as shootin' required a blue  key card.
Arlene  went over  and  put  her  ear to it. "I  hear what might  be a  lift
operating; I guess we go thataway."
     "Key, key,  who's got the  key?" I asked. "Another  typical day on  the
job. Teleport. Get a key. Open a door. Find a teleport."
     Arlene smiled. "I guess we're in a rut."





     25




     Nothing remarkable about this area,  except one  dark section that  was
just begging for  a flashlight. I  went  up, cast  a  light, and saw  twisty
passages that suggested  a  maze. The light was  curiously muted, dying  out
after only a few feet.
     "You want to poke in here?" I whispered; whispering seemed appropriate.
     "Um ...  no.  Maybe we don't need to;  and I don't like the look of the
place. It's dark--not that I'm afraid of the dark!"
     "Really? I  sure  am, especially recently. All right, it's pitch-black,
it's a maze, and the  ceilings are low and  claustrophobic.  Pass." I  mean,
why? Life is short, espe- cially on Deimos.
     I  was  still  staring into  the  blackness  when  gunshots  yanked  my
attention  back to Arlene. I raced down the hall  and saw her  pumping slugs
into tiny, emaciated demons, so small I almost didn't  recognize them. "Look
what I found!" she exclaimed, kicking the tiny bodies aside. Reaching behind
their corpses, Arlene extracted a blue key card.
     Tiny demons? I wondered . . . were they mutants? Failed experiments? Or
did  demons   shrink  when  they  starved?  Other  possibilities  were  more
disturbing: Were these child demons? Were demons born or hatched, or created
whole somewhere? I  shuddered;  whatever they were, they gave me the  creeps
more than their gigantic counterparts.
     She sprang  the  door with  the key card, and  we went  right  through,
smooth as you please  . . . only  to discover another door  right behind it,
this one requiring a yellow card! "Egah," I bellowed, and by God I meant it!
     An hour  later we had  traded a bunch of  ammunition for a shiny,  new,
yellow key card. Don't ask.
     We shuffled back to the mystery door, and Arlene inserted the card.
     It slid. Revealing . . . Yet another door: red.
     "You know," I said, "there's only one section of this whole place we've
avoided."
     "The dark, mazy thing we passed? Fly, we  don't even know there's a key
card in there, or that if there is, it's red."
     "Well... I shot a door open with a rocket once."
     "How many rockets we have?"
     "Now? Six."
     "How many does it take to kill a hell-prince?"
     "Usually six."
     Arlene sucked air through her teeth. "Maze," she voted.
     I  understood her concern;  if we used one or  two rockets to open  the
last  door,  then encountered a mino- taur on the other side, we'd be out of
luck. I shrugged; maze it was.
     As  we   entered  the  pitch-black  corridor,  our  flashlights  barely
penetrated the darkness. "There must be some kind of neutralizing or damping
field," Arlene whispered behind me.
     This bit was  too close to that Jules Verne movie, where the members of
the  expedition get separated in the dark. I wasn't going to let that happen
to us.
     "Fly--didn't  I  see  a  pair  of  goggles of some  sort  back  in  the
yellow-key room?"
     "Did you? What of it?"
     "Could they be light-amplification goggles?"
     That  sounded like a  good  excuse  to  get out of the dark.  Actually,
anything sounded like a good  excuse to get out of that dark maze; I had the
creepy feeling  that creatures were shadowing  us ... creatures that  didn't
need light- amp goggles.
     We returned the  way we  had  come,  and sure enough, the goggles  were
there.  Arlene  was   right:  one  pair.  "Will  these  even  work   in  the
energy-sucking field?" I won- dered.
     Arlene shrugged. How else could we find out?
     At the mouth of the maze we hesitated. Who was to wear them? We settled
it scientifically: my vision was 20-40, barely good enough to avoid glasses;
Arlene's  was 20-15,  better than  "perfect."  In other  words, she  got the
goggles.
     Besides, she  was the girl. I don't  know why that occurred to me then;
she seemed to get the goggles an awful lot.
     She put them on  and adjusted for  ambient light, then led me back into
the tunnel of darkness. I don't  even  like haunted-house rides at amusement
parks. "Oh, spit," she said.
     "Don't give me any bad news."
     "Battery's low."
     "I told you not to give me any bad news."
     "The goggles keep fading in and out." She'd stopped walking forward and
I bumped  up against  her  again.  "Or maybe  it's because of the field; but
they're lower power than the flashlights, and they do work .. . sort of."
     She started moving again, and dark as it was, I made  believe I was her
shadow, hand on her shoulder. "Tell me what you see."
     "Everything is green  and fuzzy. It's like looking at the world through
a Coke bottle."
     About five minutes into the maze  Arlene dived to the side, bowling  me
over.  An exploding ball of energy lit up our surroundings for a fraction of
a second; but all I saw was the back of Arlene's head.
     "Hell-prince!" she shouted. "Fly, use the launcher!"
     "Can't we run?"
     "No," she said, strangely insistent, "we've got to fight it!"
     I unslung and waited, staring  wide-eyed into  the black. "Where? Where
is it?"
     "I'll guide you,"  Arlene said, voice  lower,  more in control. Holding
her  shoulder so she wouldn't be be- tween me and my monster, I tried to aim
the rocket launcher with the other hand. I couldn't do it!
     "Still--stand still, beside me,"  she urged. "Right. Now  listen .  .."
Another lightning  ball scorched the  air,  pounding the wall just  above my
head, and I dropped  the  damned weapon! She didn't miss a beat. "It's right
at your feet, Fly. Bend down, pick it up.
     "Why don't you take it? You can see!"
     "Fly,  I  don't  know how  to  shoot it--never checked out  on it.  Now
shoulder it, damn you."
     "Aim me." I was becoming impatient, but I knew she was working as  fast
as she could.
     "Left, to  the  left, more, more;  elevate . . . shoot now!" I squeezed
the firing ring. The flare of  the rockets lit up a cone of vision around us
but I still couldn't see the attacker. "Where is he? Where?"
     "Never mind--you winged him, Fly! Glancing blow to the stomach, knocked
him down."
     "Aim me again."
     The second  shot scored  a direct  hit.  Normally that wouldn't stop  a
hell-prince. He'd only redouble his  efforts. But  this one must have gotten
lazy in the  maze, only encountering victims  occasionally, and  no  resist-
ance worth mentioning.  Suddenly I  realized we  were facing  a minotaur  in
something like its natural habitat.
     Aim me--fire!--aim me ... I loaded my sixth and final round. "Where?"
     Arlene waited a long time. "Fly . . . you knocked it to its  butt  in a
chair thing with your last shot; it's still breathing, but it's  not getting
up."
     We waited; the situation remained static. "All  right, kid," I said. "I
guess we're officially clear."
     "And now I can  officially  tell you  why  we  had  to fight.  Look  at
this--whoops,  I  mean feel this: a key  card, though  I have no  idea  what
color; they all look green to me. That slime had it in its claws."
     "You mean  it was there  while I fired rockets  at  the  hell-prince? I
could have destroyed the key, too!"
     "Well, that's why I kept  it a  secret.  Now  aren't you glad you saved
those rockets?"
     "I guess so," I said, not bothering to point out that if we hadn't gone
into the maze at all, just used one or  two rockets on the door, we'd be out
of here by now, and richer in rockets, to boot.
     We started  trekking back, and  with the unerring in- stinct such items
have, the batteries chose that moment to burn out.
     Arlene tipped me off with, "Damn it to hell!"
     She  pulled the goggles off and shoved them into her pocket. "God, Fly,
I don't want to  die in the dark." I thought she  had a perfectly reasonable
attitude. The  idea of  being caught and torn  to shreds when you can't even
see to fight back didn't appeal to me, either.
     I had a vague idea of  the way we must return. I took her  hand and led
her as fast as possible  in  that direction. Even found time to pray  again.
The nuns always knew the power of a dark room to inspire piety.
     After all that, I really was in no mood for a damned imp waiting for us
when we'd almost made it  through the  maze. It  hissed, and we stopped cold
... we could hear it--but where was it? Hands shaking, I spun left and right
with my scattergun,  afraid to shoot lest I give  away our  own position. Or
worse, hit Arlene!
     "Jesus!" Arlene  shouted, finding religion as a fireball  careened over
our  heads.  What  a  dolt--the  imp,  not  Arlene;  the  fireball  lit  our
surroundings, and in the glare I fixed Arlene and the imp. When the fireball
faded, I shot where the imp was. Arlene didn't kill time when she could kill
a monster instead; she fired just as I did, and the imp was toast.
     We were back in the light in short order. We returned to the three-door
stack.  I performed  the honors of  opening the last door, popping  through,
finding the  lift, pressing the  down button  . . . and asking Arlene if she
didn't enjoy the music of  screams and explosions behind us  as the monsters
took care of each other. They were running out of humans.
     "This is a hell of an invasion," she said.
     "You can say that again."
     Deimos must have been listening and eager to confirm every prejudice we
had. As the lift  door slid open at the next  level down, we found ourselves
staring into the hugest, hairiest, foulest, and pinkest butt I'd ever seen.
     One of  the demons, Arlene's "pinkies," was standing with its  backside
up against the lift door. It hadn't even noticed that the  door  had opened.
Cautiously, I raised  a machine gun  and Arlene raised a shotgun. We gritted
our teeth  against the noise  and fired simultaneously. A Light  Drop rectal
suppository.
     But on  the other side of Demon One  was Demon Two--and it did not take
kindly to our prescription. This  one charged like a hausfrau on speed in  a
megastore.
     We  hadn't been able to see it originally because its buddy had blocked
the view. Now it dived through the door after us.
