Gridiron

'Do you want to unpack that?' Richardson said after a moment or two.

'Or do you just expect us meekly to carry it away? We can't stay put because the great Bob Beech told us so. The man who built this piece of psycho-hardware. There I was blaming Kenny when really it couldn't have been his fault at all. He was only making use of one lousy corner of that computer. I don't see how anyone could blame him.'

'But you gave it your best shot, didn't you?' sneered Beech. 'And now you're blaming me.'

'No one's blaming anyone,' said Curtis.

'The hell they're not,' replied Richardson. 'That's what people get paid for, Sergeant. To take the blame. And the more you get paid, the more blame you have to take. You wait until this is all over. People will be lining up to kick my ass.'

'You'd better hope you've got an ass to kick,' said Curtis. 'Now why don't you listen to what he has to say.'

Curtis nodded at Beech, who continued to stare belligerently at Richardson.

'Well, don't make us go down on our knees for it,' Curtis added. 'Let's hear what you've got.'

'OK. I've been looking at some of the game commands, trying to understand the game we're in,' explained Beech. 'If it's possible to understand it. But there's one thing I've found that changes everything. There's a time factor here that we didn't even know about. As Ishmael sees it, we have to complete the game within the next twelve hours, or — '

Beech shrugged. '- Or something catastrophic is set to happen to us all.'

'Like what?' said Richardson.

'Ishmael is a bit vague, but he calls it his time bomb. There are obviously no explosives in this building, so it's safe to assume that Ishmael has something else in mind. My best guess is the standby generating set in the basement. It's oil-fired, isn't it?'

Mitch nodded. 'An oil-fire in the basement could be disastrous,' he sighed. 'Especially if Ishmael were to override all the safety devices and let it burn. With no HVAC the smoke would kill us before the fire department even knew about it.'

'Well, that's just fucking great,' said Richardson. He smiled ruefully.

'Look, I'm sorry Bob.'

'Forget it.'

'No time outs?'

'No time outs.'

Richardson clapped Mitch on the back.

'Well then,' he said, 'it looks as if Mitch gets to play Bruce Willis after all.'

-###-

Saturday night brought no relief from the heat. It was as hot as an engine block in an October jam on the Freeway. Sweat poured off the living bodies trapped in the Gridiron.

Before he set out on his self-appointed mission, Jenny walked Mitch up the corridor and round the corner to a wide empty room that looked down on the Pasadena Freeway. Cars were streaming north and south. A KTLA helicopter hovered in the hazy downtown air. She wondered how long before the Los Angeles Breakfast TV show's chopper and its cameraman would attempt to steal prurient pictures of their dead bodies as they were carried out of the building. Like the day the chopperazzi had caught Rock Hudson's return to California in the terminal stages of Aids, or the beating of Reginald Denny during the LA riots. Was that going to be her own fifteen minutes' worth of fame? She waved desperately in the hope that someone might see her, but the insect-like aircraft was already heading away, across Little Saigon and Korea Town in search of another car chase or a robbery in progress. She looked at Mitch.

'This is a bit of a mess, isn't it?' he said.

'I'm here with you,' she said. 'That's all that matters. Besides, I don't mind a bit of mess. I used to be married to one.'

Mitch laughed.

'I was thinking what Alison will say when I tell her where I've been,' he smiled. 'If I live that long. Right now she's probably with her lawyer filing divorce papers. But I'd just like to see her face when she finds out that, for once, I wasn't bullshitting her.'

'Mitch? Hold me?'

'Huh?' He put his hands around Jenny's waist and kissed her on the cheek.

'I wanted to tell you to be careful.'

'I'll be careful.'

'And that I love you.'

'I love you, too.'

'Are you sure?'

Mitch let himself be kissed as if he had been tasting the choicest, most exotic fruit. When Jenny drew back there was a dreamy, steamy look in her eyes, as if the kiss had left her slightly intoxicated.

'Yes.' He squeezed her again. 'I'm sure.'

'You know, Mitch, it might be nice if we were to — you know — '

'To what?'

Twisting away from his arms Jenny reached up under her skirt. For a brief moment Mitch thought she must have been bitten by an insect. She lifted one foot, then the other from the plain white figure-of-eight that had suddenly arrived around her ankles, and spun her prestidigitated panties on one forefinger, as if signalling surrender.

'Suppose someone comes?' Mitch said nervously.

'That's the general idea, isn't it?' she said, taking Mitch's middle finger and sucking it with indecorous meaning.

'What, is this in case I don't come back?'

'On the contrary.' She took his hand and cupped it over the foresail of hair that billowed in front of her belly, before guiding his moistened finger inside her until it was no more. Restoring the finger like some table-top magician, she said, 'This is to make sure that you do.'

She tugged at his zip and took his erection into her hand, drew him to her and folded one leg about his waist.

'What about your — y'know, your cap?'

Jenny laughed and manoeuvred herself onto him.

'Honey. Do you want me to run home and fetch it?'

'But suppose you get — '

'Pregnant?' She laughed again, and then gave a little gasp as he penetrated her.

'Mitch, honey? Don't you think we've got enough to worry about without worrying about that?'

-###-

Mitch prepared to climb into the dry-riser. He'd filled Jenny's handbag with some tools and a beer bottle full of mineral water and wore it across his chest. Jenny and Curtis accompanied him to the equipment room and watched him break open the fire-retardant access door. It was Jenny who peered inside the open riser shaft first. It was about three feet square and she thought that it looked uncomfortably like a funeral casket. Her head activated a battery-operated sensor light that illuminated several ranks of structured data-cabling systems, a smokedetector, a telephone and a wall-mounted metal frame ladder, no more than a foot wide, that led down into the cooler darkness.

'You would think that it would be warmer in here,' she remarked,

'what with all this cabling. You know, Mitch, it might be worth coming with you, just to be cooler. What do you say, Curtis?'

'No way,' he said. 'I'm claustrophobic.'

'It's air-conditioned,' Mitch explained. 'To remove excess heat. Ishmael must be protecting the cable system integrity.'

'Might be worth trying to cut some of this spaghetti,' said Curtis.

'Maybe we could slow him up some.'

'After what happened to Willis Ellery, I wouldn't like to try it,' said Mitch.

'Are you sure it's safe?'

'This stuff is mostly for telecommunications. Local area networking. Active multi-station access units for Token Ring or hubs for Ethernet. That kind of thing. It should be safe enough. Say thirty minutes max to get down to the first level. Then maybe ten or fifteen minutes to get down to the atrium and radio up.' He nodded. 'Yeah, about forty-five minutes ought to do it.'

'Be careful, Mitch,' insisted Jenny.

'I'll be careful,' he said and stepped on to the ladder. It was vibrating very slightly and the sensation in his hands and through the soles of his shoes was enough to give him an unpleasant feeling in his stomach and make him step smartly off the ladder back into the equipment room.

'What's up?'

'The ladder's vibrating,' said Mitch, rubbing his hands nervously. 'I don't know. Air-conditioning, I guess. But for a moment there I thought…'