Heavy Weather

Mulcahey's weirdest symptoms happened when Juanita wasn't watching him at all. She'd be doing her version of some comely girl-thing, like maybe a big stretch-and-bend-over in her thin paper jumpsuit, Mulcahey would all of a sudden get this very highly flammable expression. Like he was a starving man and she was an expensive cordon bleu di

Alex wasn't sure how all this was going to turn out for Juanita. She'd known this guy for at least a year now, and it was pretty damned odd for a man and woman who'd been lovers that long not to calm down some. Maybe they were calm now. In which case, the begi

Alex looked down across the landscape. No sign of the convoy. He'd left the convoy far hehind as he mulled things over. Time to turn around ~nd head back a bit.

As he wheeled the ultralight around, with sluggish machine-assisted caution, he passed the shoulder of ahiil. In the infrared, the highway-it happened to be a paved one-smoldered a bit with trapped day heat, but there was a lot of vivid heat on the far slope of that hill.

Alex stopped his maneuver and decided to check it out.

At first, be thought there was an entire army standing there in the road. At least a hundred people. Then he realized that most of the glowing patches of heat were standing on all fours. They were deer. No, goats.

Somebody had a herd of goats out on the highway.

Alex clicked open the radio cha

"Copy, Alex. You see anybody?"

"Yeah-I think so. Kinda hard to tell from this heights Rick, why would anybody have a herd of goats out on the road in the middle of the night, over?"

"You got me beat, dude."

"Maybe they travel at night for better security, like we do."

"Are they moving?"

"No, man. Just sitting there."

"Those could be pharm goats, and they could be goat rustlers, just about to rendezvous with one of those meat-packing trucks out of the city."

"People do that? Rustle goats?"

"Some people do anything for money, dude." Alex heard Rick loudly smacking his wide-awake gum into the microphone. "Or maybe they're blockin' the road with goats on purpose, and they got an ambush set up in the brush, over."

Alex lifted his faceplate and looked out bare-eyed. Pretty hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like there was some pretty thick mesquite on both sides of the road. Good-sized mesquite, too, a couple of stories tall. You could have hidden a big tribe of Comanches in it.

"Maybe you better come up here, Rick."

"No way, man, you don't want to desert the rear of the convoy in a possible ambush situation."

"But you've got the gun, man."

"I'm not go

"Right," Alex said. "'Death from above.' I kinda figured." He laughed.

"Look, Medicine Boy, I'll shoot if I have to. But if we just start blowing people away, out in the middle of nowhere without askin' any questions, then we're the ones who are go

"Cut your motor and buzz 'em, get a good quiet look."

"Right," Alex said. "I get it."

He took several deep huffs of oxygen. It felt lovely. Then he discovered that the motor would not shut down. He couldn't override the controls. Oh well. It wasn't a loud motor, anyway.

He dropped down a dozen meters over the treetops and crossed the road at an angle, right to left. The goats didn't seem to notice, or care. He did, however, spot the intense infrared glow of some kind of smokeless electric heater at the edge of the mesquite trees. There were people there too-at least half a dozen. Standing up.

He opened the cha

"I don't like this, over."

"Me either. Man, you gotta be some kind of hard-ass to steal goats from people who'd raise goats in an awful goddamn place like this." Alex felt surprised at the sudden depth of his own anger. But hell-he himself herded goats. He'd developed a genuine class feeling for goat ranchers.

"Okay." Rick sighed. "Lemme see who's awake in the convoy.~~

Alex circled the herd, slowly. More glowing bipedal figures appeared, this time at the other side of the road.

"Greg says drop a flare and check it out," Rick reported.

"Right," Alex said.

He plucked one of the flares from its plastic clip-on mount on the right-hand strut. The flares were old and dusty and covered with military-issue stenciling in Cyrillic. He hadn't imagined them working too well, but at least they were simplicity itself to use.

He yanked the top off. The flare popped and smoldered and then burst into welding-torch brilliance. Surprised despite himself, Alex dropped it.

The flare tumbled in a neat parabola and landed bouncing on the highway, at the edge of the goat herd, which immediately panicked. The goats didn't get far, though; they were all hobbled.

Sharp bangs came from the edge of the road. Alex blinked, saw several men in big hats and shaggy, fringed clothing.

"Rick," he said, "they're shooting at me."

"What?"

"They've got rifles, man, they're trying to shoot me.

"Get out of there!"

"Right," Alex muttered. He put some effort into gaining height. The ultralight responded with the grace and speed of a sofa lugged up a ffight of stairs. Blinded by the flare down on ground level, they couldn't seem to see him very well. Their shooting was ragged and they were using old-fashioned, loud, banging, chemically propelled bullets. That wouldn't matter, though, if they kept shooting.

Alex had a sudden deep conviction that he was about to be shot. Death was near. He had a rush of terror so intense that he actually felt the bullet strike him. It was going to hit him just above the hipbone and pass through his guts like a red-hot burning catheter and leave him dying in his harness dripping blood and spew. He would bleed to death in midair in the grip of a smart machine. The Troupe would call the machine in to land, and they would find him still strapped in his, seat, cold and gray and bloody and dead.

Knowing with irrational conviction that his life was over, Alex felt a dizzy spasm of terrible satisfaction. Shot dead by men with rifles. It was so much better than the way he'd always known he would die. He was go

For an insane moment Alex actually did believe in the Work, with his whole heart. Everything in his life had led up to this moment. Now he was going to be killed, and it was all fated, and had all been meant this way from the begi

But the men with guns kept missing him. And after a while the firing stopped. And then a crouching man in the shaggy clothes ran out rapidly to the burning flare in the road, and he stomped it into embers.

Alex realized that Rick had been shouting scratchily in his ears for some time.

"I'm okay!" Alex said. "Sorry."

"Where are you?"

"Ummm... between them and the convoy. Up pretty high. I think they're herding the goats off the road now. Hard to tell . .