     The  big silly got itself stuck. We took  our time  blowing this one to
oblivion at point-blank range. Oh, our bruised eardrums!
     As  Arlene  wiped demon gunk out of her eyes, she took a  gander at her
clothes and asked, "Does this come out or is it like gravy?"
     "Don't ask me. I was never much of a house husband."
     Although we  felt  good  about  our  most recent  bout of  carnage,  we
couldn't  help  but  notice  that we'd trapped  ourselves between  two demon
bodies, each of  which probably weighed over five  hundred kilos; a half ton
per baby. We'd have to climb out between them.
     "How are you at mountain climbing?" she asked.
     "How are you at spelunking?" I asked back.
     She  owned  I  was right; we didn't so  much climb  over the bodies  as
burrow  our  way through them. It  took a bit of wriggling and writhing, and
breath holding, but even- tually even I made it.
     The next problem consisted of some imps. Mighty monster slayers such as
Arlene and myself could no longer be bothered with something so trivial as a
few imps. We mopped up the floor with them on our way
     "I think we're getting a bit cocky," Arlene said.
     "We earn the right to wear the haircut of our choos- ing," I shot back,
and she laughed louder than ever before.
     We  entered a warehouse through  an open door  and around a  couple  of
corners;  this one was stacked wall-to- wall with pinkies, none as large  as
our  elevator  pals.  They charged; having nowhere  else  to go, I leapt up,
grabbed  the edge  of  a  huge box  and  hauled myself onto  the  top,  then
stretched out my hand for Arlene.
     The way the demons screamed and growled and pounded  on  the box, you'd
think  they didn't appreciate initiative  and quick thinking.  They were  so
upset they made the box shake violently.  I  was afraid  we  might be thrown
off, but by God, we hung on. Then we aimed, squeezed, and eventually the box
stopped shaking. We didn't have any trouble getting down.
     Now we had a moment to enjoy the new decor. The motif here was gleaming
chrome  and  intricate,  blued  enamel.  The appearance  was rather  sci-fi,
actually ... utterly  misplaced, considering the monsters inhabiting it. But
then, I didn't subscribe to Better Homes and Demons.
     Then we  kicked the door at  the far  end--well, I kicked it--and found
the spawning vats themselves.
     Huge,  metal  containers  they were, a  heaping helping of  pure  evil;
cisterns containing a weird, toxic-green junk, but not thick like the slime;
inside each container was the body of a half-formed monster.
     Arlene, on a whim of personal revulsion against the aliens, shot one of
the partly  formed torsos.  The  wound sealed up with a giant sucking sound,
and the  creature continued cooking. "How do  you stop something like this?"
she asked.
     "I  wish  I knew. We can  give  up  the hope of a finite number  of the
things.  They  must  be  genetically  engi-  neered  soldiers.   The   alien
mastermind, whoever or what- ever it is, must be stealing our nightmares and
producing them wholesale."
     "Uh, yeah. I  wonder how long it takes for a vat to finish producing  a
newborn monster?"
     Arlene held up  her watch. Six minutes  later the  one  she'd shot  was
finished, and none the  worse for wear. She shot it again as it stumbled out
of the vat. Again and again. Now the bullets worked. We repeated the experi-
ment several more times at six minute intervals.
     "The fluid is life-preserving as well as life-producing," I  said. "But
when a critter is born--"
     "In  other words," Arlene said, "we can't do abortion, but  we sure  as
hell can nail 'em  as newborns." She wrinkled  her brow.  "Let's do a  rough
calculation: at six minutes to cook a monster, that's ten creatures per hour
per vat.  Say  sixty-four vats in the room, means 640 monsters per hour just
from this one room. Christ! That's fifteen thousand per day."
     "There, ah ... there could be scores of rooms."
     "In a  few  days  they could  have an  army of millions," Arlene  said,
finishing her number exercise.
     "We  still have  one  chance, Arlene.  Find  the  alien mastermind  and
destroy it."
     "Yeah, that's all we have to do," she scoffed. "Piece of cake."





     26




     Too many, too many monsters, monsters, mon- sters," I muttered.
     "Monsters,  monsters  everywhere," she  echoed.  "I  don't  suppose  it
matters if there are any new types. We're doomed no matter what."
     "Don't say that, Arlene. We've been  able to kill everything we've come
up against  so  far.  That  matters. The weapons  and ammunition  give  us a
fighting chance."
     "Rats in  a maze," she said in a tone  of voice new to her. She sounded
defeated. I  didn't  like that  one  bit. "You were  right,  Fly. Even if we
always find  enough ammo, it won't save us. There are millions of them. They
are testing us."
     They are!
     At a moment like this I realized how important it was  that we had each
other. I'd experienced this  same sense  of defeat on  Phobos,  and for less
cause.  Now it was my  turn  to  encourage  the natural fighting spirit that
burned so deeply in her.
     "Then  how  we respond to  this is part of the  test, as well. We won't
defeat them  by firepower. That's only to buy us time so we can reason out a
solution."
     She looked at me without  blinking and asked, "Fly, what if there is no
solution?"
     "Don't believe that!" I urged, and  in so doing helped convince myself.
"If they were unbeatable, they wouldn't need to collect data on us."
     That took some of the shadows  out of her dark mood. "Don't worry," she
said. "I won't let you down."
     She'd been my buddy, my pal. We'd been careful not to confuse the issue
by trying  to  be lovers. But this was the  right  moment to  take her in my
arms, bring our faces close together and whisper, "It's you and me. We'll go
to the end together. We'll make them pay for everything."
     "Outstanding," she said breathily, transforming the  traditional Marine
bravado into  something very  differ- ent.  A moment passed between  us that
reminded me of the time we could have been lovers and chose buddies instead.
Now  I kissed her hard and she responded.  We might not have another chance.
And we weren't going any farther than this; not in a place where we could so
easily be reworked into dead meat, still on the hoof.
     "I'm feeling  better," she  said. "My brain is working again. You know,
we're in a good spot to do some damage."
     "Go on."
     "The bottom  level of Deimos, directly below us, is one huge  tank that
was eventually going to be filled with liquid oxygen."
     "What the hell for?"
     She flashed her  sneaky smile. "You'll love this. The UAC was  thinking
of using the entire moon of Deimos as a spaceship, too."
     "You're kidding!" I said, but I could tell she wasn't.
     "The idea was to move it to  the asteroid belt and use it for  a mining
base,"  she  said, finishing the news flash. "When I  first realized we were
moving, I thought some of us  might be back in charge here. Then I suspected
the more horrible possibility of a human-alien alliance."
     "Jesus, what a morbid  imagination! How is it I never heard about  this
plan even in casual talk?"
     "There's  secret, there's top secret, and then  there's 'rat us out and
we'll push you out the airlock.'"
     "Point  taken. If we're going to find out what's really going on, then,
I think we need to go the same way as before. Down."
     We hunted through the level, but couldn't find  an exit, a secret door,
anything.  While  we  were searching,  Arlene's mood improved. That  we were
still alive was a miracle. Any monsters who tried to have us for lunch would
get  a bad case  of indigestion.  No matter what we were up against,  I  was
going to  bet on human  unpredicta-  bility. We hadn't  spent  a  couple  of
billion years clawing to the top of the food chain for nothing.
     "Fly, have you noticed how this section is shaped?" Actually, I hadn't.
We'd been working  our  way  along  the  inside of the  wall  in  search  of
switches. "It's shaped like a skull," she said.
     "These guys are running out of ideas," I answered.
     "Those two pillars over there," she said, pointing, "are the eyes."
     "Cute," I  said. Less cute was the  pumpkin that sud- denly came out of
nowhere and began firing at us. Arlene and I hadn't  shot anything in  whole
minutes. We deflated  the  pumpkin;  and this one acted more  like a balloon
with  the air let out that any  of its brothers, as  it zigged and zagged on
the way down.
     We chased it  beyond  the two  pillars,  where  we  found  its limp and
leaking remains sitting like a cork  on a narrow  ladder-tube leading  down.
"At last," she said, "a guidepost."
     "Just what the place needs," I concurred.
     And now what? Should we still continue "down"? Or was it time to settle
once and for all whether  we were bugging out and reporting  or  going after
the mastermind ourselves?
     I stared  at the tube. So far as I could tell, down was still  the only
way out. So far, our paths still coincided.
     But  there  would come a time  when one  of us would  have  to prevail:
either Arlene's romantic sense of duty to the entire human  race, or my more
practical duty to her as my buddy,  as a Marine, and--all  right, let's face
it--and as a man to a woman.
     We  popped the  "cork" and  climbed down what seemed  like two  hundred
meters,  down into the heart  of the lox tank. The climb  was long enough to
make us  tired even if we weren't carrying all the crap that was neces- sary
to keep us alive. By the time we reached bottom, my hands were aching and my
right  knee was acting  up. I could imagine how  Arlene was feeling from the
way she tottered on her feet. I hurried over  to catch  her if she fell, but
she recovered herself and made no comment.
     We found a cozy room with four doors and a single switch in the center.
"Do you hear that?" Arlene asked.
     Until  she  mentioned  it,  I  hadn't  heard  anything  but  our  heavy
breathing; but then I noticed something so unbelievably loud that a deaf man
should have felt it; concentration is a funny thing.
     It sounded like the World Trade Center taking a stroll just outside.
     We rotated slowly, tracking the  noise, and I thought about that  movie
with the tyrannosaurus stomping around.
     "Well, Fly, what now? I doubt we could climb back up again."
     I  looked up; the hole we'd climbed through was far over our heads. "We
already know there's no way to get us out in that direction. We're  here; if
an exit exists, it has to be through one of those doors."
     "Besides, we came  here to do  a job, Fly, even if that  means fighting
Godzilla."
