"Curtis, Gomez. Something's happened to him and he's down. He probably walked into a beanbag. You'd better go in and fetch him out."
Curtis and Gomez hurried down the course. They came back lugging the limp body of Bronce. Fenton moved beside Vickers.
"He'll be madder than hell when he wakes up. The asshole likes to think he's Superman."
Streicher, Gomez and Curtis came back from the house where they'd left Bronce in the care of Hey Nurse.
"I hope that hasn't put you off, Mr. Vickers."
"I could think of better things to be doing, but what the hell."
"What the hell, indeed. You want to go ahead?"
"Whatever you say."
Gomez was in charge of handing out the ammunition.
"How many clips do you want?"
"Three."
He handed Vickers three clips for the Yasha. Vickers taped two together back to back and dropped the third into his pocket.
"Start the clock, Streicher."
Streicher had been right when he'd said that the course was "real World War I." The slope beyond the pillars was an untidy mess of trenches, razor wire, sandbagged parapets and flat representations of buildings like an unfinished movie set. He had no time, however, to stand and get his bearings. The computer that controlled the training course was programmed to play him like a rat in a maze, tracking his footfalls with sound sensors, following his body heat with thermals and all the time barraging him with an infinite variety of unpleasant surprises. An explosion of bright orange smoke went off uncomfortably close to him. He dived into the nearest trench, feeling that there was quite enough anxiety in his professional life without having to put himself through vicarious simulations. He hit the floor of the trench on all fours. A life-size cartoon samurai flipped. He let go a short blast from the Yasha and it went down again. There was an explosion behind him. This time the smoke was Prussian blue. A hail of rubber bullets slammed into the wall. He lay flat for a second and then scuttled, frogwise, up the trench. He really was a rat being goaded through a maze. Flip-up! A Nazi soldier on the edge of the trench. Burst! Gone! Red explosion! Green! Two trenches intersect. Flip-up! This time it's a little old lady. Don't fire! Magenta explosion and he's at the wall. The bad news is that it's made of vertical logs, Fort Apache style. The good news is there's a rope. Scrambling one handed and complaining how he's an assassin, not a fucking commando. Almost to the top there's a flip-up firing high velocity beanbags. Swing! Bean-bags miss but only just. Swing back, twist, bring up the Yasha. Burst, and the bad guy's gone. Straddle the top. The logs are sharpened to points. Drop. The clip in the Yasha is empty. Pull out, reverse, slam it. For an instant, he thinks about Debbie's legs, and then on again.
He's going across an open space and suddenly he doesn't feel so good. His own legs are heavy and his stomach's churning. That bastard Streicher! There's a Burroughs Tube in this set-up. He's being drenched with subsonics. He's surfing on solid ground and rubber bullets are snapping at his heels, but it's the end of the course. Hit the button and back. Flip-up, burst. Flip-up, burst. Flip-up good guy, hold your fire in the nick of time. Boom! Boom-boom! The smoke is lime green. Here's the culvert. Down on hands and knees. There's something black blocking the pipe. Fire ahead blindly. He's almost deafened but it's gone. Out into the light again. YLO gunman. Z-i-i-ppp! Down into the trench. Crawl, crawl, crawl. There's gas and his eyes are tearing. And then he can see the tops of the pillars and he's through, doing his best to look nonchalant as he walks back to the group. The asshole likes to think of himself as Superman.
"3:51, Mr. Vickers. Only just adequate."
"I'd give a lot to see a TV."
"They've got us completely cut off."
"But no movies? No tapes, no card chips?"
"I guess they figured if they gave us monitors one of us at least would be able to rig them to pick up satellite signals." Debbie turned to Gomez. "Ain't that true, Gomez?"
"Believe me, I don't know any more than you do."
"I don't believe you. You're full of shit. You've got some idea of what's going on here, you just aren't telling." Gomez shrugged. He was used to this sort of thing. "Whatever you say."
Vickers, Debbie and Gomez had been teamed for guard duty. It was the midnight-to-dawn watch of Vickers' eleventh day at what he still thought of as El Rancho Mars.
"I know one thing, I'm getting fucking sick of that training. I can't see any point to it. It's not like we're training for anything. There's no pattern to it. It all seems to be make-work."
"No gain without pain."
"No gain period."
"What's the word, Gomez, is there any pattern to it?"
Gomez was starting to get a little irritable.
"What am I supposed to say?"
Debbie mimicked his flat, colorless accent. "I just do what Streicher tells me."
"Will you lighten up?"
There were times when Debbie could ride someone beyond any productive limit. Vickers was also getting tired of the way she was beating her frustration into the ground.
"Yeah, knock it off. We've got to spend the whole night together in here. It'd be better to get along."
Debbie slid deeper into her chair, at the same time crossing her bare legs. The outburst of body language wasn't missed by either Vickers or Gomez. The two men glanced briefly at each other but held their silence. Debbie had a petulant streak.
There was something womblike about the red room. It was dark, quiet and strangely oppressive. The deep-padded contour chairs were just a little too comfortable. The air was just a little too warm and a little too dry. The smell of rubber and electrons could wrap itself around those on duty like a cocoon. The lines and columns of LEDs glowed red, amber and green. They could hypnotize anyone who stared at them for too long. There was one, dim worklamp. All other light came from the sixteen scopes that monitored the perimeter and approaches to the house. The gray-green of the ground radar, the red ghosts on the heat scopes and the patchwork multicolors of the thermals were reflected in their watching faces. The dim, concentrated quiet was like that of the cabin of a large aircraft, except it slightly lacked the calm but watchful tension. The red room quickly became boring. Vickers drank coffee from a styrofoam cup. He wished that he had two or three Marvols, even a greenie. He knew, very soon, the repetitive nothing on the screens and scopes would put him to sleep.
"It's a pity we don't have a TV. I wanted to see what happened with Tomoyo Nakamora and the gorilla. I wonder if they ever got to fuck."
"The whole thing was disgusting."
"You don't believe in cross-species sex?"
"How would you like to fuck a dog?"
"Plenty of guys fuck sheep. At least, that's the legend."
"That's only…"
"Wait a minute!" Debbie was staring intently into the screen.
"What?"
"I thought I saw something."
"Where?"
"It was just a faint blip on the ground radar. It could have been a jack rabbit or nothing at all. It was right out on the edge."
"Let's take a look. You got a bearing?"
"Maybe oh one five."
"We'll go out on oh one five, on thermal."
Gomez tapped in instructions and, on the main screen, an image moved outward from the house in the rough direction that Debbie had indicated, segueing slowly from one clump of sensors to the next. The color patchwork of the thermal showed nothing but the blue groundheat of the rocks and sand.
"Looks like it was nothing."
"They ought to have robots out there. Then we could all go to bed."