'You just leave me alone!' pleaded John Truck, cowering away as the brown hand touched his shoulder, so that its owner had to stretch and grab at the last minute. Balance undermined, he swayed. 'Right, you sod!' shouted Truck, brought the knuckles round in a dirty gray arc and hit him in the mouth. Something broke, the Arab's fingers went lax, Truck had hold of the gun before it hit the floor.
'Now,' he said, trembling with relief and fury. He wound his left hand into the hashishin's belt and held the flaccid body up as a shield. Red unsteady light dispelled the gloom as the PCO and the remaining Arab let go simultaneously with their pistols. Lunchtime smells in the Cowper stove.
'No, no,' said the PCO.
'Oh yes,' whispered Truck, shuffling inexorably forward behind the smoldering corpse, 'Oh yes.'
All three of them were on fire when he left the chamber, expressions of horror on their rigid features. What else should he have done? He watched them dispassionately for a moment or two, then, weighed down by more guns than he'd ever owned in his life, ran off into the jungle of railway tracks and junkheaps. Rusty gear trains rolled about under his feet as he went, like the fossil bones of preposterous little animals.
Energy fronts resonated silent and dating from the cliff-faces of the rolling mills; from the convection currents dancing like translucent veils above the mounds of the city came a wicked, sucking roar; hot-air refraction shifted the positions of the known stars, cold winds howled toward the stricken center of it all across the bleak loading platforms. It looked like a dream of arson. It looked like Hell -
He didn't quite know what to do. Dwarfed and stumbling, a gun in each hand and a spare one stuck down the side of his boot, he took to the lanes of shadow beneath the great corroded walls, drawn toward that essential solipsistic djinn thrashing the confines of its magnetic bottle.
Ianthine light fired the lines and pylons of the high voltage system; it limned the Kaldo converters and the vast corrugated sheds of the borax refinery; it spilled like hot glass over Truck's bald, vulnerable skull as he turned to scan the waste behind him, and discovered twenty cruel black figures leaping through the rubbish — a complete fellaheen death-commando, threading the lunatic peep-show flicker in a classic search-and-destroy maneuver.
Ben Barka had decided to cut his losses.
Truck got down on the floor and crawled further into the shadows, shaking. He could see them, but he didn't think they could see him. He rubbed his face into the rust, he bit the inside of his cheek so hard it bled. They'd have found their dead by now, smoking in the Cowper stove. 'Oh Jesus,' he sobbed. He hadn't got a chance.
He fled down a blind narrow walkway, falling repeatedly into troughs and sumps of lukewarm sticky water — at the end of the alley, fetched up against a blank wall of flaking steel — opened his split lip and dropped one of his guns.
Panicked.
'Oh my Christ, my Christ,' staring back, mouth open, bloody-chinned, no way out.
He scrabbled about, discovering rivets.
There was a door.
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Spreading his cloak to hide the flare, he fired half a Chambers magazine into the rusty lock; reeled back from the heat with his forehead blistering; stab-kicked the door and dived through it panting and laughing like a madman, reeking of scorch and smoke and death.
He had broken into a gutted pumping station, where a score of small-bore pipelines converged to supply raw organic material to one great conduit fifteen feet in diameter. Most of the transfer valve gear had been ripped out, but a faint odor of partly-processed polymers still haunted the sour air. A shattered inspection window gave access to the conduit: as soon as he had relaxed enough to be able to turn his back on the rapidly cooling door — fairly sure that for a moment the pursuit had gone off in some other direction — he poked his head through it and had a look.
The main stretched away right and left in a slight but perceptible curve, lighted by dim orange bulbs strung from a frayed cable in the ceiling — adopted by the denizens of Junk City as a trunkline for furtive journeys, a rat's highway smeared with cryptic brown graffiti and littered with rubbish. He rested his elbows on the windowsill and wondered if it would get him anywhere. Small drafts fluted through splits in the inner cladding, drying the sweat on his temples.
He was clambering in, and stuff the consequences, when someone came tap-tapping out of the dim fallopian reaches, footsteps quick and purposeful. He ducked back into the pumping station until the noise got very close, then shoved his pistols through the window and hissed, 'Move, and I'll blow you to hell!'
A short, ironical laugh, then a female voice said, 'Go on and shoot'
'What?'
'You'd be doing me a favor, Captain.'
He peered through the window.
It was Angina Seng, all coppery hair and long body. She stood regarding him with a pinched, censorious expression. Once again, he had the feeling that she was fighting a doomed action to prevent her soul evacuating her skull and boiling off into space. The lines around her mouth were deep and sad.
'I can't seem to get rid of you, can I?' she said. 'Are you going to get it over with, or can I go?'
He was amazed to realize that she honestly didn't care. He hauled himself through the window and frowned aggressively. 'I've got a bone to pick with you,' he told her, remembering that he had.
'I've no time, Captain. You'd better shoot, if that's what you feel, because I'm not waiting around any longer. Whatever you feel necessary.'
And she turned on her heel and trudged off, arms folded, head down, breasting some personal hinterland wind.
'Look here — ' He watched her receding shoulders for a minute, glanced at his guns. He felt a bit of a fool. He hurried after her like some mad philosopher chasing the Numenon forever down a gradient of misunderstanding. 'Why do you always treat me like a child?' He complained. 'If you'd leveled with me just once — '
She stopped, swung on him, her eyes blaring and alive for the first time in his experience of her.
'Because you know nothing! Because you understand nothing! Because people like you are always too puzzled and decent to shoot people like me. Because that's what you are, Captain.'
She shrugged.
'Oh, what's the use? Truck, you're a baby: there's always someone shielding you and all the other odd little people like you — if you want me to apologize for your naïvete', then bloody well forget it!'
Off she went again, and this time all he got from her when he caught up was, 'Shouldn't you be running away? They've got half the Arabs in Junk City out looking for you.'
'I was rather hoping you'd help me,' he said diffidently. 'You keep getting me into these things. You've conned me twice and I think you owe me for that.'
She looked weary and compassionate. 'You see?' she said. Then: 'Why should I, Captain, why should I owe you anything?' She looked him up and down, shook her head. 'I see no reason to help you, Captain, no reason at all.'
On the other hand, she did nothing to discourage him; so, despite his armory, he simply followed her. She was familiar, and he couldn't think of anything else to do. Walking at a fair clip, she got about ten yards ahead of him. He could always, he reasoned, shoot her in the back if she turned out to be bait in an ambush. Somehow, he didn't think he'd ever be able to shoot her in the front.
The floor took on a downward slope. Patches of congealed plastic ridged the metal underfoot, trapping little runnels of bitter condensation. Up ahead, there was a ninety-degree bend in the main. He let her go round it, stopped, put his ear to the wall. He was close enough to the reactor to feel its soul in the steel and hear the distant moan of convection currents: but other than that, only moisture dripping from the lighting cable with a sound like tapped porcelain. Angina had stopped moving. She coughed, and shuffled her feet.