n if he doesn't understand it, he will, by God, run off and try to do something. But Gunnery Sergeant Goforth used to be a DI over at Quantico in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, and he told us that when he gave an officer candidate an order that the kid didn't understand, he would stand there like a dummy and try to clarify it! "Sir, this candidate does not understand the drill instructor's order!" Gunny Goforth went bugfreak trying to get the candidates to do something, any- thing, anything but just stand there and discuss the situation! The gunny especially hated, when he gave an order, the sort of rummy way the candidate would just say "sir?"--with a look of utter bewilderment--like he'd never even heard of such a command. Like no one had ever heard of such a command . . . like nobody in his right mind would ever dream of issuing such a bizarre command! "You falkin' piece of shee-it! Just falkin' pick up th'falkin' FOD off'n th' falkin' RUNway and don' falkin' say another falkin' 'SIR,' or I's gone to rip your falkin' HAID off and YOU-rinate down yo' neck!" Gunny Goforth was from South Carolina, and his hatred of college-educated officer candidates was leg- endary. It was the college education; I was morally certain of it. They say college teaches you how to think, but I think it really teaches you how to jerk gunnery sergeants around by the short hairs. I whistled very low, catching everyone's attention. I set Olestradamus to guard the door instead of Slink, and all the spineys--and Pfc. Dodd--came forward to tear down the wall, or enough of it that we could all escape the way Arlene did last time. I'd deliberately kept him in the shadows. I wasn't sure how Arlene would react to her former lover, now zombie. I wished I could have softened the blow somewhat. Maybe I handled it all wrong. When Arlene saw Dodd, she turned white, paler than usual, so much so it was easily visible in the gloom. She fell back against the wall and started hyperventilating, staring at him. This wasn't the first time she had seen Dodd as a zombie. We caught up with him the last time on Deimos, just after jumping through the Gate--the same Gate that was just outside the crack we were working on. That time, he shambled out of the blackness ready to blow us apart, reworked so thor- oughly he didn't even recognize his once and future intended. I was sick back then, sick at heart. I knew I would have to kill the SOB, and Arlene would hate me forever, and hate herself for hating me when I only did what I had to do. But a miracle happened, the first one I'd seen on that trip, but not the last. Arlene suddenly found it inside herself to shove me out of the way and kill zombie-Dodd herself; that way, she couldn't really hate anybody. It was a hell of a thing for her to do, one of the reasons I love her so much, my best bud. Now . . . what did this mean, now we had Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd as one of our crew? But a Dodd who not only didn't remember sleeping with Arlene and loving her, but also didn't remember being killed by her. But Arlene remembered, God help her. She remembered killing her boyfriend. She blew his head off and watched the body topple like a dead tree. "Christ," she muttered beneath her breath, closing her eyes and turning away. "Christ, Fly. Did you have to run into . . . into him?" I didn't know whether Albert made it easier or harder. She had thought she loved Dodd until she met Albert Gallatin. But maybe her feelings for Albert were colored by what she'd done to Dodd, and what we all were sharing: the destruction of our planet and our entire race. At least, I knew those thoughts were firing through her brain; if I could think them with my limited mental capacity for speculation, sure as hell Arlene was obsessing about them herself. She swallowed the emotions down and became a Marine again. Dodd wasn't Dodd; he was a zombie . . . and now a platoon member. She did what she had to do. She was a U.S. Marine--semper fi, Mac. The spiney imps got busy ripping away at the masonry; Arlene and I tried to help, but human hands simply weren't strong enough to do the dirty work. We caught stones as they fell and lugged them away, trying to make as little noise as possible; the pinkies were damned noisy as a rule, and the hell princes should be used to the noise . . . but still, the last thing I wanted-- We almost, damn near made it. Slink and the other spineys--Whack, Swaller, Sniff and Chomp--used their iron nails to grind away at the crack, scraping stone away. It was already wide enough for me and Arlene (and Dodd, of course), and nearly so for the imps, but the pumpkin Olestradamus was a big prob- lem: I snapped my fingers until I got his--her?-- attention and gestured it over. "Can you deflate?" I asked. It didn't say anything but looked puzzled. "I mean, is there any way you can suck in a little at the sides, like, and squeeze through that crack?" Olestradamus floated closer to the hole and stared through it. The pumpkin had not yet spoken; I only knew I had converted it by the fact that it no longer opened its mouth and spat lightning balls at me. This is how the scene happened: we'd been battling the pumpkin in a small room, Slink and Chomp and I, taking cover behind a stone couch built for some gigantic monster with a really hard butt. While the pumpkin floated to each corner of the room, firing lightning balls at us from every conceivable angle, we screamed out our spiel about the simulation. I almost bit my tongue in half when Slink shouted out, "Masssster sshall produce miracle! Then you sshall know!" It wasn't exactly like I could just close my eyes and envision a vase of flowers appearing in the middle of the room! What was I supposed to do, suddenly "remember" that the water in the fountain was really wine? Sure, kid, sure, that would be great . . . only it didn't work that way. I couldn't "remember" some- thing so totally different because my real memory got in the way. Maybe if I were one of Arlene's religious teachers, the ones she was forever reading about-- Bodhisatvas, something like that--maybe I could perfectly visualize a Fredworld where pumpkins were only beachballs, imps were crash-test dummies, and the pinkies all wore monkey suits and served cock- tails. But I was just Flynn Taggart, and I had too good a memory to play that game. Alas, I remembered just how bad-tempered the pumpkins were . . . and this one was proving how damned good my memory was with every electrical belch. I wished that somehow Sears and Roebuck had been transferred with me; I sure could have used those gigantic Magilla Gorilla arms to pop that overinflated monster. And then an astonishing thing happened. While the pumpkin was floating around the blue-glowing room, with flickering light from several shredded light tubes, it managed to wedge itself into the small space between the stone couch and a shred of illuminating panel on the ceiling. Trying to extricate itself, the pumpkin managed to rotate so that its mouth was pointed directly skyward. Then, in frustration, seeing us in the corner of its peripheral vision, so close, touching distance--the dweebie pumpkin fired a round . . . directly up into the powerful circuitry. The short-circuit in the light tube must have acted like a capacitor, because there was a violent spark-flinging feedback loop, and the pumpkin ended up taking a jolt that must have been a hundred times the amperage of its own lightning, judging by the acrid smell of ozone. The zap scrambled every neural circuit in the pumpkin's brain. It must have blown through all of its metaprogramming, letting me reach right down into the deepest part of its brain and convert it on the spot--like it had seen God directly, that's how it responded. I turned it, we became friends. Turns out the things can talk, they just don't have much to say (too full of hot air, hah hah). Their voices are at the extreme low end of the frequency range of a human ear. Olestradamus sounded like Darth Vader played on a tape running half-speed. But now I waited expectantly for Olestradamus to answer. After a long moment staring out the crack, it rotated to face us and sadly said, "N-n-no. C-c-c-ann- n-not fit." I wondered if I had the only pumpkin who stuttered, or if that were a racial characteristic of all pumpkins. Olestradamus rotated to return to its post and froze: standing in the doorway was a hell prince. The freaking thing had finally decided to go upstairs and check on the weird silence . . . and with amazing foresight, it had chosen the exact instant that the door was unguarded! The hell prince recovered before I did. It raised its arm and fired a blast of the greenish energy beam from a wrist launcher. But Olestradamus was faster! I wouldn't have believed it possible; I'd never seen a pumpkin move so quickly. But it was in between us and the hell prince fast enough to catch the blow meant for Arlene. Olestradamus screamed in rage and pain, and re- turned fire with the lightning balls. I turned back to Arlene. "Move your gorgeous ass, A.S.!" Unceremo- niously, I grabbed her by the butt and scruff of the neck and propelled her through the hole, dumping her face-first a dozen feet down into what sounded like squishy mud. "Slink, Whack, Chomp, Dodd--punch it, through the gap!" My apostles squeezed through the gap, which was almost wide enough for a spiney, and followed Arlene to the ground. I hoped to hell she had shaken off enough daze to roll put of the way before the two- hundred-kilogram spineys dropped on her head. I leveled my shotgun, we were at such close quar- ters, and tried to get a shot around Olestradamus, but the pumpkin was too fat, too round! It and the hell prince were going at it--well, I was going to say fang and claw, but I guess it was actually mouth and wrist launcher. God, but the two races must have hated each other. But why? I remembered seeing hell-prince bodies lining the walls of one pumpkin chamber and dead deflated pumpkins strewn about the floor of another hall owned by hell princes. I guessed the only two creatures that hated each other more were steam demons and the spidermind. They were both pretty torn up. Olestradamus blocked the entire passageway, and the hell prince effectively filled the doorway, which was a good thing, because I could just glimpse the second hell prince behind the first--but he couldn't get off a shot around his compatriot. "Come on, forget it!" I bellowed. "We're through. . . . Pull back and hide--convert your brothers!" But Olestradamus didn't hear; it was too busy teaching its mortal enemy what it meant to incur the wrath of a pumpkin. And then I heard the sound I most dreaded: the flatulent noise of an inflated pumpkin popping, meet- ing its airy doom. Olestradamus collapsed into a huddled heap of rubbery flesh on the floor. It belched no more lightning. We had our first martyr on the holy quest to punish the false ones. I stepped back into the shadows of the crack. The stupid hell prince had gotten so fixated on killing its race enemy that it had entirely forgotten about me and the rest of the crew. It staggered forward, obvi- ously ninety percent dead on its feet. I was happy to supply the missing tenth. As it crouched unsteadily over the body of our loving Olestradamus, the most intelligent inflated floater I had ever known, I raised my duck gun and unloaded a shell at point-blank range into the hell prince's tem- ple. I only wished I still had the beloved double- barreled shotgun I had carried through the entire campaign on Earth. I guess Olestradamus must have torn up the hell prince more than I thought. I expected the creature to be hurt; but hell, one just like it had taken a shot directly amidships with a rocket, for Pete's sake, and lived. But this one didn't; it dropped heavily, groaning . . . and ten seconds later, it was dead, green blood and gooshie brain goo dribbling out its head. The other came charging out, but it was too late; I stepped back once more, launching myself through the crack and down about five meters to the wet peat below. I fell hard, stunning myself. As I came back to consciousness a moment later, I found I had made a giant-size mud angel. The hell prince stood at the crack and tried to fire through it, but we ran under the overhanging piece of building, completely unhittable. Thank the devil our intrepid imps hadn't made the hole any bigger; the hell prince was only just barely too big to fit. Arlene steadied me, and I told the crew what had