“Yeah, that’s it. Crawling along ocean trenches. They turn water into gases, hydrogen and oxygen, I think…H2O. The oxygen bubbles off. These machines put the hydrogen into more H-bombs. And then they lay these bombs along the trenches, thousands of them. All over the Earth. I think they make the bombs go off all at once.”

Hicks stared at the boy. “I’d like to have you talk to some other people,” Hicks said.

The boy looked uneasy. “All I’m supposed to do is give you this.” He pointed to the spider. “Am I making sense so far?”

Hicks stared at the silvery machine. “You’re scaring the hell out of me.”

“Is that good?”

“You’ve earned your lunch. If I make a phone call, will you be here when I come back?”

“Order me another hamburger, I’ll stay here all day.”

“You’ve got it,” Hicks said. He flagged down the waitress. Again, Reuben pocketed the spider.

Outside the cafeteria, near the entrance to the men’s rest room, Hicks found a phone booth. He had inserted his card into the slot and picked up the mouthpiece when he realized he hadn’t the slightest idea whom to call. He had some vague notion to talk to Harry Feinman or Arthur Gordon, but he didn’t know where they were, and it would probably take hours to track them down. Besides, Feinman was reputed to be very ill, perhaps dying. The task force had been scattered to the four winds after the President’s speech.

Dithering, he replaced the mouthpiece and stared at a potted palm, biting the corner of a fingernail. I am excited, and I am absolutely terrified. He lifted one eyebrow and glanced across the lobby. Hidden dramas.

He could take the boy’s spider and open himself — make himself vulnerable — to whatever the boy was experiencing. But he wasn’t at all clear on what that meant. Would he give up his free will, become an agent of whoever controlled the spiders? Perhaps the spiders controlled themselves — more examples of machine intelligence.

There was no way of knowing whether or not they were controlled by the machines threatening the Earth. Another layer of deception.

Hicks sought the safety of the men’s room and locked himself in a stall. Even after he had urinated, he stood behind the door, trying to control his shivers. Why a spider? Not the most reassuring shape to choose.

A battle in the asteroids. But perhaps it’s not a battle at all; just part of the demolition and making of more planet-killer probes.

He closed his eyes and saw a shower of huge starships radiating outward, leaving behind the rubble of a ruined solar system. Would even the sun become part of this interstellar disease?

He fumbled at the stall latch and stepped out, brushing past a well-dressed, elderly gentleman with a cane. “Windy day out,” the gentleman said, nodding and half turning to track Hicks with his gentle eyes.

“Yes indeed,” Hicks returned, pausing at the door, glancing back.

The gentleman nodded at him again, and their gazes held. God. Is he one? Possessed by a spider?

The old man smiled and proceeded into the stall Hicks had vacated.

Hicks returned to the cafeteria and resumed his seat in the booth. “How many people have been recruited, so far?”

Reuben had eaten nearly all of his second hamburger. “They haven’t told me,” he said.

Hicks clasped his hands in front of him. “Do you feel that you’ve been possessed?”

Reuben squinted. “I honestly don’t know. If they’re not lying to me, they’re helping all of us, and I’d rather be doing this than something else. Wouldn’t you?”

Hicks swallowed hard. “Do you still have free will?”

“Enough to argue. It takes my advice, sometimes. Sometimes, it doesn’t listen, and then it moves me around, so I suppose then I don’t have control. But it seems to know what it’s doing, and as it says, there isn’t time enough to explain to everybody.”

“You are extraordinarily persuasive,” Hicks said.

“Thank you. And thanks again for the food.” Reuben dabbled a french fry through a smear of catsup and lifted it in salute before biting into it.

“Where’s the spider?”

“Back in my pocket.”

“Can I take it with me, make up my mind later, after I’ve talked to people?”

“No, man, you touch that spider, it’s going to…you know. Have you. I’m obliged to tell you that much.”

“I can’t really agree under those circumstances,” Hicks said. Fear and caution win out.

Reuben stared at him, disappointed. “It really needs you.”

Hicks shook his head, adamant. “Tell them, it, that I cannot be coerced.”

“Looks like I made a mistake, then,” Reuben said.

Something brushed Hicks’s hand where it lay on the seat’s vinyl. He had hardly turned his head to glance down when he felt a slight prick. With a scream, he leaped up out of the booth, banging one knee on the underside of the table. He fell over on the carpet and a tumbler of water spilled on his legs and feet. Pain shot up his leg and he held his knee with both hands, grimacing.

Three other patrons and two waitresses gathered around him as his vision cleared. Sharp warmth moved rapidly up his arm, into his neck, his face, his scalp. The pain subsided. He pulled his lips back and shook his head: so stupid.

“Are you all right?” a man asked, bending over him.

“I’m fine,” Hicks said. He searched rapidly for an explanation. “Bit my tongue. Very painful. I’m fine.”

He got up on an elbow and examined his hand. There was a tiny red spot on his thumb. It stung me.

Reuben was not in the booth. The man helped Hicks to his feet and he brushed himself off, thanking the others and apologizing profusely for creating a fuss. His hand touched an egg-sized lump in his coat pocket. “There was a young man with me. Did you see where he went?” He glanced nervously at the floor and the booth seat, looking for the spider. But it’s in my pocket, he reminded himself.

“There’s somebody leaving now,” a waitress said. She pointed.

In the archway to the cafeteria, Reuben glanced over his shoulder at Hicks and smiled.

The boy walked briskly into the lobby, turned, and vanished. There was no need to follow him, so Hicks picked up the check and paid the waitress. He was shaking all over and wanted to cry, but didn’t know whether it was British reserve or the instructions flowing through him that helped him maintain.

Doesn’t feel bad, actually. Of course, I’m not in control…

He returned to his room, lay back in the bed, and closed his eyes. His shaking subsided and his breathing became steady. He rolled over on his side. The spider climbed out of his pocket and attached itself to the base of his neck.

What Reuben had tried to explain, then, unfolded before him in much more detail. An hour later, he wondered why he had even thought of resisting.

Sometime in the evening, the spider released his neck and crawled across the bed, dropping to the floor. He watched with less than half his attention; information was still flowing into him, and while some of it was incomprehensible, within a few minutes the flow would change, and he could understand more.

The spider climbed the television stand and quickly, with surprisingly little noise, drilled into the base. For an hour, sounds of cutting, stray beams of light, and puffs of smoke and dust issued from the television. All was quiet and still for another hour. Then two spiders dropped through the hole. Both crawled into Hicks’s pocket.

“Bloody hell,” Hicks said.

The Andrew Kearney Show (Syndicated Home Info Systems Net), December 19, 1996; guest appearance by science fiction writer Lawrence Van Cott:

Kearney: Mr. Van Cott, you’ve written sixty-one novels and seven works of nonfiction, or rather, it says here, speculative nonfiction. What is that?