Part 12 (1/2)

Von Ranke thought the woman looked younger now, or at least stronger, and his unease deepened.

”I do not care what you are,” Fischer said quietly. ”I only wish we were in my father's time.” He took a step toward her. She did not retreat. Her face became almost youthfully bland, and her bad eye seemed to fill in. ”Then, there would be no regulations, no rules-I could take this pistol”-he tapped his holster-”and apply it to your filthy Kike head, and perhaps kill the last Jew in Europe.” He unstrapped the holster. The woman straightened in the dark hut, as if drawing strength from Fischer's abusive tongue. Von Ranke feared for his friend. Rashness would get them in trouble.

”This is not our fathers' time,” he reminded Fischer.

Fischer paused, the pistol half in his hand, his finger curling around the trigger. ”Old woman”-though she did not look half as old, perhaps not even old at all, and certainly not bent and crippled-”you have had a very narrow shave this afternoon.”

”You have no idea who I am,” the woman half-sang, half-moaned.

”Scheisse,”Fischer spat. ”Now we will go, and report you and your hovel.”

”I am the scourge,” she breathed, and her breath smelled like burning stone even three strides away. She backed into the hut but her voice did not diminish. ”I am the visible hand, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night.”

Fischer's face hardened, and then he laughed. ”You are right,” he said to von Ranke, ”she isn't worth our trouble.” He turned and stomped out the door. Von Ranke followed, with one last glance over his shoulder into the gloom, the decay. No one has lived in this hut for years, he thought. Her shadow was gray and indefinite before the ancient stone hearth, behind the leaning, dust-covered table.

In the car von Ranke sighed. ”You do tend toward arrogance, you know that?”

Fischer grinned and shook his head. ”You drive, old friend. I'll look at the maps.” Von Ranke ramped up the Mercedes's turbine until its whine was high and steady and its exhaust cut a swirling hole in the fog behind. ”No wonder we're lost,” Fischer said. He shook out the Pan-Deutschland map peevishly. ”This is five years old-1979.”

”We'll find our way,” von Ranke said. ”I wouldn't miss old Krum-nagel's face when we deliver the plans. He fought so long against the antipodal skip bombers.... And you delay us by fooling with an old woman.”

”It is my way,” Fischer said. ”I hate disarray. Do you think he will try to veto the Pacific Northwest blitz?”

”He won't dare. He will know his place after he sees the declarations,” von Ranke said. The Mercedes whined its way toward Dole.

From the door of the hut the old woman watched, head bobbing. ”I am not a Jew,” she said, ”but I loved them, too, oh, yes. I loved all my children.” She raised her hand as the long black car roared into the fog.

”I will bring you to justice, whatever line you live upon, and all your children, and their children's children,” she said. She dropped a twist of smoke from her elbow to the dirt floor and waggled her finger. The smoke danced and drew black figures in the dirt. ”As you wished, into the time of your fathers.” The fog grew thinner. She brought her arm down, and forty years melted away with the mist.

High above a deeper growl descended on the road. A wide-winged shadow pa.s.sed over the hut, wings flas.h.i.+ng stars, invasion stripes and cannon fire.

”Hungry bird,” the shapeless figure said. ”Time to feed.”

GREGORY BENFORD.

A professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, Gregory Benford is also regarded as one of science fiction's ”killer B's” for the award-winning novels and short fiction he has written since 1965. His novel Timescape, winner of the Nebula and John W. Campbell Awards, mixed the themes of alternate history and time travel in its account of a physicist attempting to avert global disaster by manipulating events that happen decades earlier. Benford is considered one of the preeminent modern writers of hard science fiction for such novels as Eater, which works cutting-edge astronomy into its story of first human contact with aliens in the 21st century. He has also been praised for his explorations of humanist themes, notably in his Galactic Center s.e.xtet of novels of human-alien contact and human-machine interface comprised of In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, The Stars in Shroud, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, and Furious Gulf. His short fiction has been collected in In Alien Flesh and Matter's End. He is the author of Foundation's Fear, a novel set in Isaac Asimov's Foundation milieu; has collaborated on Beyond the Fall of Night, a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night; and has written a popular science book Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. His work as an anthologist includes Nuclear War, the alternate history compilation Hitler Victorious, and four volumes in the What Might Have Been series. The publication of his novel The Martian Race, about the first manned mission to the Red Planet, was timed to coincide with the 1999 touchdown of the Mars Polar Lander.

