Danty stopped her, his dark hand closing over her
mouth and his full strength forcing her back against the seat.
"I may only have one hand right now," he said in a voice as cold as a Siberian winter, "but if I have to I'll strangle you. Is that, understood?"
For a moment Sheklov thought she was going to fight back; her fists curled over and her eyes widened in a look of fury. Then, abruptly, she yielded, and went limp. When he took his hand away, she stared at Danty with a kind of adoration, as though this were the first time in her life that someone had given her an order meant to be obeyed --and she liked the novel sensation.
"Full, pleasel" Magda called as they drew up to the pumps.
"Full it isl" came the reply over the remote speakers.
"I . . ." Sheklov licked his lips. "I meant to ask someone: Why do you lay your gas-stations out this way, with the attendants in those high glass booths?"
"Robbery," Magda said. "Maybe the risk of sabotage, too. There was a time a few years ago, when I was in my teens, when gas-stations were closing down all over. They made such a lovely show when someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at the pumps."
Cash-drawer. Credit card. Usual routine. During it, Sheklov noticed that Danty was tensing and biting his lower lip. Then, as soon as the card came back and they were leaving the station, he spoke up.
"I just figured out how they got on to us."
"You and me, you mean?" Magda said, spotting a gap in the trafc and accelerating violently towards it. "So, how?"
"A cat called Rollins-get on the superway as soon as you can, hm?-gave me a ride back to. Cowville. We stopped for gas and a suspicious pig came and checked the governor on his car. A Banshee. Thought it had been shorted out. I guess he would have filed a report. He looked at my redbook."
"Ah-hah. And the sexies got to the tape of the report, hm? Yes, that fits. So this time wherever we go, we go for godd."
"I still think you're crazy-" Sheklov began, but Danty cut him short.
"Look, Ivan or whatever your real name isl Get this into your head, will you? I was there on the beach when
you came ashore. I saw you get into Turpin's car-"
"What?" From Lora, a shrill-edged cry of horror.
"Yeah, you heard!" Danty snapped. "Your dad's carl I saw it again in the garage under the tower you live in. Recognised the licence number, so don't give me any shitl Like I was saying, Ivanl Do you want that lot to come out when they catch up with me and start feeding me interrogation drugs?"
Ahead, the superway access point loomed, brilliant with neon strips forming arrows and the letter N for northbound. Sheklov caught a brief glimpse of the name of some city, and a distance, but faded to read them clearly.
"You're in the laughing seat," Magda said sourly, swing
ing into the traffic on the superway. As ever, there was a
vast horde of it; this was about the time-midnight whon
the night-riders took to the road. Here and there a heavy
truck lumbered along in the slow lanes, and the drivers of
private cars blasted their horns to register their opinion
that all trucks should be forbidden these roads.
"Huh?" Danty said. "Oh, you mean what I was saying a few hours ago, I guess. Like about getting out?"
"Yeah."
"I meant it," Danty said after a pause. "But . . well, tell Ivan here what happens to someone when the sexier put the knife in."
"Oh, life simply stops being worth living," Magda said. "Even if they don't convict you of anything, the fact that you're under suspicion gets around. They have computerto-computer links, you know"-with a glance at Sheklov beside her-"for absolutely everything you may want to do. Your credit rating goes first, and your cards are cancelled, and as you probably know carrying cash in this country is a bad idea. Has been since God knows when. Before Danty was born, certainly."
"Right,." Danty agreed.
"Robbery again?" Sheklov hazarded. He was on the verge of caving in; these people took it so matter-of-factly that he was Russian, and it didn't trouble them, at allonly the attention of the security force was on their minds.