     I shrugged;  what else was there to say? "One switch; four doors. Which
one does it open?"
     I went to  a door at  random and tried to open it manually. Nothing. It
wouldn't  budge, even when  I kicked it. The behemoth still marched back and
forth outside, shaking the entire building with every step.
     "I can't help it," I said at last, "I'm a born lever- puller."
     "You're repeating yourself," Arlene repeated.
     She flattened against the  wall  as I  slapped  the switch, then joined
her. All four doors opened smoothly, simul- taneously.
     "Move out!" I shouted.
     As fast  as we could,  we bolted  through the door and entered a  tiny,
garagelike  room  looking  into  a   brilliantly  lit,  silver  and   white,
chrome-covered keep--the size of Texas. Wings from the central room extended
like an X into the huge tank.
     We slid  outside on the double.  The sound  of the  walking  skyscraper
inspired speed on  our  part--and that  was without  even bothering  to look
behind to see what was making all the ruckus.
     Halfway to one of the wings,  I  couldn't stand the suspense; like Mrs.
Lot, I looked back.
     I  thought I'd seen everything. After imps and demons and  pumpkins and
hell-princes, I'd be able to handle anything else they threw at us! At least
that's what I thought.
     I'd also thought the hell-princes were giants when I first saw them. My
scale was in for a rude awakening.
     "Mother Mary!" I shouted involuntarily. The others weren't monsters any
longer, not compared to this!
     It stood five meters tall, with piston-driven legs sup-  porting a body
that must have weighed  hundreds of tons.  Deep within its massive structure
came the grinding of many  gears.  The arms were also piston-driven, and the
left arm ended in a huge box that didn't look anything like a lunch box.
     "No!"  This  time it was Arlene who  had glanced behind  and echoed  my
opinion.  Now  that we'd  had our turn at making  noise, it was time for the
colossus to speak.
     The  scream of rage that came out of its mouth was so loud that it  was
as if  the two long horns--one on each  side of its head, and growing out so
far  as to end over the  muscled shoulders--were actually 50,000-watt stereo
speakers amplifying the sound so that  everyone could hear it from Deimos to
Phobos to Mars.
     While it roared, the arm  with the box on the end pointed  at us.  That
broke the spell. We were both very good at noticing anything pointing at us.
     We ran like hell itself was on our tail, up the left wing seconds ahead
of  a terrific  detonation.  A  miniature  cruise  missile  had  missed  us,
impacting  against  the  far wall. Even at a distance of two hundred meters,
the explosion knocked us off our feet.
     We ran as we'd  never run  before. All the  eighteen- wheelers  in  the
universe were coming at us on a down- grade to doom. We needed an exit ramp.
     "Look!"  Arlene screamed, pointing at  a  narrow  hole where  the wings
joined the central building we'd just  exited.  She dived  through without a
hitch. Me, I got stuck--it was Phobos all  over again! But I wasn't going to
waste an opportunity, even with the wits scared out of me.
     I turned  and loosed a few  rounds from my trusty  rocket  launcher.  I
figured, Why the hell not?
     The rockets struck dead-on--with no apparent effect.
     The titan  roared; a good translation, I guess,  would be, "Now it's my
turn!"
     27




     The  steam-driven demon returned fire, striking the wall  of the  wing,
blowing us to the  ground. The good news was that  this finished the task of
getting me through the hole.
     We were so stunned, we could barely pick ourselves up from the floor; a
floor that was shaking  from the ap- proaching leviathan.  "Get up!" I said,
grabbing Arlene by the arm and pulling her to her feet. The colossus stomped
straight toward us, and I knew that  a flimsy piece of wall would  be like a
piece  of Kleenex  to  the thing even before  he  ripped  through it without
slowing down.
     We  staggered  in the  other direction,  up the  other  wing, "My right
foot's numb!" Arlene hollered. "It's asleep!" I heard the fear in her voice.
I'm sure she could hear the fear in mine, too.
     "Wake it up," I said, and while she stomped her foot, forcing the blood
to circulate, I fired a few more rockets at the monster. There was no effect
worth mentioning.
     "This thing won't die!" Arlene shouted as we ran.
     "Not without  something heavier," I  agreed.  Arlene stared  at the far
wall  and   started  mumbling  to   herself,   obviously  making   thumbnail
calculations. I  added one  and one, and  got  two human  beings  crazy with
terror.
     As we rounded the corner  of the  next wing, we heard  the steam-driven
demon crunching after us. At least  he wasn't moving any faster than a brisk
walk.  At his size, if  he didn't tire, that walk would finish  us. I didn't
want to think about the missiles he could fire. We turned another corner. So
long as we heard him but didn't see him, I figured we were doing our best.
     "Fly!" Arlene cried.  "Near as I can figure, this  room is much  larger
than  the  Gate gravity  field the aliens  set  up." She  took another  deep
breath, coughed, continued:  "The periphery of the room should be  at normal
Deimos gravity."
     "Close to zero, you mean."
     "Yes."
     I froze, staring at the far  wall. Something was nagging at the back of
my  brain.  This  was  no  time  to ignore  hunches,  instincts,  or  sudden
revelation.  "Arlene, we've got to lure Godzilla out of the anomaly and into
the normal gravity zone."
     She didn't ask why. She had a better question: "Which one of us?"
     She  was right. The only way to do this was for one  of  us to get into
the zone and taunt the creature until it charged.
     Arlene did  some quick mind reading. "There's  only  one  choice,"  she
said. "I'm faster, you lumbering ox."
     I couldn't argue with her about that.  I was already  a lot more winded
than  she. I used to kid her  about having the  fastest cleats in the  Light
Drop; now it was life or death riding  on her foot speed. She  must not have
liked my expression.  "Fly, it has  to be me! Besides, you're a much  better
shot with the rockets."
     "Lot of good that's done us."
     "It's the only weapon might even slow it down," she insisted; and there
was  no arguing with logic. She stopped  running  and so did I.  She put her
hand on my cheek  and it was warm and damp. We were both  sweating like mad.
"If I don't make it," she said, forcing her breathing to slow, and the words
to come  out slow and easy, "it's been a cool  couple of  years. Take  care,
Fly, and when you start firing those rockets, try  not to mix me up with the
big guy."
     I wanted to say too much, so I  only nodded and kept my mouth shut. She
jogged toward  the distant wall, looking back over her shoulder once. I felt
like a heel, but she was right. Got sweat in my eyes, too.
     Then the biggest monster in the universe rounded the edge and loped by.
It  walked  right  by  me, sniffed  the air  with  nauseating  nostrils, and
stopped! That unbelievable head slowly began to turn in my direction. I gave
myself up for dead . . . but Arlene had other ideas.
     She  made  so much  noise she could have been a three-piece  band.  She
caterwauled,  taunted, laughed, pointed, howled and  hooted, and  tap-danced
for a big finish. She passed the audition.
     The big mother raised its missile arm. Arlene, back against the wall in
the corner, planted her feet firmly and  shoved off, like a  kid shoving off
in a pool to get a head start at a swim meet. Darn near zero-g could be fun.
     She streaked sideways along the adjacent wall, and the missile impacted
astern of her, pissing off the steam- demon.
     "Roaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggrrrrrraaaaaaaauuughghh," it complained, stomping
after her.  She crouched, safe in a corner, watching every  move  the  enemy
made. When Godzilla  stopped halfway and fired another three mis- siles, she
was ready for it. She  timed her leap to  take her farther  along  the  back
wall, out of the blast radius.
     As  the demon  pumped after  her, I  had a clear  view from behind, and
noticed that a whole  rack of small missiles was built into  the  creature's
back! What did that say about the thing's creators?
     Then,  one cannonball-crashing  step  past  the invisible  line did the
trick,  and  the  big guy launched into the  air, smashing against the  high
ceiling.  "Welcome to the gravity zone, sucker!" I yelled, then stepped  out
of cover and fired a barrage of rockets at a target that was just too damned
big to miss. Hell, Lieutenant Weems could have hit this one.
     The  rockets  exploded  against  the  demon, knocking  it farther  back
against the  wall.  This got its attention. Eyes big as dinner plates looked
at me in  an unkindly  fashion. The demon raised  its arm, but  didn't fire.
This was because it was slowly rotating in the air like a windmill. Good old
zero-g!
     Every time it lined me up  for a  shot, it had shifted again. And while
it was  unable  to  steady itself,  I  kept firing rockets. By the  time  it
managed  to  stabilize  itself  and line up a shot,  I had pumped a total of
fifteen rockets. Fifteen, and it didn't give a spit!
     Realizing that  sooner or later the steam-demon might get off a missile
in my direction, I made plans.
     The essence of virtually every martial art--and they taught us a lot in
the Light Drop Infantry--is to use the  other guy's own weapons against him.
Like, what the hell? What did I have to lose except my life, and all Earth?
     I stood  perfectly visible  and stopped shooting; I wanted that titanic
SOB to finally bring its missile launcher to bear. Sounds stupid, I know . .
. but it really was all part of the plan.
     I meant to do that!
     Behind me the walls came to a point,  and there was another hole in the
wing just begging for me to fill her up. I waited until the steam-demon drew
a  bead  on me ... then I dived into the slit  as  it fired. By the time the
cruise missile impacted  against the wing wall, I'd rolled on the other side
of it, protected.
     What happened next was in the hands of Sir Isaac Newton.
     The  force of  the shot threw the demon backward  against the wall with
such terrific force that five meters of solid monster was torn to shreds.
     It sounded as  if an  entire supermarket had been  slam-dunked into the
side of a mountain. The next sound was music to my ears: Arlene giving a war
cry of such  glee and  joy that I wanted to join her around some prehistoric
campfire to gloat over the dead enemy and marvel at our own survival.
