Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

“We’ll catch him,” Thompson said, his confidence returning.

“Don’t be too sure,” said Terry. “Jim Raeder has fought wild bulls-now he battles jackals. He’s an average man. He’s the people -who mean ultimate doom to you and your kind.”

“We’ll get him,” Thompson said.

“And one thing more,” Terry said, very softly. “Jim Raeder does not stand alone. The folks of America are for him. Good Samaritans from all corners of our great nation stand ready to assist him. Unarmed, defenseless, Jim Raeder can count on the aid and goodheartedness of the people, whose representative he is. So don’t be too sure, Claude Thompson! The average men are for Jim Raeder-and there are a lot of average men!”

RAEDER thought about it, lying motionless in the underbrush. Yes, the people had helped him. But they had helped the killers, too.

A tremor ran through him. He had chosen, he reminded himself. He alone was responsible. The psychological test had proved that.

And yet, how responsible were the psychologists who had given him the test? How responsible was Mike Terry for offering a poor man so much money? Society had woven the noose and put it around his neck, and he was hanging himself with it and calling it free will.

Whose fault?

“Aha!” someone cried.

Raeder looked up and saw a portly man standing near him.

The man wore a loud tweed jacket. He had binoculars around his neck and a cane in his hand.

“Mister,” Raeder whispered, “please don’t tell!”

“Hi!” shouted the portly man, pointing at Raeder with his cane. “Here he is!”

A madman, thought Raeder. The damned fool must think he’s playing Hare and Hounds.

“Right over here!” the man screamed.

Cursing, Raeder sprang to his feet and began running. He came out of the ravine and saw a white building in the distance. He turned toward it. Behind him he could still hear the man.

“That way, over there. Look, you fools, can’t you see him yet?”

The killers were shooting again. Raeder ran, stumbling over uneven ground, past three children playing in a tree house.

“Here he is!” the children screamed. “Here he is!”

Raeder groaned and ran on. He reached the steps of the building and saw that it was a church.

As he opened the door, a bullet struck him behind the right kneecap.

He fell, and crawled inside the church.

The television set in his pocket was saying, “What a finish, folks, what a finish! Raeder’s been hit! He’s been hit, folks, he’s crawling now, he’s in pain, but he hasn’t given up! NOT Jim Raeder!”

Raeder lay in the aisle near the altar. He could hear a child’s eager voice saying, “He went in there, Mr. Thompson. Hurry, you can still catch him!”

Wasn’t a church considered a sanctuary? Raeder wondered.

Then the door was flung open, and Raeder realized that the custom was no longer observed. He gathered himself together and crawled past the altar, out of the back door of the church.

He was in an old graveyard. He crawled past crosses and stars, past slabs of marble and granite, past stone tombs and rude wooden markers. A bullet exploded on a tombstone near his head, showering him with fragments. He crawled to the edge of an open grave.

They had deceived him, he thought. All of those nice, average, normal people. Hadn’t they said he was their representative? Hadn’t they sworn to protect their own? But no, they loathed him. Why hadn’t he seen it? Their hero was the cold, blank-eyed gunman: Thompson, Capone, Billy the Kid, Young Lochinvar, El Cid, Cuchulain, the man without human hopes or fears. They worshipped him, that dead, implacable robot gunman, and lusted to feel his foot in their face.

Raeder tried to move, and slid helplessly into the open grave.

He lay on his back, looking at the blue sky. Presently a black silhouette loomed above him, blotting out the sky. Metal twinkled. The silhouette slowly took aim.

And Raeder gave up all hope forever.

“Wait, Thompson!” roared the amplified voice of Mike Terry. The revolver wavered.

“It is one second past five o’clock! The week is up! JIM RAEDER HAS WON!”

There was pandemonium of cheering from the studio audience.

The Thompson gang, gathered around the grave, looked sullen.

“He’s won, friends, he’s won!” Mike Terry cried. “Look, look on your screen! The police have arrived, they’re taking the Thompsons away from their victim-the victim they could not kill. And all this is thanks to you, Good Samaritans of America. Look folks, tender hands are lifting Jim Raeder from the open grave that was his final refuge. Good Samaritan Janice Morrow is there. Could this be the beginning of a romance? Jim seems to have fainted, friends; they’re giving him a stimulant. He’s won two hundred thousand dollars! Now we’ll have a few words from Jim Raeder!”

There was a short silence.

“That’s odd,” said Mike Terry. “Folks, I’m afraid we can’t hear from Jim just now. The doctors are examining him. Just one moment…”

There was a silence. Mike Terry wiped his forehead and smiled.

“It’s the strain, folks, the terrible strain. The doctor tells me… Well, folks, Jim Raeder is temporarily not himself. But it’s only temporary! JBC is hiring the best psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in the country. We’re going to do everything humanly possible for this gallant boy. And entirely at our own expense.”

Mike Terry glanced at the studio clock. “Well, it’s about time to sign off, folks. Watch for the announcement of our next great thrill show. And don’t worry, I’m sure that very soon we’ll have Jim Raeder back with us.”

Mike Terry smiled, and winked at the audience. “He’s bound to get well, friends. After all, we’re all pulling for him!”

Here’s a fast-paced tale that takes us inside a very dangerous game, one with real-world implications-and demonstrates that even in a game, there are sometimes things more important than hit-points and treasure.

Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of the popular Boing Boing website ( boingboing.net ), a co-founder of the internet search-engine company OpenCola.com , and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org ). In 2001, he also won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, The Infinite Matrix, On Spec, Salon, and elsewhere, and were recently collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More. His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award as Best First Novel, and was followed shortly by a second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Doctorow’s other books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, written with Karl Schroeder, and a guide to Essential Blogging, written with Shelley Powers. His most recent book is a new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. He has a website at www.craphound.com .

ANDA didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf, because if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet, and none of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armour. Bintware, she called it.