“No,” Donald said, surprised at his own determination.
“You can’t get out unless I let you.”
“You can’t drive off unless I let you.”
“Hoping for a prowlie to come by, hm? Fuzzy-wuzzies don’t pass this way if they can help!”
“Somebody’s going to notice a cab with the hire sign lit sitting in the middle of the street and not moving.”
“Who said it was lit?”
“You can’t turn it off without you closing the door!”
“Think not? I cut out the police alarm, didn’t I?”
“And it shows—you turned the seal red.”
“You’re the first in two weeks noticed that. Last one I chopped the fingers off.”
Donald licked his lips and eyed the adjacent sidewalks. Although this district was comparatively empty, it was not wholly unpopulated. An old Afram woman was this very moment approaching. He leaned to the gap in the door and called out.
“Lady! Fetch the police! This cab’s a pseudo!”
The old woman stared at him, crossed herself, and hurried by.
The driver gave a sour laugh. “You don’t know what it’s like around here, do you, Shalmaneser? Got left out of your programming!”
Donald’s heart sank. He was on the point of admitting defeat and offering to hit the sidewalk, when a movement at the corner of the street attracted him.
“You said prowlies don’t come this way,” he exclaimed.
“Right.”
“Then how about that one closing from behind?”
The driver stared at his TV unit, dismayed.
Does he think I’m bluffing? That’s no bluff—it’s a hundred per cent genuine prowl car!
Armoured, armed with gas and flame, the police car pussyfooted towards the stationary cab. The driver sounded his move-along siren.
“Take your hand off the pillar,” the hackie said. “I’ll balance the deal for you. What you want? I have contacts—Skulbustium, Yaginol, shiggies, name it and I’ll fix it.”
“No,” Donald said again, this time triumphantly.
He could see the silhouettes of the men in the prowlie now. Also, by this time, half a dozen people had gathered on the sidewalk. A couple of them were teenage Aframs, who shouted something indistinct at the police and doubled up in laughter.
The door of the prowlie opened, and Donald relaxed. A matter of seconds now—
Except that the moment the fuzzy-wuzzy stood up on the street, a hail of garbage pelted him from nowhere. He yelled a curse, hauled out his bolt-gun and sent a shot high into the darkness towards the adventure playground. Someone screamed. The standers-by dived for cover. The driver piled out of Donald’s cab and the policeman loosed another shot at him but missed. A whole can of garbage came slamming down from a higher level now, contents first, then can, squelch, then crash. Another policeman leaned out of the car and fired at the approximate source of the attack.
Belatedly aware that the door was no longer pressing on his hand, Donald scrambled out, shouting for the police to stop wasting their shots and go after the hackie. The man peering from the prowlie’s window saw him only as a human shape and fired at him. The hiss of the bolt searing past his ear made him gulp and stumble for the sidewalk.
A hand reached up from the protection of a stoop and caught his ankle. The gesture might have been friendly but Donald could not tell. He tore his Jettigun from his pocket and fired it into the face of the man who had clutched at him.
A scream. A girl’s voice: “You do that to my brothah—!” Windows flinging open both sides of the street. Shouting kids, emerging from the senseless shadows of the adventure playground, delighted at the excitement and starting to hurl down whatever came handy—fragments of split concrete, cans and packages, plant-tubs. A dark, pretty face transformed by fury. The erratic brilliance of gun-bolts as the police fired wildly. Someone uttering a resonant Spanish curse: “May that lover of he-goats catch the clap and the pox!”
He struck out at the girl who was trying to claw his face, and remembered his Karatand too late. The metal-rigid glove slammed into her mouth and sent her moaning and bleeding into the middle of the street, into the fierce lights of the prowl car. The red trickling down her chin was brilliant as fire.
“Kill the bleeders!”
Where did they all come from?
Suddenly the street was alive, like an overturned ants’ nest, doors and passages vomiting people. Metal bars glinted, throats shrieked animal fury, windows shattered and glass rained slashingly on heads below. The prowlie’s siren added to the din and the two policemen who had ventured out climbed back in a second ahead of another salvo of garbage. Between the prowlie and the cab the injured girl rocked on her heels, moaned, dripped blood from her cut lip down her shimmering green dresslet. Donald shrank back into an embrasure decorating the wall of the nearest building, overlooked because the late arrivals had taken it for granted the police were responsible for the girl’s crying.
The prowlie tried to back up. Through its still-open window Donald heard its occupants shouting to headquarters for aid. A flame-gun belched at the base of a lamp-post and metal ran like lard in a pan. The post fell across the back of the prowlie and blocked its retreat. Yelling joyfully, scores of people ran to develop the improvised barricade into something more substantial. A can of oil was flung down and the flame-gun ignited it. Capering like dervishes, youths and girls taunted the police by its light. Someone scored a hit on the car’s left headlamp with a rock and it shattered. Too late the driver remembered to wind up the wire-mesh screens. Another scream of triumph and another rock, making the car’s roof boom like a steel drum. Paint chipped and fragments flew, one of them taking a stander-by in the eye so that he covered his face with both hands and shouted that he was blind.
That settled matters.
“Oh my God,” Donald said, and it was more of a prayer than he had uttered since he was a schoolchild. “It’s going to be a riot. It’s going—to be—a riot…!”
context (9)
GUNCRIT
“People who feel the need to foul up their perceptions with hop or Yaginol or Skulbustium simply aren’t turned on to the essential truth that the real world can always be identified by its unique characteristic: it, and it only, can take us completely by surprise.
“Take two lumps of greyish metal and bring them together. Result: one wrecked city.
“Could anyone have predicted or envisaged that until they knew enough about the real world to calculate the properties of a substance called Uranium-235?
“People are going around marvelling at the fact that there’s a solid scientific basis for palmistry. Anybody with a grain of intelligence could have said, directly the notion of the genetic code was formulated, that there was no a priori reason why the pattern of the folds in the palm should not be related to a person’s temperament by way of an association of genes sharing the same chromosome. Indeed, there were all kinds of reasons for assuming this actually was so, because we aren’t totally stupid—as I’ve pointed out before—and unless there was in palmistry some element of relevance to real experience we’d have given it up and gone chasing some other will-o’-the-wisp. There’s no shortage of them.
“But it took forty years for someone to conduct a properly rigorous study of the subject and demonstrate that the suspicion was well-founded. This I do find remarkable—or disheartening might be a better word.
“All right: what should you be surprised at, these days?
“The fact that, having learned so much about ourselves—the designs on our palms being just one example of the way we’ve analysed ourselves down to the constituent molecules, so that we can claim to be in sight of the day when we won’t merely be able to ensure the sex of our offspring (if we can afford the fee) but also to choose whether we’ll have a math genius in the family, or a musician, or a moron (some people might like to breed a moron for a pet, I guess…)—having got to this state, then, we know less about our reactions in the mass than we do about the behaviour of non-human things like a lump of U-235.