page, but within the mind of the man setting words to
paper. Or woman, as the case may be. But there isn’t any
use discussing it. I haven’t any say about it. Besides, I’ve
seen her picture, and I’m certain you can wait seven
months for that kind of stuff.” Voice of the obscene tele-
phone caller, yet still authoritarian. In the back of his
throat: unvoiced laughter that will explode when I hang
up.
“I know why you’re in the military now,” I said, my
voice deceptively neutral.
“Why is that?” he asked, walking into it.
“When your own manhood is negligible, a gun must at
least be a little consolation.” And I hung up on the creep.
“That was definitely a mistake,” my mentor said.
I picked my coat up and worked into it. “Maybe.”
“No maybe about it. Where are you going now?”
“Home, pack some things, and get out. Look, I’ll get a
message to you so you’ll know where I’m at. Wait. Scratch
that. I’ve got a key to Melinda’s apartment. If it’s still
unoccupied, I’ll stay there. They’ll check hotels right
away, so maybe her place is safer. Maybe I’m not as
potent a wedge as I think I am. Maybe they really don’t
need my esp. But I rather think they’ll come crawling
after a while; it’s the only way I can help her.”
“You love her?” he asked.
I nodded. I couldn’t really say it. Maybe it was still a
hangover from my delusions of godhood. Or maybe I was
just afraid that her affection did not run as deep as mine.
Perhaps, in a month, she had forgotten me.
“Then hurry,” he said. “You might not have much
time.”
I left his Tudor home under the trees, took one of his
two hovercars, and pressed the accelerator half through
the floor on the way home. The craft veered from one
side of the road to the other as clouds of snow kicked up
and stuttered through the blades of the air cushion
mechanism, but I didn’t hit anyone.
Perhaps the sole reason for Melinda’s arrest was her own
actions. But I thought not. It seemed too clever a hook in
my side to hold me should I ever return from the no-
man’s-land inside of Child. Melinda was the perfect in-
surance policy, they must have thought, against my temper
and foolishness.
I parked the car on my patio and entered the house
through the double glass doors, packed two suitcases, and
folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox
into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all
in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one
government could not much affect its value. I took two
game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range
downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and
put everything in the car.
As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside
the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic
Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of
the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into
sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.
IV
I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching
vehicles, three in all: the howler which I had first seen, a
crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what
they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular
patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were
sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not
wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the
woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the de-
velopment, and knew the hovercar would never hold up
on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work
on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew
through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor
of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.
And if I went back, there was only my house to take
refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road
down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it