“Frank?”
“What? Hurry and get your clothes on.”
“Frank, maybe it would be a lot better if I just let it kill me.”
He stopped tucking his shirt in and turned around to face her. He could see only the vague outline of her small but womanly body outlined by the sheet, her hair like spun silk . . . He crossed to her and lifted her head up. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She was crying.
“Don’t you love me?” he asked.
She tried to answer, but the words were sobs.
“Then get the hell dressed,” he said gently.
And he left. In the kitchen, he took the gun from the drawer. Outside, the sky was clear; the wind was stiff, whipping the snow into a frenzy. When he brought the car to the front door, she was waiting.
“Where will we go?” she asked.
“Farther out than before. And we will cover well.”
Christmas was coming.
He thought about that as he drove. He thought about parties and eggnog, church services, candles on altars, candles in windows. He thought about Christ climbing down from his bare tree and wondered what Ferlinghetti would have written had he lived in the present and been married to a hallucino-child.
Far out in the country, he angled the Champion onto a side road, cruised along it for a time, broke off the road into a wide trench that petered out into woods at a clearing in the center of the forest. They were three miles from a road, sheltered on all sides by trees, exposed only directly overhead where the clearing allowed the stars to look down. When they got out, they heard the helicopter whining somewhere above them.
Then the sun came on. The copter settled into the clearing, its headlamps like the eyes of some tremendous moth, its rotors like wings.
“Frank!”
He grabbed her, pulled her back into the car, scrambled behind the wheel.
please do not attempt to escape. It Was the Voice of T.
He would have to reverse out of there, which would be a disastrous undertaking in this rugged terrain. Or he would have to push through them. Jameson, T, and another android labeled JJK were crossing the hoary field, legs frosted with snow, weapons drawn. He rolled down the window. “What do you want?”
“If you bought groceries that morning, Mr. Cauvell,” Jameson said between breaths, “why did no grocer within fifty miles have a record of your personal purchase?”
T was twenty feet away, directly in front of the car.
He slammed down on the accelerator, flipped the melting bars to full power, felt the jolt when T went under the wheels, as the second android was struck a glancing blow that tore its arm off. The engine was whining. He could not make a swift escape through the drifts, for the melting bars would not be able to work fast enough. He wrenched the wheel to the left, spun the Champion around, and shot back along the trail he had burned into the clearing in the first place. He passed Jameson who leaped out of his way. The two androids were lifeless.
“We’re free!” he shouted excitedly.
The vibra-beam sliced a neat hole through the rear window and struck Laurie on the temple. She slumped across him, dribbling blood from one ear . . .
He could personify the moon: the moon peered down patronizingly. He could make a girl into a rose: she was a rose, soft and gentle. He could forge metaphors, hammer out similes; he could allocate so much alliteration to just so many lines. But he could not stop the bleeding from her ear.
He could rise up in the morning like a dragon from the sea.
With the sun over his shoulder, he could warp words to say his thoughts.
He could lie down at night, satisfied as a god must be.
But stopping the blood was beyond his powers.
She was stretched across the back seat, face up, pale and ghostly in what little moonlight filtered through the tinted windows. Cauvell lashed himself into the bucket seat, gripped the wheel viciously. Where to? How long would he have until all roads were blocked? The forest clearing was fifteen miles behind, but the world had shrunk to the size of an orange in recent years, and fifteen miles was hardly the length of one seed. The thing, perhaps, was to find a small town and—with the gun—force a doctor to care for her. Hide the Champion in the doctor’s garage. He turned the engine over, wheeled into the twisting lane, and spun his wheels over the snow.