ROOTY
Root-root-root-root!
SNAKE HUNTER Shutup, Rooty. (to COLONEL HENRY) So what’s our plan?
COLONEL HENRY takes the floatpad further up, so he can use his highlighter to circle a couple of the protrusions on the inner sides of the corridor.
COLONEL HENRY Drone telemetry reports that the Force Corridor itself is over 200,000 miles long and 50,000 miles wide, a hallway of death in which nothing can live! But it may have a weakness! I think these square shapes are power-generators. If we could knock “em out-
BOUNTY Are we talkin” Power Wagon assault, boss?
We move in on COLONEL HENRY’s grim face.
COLONEL HENRY
It’s Earth’s only chance.
INT. CRISIS DESK, WITH THE MOTOKOPS
SNAKE HUNTER A deep space Power Wagon assault? Could be a quick trip to that Boot Hill in the sky!
ROOTY
Root-root-root-root!
ALL
Shut up, Rooty!
INT. A HALLWAY IN THE CRISIS CENTER
COLONEL HENRY and CASSIE STYLES are in the lead, the other MotoKops behind them. ROOTY, as usual, is bumbling along in the rear.
COLONEL HENRY
You’re worried, little one.
CASSIE Of course I’m worried! Snake Hunter is right! The Power Wagons were never designed for the stresses of a deep space assault!
COLONEL HENRY But that’s not all that’s on your mind.
CASSIE Sometimes I hate your telepathy, Hank.
COLONEL HENRY
Come on… give.
CASSIE Something bothers me about those shapes inside the Force Corridor. What if they aren’t power-generators?
COLONEL HENRY
What else could they be?
They have reached the slide-door to the Power Wagon Corral. COLONEL HENRY slaps his hand into the palm-lock and the door slides up.
CASSIE I don’t know, but…
INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, FEATURING THE MOTOKOPS
CASSIE gasps with shock, eyes widening! COLONEL HENRY, looking grim, puts his arm. around her. The other squad-members gather round
ROOTY
Root-root-root-root!
SNAKE HUNTER Yeah, Rooty, I couldn’t agree more!
He stares bitterly at:
INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, MOTOKOPS” POV
Floating in the middle of the parked Power Wagons, between SNAKE HUNTER’s Tracker Arrow and the silver-sided Rooty-Toot, is a grim visitor: the Meatwagon,HUMMING SOFTLY.
INT. RESUME MOTOKOPS SQUAD
COLONEL HENRY
MotoKops, prepare for battle!
SNAKE HUNTER (his stun-pistol already out) Way ahead of you, boss.
The others draw.
INT. RESUME MEATWAGON
The Doom Turret SLIDES BACK, revealing NO FACE, sinister as always in his black uniform. Sitting behind him at the controls, with her customary look of sexy hauteur, is COUNTESS LILI. The Hypno-Jewel around her neck FLICKERS WILDLY through the color spectrum.
NO FACE
Floatpad, Countess. Now!
COUNTESS LILI
Yes, Excellent One.
The COUNTESS pulls a lever. A floatpad appears. NO FACE steps on to it and is wafted down to the floor of the Corral. He is unarmed, and asCOLONEL HENRY steps forward, he holsters his own stunner.
COLONEL HENRY
Aren’t you a little far from home, No Face?
NO FACE
Home is where the heart is, my dear Hank.
BOUNTY
This is no time for games.
NO FACE As it happens, I couldn’t agree more. The Force Corridor approaches. You, Colonel Henry, are planning a Power Wagon assault-
MAJOR PIKE
How do you know that?
NO FACE (icy)
Because it’s what I’d do, you idiot!
(to COLONEL HENRY) A Power Wagon assault is incredibly risky, but it may also be Earth’s only chance. You’ll need all the help you can get, and you have no vehicle at your command as powerful as the Meatwagon.
SNAKE HUNTER That’s a matter of opinion, you mutt. My Tracker Arrow-
COLONEL HENRY
Stow the gab!
(to NO FACE)
What are you offering?
NO FACE A partnership until the crisis is past. Old quarrels put aside, at least temporarily. A joint attack on the Force Corridor.
He offers his black-gloved hand. COLONEL HENRY starts to reciprocate, and then MAJOR PIKE steps forward. His almond-shaped eyes are wide, and his mouth-horn quivers with alarm.
