Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

Or perhaps they were being shot off by fools. In Amelia’s experience, you could never write off the fool option.

Radio 2 was blinking and squawking like a battery-operated chicken. Amelia ignored it. Until she knew who was shooting at her, she wasn’t talking to anybody: any radio contact would reveal her location.

As, treading air, she rounded the skeleton of the would-be shipping line, Amelia noticed something odd. It looked like a lump of rags hanging from a rope tied to a girder — possibly a support strut for a planned crosswalk — that stuck out from the metal framework. What on earth could that be? Then it moved, wriggling downward, and she saw that it was a boy!

And he was sliding rapidly down toward the end of his rope.

Almost without thinking, Amelia brought her autogyro in. There had to be a way of saving the kid. The rotor blades were a problem, and their wash. She couldn’t slow down much more than she already had — autogyros didn’t hover. But if she took both the forward speed and the wash into account, made them work together…

It would be trying to snag a baseball in a hurricane. But she didn’t see any alternative.

She came in, the wash from her props blowing the lump of rags and the rope it hung from almost parallel to the ground. She could see the kid clearly now, a little boy in a motley coat, his body hanging just above Amelia. He had a metal box hanging from a belt around his neck that in another instant was going to tear him off the rope for sure.

There was one hellishly giddy moment when her rotors went above the out-stuck girder and her fuselage with its stubby wings went below. She reached out with the mail hook, grabbed the kid, and pulled him into the cockpit as the ’gyro moved relentlessly forward.

The tip of the rope whipped up and away and was shredded into dust by the whirling blades. The boy fell heavily between Amelia and her rudder, so that she couldn’t see a damned thing.

She shoved him up and over her, unceremoniously dumping the brat headfirst into the passenger seat. Then she grabbed the controls, easing her bird back into the center of the alley.

From behind her, the kid shouted, “Jeepers, Amelia. Get outta here, f’cripesake! He’s coming for you!”

“What?” Amelia yelled. Then the words registered. “Who’s shooting? Why?” The brat knew something. “Where are they? How do you know?” Then, sternly, “That was an insanely dangerous thing for you to do.”

“Don’t get yer wig in a frizzle,” said the kid. “I done this a million times.”

“You have?” said Amelia in surprise.

“In my dreams, anyway,” said the kid. “Hold the questions. Right now we gotta lam outta here, before somebody notices us what shouldn’t. I’ll listen in on what’s happening.” He twisted around and tore open the seat back, revealing the dry batteries, and yanked the cords from them. The radio went dead.

“Hey!” Amelia cried.

“Not to worry. I’m just splicing my Universal Receiver to your power supply. Your radios are obsolete now, but you couldn’t know that….” Now the little gremlin had removed a floor panel and was crawling in among the autogyro’s workings. “Lemme just ground this and… Say! Why have you got a bomb in here?”

“Huh? You mean… Oh, that’s just some electronic doohickey the Naked Brains asked me to test for them.”

“Tell it to the Marines, lady. I didn’t fall off no turnip truck. The onliest electronics you got here is two wires coming off a detonator cap and leading to one of your radios. If I didn’t know better, I’d tag this sucker as a remote-controlled self-destruct device.” The imp stuck its head out of the workings again, and said, “Oh yeah. The name’s Radio Jones.”

With an abrupt rush of conceptual vertigo, Amelia realized that this gamin was a girl . “How do you do,” she said dazedly. “I’m…”

“I know who you are,” Radio said. “I got your picture on the wall.” Then, seeing that they were coming up on the bend in Archer Road, “Hey! Nix! Not that way! There’s a guy with a coupla rockets up there just waiting for you to show your face. Pull a double curl and loop back down Vanzetti. There’s a vacant lot this side of the Shamrock Tavern that’s just wide enough for the ’gyro. Martin Dooley’s the barkeep there, and he’s got a shed large enough to hide this thing. Let’s vamoose!”

A rocket exploded behind her.

Good advice was good advice. No matter how unlikely its source.

Amelia Spindizzy vamoosed.

But as she did, she could not help casting a wistful glance back over her shoulder, hoping against hope for a glimpse of a bright red aeroplane. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about Eszterhazy surviving this?” she heard herself asking her odd young passenger. Whatever was happening, with his superb skills, surely he must have survived.

“Uh, about that…” Radio Jones said. “I kinda got some bad news for you.”

Rudy awoke to find himself in Hell.

Hell was touchless, tasteless, scentless, and black as pitch. It consisted entirely of a bedlam of voices: “Lemme outta here — wasn’t doing nothing — Mabel! Where are you, Mabel? — I’m serious, I got bad claustrophobia — goddamn flicks! — there’s gotta be — minding my own business — Mabel! — gonna puke — all the things I coulda been — I don’t like it here — can’t even hear myself think — Oh, Freddy, if only I’da toldja I loved you when I coulda — got to be a way out — why won’t anybody tell me what’s happening? — if the resta youse don’t shut — ”

He knew where he was now. He understood their situation. Gathering himself together, Rudy funneled all the energy he had into a mental shout:

“Silence!”

His thought was so forceful and purposive that it shocked all the other voices into silence.

“Comrades!” he began. “It is clear enough what has happened here. We have all been harvested by the police lackeys of the Naked Brains. By the total lack of somatic sensations, I deduce that we have ourselves been made into Naked Brains.” Somebody sent out a stab of raw emotion. Before his or her (not that gender mattered anymore, under the circumstances) hysteria could spread, Rudy rushed onward in a torrent of words. “But there is no need for despair. We are not without hope. So long as we have our thoughts, our inner strength, and our powers of reason, we hold within ourselves the tools of liberation.”

“Liberation?” somebody scoffed. “It’s my body’s been liberated, and from me . It’s them is doing the liberatin’, not us.”

“I understand your anger, brother,” Rudy said. “But the opportunity is to him who keeps his head.” Belatedly, Rudy realized that this was probably not the smartest thing to say. The anonymous voices responded with jeers. “Peace, brothers and sisters. We may well be lost, and we must face up to that.” More jeers. “And yet, we all have family and friends who we left behind.” Everyone, that is, save for himself — a thought that Rudy quickly suppressed. “Think of the world that is coming for them — one of midnight terror, an absolutist government, the constant fear of denouncement and punishment without trial. Of imprisonment without hope of commutation, of citizens randomly plucked from the streets for harvesting…” He paused to let that sink in. “I firmly believe that we can yet free ourselves. But even if we could not, would it not be worth our uttermost efforts to fight the tyranny of the Brains? For the sake of those we left behind?”

There was a general muttering of agreement. Rudy had created a community among his listeners. Now, quickly, to take advantage of it! “Who here knows anything about telecommunications technology?”