A Darkness in My Soul

serious if the car still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceleration, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.
        Taking the car out next to the curling waves that foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the cliff to see what was transpiring there-and was just in time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush to follow me.
        Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev four times faster than a small car's blades ever can; extra compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim to add extra boost if the time should come when they are needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundredfoot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge howler fell like a mountain.
        In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed and force that the blades at full and the compressed air jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.
        The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn't want to see what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted to.
        Down…
        And down…
        Sand exploded upward as the howler reached the beach.
        But the thing wasn't slowed.
        It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound, with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.
        At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of ignition. On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere, burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.
        They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific impact of the crash.
        Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.
        The howler's descent, however, had been a good object lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.
        I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the city, where I knew I could regain the highway before long.
        In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn't it true that every citizen who roots for "our side" to "kill the gooks" is as responsible for every death as the man wielding the gun? Isn't it true that none of us can escape responsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we constantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?
        Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses behind.
        As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with themand yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself, time to make my anger into something more formidable than emotion.
        I was superman, and it was time to act like one.
        Or so I thought and so it seemed to be…
        V
        In the large apartment complexes such as the one in which Melinda maintained her home, there is every convenience of modern living that one