MAJOR PIKE Don’t do it, Hank! You can’t trust him! It’s a trick!
NO FACE I understand how you feel, Major… we both do, do we not, Countess?
COUNTESS LILI
Yes, Excellent One.
NO FACE But this time there are no tricks, no hidden cards.
COLONEL HENRY (to MAJOR PIKE) And we have no choice.
NO FACE Indeed we don’t. Time is running out.
COLONEL HENRY reaches out and takes NO FACE’shand.
NO FACE
Partners?
COLONEL HENRY
For now.
ROOTY
Root-root-root-root!
We FADE TO BLACK. Ends ACT 2.
Chapter Six
Now speaking in the voice of Ben Cartwright, patriarch of the Ponderosa, Tak said: “Ma’am, it looks to me like you were planning on skedaddling.”
“No…”
It was her voice, but weak and distant, like a radio transmission coming in from the West Coast on a rainy night. “No, I was just going to the store. Because we’re out of…” Out of what? What could they possibly be out of that this monster would care about, believe in? And, blessedly, something came to her. “Chocolate syrup! Hershey’s!”
It came toward her from the den doorway, Seth Garin in MotoKops Underoos, only now she saw an amazing, horrid thing: the child’s bare toes were dragging across the living-room carpet, but otherwise it was floating along like a boy-shaped balloon. It was Seth’s body, poignantly grimy at the wrists and ankles, but there was no Seth in the eyes. None at all. Now it was just the thing that looked like it belonged in a swamp.
“Says she was just going to take a mosey down to the general store,” said the voice of Ben Cartwright. Whatever else Tak might be, it was a hellishly good mimic. You had to give it that. “What do you think, Adam?”
“Think she’s lying, Paw,” said the voice of Pernell Roberts, the actor who had played Adam Cartwright. Roberts had lost his hair over the years, but he had gotten the best of the deal, anyway; the actors who had played his father and his brothers had all died in the years since Bonanza had galloped off into the sunset of reruns and cable TV.
Back to the voice of Ben as the thing drifted closer, close enough for her to be able to smell sour sweat and a sweet lingering ghost of No More Tears shampoo. “What do you think, Hoss? Speak up, boy.”
“Lyin, Paw,” Dan Blocker’s voice said… and for a moment the almost-floating child actually looked like Blocker.
“Little Joe?”
“Lyin, Paw.”
“Root-root-root-root!”
“Shut up, Rooty,” said Snake Hunter’s voice. It was as if some invisible ensemble of talented lunatics were putting on a show for her. When the thing in front of her spoke again, Snake Hunter was gone and Ben Cartwright was back, that stern Moses of the Sierra Nevada. We don’t much abide liars on the Ponderosa, ma’am. Skedaddlers, either. Now what do you reckon we should do with you?”
Don’t hurt me, she tried to say, but no words came out, not even a whisper of words. She tried to switch over to some internal circuit, visualizing the little red telephone, only with SETH stamped into the plastic of the handset now. It scared her to try and reach Seth directly, but she had never been in a jam like this. If it decided it wanted her dead…
She saw the phone in her mind, saw herself speaking into it, and what she had to say was painfully simple: Don’t let it hurt me, Seth. You had power over it at the start, I know you did.
Maybe not much, but a little. If you have any left-any power, any influence-please don’t let it hurt me, please don’t let it kill me. I’m miserable, but not miserable enough to want to die. Not yet.
She looked for a flicker of humanity in the floating thing’s eyes, the slightest sign of Seth, and saw nothing.
Suddenly her left hand shot up and then slapped down, whacking her left cheek with a sound like a breaking stick of kindling. Heat flooded her skin; it was as if someone had turned a sunlamp on that side of her face. Her left eye began to water.
Now her right hand rose up in front of her eyes, like a Hindu swami’s snake rising out of its basket. It hung in front of her for a moment, and then slowly folded itself into a fist.
No, she tried to say, please no, please, Seth, don’t let it, but nothing came out this time, either, and the fist plummeted down, knuckles very white in the dim room, and then her nose seemed to explode upward in clouds of white dots like butterflies. They danced frantically in front of her eyes even as blood, warm and loose, began to run down over her lips and chin. She staggered backward.
“This woman is an affront to justice in the twenty-third century!” Colonel Henry said in his stern voice-a voice she found more hateful and self-righteous each time an episode of the fucking cartoon came on. “She must be shown the error of her ways.”