Snake Eyes | Page 8

the red dot with coordinate markings flashing beside it was barely moving.
"How are you feeling, George?" the voice said, soft, feminine, consoling. George was fighting the impulse to open his helmet so that he could see the stars--it seemed important to get the colors just right.
"Who is this?" he said.
"Aleph."
Oh shit, more surprises. "You never sounded like this before."
"No, I was trying to conform to your idea of me,"
"Well, which is your real voice?"
"I don't have one."
If you don't have a real voice, you aren't really there--that seemed clear to George, for reasons that eluded him. "So who the hell are you?"
"Whoever I wish to be." This was interesting, George thought.
"Bullshit," replied the snake (they could call it what they wanted, to George it would always be the snake), "let's burn."
George said, "I don't get it."
"You will, if you live. Do you want to die?"
"No, but I don't want to be me, and dying seems to be the only alternative."
"Why don't you want to be you?"
"Because I scare myself."
This was familiar dialogue, one part of George noted, between the lunatic and the voice of reason. Jesus, he thought, I have taken myself hostage. "I don't want to do this anymore," he said. George turned oft his suit radio and felt the rage building inside him, the snake mad as hell.
What's your problem? he wanted to know. He didn't really expect an answer, but he got one--picture in his head of a cloudless blue sky the horizon turning, a gray aircraft swinging into view, and the airtrame shuddering as missiles released and their contrails centered on the other plane, turning it into a ball of fire. Behind the picture a clear idea, I want to kill something.
Fine. George swiveled the suit once again and centered the navigational computer' cross hairs on the center of the blue-white globe in front of him, then squeezed the triggers. We'll kill something.
RED BURN RED BURN RED BURN
Inarticulate questioning from the thing inside, but George didn't mind, he was into it now, thinking, Sure, we'll burn. He'd taken his chances when he let them wire him up, and now the dice have come up--you've got it-- snake eyes, so all that's left is to pick a fast death, one with a nice edge on it--take this fucking snake and kill it in style. Earth grew closer The snake caught on. It didn't like it. Too bad, snake. George never saw the robot tug coming. Looking like bedsprings piled with a junk store's throwaways, topped with parabolic and spike antennas, it fired half a dozen sticky-tipped lines from a hundred meters away Four of them hit George, three of them stuck, and it reeled him in and headed back toward Athena Station.
George felt an anger, not the snake's this time but his own, and he wept with that anger and frustration . . . I will get you the next time, mother-fucker, he told the snake and could feel it shrink away--it believed him. Still his rage built, and he was screaming with it, writhing in the lines that held him, smashing his gauntlets against his helmet.
At the open airlock, long, articulated grapple arms took George from the robot tug. Passive, his anger exhausted, he lay quietly as they retracted, dragging him through the airlock entry and into the suit locker beyond, where they placed him in analuminum strut cradle. Through his faceplate he saw Lizzie, dressed in a white cotton undersuit--she climbed onto George's suit and worked the controls to split its hard body down the middle. As it opened she stepped inside the clamshell opening. She hit the switches that disconnected the flexible arm and leg tubes, unfastened the helmet, and lifted it oft George's head.
"How do you feel?" she said.
"Like an idiot."
"It's all right. You've done the hard part."
Charley Hughes watched from a catwalk above them. From this distance they looked like children in the white undersuits, twins emerging from a plastic womb, watched over by the blank-faced shells hanging above them. Incestuous twins--she lay nestled atop him, kissed his throat. "I am not a voyeur," Hughes said. He went into the corridor, where Innis was waiting.
"How is everything?" Innis said."Lizzie will be with him for a while."
"Yeah, young goddamn love, eh, Charley? I'm glad for it. If it weren't for that erotic attachment, we'd be the ones explaining it all to him."
"We cannot evade that responsibility so easily He will have to be told how we put him at risk, and I don't look forward to it."
"Don't be so sensitive. I'm tired. You need me for anything, call." He shambled down the corridor
Chanley Hughes sat on the floor, his back against the wall. He held his hands out, palms down, fingers spread. Solid, very solid. When they got their next candidate, the shaking