happened to poor Olestradamus. Arlene made the same point about him, her, it being a martyr, and I explained the concept to Slink for later processing to the other apostles. Above us was sky, horribly enough; we had come down more than two kilometers through the solid rock of Phobos . . . and here, at the bottom, directly overhead we saw the stars! It made no geographic sense, but, of course, it didn't have to--it was nothing but computer software, after all. Across the field, I saw the raised platform that was the Gate. I pointed. "Well, men, I hate to say it, but if we're going to find that power source, we'd better get the hell off Phobos." Arlene raised her eyebrows, then shrugged. "Well, sayonara, Phobos. And I was so looking forward to a more extended visit." Yeah, right, A.S. 17 Marines are like cats. They sleep lightly, half an eye peeled for charlie, sniffing the air like a huge carnivorous tiger that's always hungry. They can fall asleep standing up, in zero-g, during reentry, even while marching on the flipping parade ground. Don't ever try to sneak up on a Marine; Jesus the Anointed One walking on the water makes enough racket to jerk a Marine awake from a sound sleep. And when a Marine wakes up, he's on his feet in one fluid move- ment, rifle in hand, fully alert in less time than the fastest microprocessor takes to execute a single machine-code command. Except me, that is. Fly Taggart wakes up not remembering his own name, bleary and groggy, eye- lids glued shut with little pieces of sleep. I stagger like one of the Fred-worked zombies with a mouth full of cotton, inarticulately begging and pleading for some life-giving coffee. Usually it takes two recruits and a burly Pfc. to slap some sense into me in the morning. This time, it took a scared lance corporal. Arlene snapped me out of my coma by the simplest possible means: she started kicking me in the ribs, gently at first, getting harder and harder, until at last I blindly reached out a meaty ham-fist and caught her ankle in mid-kick. Without waking more than halfway, I jerked her off her feet and snarled something about not tickling a man when he's trying to get some Z's. Then I blinked awake. I sat up on a blue-specked dirt patch overgrown with clumps of sharp, brittle, blue grass that seemed to undulate, though I couldn't quite tell for sure. Arlene picked herself up, brushing the dirt from her uniform and rubbing her knee. "Damn you, Sarge!" she stage-whispered. "I was just trying to get up quietly." Taking my cue from the lance corporal, I kept my own voice low. "What the hell is going on? Last thing I remember, I was strapped to a table and the New- bies were trying to suck my brains out with a vacuum cleaner." I stared around. Arlene and I sat atop a small hill that faintly rippled. In the distance, I saw the human- built ship, the Disrespect to Death-Bringing Decon- structionists. It was even smaller than I imagined, utterly dwarfed by my memory of the Fred ship. I would still love to see them side by side, though. The Disrespect looked far sleeker and more elegant. In all other directions was a flat plain, broken only by immensely tall thin trees. They swayed so easily, though, in the faintest air current, that maybe they were just very tall grass. Blue was the color of the day. I knew for a fact that the desert we had walked across from the Fred ship was brownish gray, with not a trace of blue. I bent down and looked close at the ground: the blue specks that colored the entire terrain were actually tiny bugs! Almost microscopic insects swarming over everything--over me and Arlene, even. I cringed for a moment; I've always hated bugs. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, and I didn't feel any pain. Alas, even Ninepin had deserted us. I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone, the inadvertent little traitor. "Arlene--" "Yeah, I know. You can't even brush 'em off; they're too small. I figure they must eat microbes, so maybe they're not all bad." "Arlene, where the hell are we?" She shrugged. The blue critters in her bright red hair turned her head purple. "Near as I can deduce, Fly, the Resuscitators tried to suck our souls out; my nose still hurts like hell." Now that she mentioned it, I realized my own sinuses felt like some combat engineer was cranking a hand drill inside. "But we're still here--I think. Do you feel any different?" She shook her head. "Nada. Whatever kind of soul I had before, it sure feels the same now." Then she turned her head and squinted in the direction of the ship. "On the other hand, would we even know if it was changed?" I started to stand, but she put out a hand and held me down to a crouch. "Fly, they're down there, bottom of the hill." "Who?" "Your converts--the fourteen still left alive who didn't despair and get reinfected. Sears and Roebuck are down there, too--their bodies. The freaking New- bies killed them to shut them up--they wouldn't stop arguing about them using the machine, and then when the Res-men started sucking out your soul, S and R actually attacked them!" "Jesus! Kill anyone?" "I couldn't believe their strength. Their little legs spun like a gyroscope . . . you know how they chug so fast, their legs are just blurs? They dashed around the room at high velocity, breaking necks and crushing skulls with those powerful Magilla Gorilla arms of theirs. It was beautiful!" "How many did they get?" "At least eight Res-men murdered while they stu- pidly tried to aim their shots. You can't hit something moving that fast by aiming at it!" "You got to lead it." "Yeah, but which way? Sears and Roebuck kept changing direction so fast, I thought I was looking at a UFO! So finally one of the Res-men must've got an infusion of brains from the Newbie molecules infect- ing her, she grabbed a laser cannon and just held the trigger in while she swept the beam back and forth across the room, fast as she could. Did you know Klave can jump like mofos?" "They can probably run up the walls, with the speed they're capable of." "But she finally got them. Cut the boys down on the downbeat." I blinked. Man, I'm out for five minutes, and look what I miss! It was like going out for popcorn, and when you get back, the giant ants are already devour- ing Austin. "Christ, then what?" "Then they finished with you like nothing hap- pened, and they started on me, and I woke up here. I was lying next to you, but you were stiff as granite, even though your heart was beating and your lungs breathing. I figured you were brain-dead . . . and I guess that's what Tokughavita thought." "How do you know they're all down there?" "How do you think? I'm Marine Corps recon.... I crawled to the edge of that ridge and reconnoitered. They're all down there in a circle--looks like they're performing some sort of shamanic ritual. They're bobbing their heads like pigeons." I crawled as quietly as I could to the ledge she indicated and looked down on our converts. I recog- nized the overcaptain and several of the boys. "Sha- manic ritual? Jeez, Arlene, they're praying. Haven't you ever been to church, you heathen?" "That's what I said, a magical ritual." She squirmed up beside me. I couldn't help smiling, she felt so good. "Wonder what the hell they're praying for?" I stared at her, exasperated. "Probably for the safe return of our souls to our bodies, you moron." She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. "Man . . . are you trying to tell me that stuff works?" "Worked this time, I reckon. Come on, babe, let's go down and scare the hell out of the natives." We had nothing better to do, so we rose and descended majestically from the mount. When we were almost down, one of the converts shouted and pointed; his mouth moved, but no words came out. In three seconds, the rest of them had scrambled to their feet and were staring silently, stunned and awed. I stopped where I was and spread my arms. "Be- hold," I declared. "I have risen from the dead. Let this be the reward for your unwavering faith!" I felt a prickling in the back of my neck. I didn't dare look up.... I knew what it was: God the Angry Father was glaring at me for my blasphemy. But it was in a good cause! We had to keep their level of faith high, so if there were any molecular Newbies floating around, they couldn't get a toehold. Somehow, strong faith, faith in anything, seemed to stop them. Maybe it created some sort of chemical imbalance? Hell, that was for the college creeps to figure out. I just wanted to fight the bastards! Toku and the Converts--didn't I see them at Lollapalooza?--swarmed us like locusts on a wheat field, and Arlene kept pushing them back so they wouldn't mob me. "Chill, chill, you clowns! Get your asses back over the line--I want you to stay at least four paces from me, or I pull out the nutcracker!" The two of us got them simmered down enough for Tokughavita to tell us what happened after Arlene and I were killed. "Didn't know what to do," he explained, turning up his hands. "Said you were dead, souls gone. Believed--saw no signs of life in eyes!" "I don't get it," I said. "Did the thing work, or didn't it?" "Took bodies down from tables. Resuscitators gave them to us, said they were meat only, no further use. Cast us out, said we were unfixable, ruined. Called faith ruin and fatal flaw in operating system." I smiled. I could just imagine the Res-men's frustra- tion. Suddenly, they were locked out of what had been their comfortable home, the human mind, for the last God knows how long! If I were any judge of character, the bastards were really running scared now. "So they're still in there?" I nodded at the ship. "Yes, master, still present, but cannot get at them. Activated all ship's defenses." "So he drove out the man." It was a sweet voice. . . . "And he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." I turned to Arlene, nonplussed. "I didn't know you knew the Bible." "I, uh, I don't. I just know that verse. I must have heard it in a movie or something." "Activated launch sequence," continued the over- captain. "Ship launches in thirty minutes. Should get to cover, otherwise we'll be burned black." The other remnants of the Fearsome Flies grabbed all their stuff and bundled it up, but I caught myself wondering: if Arlene and I hadn't awakened just then, would these goofs have sat right there, while the ship launched and burned them alive? I winced at the thought; they had faith, but I obviously needed to work a bit on the common-sense aspect of religion. We stood over the bodies of Sears and Roebuck. From where I stood, the wounds didn't look all that bad . . . but where I stood was a million klicks away from the medical lab on the Disrespect. Yet we couldn't just leave them there! If their bodies were burned, not only would their spirits be irrevocably lost, left to wander the barren dunes and blue bug- covered plains, but they would feel every microsec- ond of the incineration . . . and they would re- member. "Jeez, Fly, that was a hell of an act of bravery on S and R's part. I mean, here we are, hundreds of light- years from the Klave homeworld. They must have known the odds were slim to none that we'd be able to resuscitate them." Arlene crouched, staring cau- tiously at Sears and Roebuck, unlikeliest of heroes. An idea was starting to germinate in my brain. "Toku, you guys got a hovercar or landrover or something down here?" He looked puzzled, scratching his chin. The hirsute overcaptain desperately needed a shave; he was start- ing to look like a chimpanzee balancing on its hind legs. "Don't know. Different department." Yeesh, here we went again with the ultraindividual- ism! I gathered them around us in a circle. "All right, you proto-jarheads, did any of you drive a vehicle off that ship?" Silence, many heads shaking. Arlene put her hand on my arm. "Excuse me, Sarge, you're not asking that right. May I?" I waited a moment, eyes flicking back and forth, then I grunted assent. "Dudes," she began, "did any of you see a vehicle on the dirt here?" Instantly, half a dozen hands went up. The crew- men started talking all at once, but they quickly compared stories and pointed along the axis of the ship, heading aft. "About three kilometers," ex- plained the overcaptain. I wanted to strangle the entire lot of literal doof- uses! Drive it off the ship . . . Jeez! I glanced at Arlene, who said, "Come on, Fly, you know which of us is the better runner." "Take off, kiddo, and for God's sake, make it the fastest 3 K you've ever run. Wait, which of you is