MANa.s.sAS, AGAIN.

Gregory Benford

There were worse things than getting swept up in the first battle of the first war in over a century, but Bradley could not right away think of any.

They had been out on a lark, really. Bradley got his buddy Paul to go along, flying low over the hills to watch the grand formations of men and machines. Bradley knew how to keep below the radar screens, sometimes skimming along so close to the treetops that branches snapped on their understruts. They had come in before dawn, using Bradley's dad's luxury, ultraquiet cruiser-over the broad fields, using the sunrise to blind the optical sensors below.

It had been enormously exciting. The gleaming columns, the acrid smoke of ruin, the distant m.u.f.fled coughs of combat.

Then somebody shot them down.

Not a full, square hit, luckily. Bradley had gotten them over two ranges of hills, lurching through shot-racked air. Then they came down heavily, air bags saving the two boys.

They had no choice but to go along with the team that picked them out of their wreckage. Dexter, a big, swarthy man, seemed to be in charge. He said, ”We got word a bunch of mechs are comin' along this road. You stick with us, you can help out.”

Bradley said irritably, ”Why should we? I want to-”

”Cause it's not safe round here, kid,” Dexter said. ”You joyriding rich kids, maybe you'll learn something about that today.”

Dexter grinned, showing two missing teeth, and waved the rest of his company to keep moving into the slanting early-morning glow.

n.o.body had any food and Bradley was pretty sure they would not have shared it out if they had. The fighting over the ridge to the west had disrupted whatever supply lines there were into this open, once agricultural land.

They reached the crossroads by midmorning and right away knocked out a servant mech by mistake. It saw them come hiking over the hill through the thick oaks and started chuffing away, moving as fast as it could. It was an R cla.s.s, s.h.i.+ny and chromed.

A woman who carried one of the long rods over her shoulder whipped the rod down and sighted along it and a loud boom startled Bradley. The R mech went down. ”First one of the day,” the woman named Angel said.

”Musta been a scout,” Dexter said.

”For what?” Bradley asked, shocked as they walked down the slope toward the mech in air still cool and moist from the dawn.

Paul said tentatively, ”The mech withdrawal?”

Dexter nodded. ”Mechs're on their way through here. Bet they're scared plenty.”

They saw the R mech had a small hole punched through it right in the servo controls near the back. ”Not bad shootin',” a man said to Angel.

”I tole you these'd work,” Angel said proudly. ”I sighted mine in fresh this mornin'. It helps.”

Bradley realized suddenly that the various machined rods these dozen people carried were all weapons, fabrications turned out of factories exclusively human-run. Killing tools, he thought in blank surprise. Like the old days. You see them in dramas and stuff, but they've been illegal for a century.

”Maybe this mech was just plain scared,” Bradley said. ”It's got software for that.”

”We sent out a beeper warning,” Dexter said, slapping the pack on his back. ”Goes out of this li'l rig here. Any mech wants no trouble, all they got to do is come up on us slow and then lie down so we can have a look at their programming cubes.”

”Disable it?”

”Sure. How else we going to be sure?”

”This one ran clear as anything,” Angel said, reloading her rifle.

”Maybe it didn't understand,” Bradley said. The R models were deft, subtle, terrific at social graces.

”It knew, all right,” Angel said, popping the mech's central port open and pulling out its ID cube. ”Look, it's from Sanfran.”