Richards discovered that the old cliche was a lie. Time did not stand still. In some ways it would have been better if it had. Then there at least would have been an end to hope.
Twice the amplified voice informed Richards that he was lying. He told them if it was so, they had better open up. Five minutes later a new amplified voice told him that the Lockheed's flaps were frozen and that fueling would have to begin with another plane. Richards told them that was fine. As long as the plane was ready to go by the original deadline.
The minutes crept by. Twenty-six left, twenty-five, twenty-two, twenty (she hasn't broken yet, my God, maybe), eighteen, fifteen (the plane's engines again, rising to a strident howl as the ground crews went through fuel-system and preflight checks), ten minutes, then eight.
"RICHARDS?"
"HERE."
"WE HAVE SIMPLY GOT TO HAVE MORE TIME. THE BIRD's FLAPS ARE FROZEN SOLID. WE'RE GOING TO IRRIGATE THE VANES WITH LIQUID HYDROGEN BUT WE SIMPLY HAVE TO HAVE TIME."
"YOU HAVE IT. SEVEN MINUTES. THEN I AM GOING TO PROCEED TO THE AIRFIELD USING THE SERVICE RAMP. I WILL BE DRIVING WITH ONE HAND ON THE WHEEL AND ONE HAND ON THE IMPLODER RING. ALL GATES WILL BE OPENED. AND REMEMBER THAT I'll BE GETTING CLOSER TO THOSE FUEL TANKS ALL THE TIME."
"YOU DON'T SEEM TO REALIZE THAT WE-"
"I'M THROUGH TALKING, FELLOWS. SIX MINUTES."
The second hand made its orderly, regular turns. Three minutes left, two, one. They would be going for broke in the little room he could not imagine. He tried to call Amelia's image up in his mind and failed. It was already blurring into other faces. One composite face composed of Stacey and Bradley and Elton and Virginia Parrakis and the boy with the dog. All he could remember was that she was soft and pretty in the uninspired way that so many women can be thanks to Max Factor and Revlon and the plastic surgeons who tuck and tie and smooth out and unbend. Soft. Soft. But hard in some deep place. Where did you go hard, WASP woman? Are you hard enough? Or are you blowing the game right now?
He felt something warm running down his chin and discovered he had bitten his lips through, not once but several times.
He wiped his mouth absently, leaving a tear drop-shaped smear of blood on his sleeve, and dropped the car into gear. It rose obediently, lifters grumbling.
"RICHARDS! IF YOU MOVE THAT CAR, WE'll SHOOT! THE GIRL TALKED! WE KNOW!"
No one fired a shot.
In a way, it was almost anticlimactic.
MINUS 031 AND COUNTING
The service ramp described a rising arc around the glassine, futuristic Northern States Terminal. The way was lined with police holding everything from Mace-B and tear gas to heavy armor-piercing weaponry. Their faces were flat, dull, uniform. Richards drove slowly, sitting up straight now, and they looked at him with vacant, bovine awe. In much the same way, Richards thought, that cows must look at a farmer who had gone mad and lies kicking and sun-fishing and screaming on the barn floor.
The gate to the service area (CAUTION-EMPLOYEES ONLY-NO SMOKING-UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS KEEP OUT) had been swung open, and Richards drove sedately through, passing ranks of high-octane tanker trucks and small private planes pulled up on their chocks. Beyond them was a taxiway, wide oil-blackened cement with expansion joints. Here his bird was waiting, a huge white jumbo jet with a dozen turbine engines softly grumbling. Beyond, runways stretched straight and clean into the gathering twilight, seeming to approach a meeting point on the horizon. The bird's roll-up stairway was just being put into place by four men wearing coveralls. To Richards, it looked like the stairs leading to a scaffold.
And, as if to complete the image, the executioner stepped neatly out of the shadows that the plane's huge belly threw. Evan McCone.
Richards looked at him with the curiosity of a man seeing a celebrity for the first time-no matter how many times you see his picture in the movie 3-D's you can't believe his reality until he appears in the flesh-and then the reality takes on a curious tone of hallucination, as if entity had no right to exist separate from image.
He was a small man wearing rimless glasses, with a faint suggestion of a pot belly beneath his well-tailored suit. It was rumored that McCone wore elevator shoes, but if so, they were unobtrusive. There was a small silver flag-pin in his lapel. All in all, he did not look like a monster at all, the inheritor of such fearsome alphabet-soup bureaus as the FBI and the CIA. Not like a man who had mastered the technique of the black car in the night, the rubber club, the sly question about relatives back home. Not like a man who had mastered the entire spectrum of fear.
"Ben Richards?" He used no bullhorn, and without it his voice was soft and cultured without being effeminate in the slightest.
"Yes."
"I have a sworn bill from the Games Federation, an accredited arm of the Network Communications Commission, for your apprehension and execution. Will you honor it?"