And then there was another, and far more serious, matter: his cough was back. It had started really small at first, just a little throat-clearing rasp, but Alex had known for some time that the dosage of blue goo was losing its charm. His lungs no longer felt like sweet slick paper dipped in oil. Slowly but with terrible sureness, they were starting to feel a hell of a lot more like his own lungs. He'd worn the breathing mask faithfully, until his tanned face had a white triangular muzzle of untanned skin just like a raccoon's, but that wasn't enough. He was going to have to take steps.

The June 2 pursuit was all-out. They were up before dawn, and Mulcahey himself went into the field. The only people left in camp were Joe Brasseur doing navigation, Buzzard as network coord, and Sam Moncrieff as nowcaster. And, of course, Alex, nominally in charge of the support jeeps.

This was not a very taxing job. The support jeeps were unmanned, and were supposed to carry supplies into the field through global positioning. If called upon, Alex was supposed to instantly load the jeeps with spare whatchamacallits and then route them long-distance to a rendezvous.

Alex assumed that this assignment was a subtle reference on Mulcahey's part to Alex's covert use of a dope mule. Kind of a deliberate shoulder tap there on the part of the Troupe jefe. To Alex's deep relief, Mulcahey almost never took any notice of Alex, favorable or unfavorable. He'd never called Alex in for one of those head-to-head encounter sessions that seemed to leave the other Troupers so bent out of shape. But every once in a while there would be these ambiguous little jabs. Intended, Alex figured, to intimidate him, to assure him that Mulcahey did have an eye on him, so he wouldn't try anything really stupid.

When you came right down to it, this tactic worked pretty well.

In reality, Alex's support job consisted mostly of fetching venison chili for Sam, Joe, and Buzzard, since the men were leashed to their machinery. The goats were taken care of: the Troupe had stretched a line of wire around the perimeter posts and had corralled the goats inside the camp. The goats were cropping all the grass in camp, and crapping all over the ground as well, but they'd be breaking camp tomorrow and leaving, so it didn't matter much.

Sam Moncrieff was thrilled with his nowcaster status. He'd been Mulcahey's star grad student before Mukahey had left academia (in a shambles), and Sam took the exalted central role of Troupe nowcaster with complete and utter seriousness. He was stomping around blindly in the command yurt with his head in a virching helmet, burrowing through scientific visualizations like some kind of data-gloved gopher.

Joe Brasseur had his own navigation setup in the command yurt's left-hand annex.

So Alex found himself alone in the right-hand annex, the sysadmin station, with Buzzard.

Buzzard was in a peculiar mood.

"I hate what Janey has done to this system, dude," Buzzard opined, clumsily rolling a marijuana cigarette. "It don't crash as much now, and Christ knows it looks a lot prettier, but it's a real mud bath to run."

Alex examined the gndwork of the display for his support jeeps. It always amazed him how many forgotten little ghost towns there were, out in West Texas. "I guess you'd rather be out virching your 'thopters."

"Aw, you can't chase 'em all," Buzzard said tolerantly. "Let Kiehl get his chance out in the field, this candy-ass sysadmin desk work would drive anybody nuts." He lit his joint with a Mexican cigarette lighter and inhaled. "Want some?" he squeaked.

"No thanks."

"When the cat's away, dude." Buzzard shrugged. "Jerry would get on my case about this, but I tell ya, you spend fourteen straight hours shuffling icons, and it downright helps to be ripped to the tits."

Alex watched as Buzzard plunged into his thicket of screens and menus. Alex guessed that he was tweaking the flow of data from distant Troupe weather instruments, but as far as Alex knew, Buzzard might as well have been bobbing for digital apples.

Buzzard worked a long time, in a glassy-eyed trance of efficiency, stopping twice to decant some dire herbal concoction into a paper cup.

Alex, testing his ingenuity toits limits, managed to pry open one of the Troupe's communication channels on a spare laptop. Rudy and Rick, in the Baker pursuit vehicle somewhere in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, were getting very excited about hail. Not so much the size of it, as the color. The hail was black.

"Black hail," Alex remarked.

"That's nothing," Buzzard said, tugging on the metal lump he wore on a thong around his neck. "Just means there's a little dust in it. It's gettin' real dry up in Colorado. Lotta dust, lotta haze up top... black hail. It can happen."

"Well, I've never seen black hail before," Alex said. "And it sounds like they haven't either."

"I saw a stone fall out of the sky once," Buzzard said. "It hit my fuckin' house."

"Really?"

"Yeah. And this is the one." Buzzard tugged the metal lump, sharply. "The biggest piece of it, anyhow. Came right through the roof of my bedroom. I was ten."

"Your house was hit by a meteor?"

"Cotta happen to somebody," Buzzard said. "Statistics prove that." He paused, stared into the screen in deep abstraction, then looked up. "That's nothin' either. Once I sawa ram of meat."

"Meat fell out of the sky," he said simply. "I saw it with my own two eyes." He sighed. "You don't believe me, do ya, kid? Well, go back in the anomaly records sometime and have a look at the stuff people have seen in the past, falling out of the sky. Amazing stuff! Black bail. Black rain. Red rain. Big rocks. Frogs. Rains of fishes. Snails. Jelly. Red snow, black snow. Chunks of ice have fallen out of the sky as big as fuckin' elephants. Dude, I saw meat fall out of the sky."

"What kind of meat?" Alex asked.

"Shaved meat. No hair on it, or anything. Looked kinda like, I dunno, sliced mushrooms or sliced potatoes or something, except it was red and bloody wet and it had little veins in it. It just kinda fell out of a dark cloudy sky one summer, fallin' kinda slow, like somebody throwing potato chips. A little shower of sliced-up meat. About as wide as, I dunno, a good-sized highway, and about eighty meters long. Enough to fill up a couple of big lawn bags, if you raked it up."

"Did you rake it up?"

"Fuck no, man. We were scared to death."

"There were other people seeing this?" Alex said, surprised. "Witnesses?"

"Hell yes! Me, my dad, my cousin Elvin, and my cousin Elvin's probation officer. We were all scared to death." Buzzard's eyes were dilated and shiny. "That was during the State of Emergency.... Most of middle America was one big dust bowl. I was a teenage kid in a suburb in Kentucky, and the sky would get black at noon, and you'd get a layer of airborne Iowa or Nebraska or some shit, onto your doors and windows, dry brown dirt in layers as thick as your fingers. Heavy weather, man. People thought it was the end of the world."

"I've heard of big dust storms. I've never heard of any shaved meat."

"I dunno, man. I saw it happen. I never forgot it, either. I think my Dad and Elvin managed to forget about it after a couple years, kinda block the memory out, but I sure as hell never did. Sometimes I get the feeling that people must see shit happen like that all the time. But they're always too scared to report it to anyone else. People don't like to look like they're .........nd you sure didn't want to do it during the State of Emergency, they were doing that 'demographic relocation' shit at the time, and people were really scared they were gonna end up in weather camps. It was mega-heavy, mega-bad. .

Buzzard glanced down at his screen. What the hell is this?" He dug down in the maze of screens and came up with a flashing security alert. "Hell, we got some kind of ground car outside the camp! Dude, run outside and see!"