But he was more than lawless. He was a boy flying on cactus candy that had been eaten long ago but that had left a psychic if not a physical residue. He was a boy who knew that he was a god. Any boy's potential for cruelty paled in comparison to the cruelty of gods.
To pass the time until midnight, he imagined what he would do with his power when the last of Moonlight Cove had fallen under his command. Some of his ideas made him shiver with a strange mixture of excitement and disgust.
He was on Iceberry Way when he realized the Indian was with him. He was surprised when he turned his head and saw Runningdeer sitting in the passenger seat. Indeed he stopped the van in the middle of the street and stared in disbelief, shocked and afraid.
But Runningdeer did not menace him. In fact the Indian didn't even speak to him or look at him, but stared straight ahead, through the windshield.
Slowly understanding came to Shaddack. The Indian's spirit was his now, his possession as surely as was the van. The great spirits had given him the Indian as an advisor, as a reward for having made a success of Moonhawk. But he, not Runningdeer, was in control this time, and the Indian would speak only when spoken to.
"Hello, Runningdeer," he said.
The Indian looked at him. "Hello, Little Chief."
"You're mine now."
"Yes, Little Chief."
For just a brief flicker of time, it occurred to Shaddack that he was mad and that Runningdeer was an illusion coughed up by a sick mind. But monomaniacal boys do not have the capacity for an extended examination of their mental condition, and the thought passed out of his mind as quickly as it had entered.
To Runningdeer, he said, "You'll do what I say."
"Always."
Immensely pleased, Shaddack let up on the brake pedal and drove on. The headlights revealed an amber-eyed thing of fantastic shape, drinking from a puddle on the pavement. He refused to regard it as a thing of consequence, and when it loped away, he let it vanish from his memory as swiftly as it disappeared from the night-mantled street.
Casting a sly glance at the Indian, he said, "You know one thing I'm going to do some day?"
"What's that, Little Chief?"
"When I've converted everyone, not just the people in Moonlight Cove but everyone in the world, when no one stands against me, then I'll spend some time tracking down your family, all of your remaining brothers, sisters, even your cousins, and I'll find all of their children, and all their wives and husbands, and all their children's wives and husbands … and I'll make them pay for your crimes, I'll really, really make them pay." A whining petulance had entered his voice. He disapproved of the tone he heard himself using, but he could not lose it. "I'll kill all the men, hack them to bloody bits and pieces, do it myself. I'll let them know that it's because of their relation to you that they've got to suffer, and they'll despise you and curse your name, they'll be sorry you ever existed. And I'll rape all the women and hurt them, hurt them all, really bad, and then I'll kill them too. What do you think of that? Huh?"
"If it's what you want, Little Chief."
"Damn right it's what I want."
"Then you may have it."
"Damn right I may have it."
Shaddack was surprised when tears came to his eyes. He stopped at an intersection and didn't move on. "It wasn't right what you did to me."
The Indian said nothing.
"Say it wasn't right!"
"It wasn't right, Little Chief."
"It wasn't right at all."
"It wasn't right."
Shaddack pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He blotted his eyes. Soon his tears dried up.
He smiled at the nightscape revealed through the windshield. He sighed. He glanced at Runningdeer.
The Indian was staring forward, silent.
Shaddack said, "Of course, without you, I might never have been a child of the moonhawk."
11
The computer lab was on the ground floor, in the center of the building, near a confluence of corridors. Windows looked out on a courtyard but could not be seen from any street, which allowed Sam to switch on the overhead lights.
It was a large chamber, laid out like a language lab, with each VDT in its own three-sided cubicle. Thirty computers — upper end, hard-disk systems — were lined up along three walls and in a back-to-back row down the middle of the room.
Looking around at the wealth of hardware, Tessa said, "New Wave sure was generous, huh?"
"Maybe 'thorough' is a better word," Sam said.
He walked along a row of VDTs, looking for telephone lines and modems, but he found none.
Tessa and Chrissie stayed back by the open lab door, peering out at the dark hallway.
Sam sat down at one of the machines and switched it on. The New Wave logo appeared in the center of the screen.
With no telephones, no modems, maybe the computers really had been given to the school for student training, without the additional intention of tying the kids to New Wave during some stage of the Moonhawk Project.
The logo blinked off, and a menu appeared on the screen. Because they were hard-disk machines with tremendous capacity, their programs were already loaded and ready to go as soon as the system was powered up. The menu offered him five choices:
A. TRAINING 1 B. TRAINING 2 C. WORD PROCESSING D. ACCOUNTING E. OTHER
He hesitated, not because he couldn't decide what letter to push but because he was suddenly afraid of using the machine. He vividly remembered the Coltranes. Though it had seemed to him that they had elected to meld with their computers, that their transformation began within them, he had no way of knowing for sure that it had not been the other way around.
Maybe the computers had somehow reached out and seized them. That seemed impossible. Besides, thanks to Harry's observations, they knew that people in Moonlight Cove were being converted by an injection, not by some insidious force that passed semimagically through computer keys into the pads of their fingers. He was hesitant nevertheless. Finally he pressed E and got a list of school subjects:
A. ALL LANGUAGES B. MATH C. ALL SCIENCES D. HISTORY E. ENGLISH F. OTHER
He pressed F. A third menu appeared, and the process continued until he finally got a menu on which the final selection was NEW WAVE. When he keyed in that choice, words began to march across the screen.
HELLO, STUDENT. YOU ARE NOW IN CONTACT WITH THE SUPERCOMPUTER AT NEW WAVE MICRO TECHNOLOGY. MY NAME IS SUN. I AM HERE TO SERVE YOU.
The school machines were wired directly to New Wave. Modems were unnecessary.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MENUS? OR WILL YOU SPECIFY INTEREST?
Considering the wealth of menus in the police department's system alone, which he had reviewed last night in the patrol car, he figured he could sit here all evening just looking at menu after menu after submenu before he found what he wanted. He typed in: MOONLIGHT COVE POLICE DEPARTMENT.
THIS FILE RESTRICTED. PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF YOUR TEACHER.
He supposed that the teachers had individual code numbers that, depending on whether or not they were converted, would allow them to access otherwise restricted data. The only way to hit on one of their codes was to begin trying random combinations of digits, but since he didn't even know how many numbers were in a code, there were millions if not billions of possibilities. He could sit there until his hair turned white and his teeth fell out, and not luck into a good number.