GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"For God's sake!" Frigate said, "Why would she do that? What did she have against us? She must hate us! Everybody! Why?"

"I think," Li Po said, "that she has always been very sad behind that merry face she put on. She has had a bad life, many bad times, anyway, so many that she thinks of her life as all bad, too horrible to endure any longer. She has suffered so much, been raped and abused so much, and the attack by Dunaway was just too much. 1 think—I could be wrong, though I doubt it—that she decided that we would all be better off dead. She'd be better off dead. Everybody would be. She told me more than once that she was sorry that we had been resurrected, that it was horrible that no one could take refuge even in death. Did she ever say anything like that to you, Dick?"

"Several times."

"There has to be more than that to it," Frigate said. "If she wanted to be dead forever, all she had to do was erase her own recordings."

"She's not sane," Burton said. "She may have it in her mind that she's doing everybody a favor by making sure that they don't have to suffer as she did. Also, I suppose, she wishes to insure that those who made others suffer could no longer do that."

He was appalled, more shaken by her deeds than by anything he had ever experienced. But he did not hate her. Though she had committed the greatest sin in the world, the irrevocable and unforgivable sin, he could not hate that demented sufferer. He pitied her. Grieved for her, in fact. But he would have to kill her. No one would be safe until she was dead, and he would be doing her the greatest kindness by putting her out of her wretchedness.

He was sure that she pla

35

"Nonsense!"

"What?" Alice said.

"We don't have the slightest idea of what's really going on in that twisted mind. It doesn't matter if we do or don't. What does is that she must be stopped."

A loud pinging began. Burton started, though he had been expecting the noise, and he went to the console. The screen was displaying a diagram of a tower level section and a tiny but bright orange light was moving along one of the-corridors. In the corner of the screen was: level 4, corridor 10.

The others had crowded behind him. Frigate said, "What now?"

"She must have just left the room in which she was resurrected," Burton said. "The room would have been painted, of course, so that her past-display would not be visible to her, and I suppose that the Computer shows it only when it can be seen by the subject. What I did, I told the Computer to show me where her past-display is. Star Spoon has undoubtedly commanded the Computer not to reveal her presence by allowing us to scan the halls near where she is. But one thing she ca

"She's intelligent," Li Po said. "She'll soon realize that you may be tracking her through the display. What we can do, she can do. She'll ask the Computer to show her our displays."

"Yes," Burton said, "but the thing about the Computer is that whoever gets ahead of the other with his command can forestall the other. I told it not to show her where ours are."

"She'll know that when the Computer doesn't show them to her," Li Po said. "That'll make her very cautious."

"She would be anyway," Burton said. "Pete, go burn off Gull's sealant. Tell him what's happened, give him a beamer. We need everyone we can get."

Frigate looked reluctant to leave, but he did so at once.

"We can't stay in this place," Burton said. "She can't seal up the door as long as it's open, but she could set up something—a robot machine that would automatically beam us the moment we stuck our heads through the doorway, for instance—so we won't stay here."

The orange light had stopped at a shaft, VC-A3-2.

"That leads up our corridor," Burton said. "We haven't much time."

He got up from the console chair and went through the doorway leading to the bedroom corridor. Frigate had just finished melting off the sealant and was waiting for the smoke to clear away. The door to Gull's room had swung open. Burton shouted, "Tell him to hold his breath and get right out here!"

The others went to their bedrooms and got their weapons and extra powerpacks. Burton watched the screen while the others were busy. When they were all in the main room, he told them what they must do. Gull was confused and did not know all that had happened, since Frigate had only had time to give him a few facts. Nevertheless, he nodded when Burton rapid-fired instructions at him, and he ran off.

All left the apartment then, and Burton had the Computer close the door. The apartment was halfway on the corridor between two lift shafts. Star Spoon was by the fourth-floor entrance to the shaft to their right as they left their place. They sped down the corridor toward the shaft, Alice dropping behind them to enter an apartment on the right side. She would station herself in the darkened area by the door, which would be left half-open. From there she could cover the shaft entrance, about four hundred and fifty feet away.

The four men separated when they came to the cross-corridor. The lift shaft was in the center of the cross-corridor, and there were deep bays at each corner to permit traffic of big machines. The shaft could be entered from four sides. Li Po and Gull went to the right down the cross-corridor and took positions behind partly closed doors about a hundred feet from the shaft. Burton continued down the corridor and entered a room that was about a hundred feet from the shaft. Frigate was to go to the left at the intersection and take a station behind a door about two hundred feet from the shaft.

When Star Spoon left the shaft at this level, she would be the target of cross-fire from five beamers.

Burton's room was dark except for the glow of the computer console screen. He watched the orange light, waiting for it to move into the shaft and ascend toward the third level.

"She's certainly taking her time," he muttered. What was she doing? Trying to imagine all the possible traps? Or had she lost her nerve?

Very early that morning, Burton had taken one hundred pounds of plastic explosive from the e-m converter. Using his flying chair to elevate himself to the tops of seven lift shafts and along the sides, working furiously, he had pressed the explosive around the entrances of the nearest shafts. He had not applied the plastic to the bottom of the entrances because Star Spoon would probably see it before exiting. By the time she had left the shaft, even if she saw the plastic on the sides, she would be too late to escape. Proximity fuses would set off the explosive.

These might be useless, since she might take a distant shaft. But if she passed close to a mined opening, she still might set off one.

He looked down the corridor and through the opening of the shaft. Then he glanced back at the screen. Ah! The orange light was ascending the lines indicating the shaft near which they waited.

He crouched by the door. A few seconds later, a transparent vehicle, in the center of which Star Spoon sat, rose into full view. It halted, suspended in the shaft, allowing him to see it in all its details. It was much like the armored chair that he had fashioned except that there were more heavy beamers than in his.

He could only see her back until she turned her head to give him a half-profile. She was expressionless.

The armor would resist for a while the ray of a beamer on full-power. Only if the ray could be kept on one spot could it penetrate the armor. And Star Spoon would keep her vehicle moving.