Read Online The Mammoth Book of SF Wars by Ian Watson [Ed], Ian Whates [Ed] - Free Book Online

finished and gone before we can reach them!”
    This was all wrong; he could not talk to her about anything important before he had calmed her. He said, searching for some way to reach her: “But we have to go on as if they won’t. Nothing else we’ve tried has worked. At least Compton’s project hasn’t failed.”
    “Now you’re on his side! You!”
    She was nothing like the way she had been with him. She would never have been like this. The way she was now, she and Malachi Runner could not meet. He understood, now, that in the years since she had left Headquarters with Compton she had come to think back on Malachi Runner not as a man but as an embodiment of that safe life. It was not him she was shouting out to. It was to all those days gone for ever.
    And so I must be those days of life in a place where shafts lead to the wine-rich air of the surface, and there is no sound of metal twisting in the rock. I am not Malachi Runner now. I hoped I could be. I should have read that letter as it was, not as I hoped it was. Goodbye, Runner, you aren’t needed here.
    “No, I’m not on his side. But I wouldn’t dare stop him if I could. I wouldn’t dare shut off any hope that things will end and the world can go back to living.”
    “End? Where can they end? He goes on; he can’t move an arm or a finger, but he goes on. He doesn’t need anything but that box that keeps him alive and this tunnel and that ship. Where can I touch him?”
    They stood separated by their outstretched hands, and Runner watched her as intently as though he had been ordered to make a report on her.
    “I thought I could help him, but now he’s in that box!”
    Yes, Runner thought, now he’s in that box. He will not let death rob him of seeing the end of his plans. And you love him, but he’s gone where you can’t follow. Can you?
    He considered what he saw in her now, and he knew she was lost. But he thought that if the war would only end, there would be ways to reach her. He could not reach her now; nothing could reach her. He knew insanity was incurable, but he thought that perhaps she was not yet insane; if he could at least keep her within this world’s bounds, there might be time, and ways, to bring her back. If not to him, then at least to the remembered days of Headquarters.
    “Norma!” he said, driven by what he foresaw and feared. He pulled her close and caught her eyes in his own. “Norma, you have got to promise me that no matter what happens, you won’t get into another one of those boxes so you can be with him.”
    The thought was entirely new to her. Her voice was much lower. She frowned as if to see him better and said: “Get into one of those boxes? Oh, no – no, I’m not sick, yet. I only have to have shots for my nerves. A corpsman comes and gives them to me. He’ll be here soon. It’s only if you can’t not-care; I mean, if you have to stay involved, like he does, that you need the interrupter circuits instead of the tranquilizer shots. You don’t get into one of those boxes just for fear,” she said.
    He had forgotten that; he had more than forgotten it – there were apparently things in the world that had made him be sure, for a moment, that it really was fear.
    He did not like hallucinating. He did not have any way of depending on himself if he had lapses like that.
    “Norma, how do I look to you?” he said rapidly.
    She was still frowning at him in that way. “You look about the same as always,” she said.
    He left her quickly – he had never thought, in conniving for this assignment with the letter crackling in his pocket, that he would leave her so quickly. And he went to his accommodation, crossing the raw, still untracked and unsheathed echoing shaft of the tunnel this near the face, with the labour battalion squads filing back and forth and the rubble carts rumbling. And in the morning he set out. He crawled into the weapons carrier, and was lifted up to a hidden opening that had been made for