The thought reminded Nicklin that there had been no audible reports from the unseen weaponry. It meant that whoever was out there was using tail-burning ammunition—in effect, miniature rocket projectiles which in spite of dubious accuracy were favoured by some hunters because there was no muzzle blast to frighten off their prey.
Nicklin’s mind seized on the new thought, somehow managing to find a glimmer of reassurance in it. The worst of the trouble might already be over if a couple of liquored-up hunters were responsible. Having had their bit of fun, they could easily have developed cold feet and retreated into the bush. The idea took on a life of its own, isolating Nicklin from normal time, expanding its solitary theme into a monotonous fugue. Oh yes, things were bad. There was no denying that things were bad—especially after what had happened to poor Gerl—but they weren’t all that bad. After all, nobody had been killed. Gerl’s face was in a hell of a mess, one had to admit that, but nobody had actually been killed…
A subjective aeon had passed by the time Nicklin lunged up the broad steps of the house, through the open doors and into the shade of the entrance hall. I probably won’t even have to use this, he chanted to himself as he snatched the rifle out of the antique oak stand. Even in that moment of extremity the machine-lover in him appreciated the weapon’s lightness.
He ran back outside to the sunshine, shaded his eyes and scanned the hillside, fully expecting to see Montane and Kingsley working their way down the slope. There was no sign of them, no movement anywhere. The scene had a slumbrous Sunday afternoon look about it, a Monet landscape quality which Nicklin found quite astonishing. Forcing his mind to deal with real time again, he was even more astonished to realise that only forty or fifty seconds could have passed since he began his dash from the hilltop.
That was a very brief period indeed, no time at all, for somebody who had to tend a wounded man, or for hunters moving tentatively under cover. He started running once more, seeming to swoop above the ground like a low-flying bird. The wilderness of the garden flicked past him, the contrived slope of the hill sank behind him—then he was back on the rubbled centre stage of the drama. Montane was kneeling beside Kingsley, helping him to wad a handkerchief into his mouth, but otherwise nothing had changed during Nicklin’s absence. He bent as low as he could, scurried forward and threw himself into a prone position close to Montane.
“Well?” he breathed. “Well?”
“It’s still going on.”
“You’re sure?”
“I saw dust.” Montane gave Nicklin an expectant look, a look which ended his naive hopes of remaining little more than an observer.
“In that case…” He slid the rifle to the top of the low bank of earth and pebbles, then slowly raised his head behind the weapon, wondering how much he would know about the event if his brain were to be pulped by a miniature rocket. His life continued. The land lay silent beneath the high sun, a pulsing blaze of tall grass, brushwood and flat-topped trees, betraying no enemy presence.
He moved his head slightly, bringing his eyes into the focus zone of the rifle’s smartscope, and at once the scene changed. There was no magnified but curtailed image, as would have been produced by a traditional lens system. Instead, as the scope analysed and edited a superhuman range of frequencies, projecting the result directly on to his retinas, Nicklin saw a glare-free representation of all that lay before him. In that strange, colour-adjusted universe—seen through bright blue cross-hairs—leafy matter was almost transparent. And clearly visible among gauzy stands of ghost-grass were two human figures, glowing with a neon pinkness. They were down on their stomachs, wriggling towards the hill with a snaky lateral motion, their breath feathering up like smoke signals. Not far behind them was a tree whose thick trunk, opaque to the smartscope, seemed to be emitting little smoke signals of its own.
The machine-lover, the game-player in Nicklin took immediate control of his mind and body. He moved the intersection of the cross-hairs on to the nearer of the crawling figures and squeezed the trigger. A breath of heat touched his forehead and the figure abruptly lost its human outlines, becoming a shapeless smear which was further blurred by swirls of luminous pink vapour. A second later, its arrival delayed by the intervening two hundred metres, came a dull, soggy thud-thud.
The knowledge that he had heard a man’s internal organs and torso exploding would have appalled Nicklin had he been in a normal state of mind, but the game was on—and the cross-hairs were already centring themselves on the second figure. He squeezed the trigger again, and this time—amid the blotch of destruction—he actually glimpsed the target’s ribcage snapping wide open like some spring-loaded mechanical device.
“Do you think you hit anything?” Montane had appeared at Nicklin’s side, and his eyes—inefficient biological organs—were blindly scanning the innocent, sun-drenched scene.
“Oh, yes,” Nicklin assured him. “I hit something.”
Montane gave him a worried glance. “Maybe we should go down there and—”
“Wait!” Nicklin, still under the spell of the smartscope, had transferred all his attention to the vicinity of the tree. Flickers of pink brilliance informed him that the person who had been standing behind the trunk was now running away and attempting to keep the tree in between him and the dealer of death. But almost at once he was forced to detour around a shrub and, long hair streaming, came fully into Nicklin’s inhuman view. The cross-hairs quartered his back on the instant and Nicklin’s trigger finger made the appropriate response. The fleeing figure disintegrated, shedding an arm which spun off to one side like a broken propeller.
An unexpected blow on his shoulder startled Nicklin, recalling him to the real world.
“Why did you do that?” Montane’s face was distorted, accusing. “There was no need for that.”
“Why did I—!” Nicklin pointed at Gerl Kingsley, who had risen to his knees and was fingering a pronged whitish object which was emerging from the bloody hole in his cheek. “Ask him if there was any need for it!”
“For God’s sake, the man was running away!”
“Yeah, to fetch the rest of his clan! What the fuck’s the matter with you, Corey? Are you tired of living? Is it all getting too much for you?” The physical after-effects of Nicklin’s sprint down the hill and back, seemingly held in abeyance to make him a steady gun platform, suddenly began to manifest themselves. His breathing became harsh and rapid, and a salty froth thickened in his mouth.
“You don’t know what the man was going to do,” Montane said, shaking his head.
“Perhaps he remembered he’d left the bath water running,” Nicklin suggested, putting on his smile. Did I kill three men? Did I really and truly vaporise three men?
“You can joke? How can you joke?”
“It’s easy,” Nicklin said, determined to brook no more questions—from without or within. “All you have to do is remember that everybody is a piece of shit.”
“We have to get Gerl to a doctor,” Montane said, after a pause.
He turned away, but before doing so he gave Nicklin a prolonged look. His eyes betrayed no hatred, which was something Nicklin had expected and could have savoured. Instead, they showed simple contempt.