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Show Anting Alone Page 354 bodies from the encampment. Spy satellites - ours or theirs - can read the matchbook you light cigarettes or forest fires with, remember. The satellites would read the labels on the shirt collars of the live bodies and would perform spontaneous fibroanalyses of the hairs in the pores of their necks and would at the speed of light notify the main intercontinental textile computer of the live bodies' separate identities. The computer would be obliged to give the order for a first strike. Mr. Cicerone wants to give his favorite employee Axelrad a chance to escape, to live, to finish the ethnography he's working on. Mr. Cicerone wants Axelrad to escape the encampment on his own before the big Armageddon cuts loose: Cobra 'copters putting a thirty-millimeter round in every square inch of earth from the base of Cheyenne Mountain to the tip of the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun at the summit. Axelrad rode it out to its improbable conclusion until he stopped trembling. He drew upon what remained of his Center of Inner Strength, and forced himself to live through a moment of quietude and contemplation, just as the old man always suggested, until he could move without trembling and twitching and squeaking the cheap wood that closed him in now like a pauper's coffin. Axelrad finally moved, but he didn't breathe until he'd completely forgotten the question that had just immobilized him. All he cared consciously to remember about the encampment - possibly nothing more than a flattened tornado-clearing itself now ~ was that he'd followed his first, most primitive instinct back there this morning. Not bothering to hang up the radio-phone, nor even to disengage the secret black-box from the bicycle generator, he'd gotten his ass out of there. |