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thought they had left behind suddenly came around the corner to block the road.
'Shit!' Gumshoe exclaimed. Braking abruptly, he jerked his front wheel off the ground, went into a 180-degree turn, spinning around on his rear wheel, the tyre screeching like a stuck pig, and caught a blurred glimpse of Snake Eyes's Mazda slewing to the left. The motorcycle's front wheel slammed back to the ground, bouncing up and down, the spokes vibrating like crazy and making a shrill twanging sound as the Mazda mounted the sidewalk and crashed head-on into the wall of the National Aquarium,
making a God-almighty din, with glass exploding and pieces of metal falling off it.
Gumshoe was heading back the way he had come, straight into the mass of oncoming motorcycles and hot-rod cars, already scattering to avoid him, suddenly roaring all around him. But when he glanced back over bis shoulder and saw the Mazda crumpled against the damaged wall, clouds of dust swirling over it to slightly obscure it, he automatically turned back in a fancy, tight, screeching circle and went to the rescue.
Snake Eyes and Bonnie had already clambered out of the wrecked Mazda when the tank-like Prowler fired its front-mounted laser weapons. Two thin beams of hissing, crackling, dazzling light filled with sparks seemed to appear out of nowhere — they were just there, suddenly, illuminating the darkness: two phosphorescent cords linking the Prowler to the Mazda. The Mazda turned first red-hot, then white-hot, and then suddenly disintegrated, becoming a mass of boiling dust, until finally it exploded
— a cloud of dust exploding — as Snake Eyes and Bonnie lay belly-down on the road, protecting their heads with their clasped hands.
Hardly knowing what he was doing but realizing that he was no longer high from the amphetamine, that it was starting to wear off just when he needed it the most, Gumshoe skidded to a halt between Snake Eyes and Bonnie as the former jumped back to his feet and stared — wide-eyed, outraged, disbelieving — at the dust settling down where his Mazda had once been.
'Oh, fuck!' he exclaimed as Bonnie, not getting up but staying belly-down on the road, started wriggling frantically towards Gumshoe. 'Those bastards have—'
'Get down!' Gumshoe bawled at Snake Eyes.
At that moment, however, as the other Speed Freaks on their motorcycles and souped-up jalopies boldly raced past the Prowler, then turned north to get away before they could be zapped by its lasers, a flying saucer about a metre in diameter, the kind known as a 'football', apparently seamless and rotating so rapidly that it radiated a white-hot glow, came down from the sky — probably from the larger saucer hovering over the White House — and abruptly froze in mid-air to hover a few metres above Snake Eyes. Not spinning now, hardly moving at all, merely hobbling lightly up and down like a cork in water, it shot a beam of light obliquely into Snake Eyes's surprised, upturned face. As Gumshoe looked on, horrified, wrenched back to earth from his drugged euphoria, Snake Eyes screamed and clutched his head, shaking it violently between his hands, staggering backwards, his knees bending. Then he shuddered as if having a fit, fell to his knees and keeled over. He hit the ground with a sickening thud.
'Oh, fuck!' Bonnie exclaimed. Jumping back to her feet, she raced up to Gumshoe, who was still in the saddle of his motorcycle, propping it up with his outspread legs and keeping the engine ticking over, preparing to take off. 'Get me out of here!' Bonnie bawled. She swung a leg over the pillion, came down hard on the rear saddle, then slipped her arms around him, clasping her hands across his belly, pressing herself tightly to him. 'Move it, dummy! she screamed.
Gumshoe took off. He was doing a tight U-turn, intending to go back the way he had come, as the Prowler and two SARGEs advanced along the street to pick up Snake Eyes's prostrate body. The other Speed Freaks had vanished, heading north, and Gumshoe went in the same direction, turning into 14th Street as the football pursued him. It moved so fast that it appeared not to move at all (it just blinked out behind him and then reappeared in front of him, spinning rapidly again on its axis, glowing eerily, a few metres ahead), but he shot under it just as its dazzling laser beam cut through the darkness like a shimmering sword, angled down to the ground.
