jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could
see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the
armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.
The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only
have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades
smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like
cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a
decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety
glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn’t want to see
what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes
off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted
to.
Down…
And down…
Sand exploded upward as the howler reached the
beach.
But the thing wasn’t slowed.
It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound,
with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in
upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped
toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty
miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way
thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.
At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo
section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some
hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and
flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of
ignition. On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who
had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere,
burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.
They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific
impact of the crash.
Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched
by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and
gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming
down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would
have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had
had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.
The howler’s descent, however, had been a good object
lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.
I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the
city, where I knew I could regain the highway before
long.
In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for
me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers
of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn’t it true
that every citizen who roots for “our side” to “kill the
gooks” is as responsible for every death as the man wield-
ing the gun? Isn’t it true that none of us can escape re-
sponsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of
us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we con-
stantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?
Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to
recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses
behind.
As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with
myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with them—
and yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to
work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself,
time to make my anger into something more formidable
than emotion.
I was superman, and it was time to act like one.
Or so I thought and so it seemed to be….
V
In the large apartment complexes such as the one in
which Melinda maintained her home, there is every conve-
nience of modern living that one could wish for—all
under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are
special “ethnic” food centers; there are clothing stores and
beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hover-
cars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restau-
rants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and
car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal
prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved
chemical stimulants.
To connect all these facilities and to make them all
accessible in minutes from every reach of the three-block-
square structure (and when you consider that with eighty
floors and nine square blocks per floor, there are 720