Part 19 (1/2)
A sense of determination flooded Rudy's being. This was what all his life had been leading up to. This was his moment of destiny.
Which made it particularly ironic that it was at that very moment that the Fist smashed in the door of the laboratory.
Radio Jones had punched a hole in the center of a sheet of paper and taped it to the casing of her all-frequencies receiver with the tuner k.n.o.b at the center, so she could mark the location of each transceiver set she found. The tuner had a range of two hundred ten degrees, which covered the entire spectrum of the communications band. So she eyeballed it into quarters and then tenths, to give a rough idea how things were laid out. It would be better to rank them by electromagnetic frequency, but she didn't have the time to work all that out, and anyway, though she would never admit this out loud, she was just a little weak on the theoretics. Radio was more a vacuum-tube-and-solder-gun kind of girl.
Right now the paper was heavily marked right in the center of the dial, from ninety to one-sixty degrees. There were dozens of flier-Brain pairs, and she'd put a mark by each one, and identified a good quarter of them including, she was particularly pleased to see, all the big guys: Eszterhazy, Spindizzy, Blockhead O'Brien, Stackerlee Brown. When there wasn't any room for more names, Radio went exploring into the rest of the spectrum, moving out from the center by incremental degrees.
So, because she wasn't listening to the players, Radio missed the beginning of the ma.s.sacre. It was only when she realized that everybody in Edna's had rushed out into the street that she looked up from her ch.o.r.e and saw the aeroplanes falling and autogyros spinning out of control. She went to the window just in time to hear a universal gasp as a Zeppelin exploded in the sky overhead. Reflected flames glowed red on the uplifted faces.
”Holy cow!” Radio ran back to her set and twisted her dial back toward the center.
”... Warinowski,” a Naked Brain was saying dispa.s.sionately. ”Juric-Kocik. Bai. Gevers ...”
A human voice impatiently broke in on the recitation. ”What about Spindizzy? She's worth more than the rest of them put together. Did she set off her bomb?”
”No.” A long pause. ”Maybe she disarmed it.”
”If that's the case, she'll be gunning for me.” The human voice was horribly, horribly familiar. ”Plot her vectors, tell me where she is, and I'll take care of her.”
”Oh, no,” Radio said. ”It can't be.”
”What is your current situation?”
”My rockets are primed and ready, and I've got a clear line of sight straight down Archer Road, from Franklin all the way to the bend.”
”Stay your course. We will direct Amelia Spindizzy onto Archer Road, headed south, away from you. When you see her clear the Frank Lloyd Wright Tower, count three and fire.”
”Roger,” the rocket-a.s.sa.s.sin said. Now there was no doubt at all in Radio's mind. She knew that voice. She knew the killer.
And she knew what she had to do.
Amelia Spindizzy's ears rang from the force of the blast, and she could feel in the joystick an arrhythmic throb. Where had the missile come from that had caused the explosion? What had happened to Eszterhazy? She was sure she had not accidentally pressed the red b.u.t.ton on the joystick, so he should be fine, if he had evaded the blast. Hyperalert, Amelia detected an almost invisible scratch in the air, tracing the trajectory of a second rocket, and braced herself for another shock.
When it came, she was ready for it. This time she rode, with her whole body, the great twisting thrusts that came from the rotor, much as she would ride a stallion or, she imagined, a man. The blades sliced the air and the autogyro shook, but she forced her will on the powerful machine, which had until this instant been her partner, not her opponent, and overmastered it.
It might be true that you never see the missile that kills you. But that didn't mean you couldn't be killed by a missile you could see. Amelia needed to get out of the line of fire a third missile might err on the side of accuracy. She banked sharply down into Archer Road, past the speakeasy and the storefront church, and pulled a brisk half-Eszterhazy into an alley next to a skeleton of iron girders with a banner reading FUTURE HOME OF BLACK STAR LINE s.h.i.+PPING & NAVIGATION. All that raw iron would block her comptroller's radio signal, but that hardly mattered now. At third-floor level, slowing to the speed of a running man, she crept, as it were, back to where she would see what was happening over the Great Square.
Eszterhazy was nowhere in evidence, but neither was there a column of smoke where she had seen him last. Perhaps, like herself, he'd held his craft together and gone to cover. Missiles were still arcing through the air and exploding. There were no flying machines in the sky and the great Zeppelins were sinking down like foundering s.h.i.+ps. It wasn't clear what the missiles were aimed at perhaps their purpose at this point was simply to keep any surviving 'planes and autogyros out of the sky.
Or perhaps they were being shot off by fools. In Amelia's experience, you could never write off the fool option.
Radio 2 was blinking and squawking like a battery-operated chicken. Amelia ignored it. Until she knew who was shooting at her, she wasn't talking to anybody: any radio contact would reveal her location.
As, treading air, she rounded the skeleton of the would-be s.h.i.+pping line, Amelia noticed something odd. It looked like a lump of rags hanging from a rope tied to a girder possibly a support strut for a planned crosswalk that stuck out from the metal framework. What on earth could that be? Then it moved, wriggling downward, and she saw that it was a boy!
And he was sliding rapidly down toward the end of his rope.
