Right now the paper was heavily marked right in the center of the dial, from ninety to one-sixty degrees. There were dozens of flier-Brain pairs, and she’d put a mark by each one, and identified a good quarter of them. Including, she was particularly pleased to see, all the big guys — Eszterhazy, Spindizzy, Blockhead O’Brien, Stackerlee Brown. When there wasn’t any room for more names, Radio went exploring into the rest of the spectrum, moving out from the center by incremental degrees.
So, because she wasn’t listening to the players, Radio missed the beginning of the massacre. It was only when she realized that everybody in Edna’s had rushed out into the street that she looked up from her chore and saw the aeroplanes falling and autogyros spinning out of control. She went to the window just in time to hear a universal gasp as a Zeppelin exploded in the sky overhead. Reflected flames glowed red on the uplifted faces.
“Holy cow!” Radio ran back to her set and twisted her dial back toward the center.
“… Warinowski,” a Naked Brain was saying dispassionately. “Juric-Kocik. Bai. Gevers…”
A human voice impatiently broke in on the recitation. “What about Spindizzy? She’s worth more than the rest of them put together. Did she set off her bomb?”
“No.” A long pause. “Maybe she disarmed it.”
“If that’s the case, she’ll be gunning for me.” The human voice was horribly, horribly familiar. “Plot her vectors, tell me where she is, and I’ll take care of her.”
“Oh, no,” Radio said. “It can’t be.”
“What is your current situation?”
“My rockets are primed and ready, and I’ve got a clear line of sight straight down Archer Road, from Franklin all the way to the bend.”
“Stay your course. We will direct Amelia Spindizzy onto Archer Road, headed south, away from you. When you see her clear the Frank Lloyd Wright Tower, count three and fire.”
“Roger,” the rocket-assassin said. Now there was no doubt at all in Radio’s mind. She knew that voice. She knew the killer.
And she knew what she had to do.
Amelia Spindizzy’s ears rang from the force of the blast, and she could feel in the joystick an arrhythmic throb. Where had the missile come from that had caused the explosion? What had happened to Eszterhazy? She was sure she had not accidentally pressed the red button on the joystick, so he should be fine, if he had evaded the blast. Hyperalert, Amelia detected an almost invisible scratch in the air, tracing the trajectory of a second rocket, and braced herself for another shock.
When it came, she was ready for it. This time she rode, with her whole body, the great twisting thrusts that came from the rotor, much as she would ride a stallion or, she imagined, a man. The blades sliced the air and the autogyro shook, but she forced her will on the powerful machine, which had until this instant been her partner, not her opponent, and overmastered it.
It might be true that you never see the missile that kills you. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t be killed by a missile you could see. Amelia needed to get out of the line of fire — a third missile might err on the side of accuracy. She banked sharply down into Archer Road, past the speakeasy and the storefront church, and pulled a brisk half-Eszterhazy into an alley next to a skeleton of iron girders with a banner reading FUTURE HOME OF BLACK STAR LINE SHIPPING & NAVIGATION. All that raw iron would block her comptroller’s radio signal, but that hardly mattered now. At third-floor level, slowing to the speed of a running man, she crept, as it were, back to where she would see what was happening over the Great Square.
Eszterhazy was nowhere in evidence, but neither was there a column of smoke where she had seen him last. Perhaps, like herself, he’d held his craft together and gone to cover. Missiles were still arcing through the air and exploding. There were no flying machines in the sky and the great Zeppelins were sinking down like foundering ships. It wasn’t clear what the missiles were aimed at — perhaps their purpose at this point was simply to keep any surviving ’planes and autogyros out of the sky.
Or perhaps they were being shot off by fools. In Amelia’s experience, you could never write off the fool option.
Radio 2 was blinking and squawking like a battery-operated chicken. Amelia ignored it. Until she knew who was shooting at her, she wasn’t talking to anybody: any radio contact would reveal her location.
As, treading air, she rounded the skeleton of the would-be shipping line, Amelia noticed something odd. It looked like a lump of rags hanging from a rope tied to a girder — possibly a support strut for a planned crosswalk — that stuck out from the metal framework. What on earth could that be? Then it moved, wriggling downward, and she saw that it was a boy!
And he was sliding rapidly down toward the end of his rope.
Almost without thinking, Amelia brought her autogyro in. There had to be a way of saving the kid. The rotor blades were a problem, and their wash. She couldn’t slow down much more than she already had — autogyros didn’t hover. But if she took both the forward speed and the wash into account, made them work together…
It would be trying to snag a baseball in a hurricane. But she didn’t see any alternative.
She came in, the wash from her props blowing the lump of rags and the rope it hung from almost parallel to the ground. She could see the kid clearly now, a little boy in a motley coat, his body hanging just above Amelia. He had a metal box hanging from a belt around his neck that in another instant was going to tear him off the rope for sure.
There was one hellishly giddy moment when her rotors went above the out-stuck girder and her fuselage with its stubby wings went below. She reached out with the mail hook, grabbed the kid, and pulled him into the cockpit as the ’gyro moved relentlessly forward.
The tip of the rope whipped up and away and was shredded into dust by the whirling blades. The boy fell heavily between Amelia and her rudder, so that she couldn’t see a damned thing.
She shoved him up and over her, unceremoniously dumping the brat headfirst into the passenger seat. Then she grabbed the controls, easing her bird back into the center of the alley.
From behind her, the kid shouted, “Jeepers, Amelia. Get outta here, f’cripesake! He’s coming for you!”
“What?” Amelia yelled. Then the words registered. “Who’s shooting? Why?” The brat knew something. “Where are they? How do you know?” Then, sternly, “That was an insanely dangerous thing for you to do.”
“Don’t get yer wig in a frizzle,” said the kid. “I done this a million times.”
“You have?” said Amelia in surprise.
“In my dreams, anyway,” said the kid. “Hold the questions. Right now we gotta lam outta here, before somebody notices us what shouldn’t. I’ll listen in on what’s happening.” He twisted around and tore open the seat back, revealing the dry batteries, and yanked the cords from them. The radio went dead.
“Hey!” Amelia cried.
“Not to worry. I’m just splicing my Universal Receiver to your power supply. Your radios are obsolete now, but you couldn’t know that….” Now the little gremlin had removed a floor panel and was crawling in among the autogyro’s workings. “Lemme just ground this and… Say! Why have you got a bomb in here?”
“Huh? You mean… Oh, that’s just some electronic doohickey the Naked Brains asked me to test for them.”