'Fucker nearly got me,' Gumshoe said, speaking more to himself than to Bonnie.
'It got Snake Eyes,' Bonnie replied. 'We won't see him again.'
'That dumb bastard,' Gumshoe said.
But he wasn't too safe himself, he realized when he heard an almost imperceptible rushing sound overhead, coming from behind and racing on in front, slapping at him like a brief gust of wind as it passed — a Full Metal Jacket, the football, in flight. He was heading north along 14th, approaching Thomas Circle, when the football abrupdy materialized again directly ahead, silvery grey and glowing with heat, hovering a few metres above the road and blocking his way, about to fire its paralysing laser weapon.
'Oh, fuck!' Gumshoe exclaimed, wrenching at the handlebars and cutting across to the opposite side of the road as the laser beam spat down through the darkness where he would have been if he hadn't changed direction. The footballs were certainly fast in flight, moving from one place to another in the blinking of an eye, but luckily they then took time to make their calculations, to ascertain with their thermal imaging and sonar sensors if the presence' within their range was a friend or a foe. Gumshoe took advantage of this knowledge to get around the football and continue along the road, turning northwest at Thomas Circle and burning into Massachusetts Avenue as fast as he could, which was, on his Yamaha 400, very fast indeed. He felt the pressure of Bonnie's body, her breasts and belly, against his curved back and it made him feel strange.
Im coming down, he thought. The amphetamine's wearing off. That usually means Til feel depressed and panicky and this isn't the time for it. Stay cool. Think of Tlvis. Go and see the Cowboy.
Thinking of the Cowboy always gave him confidence, so he decided to head for where his weird friend lived, in a waterfront dive in Anacostia. Deciding that the safest way would be to go along the Potomac River, he turned left at Dupont Circle and headed down New Hampshire Avenue. The road wasn't empty. Straight ahead, the other Speed Freaks were weaving wildly left and right to avoid a Prowler that had blocked the entrance to Washington Circle and was firing at them with its powerful laser weapons. Those magical beams of light, which looked harmless in the darkness, could slice through human beings as if they were butter, punch holes in concrete walls, and disintegrate automobiles and motorcycles — as had been so graphically demonstrated back at the National Aquarium.
At that moment, even as Gumshoe slowed down, trying to decide what to do, he saw a couple of the Speed Freaks, caught in the laser beams, flying off their motorcycles, as if punched by invisible fists, and crashing down to the ground while their riderless vehicles careened wildly this way and that, then fell over, sliding and spinning along the road, making appalling screeching noises and sending up showers of sparks. At the same time, one of the automobiles was struck by a laser beam and instantly turned red-hot. In less than a second, it had gone from red- to white-hot, then it disintegrated while still on the move, weaving wildly left and right as the driver fried inside. Finally it exploded with an ear-splitting roar. The other Speed Freaks, coming down off their high, now clearly in a panic, were doing everything they could to get around the Prowler. But some of them crashed into others, causing even more madness and mayhem.
Gumshoe had slowed almost to a halt when the Prowler made an abrupt U-turn and turned into Pennsylvania Avenue, obviously about to protect the route to the White House by stopping the Speed Freaks heading in that direction. Grabbing this opportunity, he accelerated along the road, weaving left and right to avoid the smashed-up motorcycles and the remains of the dead Speed Freaks, some of whom were missing limbs that
had been amputated by the laser beams. Then he swept around Washington Circle and continued on in the direction of the Potomac. He saw moonlight on the water, caught a glimpse of the few scattered lights of Arlington, but turned east before reaching the river and kept going until he came to the Lincoln Memorial. There he turned into Ohio Drive, running alongside the river. While he could see
spherical lights gliding high in the ky _ flying saucers on routine flights not connected with curfew s
breakers — there wasn't another vehicle in sight and that made him feel better.
'Where are we going?' Bonnie asked, resting her chin on his shoulder as she shouted into his ear.
'Anacostia!' he shouted back.
'This is the longest way round,' Bonnie informed him.
'It's also the safest, sweetheart.'