really fast?" Every hand shot skyward. I rolled my eyes. These guys were worse than the natives on the island where everyone either always lies or always tells the truth! "Look, I know each of you is the fastest SOB in the outfit ... so every man point at the second fastest dude." I had fourteen converts: six pointed at one guy, four pointed at another, and the other two pointed at each other. The two winners were startled by the sudden attention and didn't point at anyone. "Right, you and you, follow Corporal Sanders. Move out!" I sat down to wait, trying my damnedest to look completely calm and patient. In reality, I was about ready to chew the heads off a bag of ten-penny nails. I was still waiting in exactly the same posture, having forced myself to be utterly still, when Arlene and the boys "drove" up twenty-one minutes later in a hovercar. By then, everyone was nervously sneaking peeks at his watch--except Overcaptain Tokughavita, the only man with utter, absolute faith in me. He knew I wouldn't let them down, even if I had no control whatsoever over the search for the land cart! The cart was pretty similar to the one I'd used on Phobos a couple of centuries ago, except it was big enough to collect a few tons of samples. The cart was huge and blue: ten meters from stem to stern and two meters wide, with a foldable gate around the bed. It liked to sit about six meters above the deck, maintain- ing altitude with some sort of air-jet arrangement, instead of the fans that levitated the land carts on Mars. The engine looked complex, and it was totally exposed, not even a cowling; I couldn't make head or tail out of the guts. It was nothing like the fan-levs I had taken apart in the Pendleton motor pool a few years and a couple of stripes ago. An engineer named Abumaha was watching the ship, and he announced that the tail had begun to smoke. That meant we had all of three minutes before the ship blasted into orbit. "All hands, throw everything onto the land sled, don't worry about the order--move!" Arlene and I took personal charge of the bodies of Sears and Roebuck, carefully laying them atop a nice soft pile of clothing and coats. The boys (including two girls) leapt aboard, just as the tail of the ship suddenly turned too bright to look at with the naked eye. The Res-men had fired up the fusion reactor. "Arlene," I said softly, "get us the f out of here, okay?" She jammed on the throttle, and I was hurled to the deck. One crewman almost tumbled out the back, but Tokughavita caught him by the hair and the scruff of his neck and hauled him back aboard. One minute later, we were already half a klick away . . . and the darkening sky suddenly lit up as bright as a dozen suns. The Disrespect was launching toward orbit. We ran fast, faster, but the Shockwave caught up with us nonetheless. It rocked the cart so viciously that Arlene backed off the throttle and pulled up to a halt. Good thing. With the second jolt, I was hurled out of the land cart! I hit the ground heavily, too stunned to stand, but not too stunned to laugh at Arlene's attempts to settle the hovercraft onto the ground to pick me up. The ground shimmied and shook beneath me, so I stayed on my butt, my back turned to a fusion reaction bright enough to burn out my retinas in a millisecond. At last, she got the thing onto the ground, scooped me inside, and headed away again. Behind us, the ship cleared the lower atmosphere, and we stopped hearing the roar of exploding gases around the engine nozzle, hot as a stellar core. "Where to, O Exalted One?" Arlene asked. "Where do you think? Back to the Fred ship so we can repair Sears and Roebuck. If any two can figure out a way off this rock, they can. And Arlene . . . change drivers, huh? I wouldn't mind getting there intact." 18 "No, no, saw them! Saw you in computer." Overcaptain Tokughavita was struggling to convince Arlene and me that the Res-man soul-sucker really had worked as advertised. "But we're not in the freaking computer," ex- plained my lance with amazing patience, for her. "We're sitting in this stupid hovercraft, listening to your drivel about us being sucked out of our bodies and plopped into a computer." Tokughavita groaned, leaning his head back and raising his arms in perhaps the most prototypical human gesture of them all--cosmic frustration. "Then who did see? Saw both of you in computer, fighting monsters right out of book." "Book? What book? What the hell are you--" "Knee-Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth," I answered for the man. "The books that Jill wrote. They're talking about the monsters that the Freds genetically engineered for us on Phobos and Deimos--you know, the spiney imps, steam demons, spiderminds, boneys. All the things that made life worth killing." Arlene stared at me, mouth open. "We were fighting steam demons? In the computer?" The wind was harsh but not strong enough to blow me down again. The driver had cut the speed, now that the Res-men had lifted off in the Disrespect. The guy was a convert named Blinky Abumaha who used to be a fusion technician, damned useful if we were ever going to get off the rock. I stood up, facing toward the front, my face rubbed raw by the mini- gale, kicking up sand so fine it felt like a bad sunburn as it pocked my skin. "Arlene, leave him alone. I think Toku is telling the honest truth. . . . The damned thing really did work." "Come again, Fly-boy? Maybe when you fell out, you landed on your head." "It really did pull our soul out . . . but the Newbies, who are driving this technology revolution, they don't know any kind of soul but their own--the standard soul in the galaxy. They only know the so-called biological soul, like Sears and Roebuck have, the kind that sticks around like a ghost in the body even after death." "You saying we have a different kind of soul?" "It makes sense, doesn't it? A.S., we're the only creatures in the galaxy who can die . . . and we're the only creatures who have anything like faith. Of course our soul works differently!" "So you're saying when they used the machine . . ." Arlene faded away. I turned back, and she had her hand over her mouth, eyes wide behind her goggles. "I think you figured it out," I said softly. "Fly, the machine duplicated our souls! There really is another version of Fly and Arlene out there, and they've got us back fighting the Fred monsters again. Oh Christ, those poor--ah, I was about to say--" "Those poor souls. Go ahead and say it, A.S. It's literally true." She spared me the echo, and I couldn't get more than a grunt out of her all the way back to the Fred ship. In fact, my lance seemed lost in thought, not even staring at the fascinating scenery, klick after klick of barren gray-brown desert, the monotony broken only by sand dunes that flowed visibly across the surface, blown by the wind. The sand was so fine, it acted like a fluid . . . like ocean waves in slow motion. "Bullet for your thoughts," I said, as the gigantic Fred ship, torn into pieces by the crash landing, hove into view. "You can't figure it out?" "I'm not a mind reader, Corporal." "You can't add the Newbie device to Albert and get five?" "Five? Five what?" She shook her head, and I felt like a total idiot. Obviously, she was seeing something, but damned if I could guess what. "Come on, Arlene, you're the sci-fi gal here, not me!" She put her hand familiarly on my knee. "Later, Fly. Okay?" I tried not to think of her hand sliding farther up my leg, but my body refused to cooperate. She must have somehow felt my mood; she removed her hand and snuck a quick glance southward. "Jesus, Fly, what's got into you?" "Just thinking about the shellback initiation on the Bova," I lied. "When you came out in the pasties and g-string, you really gave me a woodie." "Really? Cool." She smiled, then chuckled. "Re- member the look on Albert's face? I thought he was going to call me the Whore of Babylon! 'Get thee behind me, Satan!'" "Hmph. You ought to quote the real Bible, if you have to quote something." "You mean the Catholic Bible?" "Imprimatur, nihil obstat. The very same." "All right, so how does the, ahem, real Bible say it?" "It's not in the real Bible, of course." Arlene rolled her eyes and muttered some dark blasphemy. And then we were there, at the gaping mouth of the Fred ship, the aft end of the final forward piece. Blinky Abumaha drove the hovercraft right inside the crack, forward as far as he could through the wrecked empty cargohold where we had whiled away many simple hours training and shooting at imaginary Freds. Then he parked the car, and we all piled off and started hoofing it forward, "through caverns measureless to man." We pulled short at the first medical lab we found. During the time we had spent on the ship, the weeks heading toward Fredworld, then the weeks we fol- lowed the spoor of the Newbies to this barren place, Sears and Roebuck had finally, reluctantly, showed us a little bit about working the various machines and devices. I wondered if they realized that their own lives would someday depend upon how well they taught, how closely we observed? We slapped their bodies up on a pair of tables, and I took my first really close look since we found them dead in the circle of apostles. One of them--don't ask me which--had a deep but cauterized beam wound across the chest. Cause of death: severe trauma to the left heart, severing of the greater and lesser aortae. The other Klave in the pair had beheld a beam in his own eye. (I had no idea whether anyone else had picked up a mote.) The thin beam fired straight through his retina into the head. "You know," I said, pointing at the wound, "that shouldn't have been fatal." Arlene looked incredulous, so I explained it to her. "Klave don't keep their brains in their heads; it's under the stomach, here." I tapped the point of the triangle formed by the Magilla Gorilla body, just above the stubby legs that could work so fast the human eye couldn't even see them. "Well," she said cautiously, "did he maybe die because the other one died?" I shrugged, nodded. "I can't imagine one dead, one alive; maybe they couldn't either." I felt for pulses in all the most likely spots. Neither gorilla was alive by any test I could think up on the spot. "Come on, you apes," I said, "you wanna live forever?" Only Arlene laughed. I guessed that two hundred years hadn't treated Mr. Heinlein kindly. We folded up the massive arms of the Klave with the heart and aorta damage and shoved him into one of the ma- chines, the one that was supposed to repair the gross physical damage in major organs. If we could get them up and relatively functional, they could proba- bly take over the finer points of surgery themselves, stuff like the eye damage and the numerous burns and ribbon lacerations. The machine looked like a huge chest of drawers, with the bottom drawer big enough for a Fred, which meant nearly enough for a Klave. We managed to stuff the hairy gorilla into the thing anyway, but I was almost at the point of severing one of the arms and letting Sears or Roebuck reattach it later. Fortunately, it didn't come to that. S and R might be totally ice when it came to mutilating bodies, but that wasn't taught in Light Drop Combat Tactics School. I twisted the dials in the upper left drawer to indicate "circulatory system"--the Freds used visual icons, fortunately, since I didn't speak Fredish-- while Arlene cycled through a seemingly endless cata- log of different species, looking for Klave. "Jeez, Fly, there's no end to them! It's like that party scene at the end of that stupid movie, The Pandora Point, where six million different aliens swarm the place, and Milt Kreuger has to make them all cocktails he never heard of." She almost selected one version, but I pointed out that the most distinguishing characteristic of the Klave was that they were always paired. The icon she found showed only a single entity--"you can't tell me the Freds don't know that much about the Klave after six million years of warfare!" So she continued the cycle, and eventually she found the correct species-- as I predicted, even the icon showed them doubled. "Okay, we ready to rock 'n' roll?" I asked. "Hit it, Tiger." I took a deep breath and punched the button marked with a large up-arrow; it turned from blue to yellow. The devil machine began grinding and scrap- ing. I shouldn't have been surprised. It was Fred technology, after all, so of course it sounded like a brake failure at the end of the universe. When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the