"Not just that-I mean, not just the risk of being robbed," Magda said. Now, already, at the high speeds permitted on the superway, the city was dwindling and the dark shell of the night was closing them in. "More the automatic assumption that if you're carrying more than
like fifty bucks-peanutsl-you're the thief. Lose your credit rating, you might as well be bankrupt. After that, of course, if you have a job, they make sure your employers find out. Then your landlord; that's the usual order. If you're married, your spouse, and particularly your kids, if they're over say eight or ten years old. I had a client once who came to me because her son, who was thirteen, had heard his father was under suspicion by the series. and wanted her to run away with him where Dad couldn't find them, then inform on him to the pigs."
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance," Danty said, and made the quotation downright obscene.
"Is.this-is this so literally true that you're running out on your home?" Sheklov said in a bewildered tone, no longer sure whether he was Holtzer or himself.
"And our country, if we can make it," Danty said. "Like Magda just told you, once the searchlight turns on you, life stops being worth living. Mag'1"
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry. Truly I am. If I'd been any better at my thing, I'd have kept you from getting involved-"
"Oh, zip it up," Magda cut in wearily. "I guess you were right when you talked to me earlier on. I don't have anything worth staying for. Hell, it's got to where if I order a book I'm interested in through the mail, a pig shows up the day after it's delivered asking why I wanted it.
"Yeah," Danty said. "And : . . well, if it's_ any consolation, I feel-beyond any doubt-that this is a right thing to do. It leads somewhere. It does something terribly important that I can't understand. But I'm sure, I'm convinced it does it!"
Sheklov, listening, felt a renewal of that unaccountable exaltation that had struck him on the way into Cowville.
"Where are we going?" Lora said faintly.
"Canada," Danty said. "Put you off a hundred miles or so from here, if you like. If you promise not. to set the series on us, or the pigs."
"Canada?" Sheklov snapped, before Lora could answer. "But it's not as simple as--"
"The grapevine tells you where youycan still get across," Magda broke in. "We know a couple of places. Dodgy, but with Danty to take care of us, we'll make it. And of
course the moment you set foot on Canadian soil, they'd die rather than turn you back . . ."
"I don't want to be put out," Lora said abruptly. Danty and Sheklov looked at her hard.
"No," she emphasised. "If it's true that-that my father brought a Russian agent into . . . 7" It turned into a question, and died away. Danty nodded vigorously.
"Whatever Ivan saysl" he insisted.
"Then lie lied to me all my life," Lora whispered. "I don't want to see him again as long as I live. And that's not crazy talk. I'm cold sober again, and I mean it."
In which case . . .
Sheklov felt as though he were going over the edge of a cliff into deep, icy water. But he said, "My name isn't Ivan. It's Vassily."
. acv ,
Lora huddled away into the corner of the rear seat and could be heard faintly crying-not sobbing. simply snuffling. Headlights on the other half of the road shot towards them like tracer-bullets.
Sheklov thought: Regarding success and failure alike. . .
Well, at the moment he was compelled to, whether or not he had-achieved detachment. Because he had absolutely no inkling which had overtaken him. Either he had failed, spectacularly and monstrously, and was going to have to kill himself and his companions in order to avoid exposure of Turpin. or else he had succeeded in some manner he did not understand.
Danty knew 1 was due to come ashore. He was there when 1 arrived watching me. He saw Turpin's car take me away.
He had turned ofl the site. How did he know the way to do # safely? Turpin said he would hardly dare to try the job without a schematic.
He appeared to be claiming that he foresaw the submarine being blown up if the site were not switched ofl. Then he left it switched off, thereby ensuring-he said as much-that we would be here, in this mess.
The whole thing is crazy! And so am 1!
Yet, behind all these surface thoughts, there was a kind of echo: recollection of what Magda had said, twice.
"Danty was born at the wrong end of time."
A joking commentl Must bel But it had a-a ring to it. An overtone. Some all-important hidden meaning. Tantalising, like having a word on the tip of your tongue and being unable to utter it.
There had been silence in the car, except for Lora's soft weeping, for many miles. It was as though his admission concerning his identity had been a minor climax in the course of events, and, it being passed, Danty was content to wait for some new pattern to develop. Magda, at the wheel, was patently too depressed to talk; she wore an
expression of unspeakable sadness, revealed flick-flick-flick by the oncoming headlamps.
