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I frowned for a second.  I was hoping you could consent to Mickey offering what he could to both the
PsyOps group and the scouts. When I did not see the questioning look in his eyes go away, I continued.
 Hal has two children who could probably benefit from being looked after by your daughter during the
recruitment drive.
Tadd nodded solemnly.  Fine, that s fine. They ll do that. The kids would like that. What about me?
 You? I hesitated.  You have done quite a great deal, Mr. Farber. You...your ... Letting Mickey help us
is enough.
 No, Mr. Loring. He shook his head.  I guess you don t understand. I m not so good with words. I
have to do something. I have to.
I tried to give him an understanding smile.  You have been through a great deal, Mr. Farber...
 Yeah, sure, but what is it in comparison to what he did to my Mickey? The man s thin eyebrows
almost touched in the middle of his frown.  You don t understand because you don t know what it s like.
All of you here, you talk about evil things out there. You know what you are facing. You know what you
want to do. You know how you will do it. You are ready to do it. Well... I don t know about that.
Tadd thumped himself on the chest with a fist.  What I know about is being afraid. I know about being
afraid of not knowing why wherever I standis bottom . I know about being afraid everyone has forgotten
me, and I know about being afraid someone will remember me. I know that all I know is fear, and now I
see you and hear you talking about things that don t make sense in the real world, but, damn, they explain
a lot of my fear.
He pointed at the Yidam and then at Vetha.  You wanna know why I m not going crazy with two
creature-feature monsters here? Something that s real isn t as scary as something that isn t real. Here, for
the first time, I know what the source of my fear is, and that means I can take responsibility for it.
Responsibility isn t something I ve handled for far too long.
Tadd hugged his daughter with his left arm and rested his right hand on Mickey s shoulder.  This guy
called Pygmalion hurt my son. If I leave it up to you to fix that, I ll be no better off. I won t know how to
face a problem myself, and if I can t, then I can t teach my kids to do that. If they don t learn it, they
can t teach it, and we ll all go to hell in a handbasket. He looked at Vetha.  I gather that s what your
master would love.
His gaze came back to me.  Last time I did work, it took more sweat than thinking. Whatever you got,
I ll do it.
Hal reached across the table and offered Tadd his hand.  He s with me.
 So be it. I smiled and stood.  Pack your things this evening because we leave forPhoenix at midnight.
Catch a nap here, because I expect it to be a working flight. When we hit the ground in the desert, I want
us running, and I want Pygmalion running scared.
Chapter 6
A week after the return fromJapan , I stood in my office on top of the Lorica Industries corporate
citadel. Looking west, I saw the dying sun impale itself on the towers ofCityCenter . The massive
photovoltaic cell ocean that coveredPhoenixgleamed a glossy black, except where sunlight reflected up in
blood.Surrounding the city, linking the seven corporate complexes with theCityCenter hub, the magnetic
levitation line that Fiddleback had used as a dimensional gate to invade the city stood tall and looked
quite benign.
From somewhere in my memory a line from a song bubbled up about a desert being an ocean with its
life underground. Lots and lots of life lurked beneath the black cell ocean that covered the city s lower
reaches. Down there, where the sun never hit the ground, the denizens endured a hot, gritty existence in a
land that remained perpetually in night. They called it Eclipse, and, as befits living creatures in the desert,
everything down there had spines, fangs or a poison sting to ensure survival.
I turned away from the cityscape and looked at Nero Loring.  You re certain we won t have to recreate
the maglev circuit to bring Fiddleback into our staging area?
The small, balding man in shirtsleeves nodded emphatically.  We built the maglev train because we
needed it. The dimensional gateway material was worked in covertly through the efforts of the creature
that pretended to be my daughter. It is really just basic circuitry, though it is weird.
From the table before him he picked up a three-foot-long section of fiber-optic cable slightly thicker than
his thumb.  Had I known what was really being done, I could have laid out the dimensional gate easily.
This fiber-optic cable can be manufactured with the circuitry already burned into it. All we need to do is
lay it out, hitch up some lasers to power it, set coordinates through a computer, and we re done.
I felt a shiver run down my spine.  That seems too easy.
 Nero shrugged.  Manufacturing the cable is, to be certain, easy. You re still going to need your
construction folks to clear a space for it. They re also going to have to make sure you have a stable area
for your computer control and laser hookups. That should not take that much time, actually, and that,
too, is an easy part of the operation. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]