He looked for somewhere to hide. There was nothing in the crater to
afford concealment, and nowhere to run on the plain beyond.
The vibrations stopped.
Even in the deep shadows thrown by the ship, Bobby noticed a horde of
identical insects begin to scuttle out of the bore holes in the crater
walls, one after the other. They had been called forth.
Though no apparent openings appeared in the belly of the ship, a score
or more of low-energy lasers-some yellow, some white, some blue, some
red-began to play over the floor of the crater. Each beam was the
diameter of a silver dollar, and each moved independently of the others.
Like spotlights, they repeatedly swept the crater and everything in it,
sometimes moving parallel to one another, sometimes crisscrossing one
another, in a display that further disoriented Bobby and gave him the
feeling that he was caught in the middle of a silent fireworks show.
He remembered what Manfred and Gavenall had told him about the crimson
decorations along the rim of the bug’s shell, and he saw that the white
lasers were focusing only on the insects, busily scanning the markings
around each carapace. Their owners were taking roll call. He saw a
white beam fidget over the broken corpus of one of the bugs he had
kicked, and after a moment a red beam joined it to study the carcass.
Then the red beam jumped to Bobby, and a couple of other beams of
different hue also found him, as if he was a can of peas being
identified and added to someone’s grocery bill at a supermarket
checkout.
The floor of the crater was teeming with insects now, so many that Bobby
could see neither the gray soil nor the litter of excreted diamonds over
which they clambered. He told himself that they were not really bugs;
they were just biological machines, engineered by the same race that had
built the ship hanging over him. But that didn’t help much because they
still looked more like bugs than like machines. They had been designed
to mine diamonds; they were not attracted to him whatsoever; but their
disinterest did not make him feel better, because his phobia guaranteed
that he was interested in them. His shadow-chilled skin prickled with
gooseflesh. Short circuiting nerve endings sputtered with false reports
of things crawling on him, so he felt as if bugs swarmed over him from
head to foot. They were actually creeping over his shoes, but none of
them tried to scurry up his legs; he was grateful, because he was sure
he would go mad if they began to climb him.
He used his hand as a visor over his eyes, to avoid being dazzled by the
lasers that were playing on him. He saw something gleaming in the
scanner beams only a few feet away: a curved section of what appeared to
be hollow steel tubing. It was sticking out of the powdery soil, partly
buried, further concealed by the bugs that scurried and jittered around
it. Nevertheless, at first sight Bobby knew what it was, and he was
overcome with a horrible sinking feeling. He shuffled forward, trying
to crush any of the insects because, for all he knew, the penalty for
the additional destruction of property might be instant incineration.
When he could reach the glinting curve metal, he seized it and pulled it
loose of the soft earth. It was the missing railing from the hospital
bed.
“HOW LONG?” Julie demanded.
“Twenty-one minutes,” Clint said.
They still stood near the chair where Frank had been sitting and beside
which Bobby had been stooping.
Lee Chen had gotten off the sofa, so Jackie Jaxx could sit down. The
magician-hypnotist had draped a damp washcloth over his forehead. Every
couple of minutes he protested. He could not really make people
disappear, though no one had accused him of being responsible for what
had happened to Frank and Bobby.
Having retrieved a bottle of Scotch, glasses, and ice from the office
wet bar, Lee Chen was pouring six stiff drinks,for each person in the
room, as well as for Frank and Bobby
“If you don’t need a drink to steady your nerves now,” he said, “you’ll