     I  still exercised some  caution as  I  peeped  around the wall.  A few
lights still flashed and flickered on the demon as it feebly tried to crawl.
But this baby wasn't going to bother us anymore.
     "Shall we put it out of our misery?" asked Arlene as she rejoined me.
     "Does it deserve so merciful a fate?" I asked. She raised an eyebrow in
surprise. Sometimes I think she underestimated my  intelligence. What,  only
girl Marines can get away with sounding pompous?
     "Best  to  play it safe,"  she said.  "I don't want to get back on that
merry-go-round."
     I nodded. It only took the  rest  of  my rockets, fired point-blank, to
turn  the prone body into cotton candy.  "Whose turn is it to name  the  new
monster?" I asked when the job was done.
     "You saw it first," she said.
     "All right,  then:  steam-demon. That's what  I  kept  thinking when  I
watched it move."
     "Not bad, Fly.  You're getting  better  at this.  Maybe  you could be a
writer."
     "No  need to  be insulting,"  I  said,  patting  her on the head  in  a
patronizing way.  This time I could  get away with it. I felt good. It's not
every day you trick an unstoppable force into an immovable object.
     We explored and found a huge, round manhole in the floor near where the
demon was originally  standing. Perhaps it had been  performing guard  duty.
Arlene  did  the inspection  and laughed.  "You're  going to love this," she
said, standing up.
     "Let me guess. It needs a key."
     "You don't like having to mess with keys, do you?"
     "Not when  I'm fresh out  of rockets." But we had plenty of time for  a
scavenger  hunt. Great. Whoever came up with the need for all these keys was
on a par with the  guy who  invented cross-merging back on Earth. No torture
too severe.
     "I'll bet  I  know where  it  is," Arlene  said. Following her lead, we
returned  to  the still-sparking, burning  body  of the  steam-demon. Arlene
found  a key stuck in a  slot in the creature's belly.  So he had definitely
been the guardi- an.  She started to pull it out and quickly yanked her hand
away, cussing.
     "What's the matter?"
     "It's freakin' hot!" Being careful not  to  burn herself on the quickly
slagging metal, she gingerly extracted  it, shielding her eyes from the heat
with her other hand. Wisps of steam rose  off the  purple computer key card,
but  it retained  its  shape.  She grinned like a kid who'd just  gotten the
prize in the cereal box.
     We ran to the door in the floor, the hole for a mole. Arlene plugged it
into the  slot. The hatch  rose, then rotated  open. Through this opening we
saw a brilliant, eye-hurting red. A rickety,  wooden ladder descended out of
sight. "I can hardly believe it," she said.
     "Believe what?"
     "Has  to be,  babe.  Fly,  we're  looking right  at  the  wall  of  the
hyperspace tunnel itself."
     We looked long and hard. "Now what?" she asked.
     I  shrugged. When there's no data, flip a coin.  After all,  the ladder
wasn't even charred.
     I reached my  naked hand down  into the red-red- redness.  I touched  a
color. Arlene touched my shoulder.
     "What does it feel like?" she asked.
     I told her: "You'd think it would be hot, but it isn't. It's ice-cold."
     "Weird," she  said, and  put her  hand down next  to  mine. "So  what's
outside a hyperspace wormhole?" she asked.
     "Outer space?" I suggested. "That river of faces we saw earlier? Heaven
and hell? Death?"
     We  glanced at each other  and nodded. Holding  hands, we  took a  deep
breath and stepped into the redness.
     Crimson red. Fire-engine red. Rose red. Bloodred. Lipstick red. Martian
red. The color curled around us like cold, smothering, arctic water, filling
our brains with the redness of death. We were on fire! But I felt no pain.
     The experience was not pleasant. The  flames  burned away our  clothing
and weapons, but not our skin.
     The ladder vanished; it was only in our minds, any- way. For a while we
slipped  and  slid as if we were at a crazy  amusement park; but at least we
could see. No matter how bad a situation, I was always grateful for light.





     28




     The red tunnel  was bathed in the  kind of hazy glow you get in  a dark
room when you're developing photos. So  long as I could see my hand in front
of my face, I wasn't going to freak.  But that was the only good thing about
the situation.
     Then we fell into a room. Room? Some sort of internal  organ . .  . the
walls, floor, and ceiling were pink, pulsat- ing flesh, ribbed and liberally
coated with slippery mu- cus.
     Once again both Arlene  and I were naked as  jaybirds. Instinctively, I
covered myself again, just as I had before.
     "Oh,  come  on,  Fly!" Arlene  complained. "You're a human being, thank
God. We have little enough to remind us of who we are and why we're here ...
we don't need you being shy on top of everything else."
     I  slowly took  my hands away. But I  tried  not  to  look  to hard  at
Arlene--I didn't  trust myself. We were  buddies; I wanted it to  stay  that
way.
     "This  place stinks," Arlene said. Maybe my nose had stopped working. I
counted  myself  lucky;  the organ was  diseased, sickly, and I  was glad  I
couldn't  smell it. There  was a  downward slope that wasn't  so steep as to
cause us to lose our  footing  altogether, but  I wasn't  comfortable  as we
stumbled through the giant organ. I had a disturbing sense of what organ  it
was ... a place we've all been before.
     "I just had a bad thought, Fly; I hope whatever burned away our clothes
didn't also burn away all the microbes in our guts that help us digest food.
Without them, we'll die of starvation no matter how much we eat."
     "I  doubt  it," I said,  my voice  shaky, as  if I  hadn't  used it for
decades. "I  don't  feel ravenously hungry, so evi- dently the Gate left the
MRE food in my stomach. Probably left  the microbes, as well. .  .  anything
or- ganic."
     We  both jumped when  the  demonic  uterus  started  contracting. I had
always hated amusement parks. Then we were sliding out of control. I grabbed
Arlene's hand and she squeezed hard.
     The  contractions  pushed  us  along  the floor  to a "door," a  giant,
semitransparent  cyst membrane with a doorknob  in the middle.  The knob was
made of some kind of cartilage. I pushed my  arm into a wet opening all  the
way to the shoulder and turned the knob.
     Two  corpses were  on the  other  side. They'd  only  been shadows seen
through the membrane; we couldn't tell what they were.
     One was  male, the other female. After our experience  with deja vu,  I
experienced  a momentary shock  of  thinking  the bodies were our  own! They
weren't, but they could have been related to us--similar body types, similar
faces.
     I sure as  hell knew who they were, though:  one was the third woman in
Fox Company besides Dardier and Arlene, Midori Yoshida.
     The man was Lieutenant Weems.
     I felt a curious  lack of emotion, looking at the  pair. They lay in an
awkward position,  head-to-head, each with a pistol in the other's mouth. It
was pretty clearly  a suicide pact--I supposed because of finding themselves
in hell.
     Arlene leaned down to separate them, and we made  a horrific discovery:
they weren't just lying tete-a-tete; their heads were joined together, fused
at the crowns,  the scalp flowing smoothly from one  to the other.  . . like
Siamese twins joined at the head. The  hair  color  faded  continuously from
blond (Weems) to black (Yoshida) without seam or break.
     "Jesus and Mary," I gasped.
     "I don't guess there's any  question why they blew  their brains  out,"
Arlene whispered, dropping the bodies.
     Arlene silently pointed to bloody imp  prints all around the bodies. We
both  knew  the  shape of an imp footprint when we saw one. Judging from the
depth of the heels, the bastards had been dancing around the bodies of their
human victims. I spat at one of the footprints. Arlene gripped my shoulder.
     "Fly,  please don't  think I'm a  ghoul--but  goddamn it, we need those
pistols! And much as I like looking at your . .  . your manly chest, I think
we need the clothes, too. Definitely the boots."
     She  had a point. A  stomach-turning,  revolting point;  but still  one
against which I couldn't argue.
     We spent the next several minutes robbing the  corpses  and throwing up
in the corner. But afterward we each had a pistol and twenty-six rounds.
     To exit the room we had to squeeze through a narrow opening that looked
exactly like . . . well, I didn't like to even think about it.
     I volunteered to go first, and she didn't object. "Fly," came her voice
as we wriggled and writhed through the orifice, "do you ever get the feeling
you're being born again?"
     I'm  not a  huge  fan of morbid  jokes;  this time  all I  could do was
shudder. "Arlene--maybe we shouldn't be piss- ing  off the only friend we've
got down here by blas- phemy."
     The moist,  decaying walls pressed in around my shoulders, but I  could
still push through, and where I went it  was easy for Arlene to  follow. The
thought  crossed  my mind  that the  passage  might narrow  so much that I'd
become stuck. I wasn't completely rational about this one.
     I was so glad to pop out  the other end that I barely  minded the seven
imps waiting  on  the other side. For one truly insane  moment I wondered if
that would make  Arlene Snow  White! Then  I was busy again, doing  my  job.
Arlene was right behind  me, doing her job. We  only had a brace of pistols.
The sons of bitches didn't stand a chance.
     As was the usual  case after  a good killing, we took advantage of  the
opportunity to do more sightseeing. Not once did I regret that neither of us
had thought to bring a camera. "So this is hell," Arlene said.
     "What  they want us to think of as the infernal re- gions," I  replied.
Hell was made  of  fleshy walls, an open field whose  ground was  a  mottled
scalp with  comically giant, prickly hairs growing out of randomly scattered
tufts, rivers of fire, a black and red swirling sky . . . and air that stank
of  urine, decayed flowers, and bitter lemons. There may have been a hint of
old  cat boxes mixed in there as well. "Come to think of it," I contin- ued,
"not a bad try."
     "One of their more creative efforts."