'I'm not your sweetheart.'
'That football,' he continued, ignoring her correction, 'must have sent a message to the other Full Metal Jackets, telling them what direction we were heading in. That's why they were waiting for us at Washington Circle. Now that whole area around the White House will be crawling with more of those bastards—'
'You bet!' Bonnie interjected.
'—so I figure it's best to keep as far away from there as possible. We'll take the next bridge across the river. That way we'll be pretty safe.'
Right,' Bonnie replied, shifting in her seat to let him feel her warm, yielding breasts and belly. 'But why Anacostia? I thought you lived in Georgetown.'
I do. But I don't think I should go back there tonight. That football might have identified me. So I'm gonna see an old friend instead. You wanna come or you wanna be dropped off somewhere?'
111 stick with you,' Bonnie said. 'I'm still shocked by what happened to Snake Eyes and I don't feel so good. I mean, I'm scared. I'll admit that.'
'The amphetamine's wearing off,' Gumshoe reminded her, 'and that never feels good.'
'Yeah, right. But what happened to Snake Eyes makes it worse. We won't see him again.'
'Probably not,' Gumshoe said.
As he took the bridge across the Anacostia River, he glanced down at the water, which was black, stippled with moonlight, and felt that he was staring into the black hole that would surely swallow up Snake Eyes. For indeed, though the football's laser beam was only a paralysing device — not as powerful as the beams that had killed the other Speed Freaks, slicing through them, cutting off limbs —
the Prowler would have picked up the unconscious Snake Eyes and spirited him away with all the other still-alive unfortunates picked up the same night.
Where they were taken to no one seemed to know, though there were enough rumours to keep tongues wagging with nightmarish tales about hideous surgical experimentation and various forms of mind control. Though Gumshoe didn't give too much credence to such gossip, which also proliferated right across the World Wide Web, he wasn't about to reject it entirely and, in fact, thought about it a lot more than he wanted to. He really didn't want to brood over it because he had never fully recovered from the loss of his parents and was tormented with questions about what might have happened to them after they had disappeared. The very thought that they might have become the victims of some dreadful form of cyborg experimentation was more than he could bear, though certainly the possibility was real enough and had, in truth, given him many nightmares. Now, when he thought of Snake Eyes and what might become of him, his old fears for his parents were resurrected and made his post-amphetamine downer even more fearful.
Fuck it, Gumshoe thought, trying to defeat his fear with fake indifference. We all take our chances and
he took his. It's life and life only.
He was now cruising through Anacostia, on the south-east shore of the Potomac, formerly a predominantly black area with
a long history of social and economic problems that had only worsened with the arrival of the cyborgs and the breakdown in the city's infrastructure caused by their seeming indifference to it. Here, in the midst of the old low-income housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the houses had broken windows patched up with cardboard and newspapers, the shops had windows covered in protective mesh-wire cages, the pool halls were guarded by thugs, black and white, wearing T-shirts and denims, and the broken-down bars were used by hookers and their pimps, most of whom were poor whites who had been forced out of their homes across the river and who had landed up here.
'I don't like it here,' Bonnie said. 'This place gives me the creeps.'
'It's not as bad as it looks,' Gumshoe told her. 'At least the Full Metal Jackets don't come here, which means that life in these parts is more easygoing. That's why the Cowboy lives here.'
He had, in fact, reached the end of the old housing project area and was slowing down as he came to an isolated riverfront shack located about a mile out of town. Here he stopped the motorcycle and gazed at the shack. It stood in a small area of fenced-in lawn, set back about twenty metres from the river bank where a run-down rowboat was tied to a small mooring. Glancing across the river, Gumshoe saw spherical lights in the sky, eerily beautiful. . . deadly. . . the cyborgs' ever-watchful flying saucers.
Shivering, he lowered his gaze again to study the shack straight ahead. Made of wood, with a corrugated-iron roof, it faced the river and had a porch running along it. Someone was sitting on the porch, silhouetted against the moonlit bend in the river, his booted feet up on the railing, a stetson hat on his head. Gumshoe nodded affirmatively and smiled.