From all the various directions in which his mind had been scattered, Sheklov forcibly pulled himself back together. He reviewed what had to be said; having organised it, he spoke.
"Dantyl"
"Yes?"
"I probably don't need to tell you that this-this talent of yours has completely blown my mind. I don't believe it, but I've been driven to accept it."
"That figures," Danty said dryly, and added: "Vassilyl By the way, what kind of a name is that? Is it Russian?"
"Yes. Though it was Greek originally. Funny, you knowl" Sheklov gave a short, harsh laugh. "It means 'king.' Not the ideal name for a good third-generation Party man."
"But you're not one," Danty said.
"I-" Sheklov began, and broke off. After a moment, 'he admitted, "No, in some ways I guess not."
"You're too independent," Danty said with assurance. "Like Magda, or me, come to that. You can quote the Gita, for example, as though you took it seriously. My guess would be you have it by heart:"
"When you wormed that out of me, I almost had a heart-attack," Sheklov said. Was it only last night? It feels like a year agol But that was a good illusion to be under. It lent the comforting impression of distance in time to his borderline panic. He didn't want to be reminded right now that he was capable of panic. He had to keep his mind at its finest pitch, to reason out and plan this ridiculous journey they were committed to.
"Yes, I'm sorry about that." Danty muttered. "But . . . well, this talent of minel I'll try to explain how it works, as far as I understand it myself-which isn't very well." He hunched forward and rested his unhurt arm on the back of Sheklov's seat; staring past him at the cars on the superway.
"Since I was-oh-sixteen, seventeen, I guess, now and then I've felt a funny pressure at the back of my head, a sensation that belongs in the same group with hunger and thirst, because it means I have to do something to satisfy it. It makes me grope around like a blind man, or sometimes just wander from one place to another until I feel
the pressure fading a little and I realise I'm on the right track. Now and then I can tell quite clearly that I have to be at some special place at some special time. Like the morning of your arrival. I knew a direction I had to go in, I knew I'd recognize the spot when I reached it."
"And you knew how to shut down the site," Sheklov said, marvelling.
"That was the same process," Danty said. "I got through the fences around the site by-by picturing an action in my mind and waiting to find out whether the pressure in my head got better or worse. Then I did the same thing with the lock on the control bunker, and then with the switches. I was asking this talent of mine, 'Is it safe to close this one? Is it safe to close that one?' And all the time I knew I had to get this right, because otherwise there was going to be a great crashing disaster. Like I told you, I figured out later that the sub that put you ashore would have triggered the detectors."
"Thank you," Sheklov said soberly. "1 wouldn't have cared to be a mile from the explosion of one of those missiles."
"Nor would I," Danty said, with his regular crooked smile. "And then there's one other thing about my talent. I can sense, in the same general way, how to-to inveigle people into doing things they didn't intend to. I can sort of time words that prompt them to react."
"Like making me quote the Gita."
"Right. I can't pull the trick all the time, only when something has built up the pressure in my head to a particular pitch. When I'm sensing something terribly important." Danty passed his hand across his eyes. "And I never felt anything a fraction as important as-as you.4'
"How do you feel about me, then?" Sheklov countered.
"It's hard to describe. Say huge. Say vast. Say colossal. You still aren't within miles of hitting the idea. It's like looking up into the sky and thinking yourself into a state where you can actually understand a million light-years. Feeling in your guts a gulf that takes light all that time to crawl across. Something that makes the whole of history; the whole story of life on Earth, the age of the Earth it. self, tiny!"
A shiver trembled down Sheklov's spine. He began to dare to think that he might, just might, have succeeded in
his mission. He still didn't see how, but the possibility was now credible.
Magda, unexpectedly, spoke up. She said, "Danty, what point of the border should we make for?"