     We saw a single door, sagging with moldy, rotten timbers. The stonework
lintel was crumbling. Arlene strolled to  the unpromising portal  and made a
close inspection. "Fly, come look at this."
     I went, but  my  stomach wished I  hadn't.  There were mites or  larvae
eating away at the stone, the wood, the fleshy walls, everything!  "Quite an
attention to detail," Arlene said as if evaluating an artwork.
     The  next moment  she stopped being an art critic.  A cloud of the tiny
creatures came off into the air as if we'd pounded on the door, but  neither
of us had  touched anything. They  settled  on  her. More followed and  they
settled  on  me. Holding  up  my hand, I could  see dozens of  little specks
spreading across my flesh . . . and there was a very slight itch.
     "Damn  it, get off'n me!" Arlene shook her arms  wildly, but enjoyed no
more  success than I. We ran, rolled, and still the little  vermin hung  on.
They were worse than lint.
     "Ah,  the  hell with it,"  I said.  "They don't seem to be  killing us.
First chance, we'll take a bath."
     "Or go through a teleporter," she said.
     "Being living organisms,  they would  probably go through  with us. No,
we'll look for water."
     "Or flea dip." She probably had a  very good  idea there. But her voice
cracked; she held on by main force.
     "Can't stand here forever," I said. "Let's pop it."
     I  cracked  the seal.  Surprise! A pair  of larger than  life  pumpkins
floated out. At  least they weren't going to crawl  around on our skin. They
were  up high enough  that we ducked and managed to  avoid being seen.  They
sailed past, looking for hoops and nets.
     The  pumpkins  saw the dead  imps  and  floated  over  to  investigate,
providing us with the opportunity  of darting through the doorway. Inside we
found a  single shotgun and a few shells. Arlene picked  it up and tossed it
to me.
     I was touched. We soldiered on.
     To the  left we saw a  rickety, wooden walkway over a pool  of boiling,
red stuff that seemed to  be a cross between lava and  the traditional green
toxin.  Annoying-  ly,  it was the only way  to  go.  As  we began to  cross
cautiously, the path started to give way. For some reason, neither of us was
the least bit surprised.
     There  was  nowhere to  go  but  forward  before  the  pathetic  bridge
collapsed into  the evil fluid below. We ran  like hell.  But at the end  we
were blocked by what appeared to be a solid stone wall.
     I threw myself at the wall, hoping to  grab a handful, and Arlene could
grab me. Instead, we  ended  up very much alive  on  the other side  of  the
illusion. There was no wall.
     If  we  were startled by the turn of  events, the imps we had landed on
were  downright  stunned. The  shotgun  lost  its virginity  then and there.
Arlene took care of a few stragglers with her 10mm.
     This  time, when we  lifted our eyes from  the carnage of the moment we
were in for a real surprise. Right in front of us  was the figure of a human
being  wrapped in  something sticky and suspended from  the  ceiling by  his
feet.
     We could tell by his clothing that he was a UAC civilian. We could tell
from his groans that he was alive.
     He was tall, nearly two meters. He was overweight and  suffering a  lot
more  because of it, the stomach hanging at a painful angle,  his belt about
to  come loose.  Blood  trickled down his  wrists from where he had tried to
free himself.
     "God, he's still kicking," Arlene said, focusing on the only  important
thing.
     I looked close; the man  appeared to be  wrapped up in spiderwebs;  the
web suspending him from  the ceiling was thick and didn't look like we could
easily break it.
     "Is there  a  knife anywhere?"  We pulled UAC  boxes over and  rummaged
through  them;  no knife,  but a  bottle would break to  serve  the purpose.
Arlene sliced,  and I cushioned his  fall as he came down, grunting  at  the
weight. Good thing there were  some medical supplies in the  UAC  boxes; the
man was in shock. Arlene pushed some D5W saline to pump up the volume; after
a while his eyes opened. He stared at us  without comprehension. I  expected
that.
     "Can you hear me?" I asked, and got nothing. "If you understand me, nod
your head."
     That took a moment but  he finally nodded. Arlene massaged his neck and
I held a finger in front of him until he focused on it. "Are you all right?"
Arlene asked him at last.
     "Unh," he grunted in a low, husky voice, carrying all the pain.
     "Who are you?" I asked.
     "Bill Ritch," he said, groggily.
     "How long were you up there?" Arlene asked.
     Further  proof that  life was  coming  back  into  him  was the way  he
shuddered. "Long enough that I thought I'd died."
     "Who put you up?" I asked.
     "The--goblin," he answered. "Spidermind."
     Oh, great;  a whole new nomenclature.  That narrowed it down to  any of
the monsters. If  we  ever reported to  Earth, We would need to  settle on a
common terminol- ogy.
     "Congratulations," said Arlene.
     "For what?" he asked, half turning to her, still dizzy.
     "Surviving." It was a big deal finding another human who could move and
wasn't a  damned  zombie! We would have  opened a  bottle of  champagne  and
celebrated  if  we'd had the  time ...  or the  booze.  As it was, Ritch was
stunned to receive a mouthful of cold water, if still a bit confused.
     Following a corridor that looped around, we  wound  up back at the same
damned  central  entrance. I would  never enjoy  an  amusement  park  again.
Peeking  cautiously around  the  corner,  I saw  we  had company,  tired  of
inspecting the dead imps outside. Pumpkins in the air, pumpkins everywhere .
. .
     They  roared  in  frustration  and  shot  their  nasty  little balls of
electricity at each other. Important datum: pumpkins are immune to their own
weapons.  And I  made a note  to see how they responded  to being baked in a
pie.
     "Were those the goblins you  meant?"  Arlene whis-  pered  to Ritch. He
shook  his  head,  but his  grim  expres-  sion  left  no  doubt  that  he'd
encountered pumpkins before.
     "They're so freaking stupid," said Arlene contemptu- ously.
     "You'd  think something  that was all head would have  more brains,"  I
added.
     The next step was obvious for those of us with brains. We dashed across
the  corridor to another closed door. I opened it a crack while Arlene  kept
watch, making sure  the pumpkins didn't  float  back. Ritch obviously hadn't
received  military training, but he caught on fast. Consid- ering what  he'd
been  through, he was a  quick study. He kept pace, which was all  we really
needed from him at the moment.
     Through the door I saw two pumpkins on the inside as well, hanging with
a  bunch  of  imps. Taking  a deep breath,  I waited  until a  mob of spinys
marched  between the  door  and  the nearest pumpkin. Then I stepped out and
fired five or six unaimed rounds. These guys didn't merit any wasted shotgun
shells. Having  done my dam- age, I popped back and braced  the door. Arlene
and Ritch helped.
     One thing you can say about  pumpkins: they don't let a little obstacle
like imps stand between them and a target.
     And one thing you can  say about imps: they  don't like  being  shot by
balls of electricity.
     We left them to each other's mercies. Over  the sound of carnage, Ritch
shouted at me. "How'd you get them fighting each other?"
     "We do it all the time," said Arlene, smiling. "It's the Iago tactic."
     "I'm impressed."
     I watched  for the two in the hall; but they'd gotten tired of shooting
each other and returned to shoot the imp carcasses.
     When the sounds behind the door died down, I slowly cracked it. I saw a
lot of dead imps  on  the floor and  the remains of  one deflated pumpkin on
top. I assumed the other one must be on the bottom of  the pile. That's when
I made a huge mistake.





     29




     Stepping  inside, I didn't think to look behind the door,  straight up,
the  logical  place  for a  surviving pumpkin to be  waiting in ambush.  And
that's exactly where the bastard was.
     "Fly!" Arlene  shouted. She was paying  attention. She never  used that
tone of voice except when it was life and death--and in this case, the issue
was my life. I threw myself on the floor just as  a lightning ball fried the
tip of my scalp. A run of 10mm rounds got my attention.
     I flipped over to see Arlene blasting away, then scram- bled to my feet
and pumped my shotgun at the floating head. She split left  and I right, and
we kept firing.
     When we were done, that  was the deadest pumpkin I had  ever seen still
floating.  It was almost like one of those old  cartoons where the character
hangs  in  space for several seconds before it remembers the law of gravity,
then quickly plummets to  the  ground. All that  was missing were  the sound
effects.
     "Incoming!" yelled Ritch,  outside the  door.  We  hadn't forgotten the
other pumpkins. We'd hoped they might have forgotten us, though.
     "Get  in!" Arlene  yelled,  pulling at  Ritch's sleeve. He  didn't need
another hint. The moment he  joined us, we slammed the door  shut and jammed
the latch with Arlene's pistol. The latch immediately rattled; God only knew
what the pumpkins were using for hands.
     "Look," Ritch said, pointing. Protruding from under a dead imp were the
pieces of a box of shotgun shells, along with shells.
     "They  may  be  covering all kinds of  supplies," I said.  The prospect
didn't appeal to me, but I thought  I should set a good example.  Getting on
my knees,  I  pulled the corpse away from the box, and dozens of shells went
rolling as Arlene and Ritch collected them.
     Then we all got busy moving the dead monsters and stacking them in  one
corner.  We received our just reward.  There was another functional shotgun,
lots of  ammo,  even  tools:  hammers,  nails, even a gas-powered chain saw.
Maybe the zombies had  been used to build condos for imps  and pumpkins.  We
even found  an  antique revolver  for Ritch; I  wondered which one of us the
civilian would accidentally shoot.
     We replaced  the pistol  in  the latch  with a handful of  nails,  then
collected  all the tools and  put them in a neat pile for later use. Weapons
and ammo  in hand, we explored  the room and found it led to a broader plaza
area. Then we found a door leading into a narrow corridor.
     "I'll go first," I said.