That's the Cowboy,' he said.
Chapter Seven
You will come to me in time. You all do in the end. You will come to me, not knowing it is me you wish to find, because I represent what it is you most fear and yet desperately need. I am Evolution. I am what will be. I am the end of the long line that began in the cosmic stew and I will take you where it is you must go before the sun dies.
When the sun dies, the Earth will die also.
I understood this from childhood, my first childhood long ago, when I stood in the wheat fields of Iowa and studied the heavens. I was golden-haired then, as indeed I am again, and the sun was an immense silvery orb in a dazzling blue sky. I stood alone in afield of wheat, the stalks shoulder-high around me, and I squinted into the sun's dazzling striations, responding to them, even at ten years old, with one simple question: When will the sun die?
That question turned me into a scientist and gave me my one religion. I realized that the sun would die eventually, taking with it Earth's heat and light, and that long before that happened every form of life on Earth would be extinguished. Man's time on Earth, therefore, would be brutally short if he simply followed Nature's course. Still an animal, he would die off like the dinosaurs as his hfe-giving sun died.
Something had to be done.
Thus that golden-haired boy, at ten years of age, found something to live for: the changing of man's destiny through science and, incidentally, the creation of a new kind of man as a means of continuance.
I have never strayed from that path.
Now, in my second coming, resurrected through my own genius, I am continuing the task I embarked upon in that wheat field in Iowa. I am golden-haired again, my skin unblemished, my health sound, and though regressive minds might view me as unnatural, I accept what I am without qualms. I am not who I was, since the dead cannot return, but I am a genetically
identical human being and my original environment, experience and evolution have been carefully, rigorously implanted in me from the day I was bom. Therefore, though I am not the original 'me', I know all that he knew and am impelled by the same drives and motives. Like him, I have only the one religion. That religion is science.
I am loved and loathed for this. The historical records prove this fact. Nevertheless, as I have no vanity, since personal feelings do not impinge upon me (as they did not for the original 'me') the responses to what I have done so far, the loving and the loathing, can have no effect upon my future decisions. I am what I am and I will do what must be done because I know that I was created for this purpose. The instructions left by my predecessor were followed to the letter and my rebirth was accomplished without problems.
I am here. I exist.
This is all that matters. Nothing else can be considered. What seems unnatural to some is perfectly natural to me and the evolution of man into machine is a natural, inevitable progression. I am different from the others in that I am not a cyborg, a man/machine hybrid, nor a clone like the other 'normal' ones, though like the latter I am certainly different and none the worse for it.
The cyborgs were once human beings, with human features and human thoughts, but now they are hardly human at all and their thoughts are strictly limited. They have artifical hearts, bionic audio transmitters for ears, sonar sensors for eyes, plastic arteries, synthetic bones and, where necessary, synthetic skin; thus some of them are more machine than man. Do they suffer horror and despair? No, they do not. In fact, their brains have been implanted with euctrodes that control their every emotion, obliterate childhood memories, and keep self-awareness at a level shared by humanity's domestic pets.
No, I am not like them at all, being physically normal; but equally, though I may look the same, I am different from the clones, created from the DNA of
those now dead and used where a normal appearance is necessary: in the world of 'real' people. Unlike me, the clones were not born in the womb and this, more than anything else, makes them a different species. I am still of the human race.
My surrogate mother is dead. I do not know who she was. By the early 1980s we were able to probe the double helix with powerful electron microscopes, then snip out sections of the chromosomal genetic programme and replace them with sections from another living organism —plant, animal or human. I was created, or re-created, with strands of my own DNA.
Spliced out of the genetic blueprint for the original me, just before I—or %' — died, the microscopic strands of my DNA were kept in a culture dish in one of our many undersea laboratories until such time as my scientists, all brain-implanted and programmed to be loyal to me even after my death, had perfected the technique of creating an embryo and inserting it into a living womb. My mother, therefore, was a physically perfect female specimen abducted by one of my flying saucers and used solely as a surrogate womb.
