Starliner(65)

"That can't have been easy, Dickie," Belgeddes said.

The monorail hummed over a slough of water black with tannin dissolved from the logs rotting in it. Animals stared at the car or dived away, but even Ms. Dewhurst was watching Wade now.

"Not so very hard," Wade said in self-deprecation. "They weren't expecting it, you see. One man, that is. And I stole an aircar when we escaped."

He sighed. "I often think," he continued, "that if I'd assassinated the Prophet instead of snatching the girls back, things might have been different."

"The Prophet Elias was there?" Da Silva blurted.

Wade nodded. "Oh, yes," he said. "It was at Taskerville, don't you know? But I was naive, as I say. Cold-blooded murder was just beyond me then."

"Wait a minute," said Dewhurst. "If the car crashed, then what happened to the hostages? The little girls, you call them."

"Eight years standard," Belgeddes said. "I'd call that little." His hand wavered toward the full bottle. "I wonder, if no one else is interested . . . ?"

Wade's slim, aristocratic fingers closed on the bottle's neck. "A thirsty business, thinking about old times," he said. "If no one minds?"

He took a deep draft from the bottle. Something that looked like grass floated in the liquid.

"The girls?" Wade resumed. "Well, I brought them back with me, of course. They could walk, most of the way, and I was younger then and fit."

He sighed. "I don't mind telling you, though—"

Belgeddes pointed. As if on cue, a monster with high shoulders and hog-like jaws crushed through a flowering shrub and rasped a buzzsaw challenge to the monorail. The beast was very nearly as big as the vehicle. The car speeded up. The driver tracked the creature with the automatic cannon over his cab until they were safely past

"—that there were times I was nervous about it," Wade concluded. He smiled and finished the beer, grass and all, with a rhythmic pumping of his throat

* * *

"I think I could take the heat," Wanda said, "but not the humidity."

The mist-shrouded sky was a sheet of white metal in which the sun was only a brighter shimmering. Driven by warmth, moisture, and light diffused over sixty-two percent of the daily cycle by Hobilo's atmosphere, the jungle encroached not only from the fringes of Taskerville but also from above. Air plants draped themselves from most horizontal surfaces of the town, and saplings managed to root themselves wherever mud had splashed.

Ran smiled. "People can take whatever they have to," he said. "It wouldn't be my choice for home either, though."

He finished his beer—which had a fruity taste. Not bad, exactly; wet, which his dry throat had needed, and from a refrigerated keg; but he was pretty sure he didn't want to know a lot about the conditions in which the stuff had been brewed. "I wonder if there's a place to get a decent meal around here?" he asked.

The counterman had one eye and a withered arm. From the look of the scars, they'd been made by a knife rather than a lizard's claws. He squirted more beer into Ran's cup, filling it halfway with a head that spilled down the sides.

"There ought to be something," Wanda said. "There's a good place back at the Terminal—"

"Hey buddy!" the counterman said. "You didn't pay for the second beer!"

Ran's eyes glazed, "You're right," he said in a frozen voice. "And I didn't see how far I could stuff the cup up your asshole. So I'd say we were quits."

The counterman jerked against the back of his kiosk. His hand groped for something under the counter, but he didn't look down and his hand clutched air. Wanda offered him a mocking salute, then took Ran's arm and guided him away. "He didn't expect that from a starchy Trident officer," she said in amusement.

Ran managed a chuckle. "He wasn't talking to any kind of officer," he said. "That—Dad's recording. Kicked me back, you know?"

"You've done it, so it's over now," Wanda said as she steered them through the ruck.

A woman selling jewelry made from lizard teeth and light metal clutched Ran's wrist, crying, "Buy a pretty for your—"

Wanda leaned across her companion to stiff-arm the woman away.

"We didn't talk much, Dad didn't," Ran said musingly. He put his hand on Wanda's nearer shoulder as if he needed her support. "I knew he'd carried a flamethrower, though, and once 1 asked him what it weighed. He said—and I didn't think he was answering me—he said he didn't know any flamethrower man who'd survived Hobilo. I said, 'But you did, Dad.'"

Wanda reached up and squeezed Ran's hand against the epaulet of her uniform.