     "Fine with me," said Arlene. Ritch was more than happy  to bring up the
rear.
     No good deed goes unpunished.  I  realized that the  moment I heard the
familiar  pig-grunting noises,  the  ugly  snuffling  that always  turned my
stomach and might keep me  from ever eating bacon again. They didn't make us
wait  very long. The demons came storming down the corridor, pale pink flesh
with claws and lots and lots of teeth.
     Somehow,  though,  after the  steam-demon,  I couldn't take the pinkies
seriously.
     The narrowness  of  the  corridor  meant  I  had  taken  point  with  a
vengeance;  no one  could  shoot past me. I loosed  a  shotgun blast.  "Fall
back!"  I  shouted,  and  heard  Arlene and  Ritch doing  it.  Taking  steps
backward, I never took my eyes  off  the enemy. I shot a second time, then a
third and fourth time, before dropping the first demon.
     I didn't like the arithmetic. Despite  our extra ammo,  there were more
demons than we could take down  at this rate.  My  comrades had made it back
through  the  door as I held the corridor. Back to the wall, I  kept firing,
when suddenly . . .
     "Hold fire!" It was Arlene's voice,  and I  couldn't imagine that she'd
gone  nuts. I risked turning my head. She stood  in the doorway, holding the
chain saw. Then  with  a chugga-mmmmmm, chuggga-mmmmmm, she pulled the cord.
Third time was the charm, and it kicked to life with an honest roar to drown
out all but a steam-demon's scream.
     Elbowing past me,  she lifted the  buzzing blade and let the teeth bite
into  the nearest demon. "Die, Pinkie, die!" she screamed.  It  sounded odd,
but the results were great: red blood splashed us both, and she kept at  it,
screaming a war cry that just might scare a fallen angel.
     Arlene waded through them, working the saw, beads of sweat and drops of
blood covering her face. A demon arm fell to the floor, blood exploding in a
torrent. She slipped on the gore, but  the movement  carried her forward and
the saw buried itself in the chest of the next demon, ripping a death gurgle
from the creature.
     I tried  to get to her to help,  but the demon corpses were in the way.
She worked the chain saw loose but fell backward, swinging it in a wide arc.
A large demon swung its  claw down hard and knocked the chain saw out of her
hand.
     Before Arlene could  get away, another claw ripped her open. She didn't
scream but fell silently.
     The sight drove me mad.  Somewhere in the  back of my mind I'd accepted
the likelihood of  our being blown to bits; but I wouldn't have us  die like
animals!
     Picking up  the  saw, I revved it and finished  the damned job, shoving
the blade into the  face of the  one who had  hurt her. I lost  count of how
many were left  but I  kept at  it, swinging the  chain saw  back and forth,
covering the walls with gore. Finally, there was nothing left to kill.
     The  red haze lifted and I remembered  Arlene. Turning back, I saw that
Ritch was with her, trying to stanch the bleeding with improvised first-aid.
My right sleeve was already in tatters, so it was a simple matter to rip off
a strip  of cloth  and use  it for  bandages. We  patched her up  as best we
could.
     Her face was pale and she was weak; but she was  alive. "Can you move?"
I asked.
     "Move or  die," she wheezed, "so I'll move." We helped  her stand up. I
started to pick up her shotgun and pass it to Ritch, but she shook her head.
"That's mine," she said, reclaiming it proudly. I wasn't about to argue.
     We  left the heavy chain  saw on the deck  and staggered forward into a
last chamber. There were disgusting things  lying around, but as nothing was
moving or  alive,  I gave it no further attention. In the center of the room
was a  teleport  pad of rusted metal, designed  in a  heavy  and  cumbersome
manner. It looked like an antique.
     "That doesn't look promising," I said.
     "We have no choice," Arlene answered  through clenched teeth. We hadn't
had a good choice in a long, long time. All three of us stepped aboard, arms
linked. Ritch must have been religious. He said a prayer.
     Maybe  because it was  an  old-fashioned teleporter, the experience was
different  from  the others . .  . like  the special F/X were  provided by a
different  company. I noticed sounds that  were new, a wind tunnel  combined
with an  avalanche; and  there  was  the sensation  of falling turning  into
floating. Then we arrived.
     "Wow!" Ritch  said.  He wasn't  as  used to this stuff as  we were. The
terminus  was  a rock  garden. Although the light was dim, we could make out
the twisted, curved, and warped rocks  that made  me think of a  giant coral
reef,  except the color and texture of the formations was the same as desert
camo. Met our old friends, the zombies.
     Arlene fired  first.  The  opportunity  to fight  put life  back in her
again. Most of these zombies weren't armed--ex- UAC civvies--which  was fine
with me. Ritch got off a  couple  of shots as  well; I don't know if he  hit
anything.  Abruptly,  I  realized we had  a  more  serious problem than  the
walking dead crew. I'd  almost forgotten the real spooks--the ghost things I
thought of as specters.
     One touched my face with all the coldness of space. I hit at the horror
wildly but struck Ritch instead, knock- ing him to the ground. It was joined
by some  of  its buddies,  those flying  metal skulls I hoped  never  to see
again. They dive-bombed us like kamikaze pilots.
     Then Ritch  found the back of a specter head by swinging his hands;  he
put his revolver against its skull and squeezed off a point-blank round.
     That got the  critter's attention; it spun  to deal with Ritch, turning
its back on me; I blew its head apart with the riot gun.
     Somehow the  idea of a ghost you can slice  and dice appealed to  me. I
didn't think  the nuns would approve. The damned specter went down screaming
like a banshee and bleeding something that stank of ice-cold grave- yards.
     While I was auditioning  for Ghost  Busters,  Arlene popped  the flying
skulls. They didn't require as  much  firepower  as the pumpkins. Ritch took
care of the remaining zombies.
     "Aim for the head, just like the movie," Arlene shouted.
     He  was  doing okay  for a novice,  and naturally  gravi- tated  to the
easiest job; but he acquitted himself well. I was happy we had found him.
     Finally the wave of bad guys subsided  and we could play  beachcombers.
There wasn't much  worth grabbing this time, however--only a bit of ammo and
a Sig-Cow for Ritch from the poorly equipped zombies.
     Now seemed a  good moment to find  out more about Bill. Arlene  thought
his  "goblin"  might be a hell-prince and described one,  but  he shook  his
head. "Not a minotaur; it was more like a giant spider," he said.
     "Oh, great," said Arlene, "a new one for the files."
     We found  out  Bill Ritch was a  computer  programmer. If we  found any
monsters with laptops, he would prove invaluable. To be fair, he'd done fine
killing his quota of zombies.
     "How'd you get captured in the first place?" Arlene asked.
     Ritch sighed. "Classic  case of 'this can't really be happening to us.'
When we  were--"  He stopped, face turning red.  When he started up again, I
knew he had skipped something important. Later, I thought. "We were studying
the Gates, and suddenly  one  of them on Deimos experienced a marked drop in
temperature. It started glowing, too."
     "But  I  thought  Deimos  was   deserted  when  all  this  started,"  I
interrupted.
     "You were  supposed to  think that," he said. "When the UAC found alien
electronics and started--then we all crowded in to see, and that's when they
started coming through, the goblins. Aliens, I mean."
     "Which ones?" I asked. "Which ones came first?"
     "The first  thing through was one of those things  you  call an imp. It
looked at us  and grinned, and we were all frozen  in total shock. We didn't
know  what  to say or do--our first contact with an alien race, and  we were
speechless!  All  those wonderful plans about what  we were going to say and
how we were going to react--"
     "Well, how  did the  imp react?"  Arlene  was  always good  at  cutting
through the plastic to get to the meat.
     Ritch shook his head sadly,  remembering something  painful.  "It threw
one of those wads of  phosphorous mucoid and killed  a senior scientist  and
two  Air Force captains. I was in the back. . . thank God. A woman screamed;
I  think  it  was Dr.  Tyya Graf. Then  another one  came  through,  and  we
panicked."
     "Mob scene?"
     "Like Soylent Green." Arlene mm-hmmed,  but I  was  confused. Must have
been another old movie reference. "If I hadn't been such a big guy,  I would
have been trampled. As it was,  I was  knocked down. I tried to get up,  and
they squirted some  sort of webbing  around  me, a neurotoxin that paralyzed
me.
     "I was  out of it for  some indeterminate time;  when I came  to,  this
spider thing was  interrogating me and I was in a huge room,  surrounded  by
hundreds of goblins of different  types, and even some of those  zombies.  I
recognized Dr. Graf,  but I could tell right away she was dead and  her body
was just reanimated. And, well, that's the story."
     Speaking of which, Arlene  interrupted with her own  thoughts: "Fly, do
you notice there's a lot more zombie bodies here than anything else?"
     "Sure."
     "So with all  the  noise  we just  made, why  didn't a  lot  more  come
running?"
     "Curiosity may have killed the cat," I said, feeling flip, "but never a
zombie. Or maybe this is all of them."
     "No brains," said Ritch, bending over one of them.
     Arlene  shook  her  head. "I  think it's because they never do anything
they're not told," she said. "They must stay in constant  communication with
someone  or  something, and only go investigate when they receive a command.
If they've been  told to patrol,  looking  for humans,  then they'll attack;
otherwise, they might march right by us and not even see us."
     "That imp who talked to me made  me wonder if imps give them orders," I
said.
     "Maybe; but we've seen  zombies where there are no imps. Maybe they get
standing orders. I saw a bunch of imps come running to check out a situation
once where all I'd done was get the  zombies firing at each other. The  imps
couldn't control them."
     "Well,  the pig-snuffling  demons don't  have any intelli- gence  worth
mentioning,  either,"  I  said.  "If there's  any more  of them around, they
wouldn't hear a battle over their own breathing."
