Silence except for the humming sound of traffic all around them. Signs were beginning to say COWVILLB up ahead.
“Yes, I guess we tried to defy nature at some stage,” Sheklov said at last. “One gets to see the results in the timber-trade, naturally-” He caught himself as Magda gave a dry laugh and echoed his last word in a whisper: naturallyl
“So what’s the other way?” he asked, irritated.
“Hold it,” Magda said, twisting around in her seat. “Heyl Close out, you twos”
In the back seat, a mutter of annoyance. Sheklov spared a glance in his mirror and saw the two heads, one fair and one dark, separate and move to a regular sitting position.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Pigs, what else?” Magda said, and leaned away from him. A car with a spotlight on the corner of the windshield was working its way up the line of traffic, and the man next to the driver was flashing the light into the windows of the cars it passed.
When they came up to Lora’s car, they found her and Danty decorously sitting, more or less fully clothed, in opposite corners of the rear seat.
“The other way?” Magda said when they had been overtaken in due sequence. “Find a route where the bastards can’t follow you and shine spotlights on you, of course.”
“There isn’t one,” Lora said in a dead voice.
The turnoff signs were saying COWVILLE-NORTH. Sheklov remembered that from their entry on to the superway. He slowed and signalled right.
“You’re not with me,” Magda said. “I mean the route where the things that count in your life aren’t the things they’re worried about-even though they ought to be afraid of them, because they’re the most dangerous. Danty, are you okay?”
He was rubbing his temple with the hand of his injured arm.
“My head hurts,” he said in a dull tone.
“Oh, Dantyl” Lora burst out. “It must be that cutl Don, get us off the superway quick as you can, find a drugstorel”
“Nol” Magda snapped. “Zip it, will you? Danty?”
“I . . .” He licked his lips. “I don’t get it all,” he said
after a pause. “But the one thing we mustn’t do is go
home.” –
“But-(” Sheklov began.
“Make for it, sure,” Danty said. Little beads of sweat, shiny in the lights of the city, were springing out on his skin. “But don’t try and stop outside, that clear? Something’s happening, something bad. We got to smell the scene and find out what.”
Sheklov gave Magda-a blank stare. She sat back with a resigned expression.
“Told you,” she said. “Danty was born at the wrong end of time, peg? So you do what he tells you. If you don’tshit, the sky may fall on us.”
. ~cu .
It was a long time before Morton Clarke could believe impersonal report of the computers, so far away from familiar desk of his, yet-electronically speaking-so close at hand that he could reach out and touch them.
They had a kind of reality to them that people never seemed to have.
He looked again at the print-outs, dangling over the automatic destruction unit, and eventually picked them up and laid them side by side, because he had to convince himself.
“The name’s the same,” he said with an access of gal. lows humor. and did what had to be done.
Then he waited. He didn’t wonder what Fenella was doing. He knew she was watching TV.
Channel 8.
The first thing the security forces did not do was notify the police that they were about to conduct a raid. It wasn’t safe to do that; the police were not secure but iealously guarded their right to pick their own men and women, to hide their confidential files . . . or to try to.
So it had been years since the U. S. Security Force liaised with the police anywhere, and above all not in Lakonia or Cowville, the most sensitive of all areas in the country.
Cold, despite the outside warmth of the night, Clarke sat at his desk and dictated what must be looked out for.
“Apartment empty.” was the first news that reached him. He gave a nod. That figured.