John Varley - Steel Beach

"… yeeeesss. Are you near the trunk or the tail?"

"Trunk."

"All right. The last poker game we played, if the high card in my hand was a King, start walking north. If it was a Queen, east. Jack, south. Got it?"

"Yeah." East it would be.

"Walk for ten minutes and stop. I'll be there."

With anyone else I'd have wasted another minute pointing out that only left me a margin of five minutes and no hope at all of getting back. With Walter I just said, "So will I." Walter has many despicable qualities, but when he says he'll do something, he'll do it.

I'd have had to move soon, anyway. As we were talking I'd spotted two of the enemy moving across the plain in big, loping strides. They were coming from the north, so I hefted the radio and tossed it toward the southeast. They immediately altered direction to follow it.

Here came the hard part. I watched them pass in front of me. Even in a regular suit I'd have been hard to spot in the shadows. But now I started walking eastwards, and in a moment I stepped out into the bright sunshine. I had to keep reminding myself how hard Gretel had been to spot when I'd first encountered her. I'd never felt so naked. I kept an eye on the soldiers, and when they reached the spot where the radio had fallen to the ground I froze, and watched as they scanned the horizon.

I didn't stay frozen long, as I quickly spotted four more people coming from various directions. It was one of the hardest things I ever did, but I started walking again before any of them could get too close.

With each step I thought of a dozen more ways they could find me and catch me. A simple radar unit would probably suffice. I'm not much at physics, but I supposed the null-suit would throw back a strong signal.

They must not have had one, because before long I was far enough away that I couldn't pick any of them out from the ground glare, and if I couldn't see them they sure as hell couldn't see me.

At the nine-minute point a bright silver jumper swooped silently over my head, not ten meters high, and I'd have jumped out of my socks if I'd had any on. It turned, and I saw the big double-n Nipple logo blazoned on its side and it was a sweet sight indeed.

The driver flew a big oval at the right distance from the Heinlein , which was almost out of sight by then, letting me see him because I had to come to him, not the other way around. Then it settled down off to my right, looking like a giant mosquito in carnal embrace with a bedstead. I started to run.

He must have had some sort of sensor on the ladder, because when I had both feet on it the jumper lifted off. Not the sort of maneuver I'd like to do on a Sunday jaunt, but I could understand his haste. I wrenched the lock door open and cycled it, and stepped inside to the unlikely spectacle of Walter training a machine gun on me.

Ho-hum. I'd had so many weapons pointed at me in the last few hours that the sight-which would have given me pause a year ago, say at contract re-negotiation time-barely registered. I experienced something I'd noticed before at the end of times of great stress: I wanted to go to sleep.

"Put that thing away, Walter," I said. "If you fire it you'd probably kill us both."

"This is a reinforced pressure hull," he said, and the gun didn't waver. "Turn that suit off first."

"I wasn't thinking about decompression," I said. "I was thinking you'd probably shoot yourself in the foot, then get lucky and hit me." But I turned it off, and he looked at my face, glanced down at my naked, outrageously pregnant body, and then looked away. He stowed the weapon and resumed his place in the pilot's seat. I struggled into the seat beside him.

"Pretty eventful day," I said.

"I wish you'd get back to covering the news instead of making it," he said. "What'd you do to get the CC so riled up?"

"That was me? This is all about me?"

"No, but you're a big part of it."

"Tell me what's happening."

"Nobody knows the whole thing yet," he said, and then started telling me the little he knew.

It had begun-back in the normal world-with thousands of elevators stalling between levels. No sooner had emergency crews been dispatched than other things began to go haywire. Soon all the mass media were off the air and Walter had had reports that pressure had been breached in several major cities, and other places had suffered oxygen depletion. There were fires, and riots, and mass confusion. Then, shortly before he got the call from me, the CC had come on most major frequencies with an announcement meant to reassure but oddly unsettling. He said there had been malfunctions, but that they were under control now. ("An obvious lie," Walter told me, almost with relish.) The CC had pledged to do a better job in the future, promised this wouldn't happen again. He'd said he was in control now.

"The first implication I got from that," Walter said, "was that he hadn't been in control for a while, and I want an explanation of that. But the thing that really got me, after I thought about it, was… what kind of control did he mean?"

"I'm not sure I understand."

"Well, obviously he's in control , or he's supposed to be. Of the day-to-day mechanics of Luna. Air, water, transportation. In the sense that he runs those things. And he's got a lot of control in the civil and criminal social sectors. He makes schedules for the government, for instance. He's got a hand in everything . He monitors everything. But in control? I didn't like the sound of it. I still don't."

While I thought that one over something very bright and very fast overtook us, shot by on the left, then tried to hang a right, as if it had changed its mind. It turned into a fireball and we flew right into it. I heard things pinging on the hull, things the size of sand grains.

"What the hell was that ?"

"Some of your friends back there. Don't worry, I'm on top of it."

"On top of it…? They're shooting at us!"

"And missing. And we're out of range. And this ship is equipped with the best illegal jamming devices money can buy. I've got tricks I haven't even used yet."

I glanced at him, a big unruly bear of a man, hunched over his manual controls and keeping one eye on an array of devices attached to the dashboard, devices I was sure hadn't come from the factory that built the jumper.

"I might have known you'd have connections with the Heinleiners," I said.

"Connections?" he snorted. "I was on the board of directors of the L5 Society when most of those 'Heinleiners' hadn't even been born yet. My father was there when the keel of that ship was launched. You might say I have connections."

"But you're not one of them."

"Let's say we have some political differences."

He probably thought they were too left-wing. Long ago in our relationship I'd talked a little politics with Walter, as most people did who came to work at the Nipple . Not many had a second conversation. The most charitable word I'd heard used to describe his convictions was "daft." What most people would think of an anarchy Walter would call a social strait-jacket.

"Don't care for Mister Smith?" I asked.

"Great scientist. Too bad he's a socialist."

"And the starship project?"

"It'll get there the day they return to the original plan. Plus about twenty years to rebuild it, tear out all the junk Smith has installed."

"Pretty impressive junk."

"He makes a great spacesuit. He hasn't shown me a star drive."

I decided to leave it at that, because I had no intention of getting into an argument with him, and because I had no way of telling if he was right or wrong.

"Guns, too," I said. "If I'd thought about it, I'd have known you'd be a gun owner."