Dark Rivers of the Heart

man in the shadows.
        At a full stop on Las Vegas Boulevard South, confronted by armed men in front of and behind him, Spencer pounded the horn, pulled the wheel hard to the right, and tramped on the accelerator. The Explorer rocketed toward the amusement park, Spaceport Vegas, pressing him and Rocky against their seats as if they were astronauts moonward bound.
        The cocksure boldness of the gunmen proved that they were feds of some kind, even if they used fake credentials to conceal their true identity.
        They would never ambush him on a major street, before witnesses, unless they were confident of pulling rank on local cops.
        On the sidewalk in front of Spaceport Vegas, on their way from casino to casino, pedestrians scattered, and the Explorer shot into a driveway posted for buses only, though no buses were in sight.
        Perhaps because of the February cold snap and the pending storm, or maybe because it was only noon, Spaceport Vegas wasn't open. The ticket booths were shuttered, and the thrill rides that were high enough to be seen behind the park walls were in suspended animation.
        Nevertheless, neon and futuristic applications of fiber optics throbbed and flashed along the perimeter wall, which was nine feet high and painted like the armored hull of a starfighter. A photosensitive cell must have switched on the lights, mistaking the midday gloom of the advancing storm for the onset of evening.
        Spencer drove between two rocket-shaped ticket booths, toward a twelve-foot-diameter tunnel of polished steel that penetrated the park walls. In blue neon, the words TIME TUNNEL TO SPACEPORT VEGAS promised more escape than he needed.
        He flew up the gentle ramp, never tapping the brakes, and raced unheeding through time.
        The massive pipe was two hundred feet long. Tubes of brilliant blue neon curved up the walls, across the ceiling. They blinked in rapid sequence from the entrance to the exit, creating an illusion of a funnel of lightning.
        Under ordinary circumstances, patrons were conveyed into the dark on lumbering trains, but the half-blinding surges of light were more eflieve that he had been catapulted into a distant era.
        Rocky was doing the head-bobbing bit again.
        "Never knew I had a dog," Spencer said, "with a need for speed."
        He fled into the far reaches of the park, where the lights had not been activated like those on the wall and in the tunnel. The deserted and seemingly endless midway rose and fell, narrowed and widened and narrowed again, and repeatedly looped back on itself.
        Spaceport Vegas featured corkscrew roller coasters, dive-bombers, scramblers, whips, and the other usual gut churners, all tricked up with lavish science fiction facades, gimmicks, and names. Light-sled to Ganymede. hyperspace Hammer. Solar Radiation Hell. Asteroid Collision.
        Devolution Drop. The park also offered elaborate flight-simulator adventures and virtual-reality experiences in buildings of futuristic or bizarrely alien architecture: Planet of the Snakemen, Blood Moon, Vortex Blaster, Deathworld. At Robot Wars, homicidal machines with red eyes guarded the entrance, and the portal to Star Monster looked like a glistening orifice at one end or the other of an extraterrestrial leviathan's digestive tract.
        Under the bleak sky, swept by cold wind, with the gray prestorm light sucking the color out of everything, the future as imagined by the creators of Spaceport Vegas was unremittingly hostile.
        Curiously, that made it appear more realistic to Spencer, more like a true vision and less like an amusement park than its designers ever intended. Allen, machine, and human predators were everywhere on the prowl. Cosmic disasters loomed at every turn: The Exploding Sun, Comet Strike, Time Snap, The Big Bang, Wasteland. The End of Time was on the same avenue of the midway that offered an adventure called Extinction.
        It was possible to look at the ominous attractions and believe that this grim future-in its mood if not its specifics-was sufficiently terrifying to be one that contemporary society might make for itself In search of a service exit, Spencer drove recklessly along the winding promenades, weaving among the attractions. He repeatedly glimpsed the Chevy and the Chrysler between the rides and the exotic structures, though never dangerously close. They were like sharks cruising in the