Corbin rolls up to them on a scooter. She looks about eleven, with dark hair and serious eyes.
“–In an hour,” Thierry is saying, “it won’t matter! We bet our lives!”
“We don’t have to untie it if we run–hello?” snaps Guido. “Yes, little girl?”
They’re standing over a tangled rope-pile, topped by a knot as big as her head.
“There are two ways to untie every knot,” Corbin says. Guido follows her gaze to a wall: there’s a glass-fronted firebox there, and inside, an axe. He looks back at her, astounded.
She’s already gone, rolling downhill and away.
“Which, as suspected,” Ford concludes, “is expressed exclusively in saliva glands, in concert with FB-3, to control mucus content.”
He sits back. Around the table, everybody looks for the next report.
“Oh,” says Crewett finally. “I guess that’s it?” Silence. “Then we’re done?”
“The human genome. Decoded and explained,” Bartle says quietly.
“I kind of expected fireworks,” jokes Spitz, but nobody laughs.
“Ceremony’s next week.”
“What’s next?”
“Monkeys, probably.”
“You mean apes.”
“No, actually I meant monkeys.”
“Anybody want to get a beer?” asks Crewett. Most of the other geneticists just shrug. There’s a distinct feeling of determinism in the air.
APOSTROPHEX tablets (diretascorsine) are indicated for the management of Protracted Indecision Disorder (see the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM-III-R]). APOSTROPHEX has a low occurrence of side effects, but you don’t really care, do you? They’re similar to a sugar pill. Forget about them. There. Felt good, huh? APOSTROPHEX can help you feel like that all the time. APOSTROPHEX takes over when you worry, when you’re scared, or when you just don’t know what to do. Try a free sample. Get a prescription. And if you run into any trouble, don’t ask your doctor about APOSTROPHEX. Ask APOSTROPHEX about your doctor.
Her uncle really does need a cane to get around now, so he uses an old wooden bat. No handle, no stabilizer–his only concession is a thick rubber foot on the end. As he says, “otherwise, the floors’d be hard on the Slugger.”
Jeryn has decided that this is a joke; that her uncle was once nicknamed Slugger, in some way related to his service in Japan. She’s given him a story and a life, where he wears a white GI undershirt and plays pickup games with local kids. Where he’s clean-shaven, square-jawed, full of promise: a Prometheus of baseball.
“See?” Miles shakes his head as they leave. “These kids are hacks. You can’t earn anything deep in a ten-minute script.”
When they’re alone in the cloakroom, Dori flips open her butterfly knife. At first she hits a rib, then tries lower; this time it punches easily into Miles’s back.
He doesn’t stiffen up into a soundless rictus like in movies, though. He stumbles away, slamming into the wall, eyes wild back at her. He screams, a strange sound, pushes clumsily with his hands. His short fingernails are raking her face. Dori puts the knife into his belly, then out. Again.
The storm didn’t roll in; there was no rolling involved. It slid, an avalanche tied to an oil slick, very quickly.
By the time Solomon realizes he shouldn’t be out in the beech copse, it’s too late. Later, he might recall that the bolt didn’t so much strike from heaven as it did leap from the earth, or he might not. The impact is about a hundred and fifty feet away. The thunder is tangible as brick. It picks him up, carries him and deposits him in a vague and pleasant dream, where friendly llamas help him stomp plums into wine.
Holography was easy enough, once the tech was there. The eye has a refresh rate and effective megapixel rating; it was just a matter of waiting for Moore’s Law to catch up.
Except for Clarence. He’s literally one in a million, part of a very small population whose eyes are always out of phase. Where everyone else sees opaque light, he sees nothing, or a flickering ghost.
Not that Clarence minds. He realized eventually that there must exist those who’d understand his ability to disbelieve illusions as a dangerous, valuable talent. After that, it didn’t take him long to find them.
It is, indeed, his father’s Oldsmobile. Ding would recognize that fishing-joke front license plate anywhere, even now, obscured as it is with dirt and oil.
The car’s gone feral in the long years since his disappearance, though, and it seems to have been a rough transition. Its wood-laminate panels are scarred and dented; he can see it’s starving. It growls at him, six cylinders throbbing with desperate hunger.
Ding steps slowly away from the wild Buick he’s skinning, careful not to look the Olds in the headlights. “Easy, boy,” he says softly. “Easy there. Just let me get to my Truckbuster…”
It was never a real court–just a back lot and the unpainted fence where they hung the goal. That fence was just waiting to collapse on any kid who pulled. Peta learned never to dunk, never to showboat, but to pull for the layup: steady, stacking, point after point through tireless afternoons. First she never won. Then she always won.
She’s wearing sneakers now, cleaner than the ones she wore back then, and her feet scuff the same pattern. But her brother’s not there. She’s alone, in the noise of the exhaust fan and the swimming-pool smell of wet concrete.
“Pebbles.”
Daniel recoils. “Oh, that’s just–”
“Not that Pebbles! Pebbles when she was older,” retorts Toe. “She and Bam-Bam were in a band, with some other kids…”
“Oh.” Daniel squints. “Yeah…”
“They solved mysteries. Dino was probably involved. You know, like every Hanna-Barbera cartoon, but Pebbles had it all over Daphne.”
“I don’t know, man, I still say Betty.”
“And think about this,” says Alex, sticking his head into the room. “Fred’s cereal is named after his daughter. Right? And what do you do with cereal?”
“Wrong!” shouts Toe. “Wrong wrong wrong!”
“Every morning!” Alex crows. “Paging Doctor Cement Freud!”