The smile left Vickers’ face. His eyes went wide and he turned towards the window. The window that had allowed the drones to verify his actual location. Nobody thinks of everything.
“If you have some variation on a god, asshole, you might want to have a very quick conversation with him. And fuck you to hell!”
Vickers leaped from his chair just as the buster arrived. One thousand pounds of high-tensile steel impacted the ground at planetary escape velocity. It wouldn’t quite match the Barringer crater, but it was good enough for pest control. The video cut off as the entire area was vaporized. At the same moment, another impact fifty-odd kilometers south created a matching crater. New Zealand would have a couple of new lakes, by and by.
From a video window off to the side, Bill began a slow clap, echoed by Charles and Ralph.
*
“After all your talk, you’re not above pummeling the Earth when it’s convenient.” Gerrold glared out of the video window at me. I had preempted today’s UN session to announce the effective end of VEHEMENT.
I couldn’t decide if Gerrold was trying to bluff his way through this, or if he thought his connection with VEHEMENT was still unknown. In any case, I wasn’t in the mood.
I stood up, placed my hands on my desk, and leaned into the camera. As I opened my mouth to speak, I realized I was too enraged even to form words. At that moment, if I’d had a ship-buster in position, Gerrold would have died.
I frame-jacked slightly, and took a few deep breaths. Just barely in control, I glared at him. “Listen, you putrid, self-inflated bag of air. A good friend of mine is dead, driven to suicide by your friend and former co-worker with your full knowledge and cooperation. People in Brazil are dead for no other reason than to fulfill his sick political goals and to allay your butt-hurt. Again, with your knowledge and approval. And most of the rest of humanity is on starvation rations at the moment. So I am not in the mood to put up with your hypocritical yammering, and the only question right now is whether I let your own countrymen impeach and hopefully lynch you, or whether I come and get you myself, take you upstairs, and push you out an airlock. Why don’t you mouth me off just one more time, you festering pile of crap. Go ahead. Just one more word!” I glared out the video window at him. In the entire UN gathering, there was not so much as a cough. I held the moment for another heartbeat, then sneered at him. “If you show up tomorrow, I’m going with plan B. I’m just sayin’.”
With a flourish, I cut the connection.
Charles grinned at me. “Say, you’re kind of scary when you get riled.”
I was too upset to smile back, but I did give him a shrug. “That’s for Homer.”
44. Baseball
Bill
March 2189
Epsilon Eridani
“Hey, batter batter, heeeeeeeeeeey, batter.”
Howard grinned at the outfield. “Has that ever worked?”
Bob yelled back, “It’s traditional. Just go with it.”
I sailed a perfect underhand toss across the plate. Howard swung and totally whiffed.
“That’s three. Everyone advance.”
Howard shrugged, materialized a glove, and jogged to the outfield. We were generally able to field a pretty full Scrub game these days, but we couldn’t depend on enough people for two teams. Original Bob had never been much of a team player anyway; we all preferred Scrub. More of a personal goals thing.
Some of us could even hit the ball.
I moved to the catcher position, and Loki took over as pitcher. Everyone else shuffled forward into the next position. As soon as we were all ready, Marvin came up to bat. Loki wound up and threw the ball right over the plate.
About ten feet over the plate.
There were boos from the outfield. I stood up. “Yeah, you’ve been practicing, my ass. That’s with practice?”
“At least it’s going in the right direction now.”
“Uh huh. In the interest of not walking every batter for the next half hour, I’m going to allow some Guppy intervention. Put it across at people height, okay?” I nodded to Marvin.
On the next pitch, Marvin knocked it into the outfield, between center and right. Howard and Dopey looked at each other, each waiting for the other to move. Marvin, no dummy, was closing in on second before the two stooges decided who should make an effort. By the time they had the ball into the infield, Marvin was at third. He took a moment to grin and thumb his nose.
We were all fairly evenly matched in sports prowess, for obvious reasons. It came down to who was paying attention and who was letting their mind drift. We played for a subjective half hour, the agreed-upon duration, then retired to the pub.
The pub was hosted in the same matrix that handled Bob-moots, so it had more than enough processor power to handle all the Bobs and all the beer. And Hungry’s coffee, of course.
As always, we ended up talking shop.
I had a group encircling me that wanted to talk about Bullwinkle.
“Bullwinkle? Really?”
“Hey, why not?” I grinned at Thor. “The thing needed an external antenna array because of the required bandwidth. I just played with the aesthetics a bit. You’ve seen the pictures.”
Howard chuckled. “It would be hard not to think of a moose. I think your sense of proportion was a little off when you built that thing.”
There were answering laughs from several people, plus some perplexed expressions from those who hadn’t seen the pictures.
“So what’s the long game, Bill?”
I shrugged. “Nothing dramatic, Mario. It’s an interesting project, and could be useful—”
“—It would give us a physical presence,” Howard interjected. “I remember Riker being frustrated sometimes, working with the enclaves. And it’s even more so for me. We have all this interaction with the ephemerals—”
“Please don’t use that word, Howard.” I gave him the stink-eye, and he looked embarrassed for a moment.
“It’s not intended to be derogatory, Bill. It’s just—”
“Then just say humans. Sure, it’s not derogatory, but it is dismissive. And it will eventually shape an attitude that their lives matter less.”
Howard gave me a blank look, then shrugged. “Anyway, the point is that I could be so much more effective if I could, you know, ‘walk among them’. Flying around, looking like a giant pill-bug, and giving orders through a speaker is just incredibly limiting.”
“Politicians did it for centuries,” someone muttered.
I grinned and said, “That’s pill, not pill-bug.”
“There are even better words…”
“Anatomical…”
“Scatological…”
I glared around the group. “If you guys break out into Gilbert and Sullivan, I’m leaving!”