“I can’t see… wait… open but blocked. A tank. It’s pointing its shooter at us.”
“Drive to within thirty feet of it and stop.”
The car crawled slowly down the four-lane access road between the parked police cars, between the ceaseless scream and babble of the crowd. A sign loomed over them: VOIGT AIRFIELD. The woman could see an electrified cyclone fence which crossed a marshy, worthless sort of field on both sides of the road. Straight ahead was a combination information booth and check-in point on a traffic island. Beyond that was the main gate, blocked by an A-62 tank capable of firing one-quarter-megaton shells from its cannon. Farther on, a confusion of roads and parking lots, all tending toward the complex jet-line terminals that blocked the runways from view. A huge control tower bulked over everything like an H. G. Wells Martian, the westering sun glaring off its polarized bank of windows and turning them to fire. Employees and passengers alike had crowded down to the nearest parking lot where they were being held back by more police. There was a pulsing, heavy whine in their ears, and Amelia saw a steel-gray Lockheed/G-A Superbird rising into a flat, powerful climb from one of the runways behind the main buildings.
“RICHARDS!”
She jumped and looked at him, frightened. He waved his hand at her nonchalantly. It’s all right, Ma. I’m only dying.
“YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE,” the huge amplified voice admonished him. “LET THE WOMAN GO. STEP OUT.”
“What now?” she asked. “It’s a stand-off. They’ll just wait until-”
“Let’s push them a little farther,” Richards said. “They’ll bluff along a little more. Lean out. Tell them I’m hurt and half-crazy. Tell them I want to give up to the Airline Police.”
“You want to do what?”
“The Airline Police are neither state enforcement nor federal. They’ve been international ever since the UN treaty of 1995. There used to be a story that if you gave up to them, you’d get amnesty. Sort of like landing on Free Parking in Monopoly. Full of shit, of course. They turn you over to the Hunters and the Hunters drag you out in back of the barn.”
She winced.
“But maybe they’ll think I believe it. Or that I’ve fooled myself into believing it. Go ahead and tell them.”
She leaned out and Richards tensed. If there was going to be an “unfortunate accident” which would remove Amelia from the picture, it would probably happen now. Her head and upper body were clearly and cleanly exposed to a thousand guns. One squeeze on one trigger and the entire farce would come to a quick end.
“Ben Richards wants to give up to the Airline Police!” she cried. “He’s shot in two places!” She threw a terrified glance over her shoulder and her voice broke, high and clear in the sudden silence the diminishing jet had left. “He’s been out of his mind half the time and God I’m so frightened… please… please… PLEASE!”
The cameras were recording it all, sending it on a live feed that would be broadcast all over North America and half the world in a matter of minutes. That was good. That was fine. Richards felt tension stiffen his limbs again and knew he was beginning to hope.
Silence for a moment; there was a conference going on behind the check-point booth.
“Very good,” Richards said softly.
She looked at him. “Do you think it’s hard to sound frightened? We’re not in this together, whatever you think. I only want you to go away.”
Richards noticed for the first time how perfect her breasts were beneath the bloodstained black and green blouse. How perfect and how precious.
There was a sudden, grinding roar and she screamed aloud.
“It’s the tank,” he said. “It’s okay. Just the tank.”
“It’s moving,” she said. “They’re going to let us in.”
“RICHARDS! YOU WILL PROCEED TO LOT 16. AIRLINE POLICE WILL BE WAITING THERE TO TAKE YOU INTO CUSTODY!”
“All right,” he said thinly. “Drive on. When you get a half a mile inside the gate, stop.”
“You’re going to get me killed,” she said hopelessly. “All I need to do is use the bathroom and you’re going to get me killed.”
The air car lifted four inches and hummed smoothly forward. Richards crouched going through the gate, anticipating a possible ambush, but there was none. The smooth blacktop curved sedately toward the main buildings. A sign with a pointing arrow informed them that this was the way to Lots 16-20.
Here the police were standing and kneeling behind yellow barricades.
Richards knew that at the slightest suspicious move, they would tear the air car apart.
“Now stop,” he said, and she did.
The reaction was instantaneous. “RICHARDS! MOVE IMMEDIATELY TO LOT 16!”
“Tell them that I want a bullhorn,” Richards said softly to her. “They are to leave one in the road twenty yards up. I want to talk to them.”
She cried his message, and then they waited. A moment later, a man in a blue uniform trotted out into the road and laid an electric bullhorn down. He stood there for a moment, perhaps savoring the realization that he was being seen by five hundred million people, and then withdrew to barricaded anonymity again.
“Go ahead,” he told her.
They crept up to the bullhorn, and when the driver’s side door was even with it, she opened the door and pulled it in. It was red and white. The letters G and A, embossed over a thunderbolt, were on the side. “Okay,” he said. “How far are we from the main building?” She squinted. “A quarter of a mile, I guess.” “How far are we from Lot 16?” “Half that.” “Good. That’s good. Yeah.” He realized he was compulsively biting his lips and tried to make himself stop. His head hurt; his entire body ached from adrenaline. “Keep driving. Go up to the entrance of Lot 16 and then stop.” “Then what?” He smiled tightly and unhappily. “That,” he said, “is going to be the site of Richards’s Last Stand.”
MINUS 036 AND COUNTING
When she stopped the car at the entrance of the parking lot, the reaction was quick and immediate. “KEEP MOVING,” the bullhorn prodded. “THE AIRPORT POLICE ARE INSIDE. AS SPECIFIED.”
Richards raised his own bullhorn for the first time. “TEN MINUTES,” he said. “I HAVE TO THINK.”
Silence again.
“Don’t you realize you’re pushing them to do it?” she asked him in a strange, controlled voice.
He uttered a weird, squeezed giggle that sounded like steam under high pressure escaping from a teapot. “They know I’m getting set to screw them. They don’t know how.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Don’t you see that yet?”
“Maybe I can,” he said.
MINUS 035 AND COUNTING
“Listen:”
“When the Games first started, people said they were the world’s greatest entertainment because there had never been anything like them. But nothing’s that original. There were the gladiators in Rome who did the same thing. And there’s another game, too. Poker. In poker the highest hand is a royal straight-flush in spades. And the toughest kind of poker is five-card stud. Four cards up on the table and one in the hole. For nickels and dimes anyone can stay in the game. It costs you maybe half a buck to see the other guy’s hole card. But when you push the stakes up, the hole card starts to look bigger and bigger. After a dozen rounds of betting, with your life’s savings and car and house on the line, that hole card stands taller than Mount Everest. The Running Man is like that. Only I’m not supposed to have any money to bet with. They’ve got the men, the firepower, and the time. We’re playing with their cards and their chips in their casino. When I’m caught, I’m supposed to fold. But maybe I stacked the deck a bit. I called the newsie line in Rockland. The newsies, that’s my ten of spades. They had to give me safe conduct, because everyone was watching. There were no more chances for neat disposal after that first roadblock. It’s funny, too, because it’s the Free-Vee that gives the Network the clout that it has. If you see it on the Free-Vee, it must be true. So if the whole country saw the police murder my hostage-a well-to-do, middle-class female hostage-they would have to believe it. They can’t risk it; the system is laboring under too much suspension of belief now. Funny, huh? My people are here. There’s been trouble on the road already. If the troopers and the Hunters turn all their guns on us, something nasty might happen. A man told me to stay near my own people. He was more right than he knew. One of the reasons they’ve been handling me with the kid gloves on is because my people are here.