The stocky human stood up and stretched. It felt good to move without the bulk of the suit, good to breathe air that smelled like Earth’s on a spring day. It felt very good to win one unequivocally.
It would have felt even better to have forgotten the scene in the dome as he left it. the drifting, smoking bodies. At the time, that part had seemed like a win also. . . .
“No,” he said, “there’s a couple people I owe … I dunno, maybe an explanation. Maybe just a chance to take a shot at me.”
Kelly’s face softened as he thought about his past, recent and farther back, as far as he could remember. “If I had good sense, I’d just walk away from that,” he said. “But I never did have much use for people who walked away from things.”
The three evident nonhumans had vanished. “You wish to be returned to the neighborhood of the woman Tuttle or the woman Romer?” said Wun, who either was psychic or understood how Kelly’s mind worked better than anybody born on Earth seemed to have done.
“You can do that?” the veteran demanded.
“Either one,” responded the alien. “Which would you prefer?”
“I – ” began Tom Kelly. He laughed without humor, a sound as sharp as the warheads outlined against the first microsecond of the destruction of Fortress.
Then he reached into his trousers pocket to see if there were a coin he could flip.