"She's got a hypo, watch it!"
But Dave has already wheeled round. "Do not profane, woman!"
He thrusts the cross at her like a weapon, so menacing that she recoils in mid-air and shows the glinting needle in her hand.
"Serpent!" He kicks her shoulder away, sending himself upward. "Blasphemer. All right," he snaps in his ordinary voice, "there's going to be some order around here starting now. Get over by that wall, all of you."
Astounded, Lorimer sees that Dave actually has a weapon in his other hand, a small grey handgun. He must have had it since Houston. Hope and ataraxia shrivel away, he is shocked into desperate reality.
"Major Davis," Lady Blue is saying. She is floating right at him, they all are, right at the gun. Oh god, do they know what it is?
"Stop!" he shouts at them. "Do what he says, for god's sake. That's a ballistic weapon, it can kill you. It shoots metal slugs." He begins edging toward Dave along the vines.
"Stand back." Dave gestures with the gun. "I am taking command of this ship in the name of the United States of America under God."
"Dave, put that gun away. You don't want to shoot people."
Dave sees him, swings the gun around. "I warn you, Lorimer. Get over there with them. Geirr's a man, when he sobers up." He looks at the women still drifting puzzledly toward him and understands. "All right, lesson one. Watch this."
He takes deliberate aim at the iguana cages and fires. There is a pinging crack. A lizard explodes bloodily, voices cry out. A loud mechanical warble starts up and overrides everything.
"A leak!" Two bodies go streaking toward the far end, everybody is moving. In the confusion Lorimer sees Dave calmly pulling himself back to the hatchway behind them, his gun ready. He pushes frantically across the tool rack to cut him off. A spray cannister comes loose in his grip, leaving him kicking in the air. The alarm warble dies.
"You will stay here until I decide to send for you," Dave announces. He has reached the hatch, is pulling the massive lock door around. It will seal off the pod, Lorimer realizes.
"Don't do it, Dave! Listen to me, you're going to kill us all." Lorimer's own internal alarms are shaking him, he knows now what all that damned volleyball has been for and he is scared to death. "Dave, listen to me!"
"Shut up." The gun swings toward him. The door is moving. Lorimer gets a foot on solidity.
"Duck! It's a bomb!" With all his strength he hurls the massive cannister at Dave's head and launches himself after it.
"Look out!" And he is sailing helplessly in slow motion, hearing the gun go off again, voices yelling. Dave must have missed him, overhead shots are tough-and then he is doubling downward, grabbing hair. A har blow strikes his gut, it is Dave's leg kicking past hi but he has his arm under the beard, the big man bucking like a bull, throwing him around.
"Get the gun, get it!" People are bumping him, getting hit. Just as his hold slips a hand snakes by him onto Dave's shoulder and they are colliding into the hatch door in a tangle. Dave's body is suddenly no longer at war.
Lorimer pushes free, sees Dave's contorted face tip slowly backward looking at him.
"Judas-"
The eyes close. It is over.
Lorimer looks around. Lady Blue is holding the gun, sighting down the barrel.
"Put that down," he gasps, winded. She goes on examining it.
"Hey, thanks!" Andy-Kay-grins lopsidedly at him, rubbing her jaw. They are all smiling, speaking warmly to him, feeling themselves, their torn clothes. Judy Dakar has a black eye starting, Connie holds a shattered iguana by the tail.
Beside him Dave drifts breathing stertorously, his blind face pointing at the sun. Judas… Lorimer feels the last shield break inside him, desolation flooding in. On the deck my captain lies.
Andy-who-is-not-a-man comes over and matter-of-factly zips up Dave's jacket, takes hold of it- and begins to tow him out. Judy Dakar stops them long enough to wrap the crucifix chain around his hand. Somebody laughs, not unkindly, as they go by.
For an instant Lorimer is back in that Evanston toilet. But they are gone, all the little giggling girls. All gone forever, gone with the big boys waiting outside to jeer at him. Bud is right, he thinks. Nothing counts any more. Grief and anger hammer at him. He knows now what he has been dreading: not their vulnerability, his..
"They were good men," he says bitterly. "They aren't bad men. You don't know what bad means. You did it to them, you broke them down. You made them do crazy things. Was it interesting? Did you learn enough?" His voice is trying to shake. "Everybody has aggressive fantasies. They didn't act on them. Never. Until you poisoned them."
They gaze at him in silence. "But nobody does," Connie says finally. "I mean, the fantasies."
"They were good men," Lorimer repeats elegiacally. He knows he is speaking for it all, for Dave's Father, for Bud's manhood, for himself, for Cro-Magnon, for the dinosaurs too, maybe. "I'm a man. By god yes, I'm angry. I have a right. We gave you all this, we made it all. We built your precious civilization and your knowledge and comfort and medicines and your dreams. All of it. We protected you, we worked our balls off keeping you and your kids. It was hard. It was a fight, a bloody fight all the way. We're tough. We had to be, can't you understand? Can't you for Christ's sake understand that?"
Another silence.
"We're trying." Lady Blue sighs. "We are trying, Dr. Lorimer. Of course we enjoy your inventions and we do appreciate your evolutionary role. But you must see there's a problem. As I understand it, what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn't it? We've just had an extraordinary demonstration. You have brought history to life for us." Her wrinkled brown eyes smile at him; a small, tea-colored matron holding an obsolete artifact.
"But the fighting is long over. It ended when you did, I believe. We can hardly turn you loose on Earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems."
"Besides, we don't think you'd be very happy," Judy Dakar adds earnestly.
"We could clone them," says Connie. "I know
there's people who would volunteer to mother. The. young ones might be all right, we could try."
"We've been over all that." Judy Paris is drinking from the water tank. She rinses and spits into the soil bed, looking worriedly at Lorimer. "We ought for take care of that leak now, we can talk tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow." She smiles at him, unselfconsciously rubbing her crotch. "I'm sure a lot of people will want to meet you."
"Put us on an island," Lorimer says wearily. ",`On. three islands." That look; he knows that look of preoccupied compassion. His mother and sister had looked just like that the time the diseased kitten came in the yard. They had comforted it and fed it and tenderly taken it to the vet to be gassed.
An acute, complex longing for the women he has known grips him. Women to whom men were not simply irrelevant. Ginny… dear god. His sister Amy Poor Amy, she was good to him when they were kids. His mouth twists.
"Your problem is," he says, "if you take the risk of giving us equal rights, what could we possibly contribute?"
"Precisely," says Lady Blue. They all smile at him relievedly, not understanding that he isn't.
"I think I'll have that antidote now," he says.
Connie floats toward him, a big, warm-hearted, utterly alien woman. "I thought you'd like yours in a bulb." She smiles kindly.
"Thank you." He takes the small, pink bulb. "Just tell me," he says to Lady Blue, who is looking at the bullet gashes, "what do you call yourselves? Women's World? Liberation? Amazonia?"
"Why, we call ourselves human beings." Her eyes twinkle absently at him, go back to the bullet marks. "Humanity, mankind." She shrugs. "The human race."
The drink tastes cool going down, something like peace and freedom, he thinks. Or death.