'That would be a pity, John,' said Nodes absently, working his way round the walls, inspecting each vehicle in turn. He stopped, rubbed at a smear of oil on his gun hand with his other thumb (the Chambers threatened erratically: a support pier; a pile of sixty-inch wheels; and a notice which read DISCIPLINARY ACTION WILL BE TAKEN AGAINST OFFICERS CAUGHT — the rest was grimy and illegible). 'None of these work, you see.'
He stared up the ramp. 'You may not be much use to the General in other hands. In those circumstances, I suspect you would be a definite danger to security.'
'What other hands? Come on, Nodes!'
'Frankly, John, I have orders to kill you if that looks likely.' Nodes's eyes became interested in the stairwell that had dropped them into the pool. Truck backed off rapidly; he didn't know whether it was fear or repugnance; he felt entitled to either, but outrage looked like eclipsing them both.
'I've had it with you, Nodes! I'm sick of being "John"! I'm sick of being it!' He waved his arms about. Evaporating sweat chilled his skin. 'My God, you lot crawl out of your holes and turn the entire Galaxy into an asylum. Whose hands?' He wiped the hair out of his eyes. 'And as for General bleeding Gaw's bleeding "sentient bomb" — '
Nodes swung on him, alert and tense. The old-animal eyes focused properly on Truck for the first time since he had entered the interrogation cell.
'Don't go on,' he said quietly. 'That is information classified above my level, and I'm not prepared to hear it.' He made a most human gesture with his free hand. 'You can only damage us both by giving information I'm not cleared to hear. I suggest we — '
A scrape of bootsoles like the sound of bandages tearing.
A shadowy figure in the stairwell.
Nodes turned far too late.
His Chambers blew a pit in the concrete at his feet; splashback set his trouser-legs on fire. He tangoed back, trying to shake both legs at once, looking horrified. Fizzing and moaning like an angry cat — like Tiny Skeffern's Fender — a five millimeter shell took him full in the chest and began to burn its way in. He fell on his back, crying 'Shoot! Oh, shoot!' trying to get a final desperate message to his fingers. The figure on the stairwell cackled softly, its feet scraping like torn cloth, like butter muslin, faint destroyed, on it came.
Nodes emptied the reaction pistol at the ceiling, attempting to get Truck. Down on one knee over the maimed ribcage, choking on the stink and smoke, Truck took it gently away from him and tossed it across the garage. It clattered and rang. Nodes groaned, put his fingers in the soft wet edge of his atrocious wound. 'I have an odd blood-group, Mary,' he said clearly. 'Oh Jesus Mother Christ.'
'You needn't have done that,' accused Truck, getting reluctantly to his feet 'I swear you all take pleasure from it.'
The King chuckled faintly. He was wearing a white leather jumpsuit of peculiar cut, tight round the crotch and armpits, hanging loosely off his old frame elsewhere. His hands were quite steady, puncture marks standing up among the hairs on their backs, sore scarlet against the gray junk grime deep in the very cells of his wrinkled pachydermic skin.
'Ingenuousness spoils the Moment, Captain Truck,' he whispered. 'It can't be your cynical amorality they all want you for. Are you out of your wits?'
He scuttled off like a lizard surprised on a warm brick, over to a dark corner, where he scrabbled in the dust on the floor. A section of the wall above him creaked and slid away. His decaying voice rattled across the garage to John Truck (puzzled and hurt and never noted for his eager intellect), two sticks rubbing in a dry wind:
'I prepared long ago for some much eventuality — I sensed a similar Moment whispering back to me across the years — H-lines alive with meaningless programs. Escape all situations. Everything comes to me beneath the rocket-mail pits, Captain — I — ' He raised his voice. 'Come! Come in, now, my friends! You are back in the domain of the King, and you can come to no more harm!'
And he vanished inside.
From the stairwell came a timid susurrus of movement. White faces peeped into the motor pool, retreated, tasting the air this way and that. Giggling and murmuring in hushed but rising tones, joking at last, their confidence growing by the second, the King's guests issued from their brief captivity in the West Central warren, their gauzy sleeves fluttering nervously at every disturbance of the air.
Truck stood like a mad stone over the fuming corpse, and they fled past him, giving him not a second glance, their lips parted, their eyes bright. The longest-running party in the history of the universe disappeared into the earth. He stared inarticulately after it. He thrust his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders.
Other, harsher footsteps rang in the corridors above — other voices, mechanical and raucous. He shook his head over the dead man. He ran.
The party having streamed on ahead of him, bent on the bright lights and the delicacies of the cutting-room floor (among which, presumably, might be numbered one hundred Denebian mainliners sweating out their unnamed obligation to the King), Chalice Veronica was alone behind his secret door. His reptilian, scrawny hand urged Truck through the gap; he cocked his head and listened; he threw the steel lever that fastened the bolthole.
'Run for it, Captain!' he hissed. 'The invading faction has been embarrassed; they are preparing a final stand.' And he made off down a low, ill-lighted tunnel. Crouching and lurching, scraping the top of his head on ancient stinking brick, his feet reluctant in two inches of evil water, Truck followed.
They had made perhaps four hundred yards from the motor pool when the floor sank a foot and the bolthole cleared its throat behind them with a vast, bellowing cough. Dust stormed about them, the lights went out, and they clung together in the dark, staggering about to keep their balance like practitioners of a strange vice. Locked in that unpleasant embrace, the King's sour old junk-breath in his nostrils, Truck felt the earth creep and shift in the dark. He was deafened, there was foul grit in his eyes and in his mouth.
After millennia, or perhaps seconds, the subsidence stabilized. Track disengaged himself from the King's arms, spat, and rubbed his eyes.
'The whole bloody Snort's come down on top of ns,' he suggested.
Veronica bared his yellow teeth in the gloom.
'I don't think so, Captain. But someone — inadvertently, perhaps — has made sure that West Central won't hold spacers for some time to come, and we seem to be safe for the Moment. Look!'
At the further end of the tunnel, a blue light glowed. They walked toward it, brushing ineffectively at the filth on their clothes.
'If s a pusher's Galaxy, Captain Truck,' said the King complacently, eating white iced cakes and applying the traditional tourniquet to his upper arm with a stained silk necktie four centuries old.
The Party ebbed and flowed desultorily around them like a thick, landlocked sea as they sat in quaint inflatable chairs (vinyl gone yellow as a junkie's face with age, its transparency clouded) beneath the Renfield Street silos.
'Each in our own way, IWG and UASR, myself, even poor mad Grishkin and the masters of his idiotic religion, we keep people from remembering that they hurt, or that they are made puzzled and miserable by the immensity of the Galaxy, the irreversibility of their own humanity. It isn't a state that can last of course — ' He snickered at himself, licked pale crumbs from his blue, anoxic lips. 'Still, we never close, Captain. We make you feel nice.'
Fat worms of cable ran the floor of the abandoned cistern — one of the four that served Veronica's trade — to power the drying plants and chemical vats; and batteries of floodlights slung fifty feet up in a network of girders poured out a devastating heat. The King's court moved slowly and amiably, drenched with warmth, sleepy with it; the party had become introspective, like a frog in the sun.