Jacob's Ladder stopped sparking, the go button turned back to blue. A pale wisp of smoke curled from the bottom drawer, and I heard a muffled yelp. Arlene and I wrestled the drawer open. Inside was a living Klave, blinking rapidly and trying to focus his eyes. Arlene unlatched the side of the drawer, and either Sears or Roebuck tumbled out onto the deck. The overcaptain and the other converts stepped backward at the sight of the mighty Klave. Evidently, they had never seen one this close before we showed up, and they were still nervous about the massive arms, barrel chest, and tiny squirming legs. The patient staggered to his feet, staring around in confu- sion as if looking for something he had lost. He spied it and ran to the other table, making peculiar whimpering noises deep in his throat. He ignored me and everybody else; he had eyes only for the other member of his pair. I started to worry. If this was how Sears (why not?) was going to behave, how were we going to ask him to repair Roebuck? Then a miracle happened. I was getting pretty used to them by then. Sears (if it were he) stared so hard at Roebuck's still form that the latter suddenly sighed, coughed up some blood, and spontaneously came back to life. "Well," I said, "it makes sense in a perverse sort of way: he pined away from loneliness, so now he comes back to life for company." We withdrew, all of us, and allowed the Klave a couple of hours alone together. Overcaptain Tokug- havita kept us riveted with a blow-by-blow account of our mighty battle against the Fred-designed genetic monsters for control of Earth.... I got utterly bored after the first five minutes. Either Jill got everything wrong or the overcaptain's reputation for a steel-trap memory was a PR scam! But Arlene found it fascinat- ing, and respect for an officer, even one who thought I was the Messiah, forced me to sit quietly while he talked and talked and talked and talked. When he finally finished, Sears and Roebuck were fully cured and together again, and I was damned well informed on the subject of my own exploits a couple of centur- ies before. I called a huge conference of all eighteen of us. Sears and Roebuck began formally introducing them- selves; I watched with great amusement while they kept isolating every possible pair of converts (182 possibilities, according to Arlene) and reintroducing themselves, only to be utterly confused when one of the pair would insist they had just met. But I called a halt, so we wouldn't spend the next six years on intros. "Boys--and girls, sorry you three--we're stuck on this rock, and there are two huge problems relating to that: first, unless we want to die here, we have to rescue ourselves; but, second, much more important, we have a mission to accomplish--we have to get after the Resuscitators and stop them from invading Earth, or, failing that, defend Earth from their inva- sion. Any suggestions?" Everyone looked at his brother. At last, Sears and Roebuck gingerly raised a massive arm each. "Um, I can get I know a way up to orbit, but not farther there." "How can you get us up to orbit?" asked Arlene, my personal Doubting Thomas. "You're not saying you can get this pile of dung to fly, are you?" "Certainly not! But I can get I know a way up to orbit, and it's with the escape-ship pod." I frowned. "You mean there's an escape pod on board? Powerful enough to boost us to orbit?" Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, possibly "laughing" at my poor English. Klave were very arrogant about their language ability. But Arlene was stuck in her cynical mood. "What the hell good does that do us? So we can get to orbit-- yippie ki-yay. Then what?" Overcaptain Tokughavita leapt up. "Battle fleet! Can take battle fleet from People Armed to Repel Invasion!" "People armed what? What is that?" "Is moon of this planet; moon is artificial, contains many and many interstellar ships." "Jesus Christ, Toku, why didn't you bother to mention this before?" "No use," he explained. "Fleet inside moon, not on planet surface, like us. Irrelevant." I stood for a long moment, simmering. When I spoke, it was the cold, quiet, reasonable tone of voice that sent shivers up and down Arlene's back. She knew what it meant. "Men, I'm going outside, find a steel ventilation grate, and kick it to shreds. I'll be back shortly." It wasn't just that latest round of idiocy; it was the entire setup. Was there ever anyone more put-upon than I? I found the grating, raised my boot, and gave it about six killer gruesome whacks, like Lizzie Borden with the ax. When I finally limped inside, I felt much better. When I returned, feeling cleansed, I issued the necessary orders: "Sears and Roebuck, get that escape pod ready. Toku, Abumaha, you guys know how to unlock the ships and fire up the engines? Good, get your trash ready, then assist the Klave, if they need it. Arlene, ah, keep an eye on everyone else." "Gee, thanks a lump, Sarge." "That's the price of being a junior non-com. When you get everything ready and you're set to go, you'll find me in the forward engine room, looking for Fred bodies to kick around." The Freds, it turned out, were not as crazy as their architecture suggested. They were very protective of their own safety, like the other races of the galaxy who expected lifespans in the hundreds of thousands or millions of years. In fact, they built life pods into their ships every few hundred meters! We had our choice of not one but three different escape pods, even in the section of Fred ship remaining intact. Sears and Roebuck led the expedition along the outermost corridor of the ship. It was a royal pain: the Fred boat was never meant to sit on the surface of a planet; they figured it would always remain in orbit . . . hence, there was no provision for walking on what amounted to the ceiling of the ship! Everything on the ventral side was smashed beyond repair, of course, by S and R's creative landing, and the dorsal side was all upside down. We jumped and banged at the hatch-open lever for what seemed like forever, and I ended up slipping and cracking my kneecap against a dead light tube that was supposed to descend from the ceiling, but now stuck up from the deck. Finally, S and R reluctantly hoisted Arlene up high, holding her face up against the hatch with their Popeye arms, while she worked all the crap to cycle the now-useless airlock. We hoisted ourselves up and inside. It was a hell of a tight fit; it was meant for about five Freds and was stuffed like a comedy sketch with eighteen of us (including two gigantic Klave, much bigger than the Freds even in their seed-depositing stage). We swarmed over one another like termites; now, if it had been me and seventeen girls, I could get into the possibilities. But I detested making inadvertent con- tact with other males, so I pushed myself into a corner and just observed. Sears and Roebuck clumped up to the driver's seat, walking over people like they were rocks across a stream. They both squeezed into the side-by-side pilot and co-pilot chairs and started flipping levers and twisting dials. The interior was very podlike: spherical, uncom- fortable, dark and metallic, stuffed with nav equip- ment. It smelled like a mixture of machine oil and-- sour lemons! Shades of Phobos and the zombies. One entire end was taken up by a huge bulge poking halfway to the center of the pod--probably the engine cowling. "Preparing yourself for taking immediately off!" Sears and Roebuck warned--and without giving us even a moment to do so, they pushed the button. The whole freaking pod exploded. That's what it felt like when it detached from the ship--a huge gut- wrenching explosion. People and gear flew every- where, and something really hard creased my cheek. Arlene screamed, but it was more a yelp of surprise than pain or agony. We rose like a bullet. As soon as we cleared the ship and started to fall back, Sears and Roebuck rotated the pod and kicked on the chemical rocket engines. They accelerated at only a couple g's, enough to get us moving. My God, but they were loud! My entire body pounded, thumping at the resonant frequency of the frigging engines. I couldn't hear a thing--the noise was beyond hearing. I plugged my ears (everyone did), but it didn't help much. Then the Klave flipped on the big boys, the fusion drive, and we roared away from the desert planet at an even eleven g's. That was the end of my reportage. The humans all passed out, and by the time Sears and Roebuck revived us, we were coasting in zero-g-- my favorite!--in a mini-Hohmann transfer orbit to- ward eventual rendezvous with the tiny artificial moon. Sears and Roebuck piloted like apes possessed, cheerfully informing the assembled multitude that "we should make able the moon just before out of running of reaction mass! Good damn chance!" Their quiet understated confidence was starting to keep me awake nights. 19 We hit the moon at "dawn." Dawn is a location on the moon, not a time. It's tide-locked, so each lunar day is an entire lunar cycle of fourteen days; you can't see the terminator creep, as you can on Earth if you stand on a mountain and look east across a plain (at the equator, the Earth's surface spins at about sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, a thou- sand miles per hour: circumference of the Earth divided by twenty-four). But the moon, smaller than Deimos, had an atmosphere! In the two hundred years since we'd been gone--or a hundred and sixty, actually; the moon was built forty years before and named People Armed to Repel Invasion, henceforth PARI--we humans cracked the secret of the gravity generators we found on Phobos and Deimos, the one final secret of the First Ones that no one else had figured out in millions of years of trying . . . but was it our achievement, or the Newbies'? When did they infect us? PARI had a gravitational acceleration of about 0.4 g, enough to hold a thin breathable atmosphere. God only knew who built the original gravity generators around Sol and the other star systems; it was one of the biggest mysteries about which the Deconstruc- tionists and Hyperrealists were fighting--somehow the cause of the split, or one of the causes, if we could believe Sears and Roebuck! But still, neither Arlene nor I had a clue why . . . something about schools of lit-crit and eleven freaking story fragments. The damned moon was deserted, like a ghost min- ing town in Gold Rush country. "Where are all the people?" I asked. Tokughavita answered, unaware of the volumes his response spoke. "Joined ship when arrived, left with us to surface." He had just admitted that the humans abandoned their post! There was only one reason they would have done that: the crew of the Disrespect had infected them . . . or vice versa. We had to walk slowly across PARI. The atmos- phere was about what it would be three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest, and even a slow walk left me panting and dizzy. The apostles weren't bothered; they said they had been "rebuilt" for greater lung capacity, among other things. Arlene and I exchanged a look. So that was why we'd had such a damned hard time trying to take down Overcaptain Tokughavita! I started to wonder uneasily what their lifespan was: they were super-strong, probably immune to most normal nonintelligent diseases, and engineered to survive on alien worlds . . . and they worshipped me as a God? I hoped I never disappointed them. Men don't take kindly to fallen idols. It felt bizarre to be walking across an artificial moon the size of a cue ball, feeling gravity almost half that of Earth. Directly ahead a couple of klicks was a tall tower. Only the top half was visible over the horizon. The rest of the surface of the moon was a jagged series of black and white stripes, like digital zebra paint; I couldn't see any other structures--but, of course, the entire moon of PARI was one gigantic "structure." We made it to the tower from our touchdown point in just over three hours. The tower was actually three towers connected by numerous spans of metal ribbon--bridges I sincerely hoped I didn't have to pass, since they had no visible guardrails and were plenty far enough up to kill me if I fell, even in the low gravity. "We, ah, don't have to climb up there, do we?" I asked Tokughavita. "Not up," he insisted. "Going down. Going down to battle fleet." "Fly," Arlene said, "you know what those towers are? They're elevators! You can ride them up out of the atmosphere, or most of it.... Am I right, Blinky?" She and the Blink-meister had gotten quite chum- my lately; I was already getting nervous. "Yeah, yeah, right up!" he agreed with sickening enthusiasm. "Go up, fast, fast, make nose bleed!" "Some other time, kids." I felt like my own father twenty years ago. We reached the base of the middle tower, and Tokughavita walked up and--I swear to God!