A Blink of the Screen

cover only when he had to and broke cover fast. But there wasn’t any watcher. If there had been, Linsay would be creeping up behind him.
    People got the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a jolly but determined man, heavily into goatskin underwear and manumission. But someone at Forward Base had loaned Linsay an old, battered copy of the book. Robinson Crusoe was on his island for over twenty-six years, Linsay learned, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Linsay approved of this: the man obviously had his head screwed on right.
    It was late summer here in what was approximately southern France, although the Fist had made such a mess of the coastline that it was barely recognizable. Here there were no longer just the spatter craters that had been such a feature a few tens of Earths back. Up here the Fist had raked across Europe and western Asia, sending major fragments barrelling towards the very core in tongues of plasma. There must have been several years of winter before the atmosphere dropped most of the dust. When it cleared, the seasons were all wrong. The colander that was Europe was slightly nearer the new Equator, the Earth had developed a wobble, and the ice caps were spreading fast.
    Mankind, however, was learning about Agriculture at the time and failed to notice. A pack of rantelopes watched Linsay cautiously. He didn’t hunt on this Earth – it was easy enough to hop back one for that – but all the same they weren’t entirely at ease. The winter following the Fist hadn’t wiped out all the primates, and some baboons in these parts were mean hunters.
    The bull baboon he’d christened Big Yin watched him from his perch on a rock. Linsay waved at him cheerfully. Big Yin had seen the rifle. He didn’t wave back.
    The man was crawling cautiously behind the inadequate cover of an outcrop of fused glass. He moved very much like a man who’d got his ideas about stealth from watching adventure films. He was holding a small handgun. It didn’t look as though it had much stopping power, but Linsay didn’t approve.
    He let off a shot that nicked the rock a few feet from the man’s head.
    ‘Throw the gun this way,’ he suggested.
    He watched shock, panic and resignation chase one another across the man’s face, as it scanned the thicket of anonymous bushes that had just spoken.
    ‘The gun,’ he repeated. He could make out the detail of the man’s belt. Gumment issue, of course, but light duty. That meant he could only have come up from Forward Base.
    ‘Okay, bush,’ said the man. He tossed the gun in Linsay’s general direction and slowly moved his hands …
    A sliver of rock nicked his ear as another round hit the glassy boulder beside him.
    ‘The belt, too,’ said the bush.
    ‘You’re Larry Linsay,’ said the man. ‘They said you were stone paranoid – no offence, you understand.’
    ‘None taken. Move those hands real careful now.’
    The hands moved real careful. ‘You don’t know me, I guess we never met. I’m Joshua Valienté. Security man. From Forward Base, you know?’
    He flinched as Linsay appeared only a few feet away. Approaching someone by movin’ up towards them through an adjacent world was an old trick, but it never failed to disconcert.
    Valienté found himself looking up into a pair of grey-blue eyes that were entirely without mercy. This bastard’d really shoot, he told himself. Don’t even look at your own gun. He’d really shoot you, up here where no one else will ever come. He wouldn’t even have to bury the body.
    ‘Prove it,’ said Linsay.
    Valienté shrugged what he hoped was an unaggressive shrug. ‘I can’t.’
    ‘All good security men carry little plastic cards,’ said Linsay. ‘They have little pictures of themselves in case they forget what they look like.’
    ‘Not when they’re off duty. Can I stand up?’
    Linsay stepped back. Possibly that meant yes. Valienté didn’t risk it.
    ‘There isn’t any Forward Base now,’ he said as levelly as he could. ‘The station’s there all right, but there aren’t any people. They’re dead.’ He paused, waiting for the reaction. It was like dropping a brick into a pool of treacle.
    ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he asked.
    ‘No. I’ve got the gun. You talk.’
    ‘All right, you soulless bastard; someone poisoned them. You know the little spring, where they get the water? In there. I was out hunting. But I saw her when I came back. Smashing