"First, secure Dee here. Things will move slower if he's tied down. Have Thurston handle that. He doesn't have the imagination to be taken in by Michael. You go to The Mountain. Take Mouse. You won't send him back to Academy, and you tell me he's interested in intelligence work. The two of you, find out who Michael met there. Keep an eye out for Seth-Infinite."
"You're softer than you pretend, my friend."
Storm shrugged. "Ship him home if he gets in the way. Tell Wulf and Helmut to start getting ready for Blackworld."
"Why?"
"Looks like we'll end up there, like it or not. We ought to be in shape. Oh. Have the older sergeants think up jobs for Benjamin and Homer. We've got to keep them out of trouble. Lucifer I want to backtrack his damned bubble-brained wife. All the way to the place where she was born. Got it?"
"Got it. I take it you won't be here yourself."
"No. I'll rendezvous with you on your way back from The Mountain." He glanced around, half expecting to see Michael crouching in a shadow. "Where we keep Fearchild. I want to ask him a question."
"Where're you going?"
"Festung Todesangst," Storm murmured. "It was the only clue in Michael's papers. Pollyanna mentioned it. So did Richard."
By the raising of an eyebrow Cassius registered as much emotion as he ever did. "To the lion's den. To see Valerie? Or Helga herself?"
"Valerie. Michael will be using the facilities for all they're worth. And she will make sure Valerie handles the work. Valerie might know what's going on."
"I shouldn't presume... Nevertheless... Gneaus, it's too damned dangerous. If she lays hands on you... "
"I'm aware of the danger. But I have my edge. She doesn't expect me. There's an unmonitored landing pad near an out-of-the-way entry lock. I have her recognition codes. I spent a fortune arranging this way in back when they were building the place."
"Gneaus, I don't think... "
"You can't talk me out of it, Cassius. It's got to be done. Let's get on with it. Let's both go and get back before anybody misses us. We can't control Michael forever even if we chain him to a wall."
"I'm on my way."
Storm sequestered himself with the things he loved, strolling around his study, gently touching this or that, remembering, reaching out after timeworn feelings he had almost forgotten. He and Cassius, they were not emotionally normal. Too many hard decisions, too many cruel losses, had turned them into calloused, indifferent men.
He worried about the young ones. Mouse especially. Would they follow the same doomed path? He hoped not.
His study tour was not a habitual practice. It reflected his appreciation of the dangers of Helga's World, and his uncertainty about his ability to get out again. "The risk has to be taken," he growled. "The thing has to be tried. The key is there somewhere. If it's anywhere."
He spent a few minutes with his wife, then collected equipment he had kept ready since the construction of Festung Todesangst. He said no good-byes.
Cassius would know what to do if he did not come back.
Nineteen: 3020 AD
Frog wakened in the Corporation hospital. Three faces hovered over him. One belonged to a Blake medic with whom he had dealt before. Smythe wasn't bad for a Corporation flunky. Another was a small white face with vulpine features and hungry eyes. He did not know the man. The third was Moira. Pretty little Moira. He tried to smile.
There were no officials around. He was surprised when his sluggish mind noted their absence.
He came up cussing like a stuttering Arab. He got his tongue under control, snarled, "Get the hell out of here, Smythe. I been getting away with it fifty years. Blake ain't going to break me with no phony medical bill."
"On the house, Frog."
"On the house, my ruddy red rectum. Blake don't give away no fourth-hand condom." He glanced at Moira, prim and blondly angelic, trying not to squirm worriedly on a hard chair. He misinterpreted her concern as embarrassment. He flashed her a weak grin. "We argue about it later."
He glared at Foxface. The man had perched on a low dresser, one foot on the floor. "Who the hell you be, guy?"
"August Plainfield. Stimpson-Hrabosky News. Pool man assigned to cover you here."
"Uhn?" He got a bad odor from the newshawk. Vulture-reek, maybe. His breed wallowed in it wherever there was human carrion.
He looked at Moira again. She looked anxious, frightened, and tired. Just the worry? Or the holonet people giving her hell?
He was no fan but he had watched enough HV to know the netmen pursued their stories ruthlessly, with a singleminded inhumanity.
He had half feared he would stir them up with his stunt, but had not foreseen that they would go after Moira. He had rehearsed a few choice lines for them. But Moira... She was a baby. She could not handle the pressure.
What did a child's comfort matter to a vulture like Plainfield? His kind saw everyone and everything as fodder for the camera-cannon they used to down the prey they fed their monster audience.
"Moira, you go outside a minute. I got a word to say to this critter." Pain was not making him feel reasonable. He was sure that Smythe, who had gone next door to check his metabolic monitors, was in a dither. The Doc was all right, but he took things too serious.
Hell, let him stew.
Moira crawled off her chair and left without a word. In her public reticence, and other ways, she was aping him. It was her way of showing affection. Frog found it disconcerting. Like so many men who maintain a tight rein on emotion, Frog longed for its expression in others. It provided him an excuse for opening a little himself. And it terrified him. He might get trapped into exposing an Achilles' heel of self.
He used some of his choice words on the newsman.
Then a few more, bloody-minded, colorful, and threatening. Plainfield endured them like a mountain weathering another of countless storms fated to lash its slopes.
"What did you find out there?" he asked when Frog ran down.
"Huh? Find? Nothing. More Shadowline. More Brightside. And if I did find something, I wouldn't tell no creepo like you."
"Thought so. You rambled a lot while you were under. About the yellow, the orange. Dreaming, Doctor Smythe thinks. I've got a notion you weren't. Dreams don't leave men radiation sick. Yellow has meant radioactivity for a thousand years."
Frog's face wrinkled in a frown so deep that for a moment he resembled a dark-eyed prune. "I don't remember so good. Oxygen starvation do things to your brain. Check my log." He smirked. Plainfield was not going to get near his rig till Blake's people checked it out. They might not bring it in for years.
"I did. I didn't find anything. In fact, I found so much nothing that it made me curious. Made me wonder why a man would tell his computer to forget a place that left him half dead of radiation poisoning. Made me wonder why a man would take the trouble to register a formal claim on the shade at the end of the Shadowline when he thinks he's dying. When he's never filed a claim before. And it made me wonder why he revised his will the minute the claim was notarized."
"I want to be buried out there," Frog improvised. "Somebody's going to do it again someday. I want him to bury my ashes on the only claim I ever had."
"Your diction and syntax are improving." Plainfield smiled a smile that made him appear more wolf than fox. "You may be telling the truth. Corporation people who think they know ‘that crazy dwarf' figure it something like that. Or think you're rigging a scheme to get them to throw money down a rathole in some cockamamie revenge. I don't suffer their preconceptions. I don't know you. I just know people. I think you found something."