-- pushed the down button to summon the elevator, like it was a high-rise in Manhattan instead of a tiny artificial moon orbiting an alien rock. We waited thirty-five minutes by my watch, while the floor counter slowly climbed through the negative numbers toward zero. When it reached that magic middle, the monstrous doors before us, big enough to drive an upright Delta-19 rocket through on its rolling launch pad, cranked slowly open to admit our party of eighteen. I felt distinctly underdressed; I should at least have been wearing a ten-story robot construction virtu-suit. Tokughavita scanned the array of buttons and finally pushed the one labeled C, with a little icon of a dot in the center of a circle--core, I presumed. My adrenaline level skyrocketed just before we plum- meted. We started descending slowly, but within a minute, we were accelerating downward so close to the gravi- tational pull that our weight slacked off to about one percent of normal, just enough to keep the soles of our boots touching the elevator floor. We dropped sicken- ingly for close to forty-five minutes, so I guess the elevator hadn't been all the way down when we rang for it. At last, we started slowing hard. I was almost kicked to my butt, and Arlene actually did hit the deck with a thud. It was three g's at least! We stopped hard and fast in about five minutes, but we'd been toughened by our ship travels and we didn't black out. Sears and Roebuck took the acceleration in stride, literally: they kept pacing up and back, impatient to see the "battle fleet" that Tokughavita talked about. I figured this must have been close to the normal gravity for a Klave. When the door cranked open, my breath caught in my throat. Before us was a mind-numbingly vast hollow sphere in the center of the moon, so wide in diameter I couldn't begin even to guess its size. It was crisscrossed by hundreds of thousands of striped tubes--catwalks, presumably, connecting different areas. "Beware," said the overcaptain. "Is zero-g beyond elevator. Center of mass." A tube beckoned directly ahead of us. I bravely led the troops forward, my stomach pulling its usual flippy-spinny trick as soon as we left the gravity zone and entered weightlessness. Tokughavita wasn't kidding about the human battle fleet. There were dozens of ships strewn around the inside of the hollow moon, too many to get an accurate estimate. Some were as short as the ship that just took off; others were longer than the Fred ship we'd hijacked to Fredworld. The nearest was about one and a half kilometers long, I reckoned. Blinky Abumaha pointed at it and said, "Damn fast ship that is, nearly fast as ship we left." "Nearly?" I got worried. I knew what that meant. He nodded vigorously. "Damn fast. Get us to Earth only twenty days behind infested ones, counting ac- celeration time, if leave now." Twenty days! I figured that meant about a two-week acceleration up to nearly lightspeed and deceleration to match Earth velocity, assuming the Disrespect could get up to speed and back down in three or four days each way. Jeez, a lot can happen in twenty days; to the Newbies, it may as well be forty years, at the speed they evolved. "All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's haul butt over to the ship and stomp down on the kick-starter." It was an easy "trek" to the nearest ship, provided you had a boatload of patience. Fortunately, that's one lesson you learn double-time in the Corps. No matter how fast we get our butts out of the rack and into our combats, pull on about a ton and a half of armor, lock and load enough ammo to sink a medium-size guided-missile frigate, and bounce out to the helo pad for a quick barf-bump to the rocket, sure as hell some 0-6 forgot his coffee cup or bis inflatable seat cushion, and we have to stand by six or seven hours while everyone from second-louie to short colonel turns the camp upside down trying to find it. You know how to move as quickly as possible along a zero-g tube, don't you? You line yourself up as best you can right down the centerline and give a shove off'n one end. Then you wait. If you're lucky, you get a good long trajectory down the tube until you hit a side wall. If you didn't aim too well, you crash in a couple of dozen meters. Either way, you have to find something solid to brace against and do it again. The stripes along the tubes turned out to be metal bands with footrests to kick off from; somebody was think- ing ahead . . . probably a non-com; an officer wouldn't have the brains. I got used to seeing Pyrex glide past me on all sides, like I was a fish swimming through a glass sewer pipe. It only took us a couple of hours for the first guy, me, to make it all the way to the ship, but we were all spread out, and it took another thirty minutes to get back into a clump. I won't say into a formation, because the "Jetsons"-era clowns under my command didn't even know the meaning of the word. Turned out our little "reindeer games" on the Fred ship were good training. Arlene was especially grate- ful; she shot me a look of thanks when she cleared the transfer tube as "tail-end Charlene." This really wasn't her forte. The ship we picked was long and strangely thin. I worried a bit about feeling cramped since we would be in it for five months. It was shaped basically like a dog bone, a klick and a half long but only a hundred meters in diameter; the endcaps were bulbous, giving the ship that "bone" look: one was the thruster, the other the feeder turbine for the scooped hydrogen. Damn thing was cramped inside. The corridors were mostly crawlways, and they were kept at 0.1 g, according to Blinky Abumaha. The cabins faced off the crawlways, all of them long and squeezed, like a bundle of pencils. Well, what the hell; we were beggars here, shouldn't get choosy. Inside, pale teal predominated with orange trim--a decorator's nightmare. Arlene liked it for some weird reason, possibly just because it was about as far as could be from a Fred ship. I discovered that if I wore red sunglasses, they matted out the blue of the walls, making the effect odd but bearable. We dogpiled into the place and started examining controls, instru- ments, and engines. Six of the fourteen had flown one of these types of ships before, and between them and the networks, we got the engines hot. The only problem was we didn't have anywhere to go! I couldn't see a hole in any direction--and neither could the radar. I grabbed Tokughavita by his uniform lapel. "Okay, smart guy, how do we get out of this thing?" The overcaptain rubbed his chin. "Was afraid would ask question. Not sure, must consult mil-net." He typed away at a console for a while, frowning deeper and deeper. By the time another hour had passed, I had to forcibly restrain him from ripping the terminal out with his bare hands and heaving it through the computer screen. The damned thing was command and menu driven--and Tokughavita didn't know the query command and couldn't find it on any of a hundred menus! Arlene and I went on a hunt, trying to find the rest of our crew, who had scattered to the four winds, pawing through every system on the ship to find the stuff they knew. I snagged eight and Arlene got the rest, but no one had a clue where a tunnel was or how to open it up if we found it. They had all flown on these sorts of ships before, but none of my platoon was a starship pilot! I cursed the miserable Res-men for not being soft-hearted enough to leave us Ninepin at least! Traitor or not, he was a useful font of intel. I dismissed most of them and called a conference with Arlene, Tokughavita, the engineer Abumaha, and Sears and Roebuck. "Boys--and you, too, A.S.-- there must be some kind of emergency exit here, just in case the worst-case scenario happened, and we had to deploy everything on hand immediately. Is there a set of instruction manuals, help systems, officer- training course . . . anything?" Everyone shook his head. "I haven't seen a damned thing," Arlene said, "and I've been looking." "The designers wouldn't probably let such datums loose in the ships, in the event to enemy capture," Sears and Roebuck suggested with entirely inappro- priate cheer. I guessed they were happy so long as no one was shooting at them, or likely to do so in the foreseeable future. We kicked it around a bit, and everyone agreed we were all ignoramuses. Very productive meeting. Now I knew why officers got the big bucks. But something had been tickling the back of my brain through the whole useless disaster, something somebody had said. I ran back the conversations in my mind . . . and abruptly I realized it was something I'd said: I'd mentioned Ninepin. If only we had him--he knew everything, though his loyalty was a bit questionable! "Arlene, you remember what Ninepin said about how long it took to build him?" "Now that you bring it up, I think it was something ridiculous, like four or five hours, wasn't it? Fly, you're not thinking of trying to build another one . . . are you?" We stared at each other, struck by the same thought. "Toku, you remember that big green ball that followed us around?" I asked. "What was that?" From across the table, the overcaptain, who had zoned out and was looking out a porthole and picking his teeth, jerked back to attention. "Big green ball? Oh, yes, was Data Pastiche. Had it installed, hoped would pick up information about ancient human culture." "Yeah, yeah, and it reported back to the Res-men about us. Are these Data Pastiches common? Would we find one on this ship, maybe?" Tokughavita shook his head. "Never saw before. Was prototype. Never used, don't know how." "Who would know?" "Man who built." I sighed in exasperation. "Well, who else, since the man who built it isn't here?" Tokughavita looked puzzled. "Is here. Is Abumaha Blinky. Didn't know?" Arlene had been half listening, bored as the rest of us, but she jumped into the conversation with both feet. "Abumaha built the thing? Our Abumaha?" "Our Abumaha, Sanders-san." Tokughavita slicked back a patch of hair that insisted upon curling around forward. I leaned over and shook him awake, describing Ninepin, but Blinky didn't have the faintest memory of building it! "Must jolly well have been under spell of Resuscitators, pip-pip." I spread my hands helplessly. "Well, did you take any notes? Draw schematics?" Blinky's face brightened. "Maybe, maybe, Jack! Kept data stack from way back, maybe used from force of habitat." He disappeared, reappeared ten minutes later in high excitement. "Yes, yes, is on nodule, damn good lucky!" Sears and Roebuck seized the interval in between to escape with their lives. I gestured to the engineering lab and we sealed Blinky Abumaha inside. The other five who knew engines prepped the ship. Nearly a day passed, but there still was no word from Blinky. When I knocked, he muttered some- thing incoherent and refused to come out, not even to eat. Sears and Roebuck had completely disappeared into the bowels of the ship--God only knows how they even fit through the passageways!