Jane paused the critic's lecture with a twitch of her glove, then pulled off her virching helmet. She plucked the flimsy little phone from her belt and answered it. "Jane here."
"Janey, it's Alex. I'm out with the goats."
"Yes?"
"Can you tell me something? I- got a laptop here and I'm trying to pull up a fine-grain of the local landscape, and I got some great satellite shots, but I can't find any global-positioning grids."
"Oh," Jane said. Alex sounded so earnest and interested that she felt quite pleased with him. She couldn't remember the last time Alex had openly asked a favor of her, that he'd simply asked her for her help. "What longitude and latitude are you looking for, exactly?"
"Longitude 100' 22' 39ff, latitude 34' 07' 25"."
"That's real close to camp."
"Yeah, I thought so."
"Should be about three hundred meters due east of the command yurt." Jerry always set the yurt right on a grid-line if he could manage it. It helped a little with radiolocation and Doppler triangulation and such.
"Yeah, that's pretty much where me and the goats are now, but I was just checking. Thanks. Bye." He hung up.
Jane thought this over for a moment, sighed, and put her helmet away.
She passed Rick and Mickey, beavering away on the system, and the helmeted Jerry, back at his usual weighted pacing. Jerry was starting to seriously wear the carpet. Jane put on her sunglasses and left camp.
Lovely spring sky. Sweet fluffy altocumulus. You'd think a sky like that could never do a moment's harm.
She found Alex sitting cross-legged under the shade of a mesquite tree. Getting shade from the tiny pinnate leaves of a mesquite was like trying to fetch water in a sieve, but Alex wore his much-glued sombrero as well. And he was wearing his breathing mask.
He was messing languidly with the flaccid black smart rope. Jane was surprised, and not at all happy, to see the smart rope again. The thing's primitive user-hostile interface was a total joke. The first time she'd used it, the vicious rope had whipped back like a snapping strand of barbed wire and left a big welt on her shin.
She walked up closer, boots crunching the spiky grass. Alex suddenly turned.
"Hi," she said.
"Hola, hermana."
"Y'know, if I'd been a coyote, I coulda just walked off with one of these goats."
"Be my guest." Alex took off the mask and yawned. "Walk off with one of these tracking collars, and Rick will come out with his rifle and exterminate you."
"What's going on Out here?"
"Just basking in my glory as hero of the day," Alex drawled. "See my throng of enthusiastic admirers?" The smart rope twitched uneasily as he tried, without success, to fling it at the goats. "I wish you hadn't called the Texas Rangers. I really don't wanna talk to those guys."
"The Rangers never stay for long. What are you up to?"
Alex said nothing. He opened his laptop, checked the clock on the screen, then stood up theatrically and looked to the south.
She turned to match his gaze. An endless vista of odd hump-shaped caprocks dotted with juniper and mesquite, here and there the blobby green lobes of distant prickly pear, a yellow sparkling of tall waving coneflowers. Far to the south a passenger jet kft a ragged contrail.
"Whoa," he said. "There it is. Here it comes. I'll be damned." He laughed. "Right on time too! Man, it's amazing what a kind word and a credit card can do."
Jane's heart sank. She didn't know what was about to happen, but already she didn't like it. Alex was watching the horizon with his worst and most evil grin.
She stepped behind his shoulder and looked across the landscape.
Then she saw it too. A bouncing machine. Something very much like a camouflage-painted kangaroo.
It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. A squat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab. It had a single thick, pistoning, metal leg.
The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadful unerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whacked its complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cue whacking a pooi ball, and it bounded off instantly, hard. The thing spent most of its time airborne, a splotchy cannonball spinning on its axis and kicking like a flea against the Texan earth. It was doing a good eighty klicks an hour. As it got closer she saw that its underside was studded with grilled sensors.
It gave a final leap and, God help her, a deft little somersault, and it landed on the earth with a brief hiss of sucked-up impact. Instantly, a skinny little gunmetal tripod flicked Out from beneath it, like a triple set of hinged switchblades.
And there it sat, instantly gone as quiet as a coffee table, not ten meters away from them.
"All right," she said. "What is that thing?"
"It's a dope mule. From my friends in Matamoros."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Look," he said, "relax. It's just a cheaper street version of Charlie, your car! Charlie's a smuggler's vehicle, and this is a smuggler's vehicle. It's just that instead of having two hundred smart spokes and driver's seats and roll bars like that big kick-ass car does, it's only got one spoke. One spoke, and a gyroscope inside, and a global positioning system." He shrugged. "And some mega chip inside so it never runs into anything and no cop ever sees it."
"Oh," she groaned. "Yeah, this is great, Alex."
"It'll carry, I dunno, maybe forty kilos merchandise. No big deal. Dope people have hundreds of these things now. They don't cost much to make, so it's like a toy for 'em.
"Why didn't you tell me about this?"
"Are you kidding? Since when do I ask your permission to do anything?" He walked up to the mule.
She hurried after him. "You'd better not."
"Get away from there!" he yelped. "They're hot-wired." Jane jumped back warily, flinching, and Alex chuckled with pleasure. "Tamperproof! Put in the wrong password, and the sucker explodes on the spot and destroys all the evidence! And what's more-if you're not, like, their friend? Or they're tired of dealing with you? Then sometimes they just booby-trap it, and blow you away the second you touch the keypad."
He laughed. "Don't look so glum. That's all just legend, really. Doper brag talk. The dope vaqueros hardly ever blow anyone up. You and me both know the border doesn't mean anything anymore. There are no more borders. Just free and open markets!" He chuckled merrily. "They can send me whatever the hell they want. Dope, explosives, frozen human hearts, who cares? They're just another delivery service."
Alex punched a long string of numbers, with exaggerated care, into a telephone keypad welded into the top of the mule. The robot mulled the matter over, then hissed open on a stainless-steel hinge, showing a big rubber 0-ring around its midsection.
Alex started pulling out the goods. Lots of plastic-wrapped cloth. A pair of cowboy boots. A yellow cylinder tank. A plastic jug. Designer sunglasses in a shockproof case. A handgun.
Alex tried the sunglasses on immediately, clearly delighted with them. "Here, you can have this," he said, tossing her the handgun. "I'm not interested."
Jane caught it with a gasp. The handgun was all injection-molded ceramic and plastic, a short-barreled six-shot revolver. It felt hard as a rock and utterly lethal. It weighed about as much as a teacup. It would pass any metal detector in the world and had probably cost all of two dollars to make.
"You're full of shit!" she said. "If the Rangers found out about this, they'd go ape."
"Yeah, and the Houston cops wouldn't like it either, if the vaqueros were dumb enough to send a mule bouncin' right down the streets of Houston, but they're not gonna do that, are they? Nobody's that stupid. Nobody knows about this but you and me. And Carol, that is." Alex pulled out a gleaming metal bracelet. "I got Carol this barometer watch! She doesn't know that I bought it for her, but I think she'll like it, don't you? It'll match her Trouper cuff." He tipped his floppy paper sombrero back on his head. "Carol's the only one around here who's been really decent to me."