Leo Frankowski

least a
colonel to join.”
    Hastings suppressed
a flash of panic.
    “If you were
here from the beginning, you must know Guibedo and Copernick.”
    “Intimately. I’m
Heinrich Copernick, George.”
    Hastings was acutely
aware of the brick of high ex plosives taped to his ankle.
    “Then you know
who I am.” Copernick had reengineered himself!
    “Of course. That
white-noise generator lit you up like a neon sign. My telepaths were quite relieved
when your battery
went dead. They said it gave them headaches.”
    “You bastard.
You had me set up all along.”
    “Let’s just say
that I wanted to meet you. We’ve been enemies for years. You fought a good
fight. But the war is over now. You ought to be thinking about your future.”
    “My
future?” Hastings’ voice was cold. “You destroy my country. You
murder my family. And then you expect me to settle down in your filthy city.”
    “George, we
both know that four years ago the world was on a collision course with absolute
disaster. Come over to my house sometime and I’ll show you the figures. Our
mechanically based technology had to go, yet our economic system was totally
supported by that technology. And our political and social structures were completely supported by
those economics. Our survival as a race depended on making the changeover to a
biological economy. And we couldn’t change a part of that system without changing it
all.
    “I’m truly sorry
about your family. They died because of an engineering error. We corrected it as
soon as we found out about it. It was an accident.
    “On the other
hand, you deliberately tried to kill my family. Twice. But like I said, the war
is over.”
    “You filthy
hypocrite. What about the eighty-five families your monsters butchered?”
Hastings said.
    “Another error.
No one had ever tried to educate an intelligent engineered species before. It
simply never occurred to me to tell them that they weren’t supposed to kill people. That error has also been
corrected. In the last three months the
LDUs have saved the lives of millions
of people. A fair penance, I should say.”
    “Saved them?
Saved them from the hell that you’ve caused with your damned metal-eating
bugs!”
    “Not
guilty,” Copernick lied. “That plague was completely natural. We
have been doing everything in our power to fight it.”
    “You must think
that I’m awfully gullible. At the precise moment when you and your damned
biological monsters are about to be wiped out, a totally new species comes along and
destroys the technology that you’re openly fighting. You warn your spys and traitors to get out of
Washington. And then you have the gall to say it’s natural.”
    Hastings dropped his
cigar. He reached down to pick it up and lit the fuse of the bomb on his ankle. He stretched his leg
under Copernick and waited.
    “Perhaps God
was on our side,” Copernick said.
    “In a pig’s
eye.”
    “You can still
settle down here, George. We could use you. You don’t have to die.”
    The plastique hadn’t
gone off.
    “Naturally we
disabled your bomb. You’re quite a heavy sleeper. The CCU predicted that you
would be willing
to commit suicide in order to kill me, but I was hoping that you’d change your
mind.”
     
    The bomb went off,
completely severing Hastings’ right foot from his leg. The legs of Copernick’s chair were virtually
powdered, and wood fibers were blown into the feet, calves, and knees of both
men.
    Though protected
somewhat by the seat of his chair, and more so by the strange directionality of
high explosives, Copernick was blown four feet into the air and across the room,
cracking his skull on a brass footrest.
    Hastings was bounced
off the opposite wall and came to rest across Copernick’s left arm.
    LDUs had been
monitoring the situation, and medical teams were on site within seconds.
    It was three months
before Hastings’ foot was regenerated, but Copernick was back on the job in
five days.
     
    The first three
months after the plague started were hard on our race, but the end was in sight.
At least in the western hemisphere, the long lines of refugees had found their various
destinations. Over half of the human race lived crowded in or around tree houses, and
virtually every
family, group, and individual person had planted a tree house, the only
means of shelter possible.
    The other half of
humanity lived in a ragged collection of plastic tents and lean-tos surrounding
the food trees, waiting for them to