There was nothing subtle about the way the vics sold themselves. The trampled-grass street I found myself in was lined with stacks of cages like the ones they use in dog kennels. They were festooned with strings of Christmas lights, and each one contained a crouched boy. Naked, to best display those mods and deformities that some found attractive. Off-duty soldiers strolled up and down the cages, checking out the possibilities. I recognized one of them.
"Sergeant-Major Pathak!" I cried. He looked up, startled and guilty. "Help me! Kill her–please! Kill her now!"
Give him credit, the sergeant-major was a game little fellow. I can’t imagine what we looked like to him, one harridan chasing the other down the streets of Hell. But he took the situation in at a glance, unholstered his sidearm and stepped forward. "Please," he said. "You will both stand where you are. You will place your hands upon the top of your head. You will–"
Gevorkian flicked her fingers at the young soldier. He screamed, and clutched his freshly crushed shoulder. She turned away from him, dismissively. The other soldiers had fled at the first sign of trouble. All her attention was on me, trembling in her sight like a winded doe. "Sweet little vic," she purred. "If you won’t play the part we had planned for you, you’ll simply have to be silenced."
"No," I whispered.
She touched my wrist. I was helpless to stop her. "You and I are going to go to my office now. We’ll have fun there. Hours and hours of fun."
"Leave her be."
As sudden and inexplicable as an apparition of the Virgin, Shriver stepped out of the darkness. He looked small and grim.
Gevorkian laughed, and gestured.
But Shriver’s hand reached up to intercept hers, and where they met, there was an electric blue flash. Gevorkian stared down, stunned, at her hand. Bits of tangled metal fell away from it. She looked up at Shriver.
He struck her down.
She fell with a brief harsh cry, like that of a sea gull. Shriver kicked her, three times, hard: In the ribs. In the stomach. In the head. Then, when she looked like she might yet regain her feet, "It’s one of them! " he shouted. "Look at her! She’s a spy for the Owners! She’s from the future! Owner! Look! Owner!"
The refugees came tumbling out of the tents and climbing down out of their cages. They looked more alive than I’d ever seen them before. They were red-faced and screaming. Their eyes were wide with hysteria. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely afraid of them. They came running. They swarmed like insects.
They seized Gevorkian and began tearing her apart.
I saw her struggle up and halfway out of their grips, saw one arm rise up above the sea of clutching hands, like that of a woman drowning.
Shriver seized my elbow and steered me away before I could see any more. I saw enough, though.
I saw too much.
"Where are we going?" I asked when I’d recovered my wits.
"Where do you think we’re going?"
He led me to my office.
There was a stranger waiting there. He took out a hand-held detector like Sergeant-Major Pathak and his men had used earlier and touched it to himself, to Shriver, and to me. Three times it flashed red, negative. "You travel through time, you pick up a residual charge," Shriver explained. "It never goes away. We’ve known about Gevorkian for a long time."
"US Special Security," the stranger said, and flipped open his ID. It meant diddle-all to me. There was a badge. It could have read Captain Crunch for all I knew or cared. But I didn’t doubt for an instant that he was SS. He had that look. To Shriver he said, "The neutralizer."
Shriver unstrapped something glittery from his wrist–the device he’d used to undo Gevorkian’s weapon–and, in a silent bit of comic bureaucratic punctilio, exchanged it for a written receipt. The security officer touched the thing with his detector. It flashed green. He put both devices away in interior pockets.
All the time, Shriver stood in the background, watching. He wasn’t told to go away.
Finally, Captain Crunch turned his attention to me again. "Where’s the snark?"
"Snark?"
The man removed a thin scrap of cloth from an inside jacket pocket and shook it out. With elaborate care, he pulled it over his left hand. An inertial glove. Seeing by my expression that I recognized it, he said, "Don’t make me use this."
I swallowed. For an instant I thought crazily of defying him, of simply refusing to tell him where the bippy was. But I’d seen an inertial glove in action before, when a lone guard had broken up a camp riot. He’d been a little man. I’d seen him crush heads like watermelons.
Anyway, the bippy was in my desk. They’d be sure to look there.
I opened the drawer, produced the device. Handed it over. "It’s a plant," I said. "They want us to have this."
Captain Crunch gave me a look that told me clear as words exactly how stupid he thought I was. "We understand more than you think we do. There are circles and circles. We have informants up in the future, and some of them are more highly placed than you’d think. Not everything that’s known is made public."
"Damn it, this sucker is evil."
A snake’s eyes would look warmer than his. "Understand this: We’re fighting for our survival here. Extinction is null-value. You can have all the moral crises you want when the war is won."
"It should be suppressed. The technology. If it’s used, it’ll just help bring about ..."
He wasn’t listening.
I’d worked for the government long enough to know when I was wasting my breath. So I shut up.
When the captain left with the bippy, Shriver still remained, looking ironically after him. "People get the kind of future they deserve," he observed.
"But that’s what I’m saying. Gevorkian came back from the future in order to help bring it about. That means that time isn’t deterministic." Maybe I was getting a little weepy. I’d had a rough day. "The other guy said there was a lot riding on this operation. They didn’t know how it was going to turn out. They didn’t know."
Shriver grunted, not at all interested.
I plowed ahead unheeding. "If it’s not deterministic–if they’re working so hard to bring it about–then all our effort isn’t futile at all. This future can be prevented."
Shriver looked up at last. There was a strangely triumphant gleam in his eye. He flashed that roguish ain’t-this-fun grin of his, and said, "I don’t know about you, but some of us are working like hell to achieve it."
With a jaunty wink, he was gone.