--but they must have found a cabin far away, because we didn't see them again for the rest of the trip. The ship was fully set, waiting for the command, when finally the scuzz emerged, rank and disheveled, and rolling out behind him was . . . "Ninepin!" Arlene and I shouted simultaneously. The little bowling ball was crystal-translucent this time, not green at all. It said nothing, merely rolled on past, right over my toe, to a console that controlled the compression field for the hydrogen--and inciden- tally interfaced the ship's mil-net. Ninepin II bumped into the bottom of the console again and again until I picked it up (it allowed me to do so) and placed it directly onto one of the nodule sockets. Ninepin glowed brightly for nearly an hour. "He's downloading the entire freaking ship!" Ar- lene whispered in awe. Then it stopped and announced, in a peevish, irksome voice, "Have finished inloading. Please re- place on deck." I picked him up and put him down, squatted over him, and started the interrogation. "Ninepin, do you know where the tunnels are to escape from this boulder?" "No," he said succinctly. "We can't get out?" Arlene demanded. "You mean we're stuck here forever?" "Can get out, not stuck. Not tunnel, emergency escape separation." I leaned over the ball. "Okay, Ninepin, listen closely. I have more seniority than anyone else in the service, so I'm in charge of PARI. I need to know how to activate the emergency escape separation. Now how do I do it?" Everyone--all the humans and Sears and Roebuck were still MIA--leaned close to hear the answer, but Ninepin wanted to verify my authority. "Taggart Flynn, born 132 BPGL; joined service 113 BPGL; time in grade, 263 years. Seniority confirmed. Rank: sergeant; command nonauthorized, higher ranking personnel present." We all turned to Overcaptain Tokughavita, who turned red under the attention. He cleared his throat, looking at me. "Toku," I said, "why don't you give me the au- thority?" He inhaled deeply, looking from one anxious face to another. Then he seemed to deflate, nodding in acquiescence. "By powers vested in me by Commons of People's State of Earth," he intoned, "hereby commission Taggart Flynn Lieutenant of Citizens of State." My mouth dropped open, but Tokughavita wasn't finished. "Hereby . . . resign own commission and resign Party membership." He looked defeated, but determined. The scream heard across the galaxy was my own. Despite it all--though I smashed the idea down a dozen times when some Fox Company chowderhead would suggest it, and ignoring my feelings in the matter--in the end, the damned Marine officer corps got its claws into me after all! My face turned purple with anger, and Arlene laughed her butt off. "So what is your first order, Lieutenant?" Still flushing, I barked, "Nothing to you, Edith!" This provoked a new round of laughter from Arlene, so I gravely repeated my order to Ninepin: "The emergency escape separation, activation!" "Separation initiated at Lieutenant Taggart's or- der," announced the damned bowling ball. I swear, when I become king, all Data Pastiches will be annihilated. Nothing seemed to happen. We sat around the table looking stupid until suddenly Arlene glanced out the viewport. "How cow! Fly, c'mere, you're not going to believe this!" I leaned over her shoulder, stared out the porthole, and gasped. The entire moon was splitting in two! A crack formed in the wall of the great central lunar chamber our ship was trapped in. It grew wider and wider, and soon I could see stars through the crack. In the space of fifteen minutes, the two hemispheres of PARI pushed apart from each other, connected by a thousand telescoping pylons. The connecting tubes snapped off like reeds in a storm. Of course, all this destruction and horrific shifting of forces happened in utter silence, since there was no atmosphere inside the hollow sphere. The PARI moon base cracked in half like a planet- egg, the two pieces rushing away from each other at 107 kilometers per hour, according to the radar tracker. We waited impatiently--it would be at least two hours before they had separated far enough to risk a straight-line barrel-run with the ship, newly christened the Great Descent into Maelstrom by Blinky Abumaha . . . and the Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People's State by Tokughavita. I planned to let the two of them duke it out for control of the history books. I sat in the captain's chair--we had one, despite the weird individualistic streak of our communist apos- tles, not quite as iconoclastic as the Freds--with Ninepin on my lap, stroking his smoothness as I would a puppy's fur. He didn't object; he didn't take any notice until he was asked a question. I suppose I may as well have been petting a network terminal, but I had developed an affection for the talking bowling ball. Sure got me in trouble a lot, but then so did a puppy. "My God," I said for about the millionth time. It was all I could think, watching the enormousness of the engineering. "I hope Sears and Roebuck know what they're missing." "Oh, they're probably watching and pouting from their stateroom. Yeesh!" Arlene leaned over and asked Ninepin the question that I should have asked minutes before: "Who built this place? Was it human- Resuscitator symbiots?" "Not symbiots," said Ninepin. "Human construc- tion. Mission launched nine years before People's Glorious Revolution, construction begun in year 96 PGL, completed 142 PGL. Disrespect to Death- Bringing Deconstructionists assigned to PARI lunar base launched year 13 PGL." "My God." This time it wasn't me; Arlene was the inadvertent petitioner. I was too busy wondering how many other far-flung human bases there were . . . and what terrifying aliens were following them home. "Wait," said Arlene, "that's too long.... We're only 107 light-years from Earth. How come it took the Disrespect, ah, 137 years Earth-time to get here?" "Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists stopped at following ports of call between Earth and this system, designated PM-220: planetary system designated--" "Skip it," she said. The names wouldn't mean anything to us anyway. At last, although the moon continued to split apart, we had a clear enough path to the stars. I suggested that Blinky could probably pilot the ship out of lunar orbit, and he decided I wasn't an idiot and throttled up the engines. I wasn't sure I liked this system: I'm used to giving and getting orders, not having a philo- sophical discussion whenever we needed to move. But it had its advantages: every man and woman in the armed forces was capable of acting entirely autonomously--a whole military full of Fly Taggarts and Arlene Sanderses, no matter what silly political ideology they espoused! There was no hurry. The ship would take many days to ramp up to speed, then an equivalent number to slow down. In between, we had five months of subjective travel time--five months! I thought about complaining, writing a strong letter to the manufac- turer. But the weird fact of proxiluminous ("near lightspeed") travel was that notwithstanding our sub- jective travel time of five months, vice the seven weeks for the Res-men, both trips would take just about 107 years in Earth-time, with us lagging only about twenty-five minutes behind. If it weren't for our twenty-nine days of acceleration vice only six days for the Disrespect, we would arrive while they were still maneuvering into orbit. But with that damned acceleration factor, the New- bies would have a three-week jump on us. I shuddered to think what they could do in twenty-three days to poor abused Earth, still reeling from the three- generation war with the Freds when Tokughavita and his crew left. There was no hurry, but my heart was pounding, my pulse galloping a klick a minute. It was all I could do to sit in the command chair and act, like, totally nonchalant, like I did this sort of thing every day: jump in my proxiluminous-drive starship and pursue molecular-size aliens who wanted to infect all of Earth and "fix" us! "Hey, Tofu," I said. He didn't notice or didn't catch the reference. "So when did the Resuscitators find you guys and infect you?" Tokughavita looked pensive. "Do not know. Been trying to clarify. Were not symbiots when left People's Planet, sure of that." "Don't you remember?" "No memory. Remember actions, not when in- fected by Resuscitators--may not have noticed if turned off sensory inputs. Long before landed at PM- 220, rebuilt engines en route, went over ship systems with hand of history." The overcaptain didn't know, or the aliens had blocked it from his mind. They left Earth 137 years ago Earth-time, but they had visited many other planetary systems and bases before arriving at this one. The molecular Newbies could have infected the humans at any port of call along the way. Arlene and I discussed it in private. "So what did happen to them?" I asked. "They left Newbie-prime in a ship, attacked Fredworld--then what? What happened to their ship?" She shrugged, making a nice effect with the front part of her uniform blouse. "Search me." (I wouldn't have minded.) "They must have headed here, but I don't know why or how . . . Jesus, Fly--maybe they didn't set out for Skinwalker; maybe they only ended up here later. Remember, it was forty years that the dead Newbie was on Fredworld. . . . Plenty of time for them to meet humans somewhere, change their course, and send out a general Newbie alert to tell all their buds where they were going." Arlene stood at the porthole, watching us drift slowly toward the crack. She spread her arms wide, stretching and almost touching the bulkhead on either side, so narrow was it. We kicked the idea around a bit, but really there was no way to settle it. Some questions must remain forever unanswered. I returned to the bridge when we approached the edge and forced myself to sit still and not bounce up and down like an orangutan in a banana factory. Blinky Abumaha piloted the ship about like I fly a plane: we didn't actually crash into anything, but it wasn't for lack of trying. By the time we finally found a big-enough hole that Blinky could make it through without scraping the sides--about seventy kilometers--my jaw ached from clenching it, and my lips were like rubber from the frozen half smile I had maintained. I was surprised my armrests didn't have finger marks on them. But we finally, by God, made it out of the PARI moon--intact. Blinky slowly burned the engine up to 104 percent, the highest it was rated, and Sears and Roebuck entered in the relative coordinates, direction and distance, to Earth. We kicked the puppy into over- drive, and the huge boot of massive acceleration slammed us all back against the aft bulkheads. Sud- denly, I wasn't sitting in my chair; I was lying back, like in a dentist's office. . . . I skip five months. Oh, all right, I can't completely skip it. We spent the coasting time training in every tactic of the Light Drop that Arlene and I could remember, plus any- thing we missed that the Glorious People's Army had developed . . . some pretty hairy tactics involving scanning lasers and enemy eyeballs, life-stasis projec- tors, crap like that. Sears and Roebuck had nothing to offer. Either the Klave had long ago given up actual physical fighting-- which I doubted after hearing Arlene describe their performance among the Res-men--or else they just weren't very personally creative in the mayhem de- partment. In any event, they sealed themselves into their stateroom again, and I didn't dare force it open for fear I'd find the walls papered with everything from nude pictures of Janice De'Souza to a Chatty Cathy doll. "Go to away!" they shouted in response to determined knocking. "Skip it this time," Arlene suggested. "What do they have to offer anyway?" So we did. It was all right. We humans were plenty ingenious enough for the entire Hyperrealist side. In five months, I was unable to instill a sense of cohesion among the apostles; they just didn't get it. They were the most mixed-up mob I'd ever seen in vaguely uniform uniforms. Somehow, they had a perfect fusion of utter individuality and total commu- nalism: they assumed that naturally the State would provide everything that its citizens could need or want, but they refused to accept the concept of duty to others even in theory! It didn't wash. They kept yammering about something called a "post-economic society," which I figured meant they had so much of everything that material goods were literally worth- less; even a beggar could pick discarded diamonds off the streets and dine on caviar every night. I have no idea what to call that system: Commu- nist? Capitalist? Heaven? It was a chilling thought: maybe the Char- ismatics were right, and the Rapture had come. Maybe when I got back, Jesus would be sitting there on His throne, wondering where we'd got to all these years. This continued off and on every day for five long months ... so I'm just going to skip it, if that's all right with everyone. Satisfied? We followed our course to the sixth decimal place and decelerated to match velocities with Earth at about six hundred kilometers low orbit . . . and fi- nally, the damned Klave appeared! They pushed into the bridge as if nothing had happened, slapping everyone on the back in congratulations and pouring around a seemingly endless bottle of some queer liqueur that tasted like head cheese. The rest of us were being dead serious--and here were Sears and Roebuck tripping happily through the low-g bridge, talking a klick a second! "Shut up, you idiots," I snapped. "Can't you see we're at general quarters here? Where