     "The  skulls  don't  even have ears," Arlene  said. "Look, it's  either
hell-princes, the  steam-demons,  or that  thing Bill described, the  spider
thing."
     "The spider creature that interrogated me," Ritch said, shuddering.
     "We'll  keep that in mind." Time to move on. Hugging the right wall, we
discovered a narrowing, "natural" corridor with more shotgun shells lying on
the floor  like  popcorn. We scooped them  up,  but  I  was  disappointed to
discover  that some were  defective  or  spent.  I was  preoc- cupied with a
handful  of  questionable-looking specimens  when they  spilled  through  my
fingers and  I dropped  to my knees to recover  them.  That saved my life. A
shotgun blast filled the space where my head had been a moment before.
     "Zombie!" Ritch called out anti-anticlimactically. No one ever shot  at
us with human  weapons except  former humans.  Another shot missed high, but
there was no third attempt on Yours Truly.
     Arlene turned to fire--and froze! "F-Fly . . ." she whispered hoarsely.
     I stared.  Jesus; it was Arlene's  worst nightmare  come  true. Wilhelm
Dodd, or what was left of him, lurched toward our little group, shifting his
twelve-gauge to get a better shot.
     30




     Arlene stared at him approaching, her mouth open, face pale as a ghost.
I didn't want to do it, but she'd made me promise!
     Feeling sick, I raised my own weapon. I knew what would happen: I would
blow  the f'ing SOB away--and  Arlene would  hate me for  the  rest  of  her
natural life . . . which might not be a very long time at that.
     Then a miracle happened.
     Just  as my finger  tightened on  the trigger,  Arlene's face  suddenly
hardened. The color returned. She closed her mouth.
     Then she pumped a shell into the receiver, shouldered her riot gun, and
blew the zombie-Dodd's face off.
     Nobody said  anything; Ritch took  his cue from  our awkward silence. I
put my hand on Arlene's  shoulder, and she spoke. Her  voice croaked like  a
rusty can  tied  behind  a very old car. "He was already gone,  Fly.  And  I
didn't want him to come between my buddy and me."
     There was that damned peculiar lump again. I blinked  --dust in my eye,
I guess--and squeezed her shoulder so hard  she winced. But she didn't  move
to push my hand away.
     She knew  what would  happen if  I  were  the one  to kill the reworked
Wilhelm Dodd . . . and she wouldn't allow that to happen.
     Evidently, our friendship was as important to her as it was to me.
     I'd forgotten  that the  zombies had  ever  been  human; I made  myself
forget. But the staring face of Willy Dodd wouldn't  let me get away with it
any longer. He was a man, a Marine, and very important in my life.  Now that
he was gone--I didn't know what to think about Arlene and me.
     Best not to think  at all, I advised me; it was good advice, and I took
it.
     Arlene was taking it  hard. Sitting  on  the floor,  she  put her  head
between her legs and took  a  series  of  long,  deep breaths.  I wanted  to
comfort her but felt helpless. "Arlene ..."  I reached out to touch her. She
shook her head and pulled away. Any other situation,  I  would have left her
alone to mourn  in private.  But there was  no privacy on Deimos  except the
solitude of the grave.
     Ritch understood what was going on and kept his mouth shut. I liked him
more and more. I glanced at my wristwatch,  a  pointless act in this  place,
perhaps; but it helped somehow: a tiny act of useless normalcy.
     "Arlene," I said, gently as  I could, "we've got to split.  You need to
pull it together."
     "Leave me alone!" she said,  keeping her face  turned away. "Don't look
at me."
     This didn't seem like a good time to  push the envelope. I'd never seen
her this badly shaken; without  another word,  I sat down, back-to-back with
her, and kept watch while she got it out of her system. Ritch stood a little
farther up the hallway, gun out, eyes averted.
     Every so often her entire body  shuddered; I  pretended not to  notice.
When she finished,  she wiped her eyes and stood up. "Let's move, Corporal,"
she  said. She was  a PFC  and I  outranked  her, but it  was all right. The
fighting tone of voice was back.
     Ritch rejoined us  and we  pushed on. Up the defile was a rise where we
could peek over  the rock wall to our left. The architect from hell had been
busy  again. A huge garden stretched out before us in  the shape  of a right
hand. We were in the thumb.
     "Can you believe this one?" Arlene asked.
     "Better than a swastika,"  I  said.  The hand covered  a good  piece of
territory, with  the "fingers" wide spread, each undoubtedly offering a wide
selection of motion  sensors  and other surprises.  The  "ring" finger had a
bizarre,  wooden  shack right where the ring would have been;  I wondered if
the "pinkie" finger would be full of Arlene's demons.
     We  started  with  the  thumb.  "Bet  the  only  prints   we  find  are
foot-prints," Ritch said. I've never  liked stupid jokes, either, but Arlene
laughed; anything to shake her out of her depression.
     I heard a familiar bubbling: the red "lava" liquid. The pool  was in  a
raised, stone  structure that could pass  as the swimming pool from  hell. I
thought I saw a switch just below the lava line.
     "What's that?" Ritch asked.
     "Toxic  yecch,"  Arlene answered.  "Haven't  you seen it before?" Ritch
shook  his head.  "You've been  lucky,"  she went  on. "Fly and I  have been
through an ocean of the stuff."
     "Looks like lava," Ritch said, proving an old  adage  about great minds
and small circles. "Is it hot?"
     "Not  enough,"  I said, "but it can  still kill you." The switch teased
me, like a piece of plastic sticking up from a bowl of red oatmeal.
     "You know,"  I  mused,  "that switch is awfully tempting..."  I found a
rock  and pitched it at the  button, jumping back. I didn't want any of that
spit splashing on me.
     I  should  have  tried  out for the majors when  the twelve-year strike
began. First try was the charm; we heard a  loud click,  and  a door rotated
open,  revealing  our latest take-home  pay:  another  AB-10, and  far  more
important, a pair  of beautiful Medikits. I would have preferred  another of
those magical blue health spheres, but this would definitely do in a pinch.
     But my heart sunk when I picked  up the  first one and saw the telltale
signs of imp. This was not  a virgin find. Tooth marks explained why most of
the drugs  were  missing.  Apparently the imps  liked  the  taste. A hurried
investigation  of the kits showed that barely enough  drugs had survived for
Arlene.
     Ritch helped  me gather together  what we needed. After  cleansing  her
wounds, with  special  care for  the  bad  gash  in  her  chest, I  gave her
painkillers and put on fresh bandages. Ritch seemed embarrassed, swabbing at
her amble, naked breasts; but titillation was the last  thing on any of  our
minds.
     "How's that?" I asked.
     "Better," she said, but  I could  tell from her strained voice and pale
face that she was far from perfect. Better would have to do.
     The dregs of the drugs proved a bonus for Ritch. He didn't look so hot,
either. Coming down from  the  ceiling and snapping out of shock  so quickly
couldn't be good for anyone, and he'd been holding his own in combat instead
of resting.
     I wish I could have offered him a needle of the stimulant I'd used back
in  the marble  room,  on Deimos; but stimulant seemed to have been what the
imps were after--the vials were all empty.
     Leaving the thumb,  we descended on the  palm as if storming heaven and
began a serious  housecleaning, sliding from rock to rock, blasting anything
in  our  way . .  .  and  scooping up anything useful.  The opposi- tion was
feeble, hardly worth mentioning except to say that they died quickly.
     Arlene lucked into finding a rocket launcher  of her  very own. Then we
helped  her locate the little battery-  sized rockets that were  nearby. She
collected seven of the little darlings, and I showed her where to stick them
and taught her the forbidden lore of proximity fuses and firing rings.
     We were so happy about the find that we must have  sent out a subverbal
signal. Monsters don't like humans being happy.
     We were ambushed by six  former comrades at  arms  and  ex-UAC workers,
four imps, three demons, two flying skulls, and a partridge in  a pear tree.
(I'm  lying  about the  pear tree.) In the ensuing carnage,  Arlene used  up
every rocket; but at least she could never again say she hadn't been checked
out on the launcher.
     Arlene and I barely worked up  a sweat. Ritch was  getting  good at the
game; he  was  a good draft pick. He'd been doing some thinking that he  was
eager to  share  with  us. Arlene still  seemed  numb  from the discovery of
Wilhelm, but I was ready to get to know this new Ritch better.
     So, as we surveyed our  latest  gaggle  of ex's, I encour- aged  him to
speak his piece.
     He'd already told us that computers were his area, but he'd been overly
modest. Evidently, he was a  bona-fide computer genius kidnapped from Deimos
by the aliens.
     "We had  already decided that  the Gates were  hypermass transportation
devices;  if they  really worked  and  weren't  just  some elaborate  failed
experiment from millenia past, it would blow every physics theory we had out
the wash.
     "We  discovered they  responded  to bursts  of high- energy microwaves;
their  circuits  responded  for  several  seconds   after  each   burst--not
electronics,  exactly,  but  something  involving  direct  manipulations  of
particle streams."
     As Ritch held court, Arlene perked up and started paying attention. She
was  getting  that  expression  she wore  when  a  boyfriend  betrayed  her.
Suddenly, her mouth dropped. "You mean you--activated the Gates  yourselves?
You turned them on? Jesus Christ, you brought those things here!"
     Arlene  had a  romantic  side that tried  to believe whatever  nonsense
officials put  out  as  the  truth  du  jour.  I'd gotten over that sort  of
silliness long  before I  joined  the  Corps--it wasn't  a long-term healthy
attitude for a jarhead.
     "I... I think we  brought these aliens through the Gate ourselves, in a
way," Ritch admitted pathetically. "But it was an accident!"
