And if I went back, there was only my house to take refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it was working against me.
The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the damn thing and didn't understand its purpose. It was no more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to rock my own hovercar.
Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt that I would work for them, and there was no chance that I could stir up any sort of hornet's nest about Melinda Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded me into the howler and took me quietly away.
But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it that easy for them.
Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the time, under my breath, was "fool" and "congenital idiot" and "raving madman," but that is neither here nor there.
Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler, I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.
The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate dandelion fluff-which turned abruptly into a lump of lead and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.
I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back against full stop so that none of the power could be used to drive the craft forward or backward-it all went straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.
The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the story would have ended much differently indeed.
The last thirty feet, the building column of air under the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise somewhere below, but it could not be that serious if the car still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceleration, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.
Taking the car out next to the curling waves that foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the cliff to see what was transpiring there-and was just in time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush to follow me.
Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev four times faster than a small car's blades ever can; extra compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim to add extra boost if the time should come when they are needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundredfoot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge howler fell like a mountain.
In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed and force that the blades at full and the compressed air jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.
The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn't want to see what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted to.
Down
And down
Sand exploded upward as the howler reached the beach.
But the thing wasn't slowed.
It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound, with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.
At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of ignition. On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere, burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.
They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific impact of the crash.
Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.
The howler's descent, however, had been a good object lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.
I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the city, where I knew I could regain the highway before long.
In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn't it true that every citizen who roots for "our side" to "kill the gooks" is as responsible for every death as the man wielding the gun? Isn't it true that none of us can escape responsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we constantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?
Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses behind.
As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with themand yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself, time to make my anger into something more formidable than emotion.
I was superman, and it was time to act like one.
Or so I thought and so it seemed to be
V
In the large apartment complexes such as the one in which Melinda maintained her home, there is every convenience of modern living that one could wish for-all under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hovercars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restaurants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved chemical stimulants.