Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

But luck was with her. She spied the symbol of a triangle inside a circle on the side of what looked like an abandoned office. She watched a man descend a flight of stairs directly beneath the painted triangle. She followed him.

“Where are we going?” Dr. Marx said. He was still a bundle of tics from angel-deprivation.

Keel didn’t answer, just dragged him along. Inside, she saw the “Easy Does It” sign and knew everything was going to be okay.

An old man saw her and waved. Incredibly, he knew her, even knew her name. “Keel,” he shouted. “I’m delighted to see you.”

“It’s a small world, Solly.”

“It’s that. But you get around some too. You cover some ground, you know. I figured ground might be covering you by now.”

Keel laughed. “Yeah.” She reached out and touched the old man’s arm. “I’m looking for a house,” she said.

IN Group they couldn’t get over it. Dr. Max Marx was a fizzing client . This amazed everyone, but two identical twins, Sere and Shona, were so dazed by this event that they insisted on dogging the wilson ’s every move. They’d flank him, peering up into his eyes, trying to fathom this mystery by an act of unrelenting scrutiny.

Brake Madders thought it was a narc thing and wanted to hurt Marx.

“No, he’s one of us,” Keel said.

And so , Keel thought, am I .

WHEN Dr. Max Marx was an old man, one of his favorite occupations was to reminisce. One of his favorite topics was Keel Benning. He gave her credit for saving his life, not only in the jungles of Pit Finitum but during the rocky days that followed when he wanted to flee the halfway house and find, again, virtual nirvana.

She had recognized every denial system and thwarted it with logic. When logic was not enough, she had simply shared his sadness and pain and doubt.

“I’ve been there,” she had said.

THE young wilsons and addiction activists knew Keel Benning only as the woman who had fought Virtvana and Mind-Slip and the vast lobby of Right to Flight, the woman who had secured a resounding victory for addicts’ rights and challenged the spurious thinking that suggested a drowning person was drowning by choice. She was a hero, but, like many heroes, she was not, to a newer generation, entirely real.

“I WAS preoccupied at the time,” Dr. Marx would tell young listeners. “I kept making plans to slip out and find some Apes and Angels. You weren’t hard pressed then-and you aren’t now-to find some mind-flaming vee in the Slash. My thoughts would go that way a lot.

“So I didn’t stop and think, ‘Here’s a woman who’s been rehabbed six times; it’s not likely she’ll stop on the seventh. She’s just endured some genuine nasty events, and she’s probably feeling the need for some quality downtime.’

“What I saw was a woman who spent every waking moment working on her recovery. And when she wasn’t doing mental, spiritual, or physical push-ups, she was helping those around her, all us shaking, vision-hungry, fizz-headed needers.

“I didn’t think, ‘What the hell is this?’ back then. But I thought it later. I thought it when I saw her graduate from medical school.

“When she went back and got a law degree, so she could fight the bastards who wouldn’t let her practice addiction medicine properly, I thought it again. That time, I asked her. I asked her what had wrought the change.”

Dr. Marx would wait as long as it took for someone to ask, “What did she say?”

“It unsettled me some,” he would say, then wait again to be prompted.

They’d prompt.

“ ‘Helping people,’ she’d said. She’d found it was a thing she could do; she had a gift for it. All those no-counts and dead-enders in a halfway house in the Slash. She found she could help them all.”

Dr. Marx saw it then, and saw it every time after that, every time he’d seen her speaking on some monolith grid at some rally, some hearing, some whatever. Once he’d seen it, he saw it every time: that glint in her eye, the incorrigible, unsinkable addict.

“People,” she had said. “What a rush.”

The Reality TV craze has helped to generate the idea that anybody and everybody can be a television star, but as the sly story that follows indicates, it’s not always as easy as it looks…

Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s , as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age. In 1990, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night. The Weight, The Tranquillity Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, Chronospace, Coyote, and Coyote Rising. His short work has been gathered in two collections, Rude Astronauts and Sex and Violence in Zero G. His most recent book is a new novel in the Coyote sequence, Coyote Frontier. He won a Hugo Award in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future,” and another Hugo in 1998 for his novella “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Whately, Massachusetts with his wife, Linda.

RAY’S Good Food Diner was located on the outskirts of town near the interstate, across a gravel parking lot from a Union 76 truckstop. The town only had 1,300 residents, so it supported only two restaurants, the other of which was a pizzeria which served up what was universally acknowledged to be the world’s most indigestible pizza. This left Ray’s Good Food Diner as the only place within fifteen miles where you could get a decent breakfast twenty-four hours a day.

Every Friday morning at about nine o’clock, Bill drove out to Ray’s for the weekly meeting of the Old Farts Club. No one remembered who first started calling it that, but it pretty well described the membership: a half-dozen or so men, each and every one of whom qualified for the senior citizen discount, who liked to get together and chew the fat, both literally and figuratively. There weren’t any rules, written or unspoken, against women or children attending the meetings, but since no one had ever brought along any family members-their wives didn’t care and their kids were all adults now and, for the most part, living away from home-the issue had never really been raised. Which was just as well; in a world where seemingly everything had been made accessible to all ages and both genders, Ray’s Good Food Diner was one of the few places left where a handful of white male chauvinists could safely convene without fear of being picketed.

A grumbling row of sixteen-wheelers idled on the other side of the lot when Bill pulled into Ray’s. He parked his ten-year-old Ford pick-up in front of the diner and climbed out. The late autumn air was cool and crisp, redolent with the scent of fallen leaves and diesel fumes; he thrust his hands into the pockets of his Elks Club windbreaker as he sauntered past the line of cars. Even without glancing through the windows, he knew which of his friends were here just by recognizing their vehicles: Chet’s charcoal-black Cadillac with the NRA sticker in the rear window; Tom’s Dodge truck with corn husks in the bed; Garrett’s decrepit Volkswagen hatchback with the mismatched driver’s side door and the dented rear bumper. John’s Volvo wasn’t there-Bill remembered that he was in Daytona Beach, visiting his son’s family. Ned hadn’t arrived yet, either because he had overslept or-more likely, Bill thought sourly-he was too hungover from his latest whiskey binge. Poor Ned.