A Darkness in My Soul

doors, packed two suitcases, and folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one government could not much affect its value. I took two game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and put everything in the car.
        As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.
        

    IV
        
        I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching vehicles, three in all: the howler which I had first seen, a crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the development, and knew the hovercar would never hold up on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.
        And if I went back, there was only my house to take refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it was working against me.
        The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the damn thing and didn't understand its purpose. It was no more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to rock my own hovercar.
        Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt that I would work for them, and there was no chance that I could stir up any sort of hornet's nest about Melinda Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded me into the howler and took me quietly away.
        But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it that easy for them.
        Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the time, under my breath, was "fool" and "congenital idiot" and "raving madman," but that is neither here nor there.
        Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler, I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.
        The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate dandelion fluff-which turned abruptly into a lump of lead and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.
        I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back against full stop so that none of the power could be used to drive the craft forward or backward-it all went straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.
        The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the story would have ended much differently indeed.
        The last thirty feet, the building column of air under the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise somewhere below, but it could not be that