Finally he drove his fist into his side where the bullet had taken him. The pain was immediate and intense, like a dash of cold water in the face. A whistling half-whispered screech issued from either side of his clenched mouth, like stereo. Fresh blood wet his shirt and sieved through onto his hand.
Amelia moaned.
“We’ll be passing over Albany in about six minutes,” Holloway said. “If you look out, you’ll see it coming up on your left.”
“Relax,” Richards said to no one, to himself. “Relax. Just relax.”
God, will it be over soon? Yes. Quite soon.
It was quarter to eight.
Minus 020 and COUNTING
It could have been a bad dream, a nightmare that had crawled out of the dark and into the unhealthy limelight of his half-awake mind-more properly a vision or an hallucination. His brain was working and concentrating on one level, dealing with the problem of navigation and the constant danger of McCone. On another, something black was taking place. Things were moving in the dark.
Track on. Positive.
Huge, whining servomechanisms turning in the dark, in the night. Infrared eyes glowing in unknown spectrums. Pale green foxfire of dials and swinging radar scopes.
Lock. We have a lock.
Trucks rumbling along back-country roads, and on triangulated flatbeds two hundred miles apart, microwave dishes swing at the night sky. Endless streams of electrons fly out on invisible batwings. Bounce, echo. The strong blip and the fading afterimage lingering until the returning swing of light illuminates it in a slightly more southerly position.
Solid?
Yeah. Two hundred miles south of Newark. It could be Newark.
Newark’s on Red, also southern New York.
Executive Hold still in effect?
That’s right.
We had him dead-bang over Albany.
Be cool, pal.
Trucks thundering through closed towns where people look out of cardboard-patched windows with terrified, hating eyes. Roaring like prehistoric beasts in the night.
439
Open the holes.
Huge, grinding motors slide huge concrete dunce-caps aside, shunting them down gleaming steel tracks. Circular silos like the entrances to the underworld of the Morlocks.
Gasps of liquid hydrogen escaping into the air.
Tracking. We are tracking, Newark.
Roger, Springfield. Keep us in.
Drunks sleeping in alleys wake foggily to the thunder of the passing tracks and stare mutely at the slices of sky between close-leaning buildings. Their eyes are faded and yellow, their mouths are dripping lines. Hands pull with senile reflex for newsies to protect against the autumn cold, but the newsies are no longer there, the Free-Vee has killed the last of them. Free-Vee is king of the world. Hallelujah. Rich folks smoke Dokes. The yellow eyes catch an unknown glimpse of high, blinking lights in the sky.
Flash, flash. Red and green, red and green. The thunder of the trucks has faded, ramming back and forth in the stone canyons like the fists of vandals. The drunks sleep again.
Bitchin’.
We got him west of Springfield.
Go-no-go in five minutes.
From Harding?
Yes.
He’s bracketed and braced.
All across the night the invisible batwings fly, drawing a glittering net across the northeast corner of America. Servos controlled by General Atomics computers function smoothly. The missiles turn and shift subtly in a thousand places to follow the blinking red and green lights that sketch the sky. They are like steel rattlesnakes filled with waiting venom.
Richards saw it all, and functioned even as he saw it. The duality of his brain was oddly comforting, in a way. It induced a detachment that was much like insanity. His blood-crusted finger followed their southward progress smoothly. Now south of Springfield, now west of Hartford, now-Tracking.
Minus 019 and COUNTING
“Mr. Richards?”
“Yes.”
“We are over Newark, New Jersey.”
“Yes,” Richards said. “I’ve been watching. Holloway?”
Holloway didn’t reply, but Richards knew he was listening.
“They’ve got a bead drawn on us all the way, don’t they?”
440
“Yes,” Holloway said.
Richards looked at McCone. “I imagine they’re trying to decide if they can afford to do away with their professional bloodhound here. Imagine they’ll decide in the affirmative. After all, all they have to do is train a new one.”
McCone was snarling at him, but Richards thought it was a completely unconscious gesture, one that could probably be traced all the way to McCone’s ancestors, the Neanderthals who had crept up behind their enemies with large rocks rather than battling to the death in the honorable but unintelligent manner.