     "Ah,  an accident," I  snorted. "Well, that certainly relieves everyone
of any personal responsibility."
     Ritch continued, not noticing the  irony. "I think,  now, that whatever
these  creatures were, they were  listening  to  the  Gates. Maybe they were
trying to fire it up from their end, and until we 'answered the phone,' they
couldn't do it. But yeah, I guess we let them in.
     "Anyway, I don't believe these are the creatures that built the Gates."
     "That's what we figured," I said. "You  got anything  more  substantial
than a gut feeling?"
     "The UAC has . . . engravings that  the Gate builders left behind. They
are as old as  the  Gates, showing what the  Gate builders looked  like." He
paused, trying to find the right words.
     "And?" we asked as one.
     "You're not going to believe this--" he started.
     "After what  we've  been  through,  we'll believe any- thing," I  said,
launching a preemptive strike.
     "Well, they look like something out of H. P. Lovecraft," he said.
     "I knew it," Arlene said. She still looked furious.
     "Am I the only  person in the solar system who never read this  guy?" I
asked, irritated. "The first one of you to talk about anything 'eldritch' is
going to get a rocket right between the eyes."
     Ritch looked  at me like he thought I might be serious, but a big smile
from  Arlene put  him  at  ease.  He swal- lowed  hard and said,  "They have
snakelike trunks with multilimbed upper torsos, no visible head;  and they'd
have to move like sidewinders."
     "How big?" Arlene wanted to know.
     "Up  to ten meters  long," he  answered. They didn't say  it but I just
know they were both thinking, Oooh, eldritch!
     I agreed. "I'd bet my life we haven't met the  real intelligence behind
this."
     Arlene  joined  in:  "Bet something of more value than  that, Fly. What
value do you think an insurance compa- ny would put on us?"
     "I  don't  gamble,"  Ritch said with a  straight  face, "and I have met
the--what'd  you call it?  The mastermind.  That spider thing  . . . it's in
charge, I'm positive."
     "Tell us more," I requested.
     He shuddered. I  knew how he felt. Theory was  one thing, close contact
another. "So far as I can  tell, the spider thing has real intelligence," he
said.  "It spoke  in  clear  English." I wasn't about to doubt him  after my
experience with the imp back on Phobos.
     "What did it say?" asked Arlene.
     "Well, first it started  asking  me questions. It started with  simple,
yes-no,  true-false; I tried to lie a few times, but it already  knew a lot,
and I got caught."
     "What was its response to a lie?"
     Ritch shrugged. "Didn't seem  to care emotionally; but it punished  me.
Horrible stuff, but all hallucination. You know how  you're having  a dream,
and you dream that you're absolutely terrified? The spidermind thing  can do
that: I can see why people who encountered one of  those, maybe thousands of
years  ago, could think  they'd  died and gone to hell." He shuddered at the
memory.
     "But the fears were all unreal.  And  after a while  I realized I could
take it. You just have to accept  being afraid like you've never been afraid
before;  but if it can't break  you with  fear, it doesn't know  what to  do
next."
     "What did it do to you?"
     "It  started  ordering  me  to  reprogram  all  the  Phobos and  Deimos
equipment. When I refused, it  tortured  me with  more and more Fear Itself,
which is what I started calling the hallucinations.  When that didn't  work,
it hung me  from the  ceiling with  its  webbing, like it  was saving me for
later."
     "I  got the impression it needed to find out more  about  humans so  it
could figure out how to crack us. Mean- while, I think it went looking for a
more cooperative programmer. I'm sure it would have killed me when it  found
one."
     "To  find out more about humans," I repeated, feeling a  chill. "Arlene
... do you think all this crap that's been thrown against us ... ?"
     She  glared at me, then glared at the deck. She  knew what I meant; she
knew it made sense.
     We  had  been the  secondary  information sources.  Had  we  given  the
mastermind anything useful? Mater Dei, I hoped not.
     "Describe the monster," Arlene said.
     Ritch  gritted  his  teeth. "It's like a huge, brainlike thing inside a
mechanical, spiderlike body."
     "What about the weapons?" I asked.
     "Ringed with more weapons than you  can imagine," Ritch said. I doubted
that. I'd reached the point where I could imagine quite a lot.
     Actually I was glad to  receive Ritch's  news. A leader alien  meant we
had something to really fight. I was exhausted cutting off the inexhaustible
limbs of this army. I was ready  for a general.  The new information cheered
up Arlene as well, bringing color back to her cheeks. She and I didn't  need
to  talk  about it. We were on  the same wavelength. We  shared our theories
with Ritch, especially the  one about Deimos  as a spaceship and what we had
discovered about the hyperspace tunnel. He had already guessed a lot.
     Then we continued our journey  up the ring finger, where  we'd seen the
shack.  We ran into  one specter,  hardly a match  for  the three of  us.  I
couldn't  help contrasting our  casualness now with my terror  at seeing  my
first zombie. Nowadays, I was almost blase.
     We prowled our way up to the ancient, crumbly, wooded hut.  Hell needed
a facelift.
     "Check  out  the  lock,"  Arlene said,  grinning  like  a girl  with  a
Christmas of accessories for her favorite doll. "I love these!"
     "Why?" I asked.
     "They take an old-fashioned key."
     "I'll help you look for it," Ritch said before I could.
     "Hell with that," she  said. "I've already got one!" She dismantled one
of the  pistols; then  she took the gas-  expander stabilizer  spline for  a
flexor  and the fixed end of the  magazine-advance spring  for  a tensor. It
took her just five minutes to pick the lock.
     "Where'd you learn that?" Ritch asked.
     "I read a lot of comic books."
     "You need help  putting that back together?" I  asked with  a  straight
face.  I couldn't  resist teasing her  a  little. She rolled  her  eyes  and
reassembled the piece in nothing Hat. She  made us wait until  she  was good
and ready to open the shack door.
     Inside  was a  switch. Surprise,  surprise,  surprise ... as our patron
saint Gomer  might say. Arlene  did the  honors,  lowering  the  wall ahead,
revealing a hidden platform containing a dozen dead, mangled, squashed  imps
and a teleport pad.
     "It's about that time," she said.
     "I want a new travel agent," I said.
     We teleported and stared, stunned into angry silence.
     We  were  right  back  where  we'd  started  after  crawling  down  the
hyperspace  tunnel! The  only improvement was we  still  had our clothes and
weapons--and Ritch, of course.
     31




     "Deja," said Arlene.
     "Vu," I said.
     "Dejah Thoris," Ritch said, and Arlene snorted. They were speaking some
kind of secret code. I wasn't going to worry about it. Starting all over was
something to worry about.
     As  before, I inserted my  arm up to the elbow  in the membranal switch
and opened the door. Inside,  we  found Weems and Yoshida in the  same room,
same  position,  still joined head-to-head . .  .  and still  holding  their
pistols in exactly the same position as before. Clothed!
     We stared for  a long  time, and poor Bill Ritch had no idea why Arlene
and I were so stunned; he  started to examine the bodies,  but Arlene gently
pulled him back before he could see what they'd done to them.
     "This is worse than  the  monsters," I  said.  We passed by and crawled
through the narrow tunnel, a very tight fit for Ritch.
     When  we reached the end, we faced the same seven imps as before,  only
this time we used shotguns. At least that was an improvement.
     We popped  the same door. Out  came two pumpkins, just  like last time.
The pumpkins were pretty much the same except for varying sizes. Arlene used
the  AB-10, and  I finished them off with  a shotgun,  our favorite  tactic.
Ritch  made  a comment  that was new: "They'd look better  with two  burning
candles for eyes instead of that headlight in the center." No one argued.
     We started to  bypass  the  collapsing  pier, going for the  other door
instead;  but  suddenly  Arlene said,  "Fly,  I  have  a  feeling we  should
duplicate our actions as precise- ly as we can."
     "Arlene, last time the demons creamed you  in that  narrow  hallway," I
reminded her. She nodded, a  bit shaky at  the  thought.  She wasn't in  any
condition to survive a  bout like  that again.  I pursued the  point: "We've
already deviated by not taking Weems's and  Yoshida's pistols and by killing
the pumpkins outside."
     "I know," she said. "I  don't have any good argument except for  female
intuition."  I  was about  to make  a  crack about the  unlikelihood of that
particular  attribute  in Arlene Sanders,  but I  saw  that  she  was deadly
serious. She glared at me until I saw reason.
     We left Ritch in  the corridor. He wasn't in shape for  what we had  in
mind. Of course, after we cleared a path for him, he could stroll through in
relative safety. We  ran like  bats out of Deimos down the  pier, this  time
charging through  the  illusory  wall of flame  and blowing away the imps we
knew to be on the other side.
     There was another reason I'd insisted we leave Ritch behind, one I kept
to myself: I half thought we'd find a  second  Bill Ritch hanging  from  the
ceiling here.
     We didn't. . . and I never brought the  subject up to Arlene or  Ritch.
God only  knows whether they thought  of it  themselves--probably, but  they
kept quiet as well.
     We  slipped back by the secret corridor and used the  same trick on the
pumpkins and imps inside the room. It was a lot easier when  we knew what to
expect. This time I knew where the last pumpkin would be floating in  ambush
when I  opened the door, and I  enjoyed  not  being surprised. Pop goes  the
pumpkin.
     Crossing the patio, Arlene grabbed the chain saw and revved it up;  but
she  made me  promise  to start shooting the moment she  lost it  this time.
Except  that this time, since she knew what  to expect, she didn't  slip and
wasn't out of position  where a demon could knock the chain saw  out of  her
hand. She ducked. She weaved. She sawed all the demons to death. It was hard
to believe she'd been seriously injured only a short time before; but having
a  chance to get it right the second t