Almost without thinking, Amelia brought her autogyro in. There had to be a way of saving the kid. The rotor blades were a problem, and their wash. She couldn't slow down much more than she already had autogyros didn't hover. But if she took both the forward speed and the wash into account, made them work together ...
It would be trying to snag a baseball in a hurricane. But she didn't see any alternative.
She came in, the wash from her props blowing the lump of rags and the rope it hung from almost parallel to the ground. She could see the kid clearly now, a little boy in a motley coat, his body hanging just above Amelia. He had a metal box hanging from a belt around his neck that in another instant was going to tear him off the rope for sure.
There was one h.e.l.lishly giddy moment when her rotors went above the out-stuck girder and her fuselage with its stubby wings went below. She reached out with the mail hook, grabbed the kid and pulled him into the c.o.c.kpit as the 'gyro moved relentlessly forward.
The tip of the rope whipped up and away and was shredded into dust by the whirling blades. The boy fell heavily between Amelia and her rudder, so that she couldn't see a d.a.m.ned thing.
She shoved him up and over her, unceremoniously dumping the brat headfirst into the pa.s.senger seat. Then she grabbed the controls, easing her bird back into the center of the alley.
From behind her, the kid shouted, ”Jeepers, Amelia. Get outta here, f'cripesake! He's coming for you!”
”What?” Amelia yelled. Then the words registered. ”Who's shooting? Why?” The brat knew something. ”Where are they? How do you know?” Then, sternly, ”That was an insanely dangerous thing for you to do.”
”Don't get yer wig in a frizzle,” said the kid. ”I done this a million times.”
”You have?” said Amelia in surprise.
”In my dreams, anyway,” said the kid. ”Hold the questions. Right now we gotta lam outta here, before somebody notices us what shouldn't. I'll listen in on what's happening.” He twisted around and tore open the seat back, revealing the dry batteries, and yanked the cords from them. The radio went dead.
”Hey!” Amelia cried.
”Not to worry. I'm just splicing my Universal Receiver to your power supply. Your radios are obsolete now, but you couldn't know that ...” Now the little gremlin had removed a floor panel and was crawling in among the autogyro's workings. ”Lemme just ground this and ... Say! Why have you got a bomb in here?”
”Huh? You mean ... Oh, that's just some electronic doohickey the Naked Brains asked me to test for them.”
”Tell it to the Marines, lady. I didn't fall off no turnip truck. The onliest electronics you got here is two wires coming off a detonator cap and leading to one of your radios. If I didn't know better, I'd tag this sucker as a remote-controlled self-destruct device.” The imp stuck its head out of the workings again, and said, ”Oh yeah. The name's Radio Jones.”
With an abrupt rush of conceptual vertigo, Amelia realized that this gamin was a girl. ”How do you do,” she said dazedly. ”I'm-”
”I know who you are,” Radio said. ”I got your picture on the wall.” Then, seeing that they were coming up on the bend in Archer Road, ”Hey! Nix! Not that way! There's a guy with a coupla rockets up there just waiting for you to show your face. Pull a double curl and loop back down Vanzetti. There's a vacant lot this side of the Shamrock Tavern that's just wide enough for the 'gyro. Martin Dooley's the barkeep there, and he's got a shed large enough to hide this thing. Let's vamoose!”
A rocket exploded behind her.
Good advice was good advice. No matter how unlikely its source.
Amelia Spindizzy vamoosed.
But as she did, she could not help casting a wistful glance back over her shoulder, hoping against hope for a glimpse of a bright red aeroplane. ”I don't suppose you've heard anything about Eszterhazy surviving this?” she heard herself asking her odd young pa.s.senger. Whatever was happening, with his superb skills, surely he must have survived.
”Uh, about that ...” Radio Jones said. ”I kinda got some bad news for you.”
Rudy awoke to find himself in h.e.l.l.
h.e.l.l was touchless, tasteless, scentless and black as pitch. It consisted entirely of a bedlam of voices: ”Lemme outta here ... wasn't doing nothing ... Mabel! Where are you, Mabel? ... I'm serious, I got bad claustrophobia ... G.o.dd.a.m.n flicks! ... there's gotta be ... minding my own business ... Mabel! ... gonna puke ... all the things I coulda been ... I don't like it here ... can't even hear myself think ... Oh, Freddy, if only I'da toldja I loved you when I coulda ... got to be a way out ... why won't anybody tell me what's happening? ... if the resta youse don't shut ...”
He knew where he was now. He understood their situation. Gathering himself together, Rudy funneled all the energy he had into a mental shout: ”Silence!”
His thought was so forceful and purposive that it shocked all the other voices into silence.
”Comrades!” he began. ”It is clear enough what has happened here. We have all been harvested by the police lackeys of the Naked Brains. By the total lack of somatic sensations, I deduce that we have ourselves been made into Naked Brains.” Somebody sent out a stab of raw emotion. Before his or her (not that gender mattered anymore, under the circ.u.mstances) hysteria could spread, Rudy rushed onward in a torrent of words. ”But there is no need for despair. We are not without hope. So long as we have our thoughts, our inner strength and our powers of reason, we hold within ourselves the tools of liberation.”