are the damned Resuscitators?" Where indeed? Blinky and Tokughavita, along with a weapons sergeant named Morihatma Morirama Morirama, had figured out how to work the particle beam cannons, which basically were human versions of the Fred ray. They sat, one in each cockpit, waiting tensely for first sight of the Resuscitator ship, the Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists. They waited a long time. Arlene and I sweated a liter each standing in the control room with the artificial gravity set to 0.3 g, 0.1 g in the crawlways: just enough to avoid total vertigo, but still allow for rapid movement across the ship using our special low- grav combat tactics. We waited a long time, too. After seventeen orbits, radiation detection sweeps of the stratosphere, infrared examination, every damned thing we could think of, we faced the stun- ning truth. There was no Res-man ship, not in orbit, not on the surface. The Disrespect had not made it yet. We were alone orbiting Earth . . . and there wasn't a trace of our spacefaring technological civilization. We were home, but nobody had bothered leaving the lights on. 20 We broke into the outer layers of atmos- phere. The Great Descent into Maelstrom of Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People's State--my impossibly ugly compromise be- tween Blinky and Tokughavita--nicknamed the Great Vengeance, to make it at least pronounceable, was a damned good ship. We flew lower and lower, stabilizing fins and the hypersonic air-cushion keep- ing the ride so steady that it almost seemed like a simulator. We skimmed quickly over Asia Minor and Western Europe, crossed England, and brushed the Arctic en route to Newfoundland. Blinky curved our orbit, blowing fuel like he didn't care. "Can fill damn quick from ocean--good jolly job!" Arlene grinned, but I didn't really like his attitude. Sears and Roebuck were behaving even stranger. They planted themselves at the perfect viewing port and hogged it utterly, staring down at the planet surface with a longing that I just couldn't understand. It wasn't even their planet! They didn't respond to queries, and we basically just forgot about them while we studied the remains of the Earth. Still no response from below. There were many cities left, and as we got lower, they didn't look particularly devastated by war. But everywhere we saw nature encroaching on human habitation . . . like all those creepy movies where the magnificent Indian city with spires and domes is overrun by the jungle-- vines and creepers and baboons invading in the Raj's palace. Nobody contacted us; no ships flew up to assess us. There was no fire-control radar sweeping the Great Vengeance, not even any ground response. The Earth slumbered like a doped-up giant. So where the hell were we supposed to go? Arlene had her own agenda. "Ninepin," she said, "who was actually with, ah, Gallatin Albert when he died?" "Lovelace Jill only companion when died in year 31 PGL." Arlene frowned. "Didn't anybody else see the body?" "Body exhibited in Hall of People's Heroes 31 PGL to 44 PGL. Body interred beneath rebuilt Tabernacle of People's Faith of Latter-Day Saints, Salt Lake Grad." Arlene gasped. I don't know why--was she still harboring hope that she would find Albert alive and well? "A.S.," I said, "I think you should accept what is. He loved you, but he's dead. Christ, girl, it's been something like five hundred years!" She didn't look up. "And he was working on life stasis when he died." "But there wasn't even a prototype until seven years after he died. Get ahold of yourself, Lance. Let's get a little reality check going here." I walked to the video screen that showed the for'ard view. "Don't you think if Albert were still around that Earth would have more civilization left than that?" We were cur- rently skimming low over the Big Muddy, north up the Mississippi River at midnight. There were settle- ments and even lights, but no evidence of high civilization other than electricity. Tokughavita came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped. It was the first friendly contact from the amazingly solitary humans of the twenty-first century. I guess he had been watching me and Arlene--we had always tended to touch a lot, just as friends. "World is gone," he said, voice heavy with emotion withheld. "Where are Resuscitators? Ex- pected they at least would be here." I smiled grimly. "Maybe Fly and Arlene killed 'em." "Maybe they got bored and evolved again," said my counterpart from across the cabin. "Maybe they e- volved into something completely different and forgot all about us." "Who knows?" Tokughavita didn't seem satisfied with our left- hand, right-hand explanations, but it was the best we could give him. We would never know why the Newbies never arrived--but thank God they didn't. The Northeast Corridor was in the same condition as the Mississippi Delta: houses, buildings, roads intact, the power grid still working, but no evidence of anything but habitation. "I want to go to Salt Lake City," Arlene declared. I snorted in exasperation, but, hell, I didn't have any better suggestion. We turned west. "Toku, what was life like when you left?" I asked. He seemed at a loss for words. "People taken control of State from greedy-capitalists, run for good of all." He said greedy capitalists as if it were a hyphenated word, a linked concept. "You what--nationalized the industries?" "Industry run for good of all. But so efficient, paradise continued." "For the workers?" He looked puzzled. "No workers. Work old con- cept, not modern. Workers abolished before People's Glorious Revolution." Now I was the confused one. "Wait a minute--then who ran the industries?" Toku looked back at Blinky Abumaha for help. "Good damn system," Blinky added. "Automated, workers not necessary, just get in the way--jolly good!" Arlene started to get interested, since the conversa- tion was taking a notably academic tinge. "So wait ... if there were no workers, then who was being exploited by the greedy capitalists?" This stymied both Blinky and Tokughavita. "Never thought damn-all about exploitation. Machines, arti- ficial intelligence . . . can greedy-capitalists exploit electronics?" I turned away. The conversation had veered way over my head. Arlene continued, but I ignored them all. I don't deal well with academics, as you've proba- bly figured out by now. We were fast approaching Salt Lake City--or Salt Lake Grad, I remembered Ninepin calling it. It must have been winter in the northern hemisphere; we kicked through an overcast sky, and suddenly the rebuilt Cathedral loomed before us. "Jesus freaking Christ!" I yelped, freezing the economics lesson be- hind me. Arlene and everyone else rushed to the video, then to the actual viewports, evidently not believing the image on the screen. The new Cathedral of the People's Faith of Latter- Day Saints rose about six hundred stories into the Utah sky, a veritable Tower of Babel! It had a ball at the very top. An observation deck? A radar system? "Jeez, Fly, it looks like a huge fist of triumph raised over the Earth." "Built after Freds repelled," Tokughavita con- firmed. "Celebrates victory." Suddenly, every warning light on the bridge went off at once. The place lit up like a Christmas tree, and about six different kinds of sirens sounded. "Mises!" Blinky swore at the con. He jerked on the stick, and the whole freaking ship swerved violently to the left and up, flinging us all to the deck. I was pressed hard, nine g's at least! Then the acceleration let up. I painfully picked myself off the deck, shaking like a pine needle in a strong wind. "What the hell was that about?" "Force field," said our pilot, face pale. "Damn jolly strong. Almost killed--crash, crash!" We circled Salt Lake Grad for more than forty minutes, mapping the exact extent of the field. One of the crew was a mathematician, a girl named Suzudira Nehsuzuki; she calculated the highest probability that the center of the field was at the Tabernacle. My guess was that it all emanated from the bulb at the top of the structure, more than a kilometer above ground level. "Fly," said my lance. "I can't tell you why ... but I must get inside that Tabernacle." "Criminey, don't you think I know why? Albert's buried there, he spent the last years of his life there. Why shouldn't you want to see it?" "Fly--I want to contact it." "Contact what?" "The Tabernacle!" "Arlene, do you feel all right? It's a building, for Christ's sake!" She turned to stare at me; her eyes were filled with the intelligence of fanaticism. I took a step back; I'd never seen her like that! "Fly . . . what was Albert working on just before he died?" "Um, life stasis." "What else did he work on?" "What else? I don't remember anything else." "Worked on SneakerNet," Tokughavita said from behind me. I jumped, then was annoyed at being startled. I sat on a chair at the radio station and stared at the video monitor as we endlessly circled the looming Tabernacle. "He worked on artificial intelligence! Fly, I'll bet that building has some sort of net, and it's probably intelligent, and it's probably been sitting here for five hundred years waiting for me to get back!" Jesus, talk about your megalomania! Then again, wasn't that precisely why Albert spent the last years of his life desperately trying to extend his life, so he could see Arlene Sanders again when she returned? "Go ahead," I ordered, rising from the chair and offering it to her. "Talk your brains out." Arlene sat down and stared at the controls. "I don't know how to turn it on," she admitted. Tokughavita reached over her shoulder and flipped the switch. I noticed that when he did, he snuck a glance down her cleavage. Somehow, that made me feel better. No matter what weirdo hybrid of communism and capi- talism they had developed, they were still, by God, human beings. "What frequency does this broadcast on?" I asked. "All," Tokughavita said. "All right, which frequencies, plural?" "All," he repeated. I finally got the message that he had set it to transmit on all possible frequencies . . . though I couldn't understand how that was possible. "Arlene to Tabernacle," she said. "Arlene calling Tabernacle. Come in, Tabernacle." A voice responded instantly. "Tabernacle here . . . but how do I know you're really Arlene?" It sounded so damned familiar that for a moment I didn't even recognize it. Then our video monitor went to snow, and a moment later, a face appeared. It was a face I knew very, very well--it was her face. "Jill!" I screamed. "Hello, person who looks like Fly Taggart," Jill said. "I'm not really Jill--I'm an AI program that Jill Lovelace set up. Who are you? And who are those pair of gorillas you brought with you?" I glanced behind, honestly confused who she meant. So that's how familiarity breeds contentment! Or does it breed? "Jill, meet Sears and Roebuck-- don't ask which is which, they won't understand you." The Magilla Gorillas simply nodded gravely, impatient for the ground. Her little blond girl's face simpered a bit, as kids do when you introduce them to a new relative and they're trying to be polite and grown up, but in reality they haven't a clue why they should care who the new person is. "They're a Klave pair--" "Man! Really? Cool!" It took me a moment to realize she was being slightly sarcastic. "Love your store, guys. Now, if you don't mind, who the heck are you two, too?" "What the hell do you mean, who are we?" Arlene demanded. "We're Sergeant Fly Taggart and Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps!" "Prove it." Arlene and I looked at each other. "How can we freaking prove we're really Fly and Arlene?" I asked. Jill's image smiled. "What's the password?" I sat down again next to Arlene. A smaller televi- sion monitor at the console in front of us showed the same image as the for'ard video screen. "Jill," I said patiently, "we didn't set up any password with you." "But you know it anyways, dudes." "We do?" "It's something you said to me ... something only you two would remember." Jill's face wasn't the aged grandmother she must have been when she died; instead, it was the Jill we knew from before--just a year or so ago, from our point of view. Still, I became so terribly homesick, looking at that fifteen-year-old's face; she was like a little sister or something--a bratty little sister, but still the closest thing to family I had left, besides Arlene. Everyone else I had ever known on Earth was long since dust in the dust. "When did I say it?" "You said