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Show Anting Alone pa g e 161 mony and wore it on his turn, since this seemed to him the sole human component of their behavior, a downright bit of eccentricity among all this assembly line humanity. No, but what about those cables? His eyes hadn't directly seen, but his peripheral memory presented him with a sharp afterimage of thick, hot, humming, boa constrictor-like cables, dozens of them, slithering and coiling and sweating up from holes bored directly into the solid granite floor at the corner of the Big Fucking Mystery Tent. All along, in his deepest, slimiest, weirdest guts, he'd hoped and/or prayed and/or feared that all this high-tech stuff, even the strange location of the camp itself, might have something to do with - with that single glowing acronym. But he'd always dismissed the idea as schoolboy paranoia. Simple sabotage? How sabotage something that huge? Part of the very earth we walk and live and get lonely and die on, for Christ's sake! He thought he heard someone screaming down inside of this mountain. Inside the rock someone screamed his name. Axelrad did not respond. He wrapped his swelling head in a cold compress of thought. Axelrad was either thrilled or horrified by the enormity of what he'd just seen. He didn't know which. He now expended actual physical effort in considering the next question that came: What interest could the old man's (the Elder's?) corporation possibly have in scrambling - "Axelra-a-a-a-ad!" came a scream from the bowels of the earth. Or from down the hill. A monster approached. Axelrad looked up from his rock and saw a Companion grab the tiny Pagette microwave beeper. Depending from an aspen branch by a leather |