“When do we get over open country again, Captain?”
“We won’t. Not on a due south heading. We will strike open sea after we cross the offshore North Carolina drilling derricks, though.”
“Everything south of here is a suburb of New York City?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Holloway said.
“Thank you.”
Newark was sprawled and groined below them like a handful of dirty jewelry thrown carelessly into some lady’s black-velvet vanity box.
“Captain?”
Wearily: “Yes.”
“You will now proceed due west. ”
McCone jumped as if he had been goosed. Amelia made a surprised coughing noise in her throat.
“West?” Holloway asked. He sounded unhappy and frightened for the first time.
“You’re asking for it, going that way. West takes us over pretty open country.
Pennsylvania between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh is all farm country. There isn’t another big city east of Cleveland.”
“Are you planning my strategy for me, Captain?”
“No, I-”
“Due west,” Richards repeated curtly.
Newark swung away beneath them. “You’re crazy,” McCone said. “They’ll blow us apart.” “With you and five other innocent people on board? This honorable country?” “It will be a mistake,” McCone said harshly. “A mistake on purpose.” “Don’t you watch The National Report? ” Richards asked, still smiling. “We don’t make mistakes. We haven’t made a mistake since 1950.” Newark was sliding away beneath the wing; darkness took its place. “You’re not laughing anymore,” Richards said.
Minus 018 and COUNTING
A half-hour later Holloway came on the voice-com again. He sounded excited.
441
“Richards, we’ve been informed by Harding Red that they want to beam a high–
intensity broadcast at us. From Games Federation. I was told you would find it very much worth your while to turn on the Free-Vee.”
“Thank you.”
He regarded the blank Free-Vee screen and almost turned it on. He withdrew his hand as if the back of the next seat with its embedded screen was hot. A curious sense of dread and deja vu filled him. It was too much like going back to the beginning, Sheila with her thin, worked face, the smell of Mrs. Jenner’s cabbage cooking down the hall. The blare of the games. Treadmill to Bucks. Swim the Crocodiles. Cathy’s screams. There could never be another child, of course, not even if he could take all this back, withdraw it, and go back to the beginning. Even the one had been against fantastically high odds.
“Turn it on, ” McCone said. “Maybe they’re going to offer us-you-a deal.”
“Shut up,” Richards said.
He waited, letting the dread fill him up like heavy water. The curious sense of presentiment. He hurt very badly. His wound was still bleeding, and his legs felt weak and far away. He didn’t know if he could get up to finish this charade when the time came.
With a grunt, Richards leaned forward again and pushed the ON button. The FreeVee sprang to incredibly clear, amplified-signal life. The face that filled the screen, patiently waiting, was very black and very familiar. Dan Killian. He was sitting at a kidney-shaped mahogany desk with the Games symbol on it.
“Hello there,” Richards said softly.
He could have fallen out of his seat when Killian straightened up, grinned, and said,
“Hello there yourself, Mr. Richards.”
Minus 017 and COUNTING
“I can’t see you,” Killian said, “but I can hear you. The jet’s voice-com is being relayed through the radio equipment in the cockpit. They tell me you’re shot up.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Richards said. “I got scratched up in the woods.”
“Oh yes,” Killian said. “The famous Run Through the Woods. Bobby Thompson canonized it on the air just tonight-along with your current exploit, of course. Tomorrow those woods will be full of people looking for a scrap of your shirt, or maybe even a cartridge case.”
“That’s too bad,” Richards said. “I saw a rabbit.”
“You’ve been the greatest contestant we’ve ever had, Richards. Through a combination of luck and skill, you’ve been positively the greatest. Great enough for us to offer you a deal. ”
“What deal? Nationally televised firing squad?”
“This plane hijack has been the most spectacular, but it’s also been the dumbest. Do 442
you know why? Because for the first time you’re not near your own people. You left them behind when you left the ground. Even the woman that’s protecting you. You may think she’s yours. She may even think it. But she’s not. There’s no one up there but us, Richards.
You’re a dead duck. Finally.”
“People keep telling me that and I keep drawing breath.”