it the first time you really trusted me. You made me feel totally adult, like a woman. The President of the Council of Twelve always, you know, made me feel like a little girl.... He was totally the Bomb, I'm not dissing him! But he always thought of me as a kid." I closed my eyes, straining to remember. Her first test by fire came when we took the truck with the teleport pad inside. Something appeared--what was it? "Arlene, remember back on Earth, with Jill and Albert, when we hijacked that truck? What was the monster that teleported into it?" "Um . . . Jeez, that goes back a ways. Wait--I've got it. It was a boney. We killed it, but it shot its rockets and just missed you, Jill, honey." The Jill image shuddered. "Yeah, I remember that! And you're right. . . . That's when you said the pass- word to me. Remember, Mr. Fly? Remember what you told me after the rockets went on either side of me?" Damn it all to hell--I didn't remember! I remem- bered saying something . . . but what was it? I shook my head sadly. "Look," Jill said, "let me cheer you up with a little game. You ever play Charades?" I nodded dumbly, and she continued. "I'll start: you watch and guess the phrase I'm thinking of." The camera pulled back--or the animated image shrank--and we saw a full-body shot of Jill. She held up four fingers. I wasn't sure what to do, but Arlene said, "Four words." Then Jill held up one finger, then one again. "First word . . . one syllable." Jill frowned like an angry mother and pointed savagely to the side. "Point," I guessed. "Look, look out!" "Leave, get out of here," Arlene suggested. Jill kept pointing. "Leave, go away, go--" Jill smiled and pointed at us with both hands. "First word is Go?" I asked. Jill nodded emphatically. She held up two fingers, then one touching her elbow. "Second word, one syllable." I was starting to get the hang of the game. Then Jill really threw me for a loop: she slapped her waist, pantomiming drawing a pistol and shooting someone. "Shoot!" Arlene shouted. "Draw, fire, stick 'em up!" "Pow, bang--ah--gun, bullet, gunfighter.. .." Jill touched her ear. "Sounds like," Arlene mut- tered. Then Jill stuck her thumbs into the shoulder holes of her sleeveless shirt. "Shirt?" I guessed, and Jill rolled her eyes. She touched her ear again, then closed her eyes and smiled blissfully. "Sounds like nap?" Arlene asked. "Sap, map, crap--" "Sounds like sleep! Weep, heap, teep . .." "Teep?" demanded my lance. "What the hell is a teep?" "It's where indies sleep," I griped. Jill was getting frantic. She finally pointed at her ear, waited a beat, then pointed at herself. Arlene muttered, "Sounds like . . . pest?" Jill almost yelped with satisfaction, but she kept her mouth shut, just pointing at Arlene. "Pest?" asked my lance. "Go pest? Go pester? Go best?" Suddenly I jumped to my feet--I remembered! Dramatically, I stabbed a meaty forefinger at our long-dead companion. "Go west, young lady!" I hol- lered. The image of Jill moved into extreme close-up on her mouth. "You have spoken the password. You now have infinite power! You may pass, Sahib." Blinky's voice from the back was an anticlimax. "Ah, force field down. Good damn show, that." "On to the Tabernacle," I suggested. "Put her down on that bulby thing, if there's enough room--that is, if you don't mind, Blinky." I really hated this new- jack command and control system. 21 Blinky Abumaha continued to circle the Tab- ernacle, fearsomely eyeing the bulbous tip. "Ah," he said, "ah, not sure is--not sure sir is too damn good idea, on the top." Arlene and I exchanged a glance back and forth, then we both turned the withering glare on Abumaha. "Can I, Fly?" she asked. I gallantly gestured her forward. "Blinky, don't take this the wrong way, honey, but--to quote Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove, 'I've been to a world's fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest damn thing I ever heard!'" The pilot looked simultaneously relieved and cha- grined. "Not serious? Just jolly joke? Oh, terrible fun--ho, ho!" He sounded genuine in the laughter, but seemingly unsure what he was laughing at. "Just put us down a quarter klick away," I clarified. "We'll, um, walk the rest of the way." We landed with much ceremony, a celebration that continued well past the first moment Arlene and I and Sears and Roebuck could squirm free. The Klave, having already had their celebration when we made orbit, disdained the party. Thank God. I didn't think I could take any more of that head-cheese liqueur! Finally, we wriggled off and marched resolutely toward the Tabernacle: Arlene in the lead, pulling us forward like an anxious puppy on a leash; Sears and Roebuck at the tail, looking worlds-weary; and poor Fly Taggart, Lieutenant Fly Taggart, stuck in the middle like the wishbone. From this short distance, less than 250 meters, the building utterly dominated one whole quarter of the sky, looming up so high we couldn't see the top for the weather--gray, ominous, overcast. Suddenly, before progressing more than fifty strides from the ship, Sears and Roebuck stopped. "Will we be okay," they said anxiously. "Yes, we're fine," I reassured them. "No, no, not to ask! Will we be okay, is calling on the telephone our uncles." "Huh?" I scratched my head. They were making even less sense than usual. Arlene, savagely impatient with her goal in sight, broke into the conversation. "Oh, wake up, Fly! I mean, sir. They're saying they don't want to go any farther; they want to call their uncles, probably on the lunar base, to come pick them up and take them home." My jaw dropped. "S and R, is that what you're saying?" "In ungood typical English of Arlene Sanders is a yes," they said. "Sears--Roebuck--are you aware of the fact that it has been about five hundred years since you left the Klave base?" They grabbed each other's head and pumped vigorously--frustration at my little-child inability to grasp the obvious. "Yes, yes! Is impatience why uncles wait with much foot-tapping for Sears and Roebuck's return!" I shrugged. I know when I'm beat. "So long, boys, can't say it's always been a treat, but it's been real." Even Arlene turned her attention away from her true love's final resting place to smile in farewell. "Don't take any wooden Fredpills," she said, thor- oughly confusing the Klave. "Has been it a slice," said the pair of Magilla Gorillas. Without another word, they turned left and strode off, marching in unison, subvocalizing all the way to each other. They disappeared around a tall ancient-looking column that supported a statue of what looked like Brigham Young, and we never saw Sears and Roebuck again. We didn't speak, Arlene and I, the rest of the way to the Tabernacle. There wasn't much to say. She knew what she hoped to find; I knew she was fooling herself. The building had a gigantic ceremonial door--and by "gigantic," I don't mean just huge! Just the door alone was bigger than the entire Tabernacle itself had been, before the Fred nuke. But when we touched it, it swung open swiftly and silently, and musical chimes played us in, sounding like a chorus of angels after our ordeal. I think they played some vocal work by Handel, but I didn't recognize it. The interior of the Tabernacle was hollow. I don't think you quite got that; the building was more than a kilometer high, and hollow. I felt like we were in the center of a volcanic crater! Inside was a huge city, with many temples and churches and such . . . and in the very center, on a hillock, was an exact duplicate of the original Mormon Tabernacle-- probably stone for stone, if it had religious signifi- cance. Arlene pointed at the recreation. "There," she said, deducing the obvious. We took twenty minutes to cross to the smaller Tabernacle within. Above us, the ceiling of the outer Tabernacle sparkled with jewels that must be worth nothing these days but the intrinsic value of their loveliness; in five hundred years, I would hope we at least would have learned how to manufacture perfect gemstones! But it was a lovely sight. The People's Faith of Latter-Day Saints didn't use just diamonds; they painted gigantic scenes in color using every imagin- able stone, from rubies to emeralds to blue sapphires to garnets and, yes, diamonds. It was no longer ostentatious, since anyone could do it--even the beggar in the street--but it was still stunning in its simple beauty. Taking a last look up at a scene of angels showing the Church Fathers' Salt Lake City (before it was Salt Lake Grad), I followed Arlene into the inner Taberna- cle. So far as I could tell, she hadn't even looked up at the ceiling. Inside, the place looked exactly like the original: exactly. I didn't check, but I'm sure if you made a nineteenth-century stereovision with one picture of the old and the other of the new, they would matte over each other perfectly as one image, but with one difference: the hollow interior of the tribute- Tabernacle was completely empty, except for the magnificent organ--and I'd bet the latter worked perfectly, too. We walked slowly across the floor, our melancholy footsteps echoing back at us. Arlene bowed her head; I don't think she was praying.... She must have been overwhelmed by the nearness of her love's life--and death. I almost put my hand on her shoulder, but I wasn't the guy she wanted just then. Ahead of us was a dark circle. As we got closer, I realized it was a circular hole in the floor. A hole? When we got to within ten meters, a grinding noise began. By the time we reached it, I realized it was a platform elevator . . . and there was a lone figure standing on it, rising out of the dark depths, waiting for us. Arlene halted in astonishment. "Jill!" I shouted, rushing forward. "Whoa, whoa!" Jill said, putting her hands out in a stop motion. "Don't get your skivvies in a knot, dudes! I'm not really me--I mean, I'm not really here. This is just a 3-D projection, and if you try to hug me, you'll fly right through me and mess up your knee . . . Fly." She looked exactly as she had when we left her, a year and five centuries ago. She was a little taller, maybe, but her hair was still blond, still punky. She had the same half smile and knowing eyes, still no makeup (thank God), and now she wore a bitchin' black leather jacket, lycra gym shorts that hugged her butt and upper thighs, and transparent plastic combat boots. I stood and stared, and blow me down if you couldn't have bet me two months' pay that that was the real Jill, and I'd have taken you up on it. "Jiminy!" she suddenly yelped, staring at us. "You really are Fly and Arlene!" "We told you!" snapped the latter-named. "But I didn't believe you, even after you passed, you know, the test thing. Now that you're in here, I just did a genetic sample thing, and like you're really you!" The animated image of Jill--just an artificial intel- ligence program, according to itself--dropped its jaw just like the real Jill would do. She leaned over and planted both hands on her knees to view us from a slightly different angle. "God, how did you live for four hundred and eighty-three years? Oh--relativity! Right?" Arlene nodded, sniffed, then wiped her nose on her military sleeve. "Jill, I ... look, I don't want to seem ungrateful, in case you have any surprises, but--" The fifteen-year-old stood tall and folded her arms, taking on that slightly superior look that age is prone to. "Don't worry, Arlene . . . I'm not going to throw an animated Albert at you. I know you wouldn't appreciate it. But I am here to take you downstairs, where there's a present for you." She waited a beat, then when we didn't move, she impatiently urged us forward with her hands. We joined her on the platform, which immediately began to sink. I didn't ask her any questions; I didn't know what to ask. I decided it could all wait.... I was pretty sure we could always come back later and catch up on what she did with her life--and get autographed copies of the books she wrote! If she didn't save a pair for us, I'd kill her, except she was already long dead and buried, or whatever they did nowadays. It was a creepy thought, and I stole many a glance at "Jill," trying not to think that Jill was dead. I felt a big lumpy knot in my stomach, even though I had known all along this would be the punishment for hopping around the universe at proxiluminous speeds. Damn it! I did what I had to do--we both did! Why, in the name of God Almighty, do we have to pay such a terrible price? Everyone we ever knew or loved, be- sides ourselves, Arlene an