Aces Abroad

"Gimli!" the dwarf shouted. His spittle sprayed Hartma

Instantly Hartma

Most of what he'd sensed was the hate. But beneath that, beneath the conscious surface of Gimli's mind lay awareness that there was something out of the ordinary about Gregg Hartma

For the first time in his life Puppetman faced the possibility he had lost a puppet.

He knew he blanched, knew he flinched, but fortunately his reaction passed for squeamishness at being spat on. "Gimli," the dwarf repeated, and Hartma

"That's not going to work too well, Gimli. You think a ski mask is going to disguise a joker with a furry snout? I-that is, if anybody saw you grab me, they'll have little enough trouble identifying you and your gang."

He was saying too much, he belatedly realized-he didn't want Miller dwelling too much on the fact that Hartma

"Come now, Gimli," said a gritty baritone voice in accented but clear English. "Why not have the mask off? The whole world will know us soon enough."

"Oh, all right," Gimli said. Puppetman could taste his resentment without having to reach. Tom Miller was having to share stage with someone, and he didn't like it. Little bubbles of interest began to well up through the seethe of Hartma

Hartma

The first thing he saw was Gimli's face. It still looked like a bagful of rotten apples. The look of exultation didn't improve it any. Hartma

It was a shitty little tenement, like shitty little tenements pretty much everywhere in the world. The wooden floor was stained and the striped wallpaper had patches of damp like a workman's armpits. From the general scatter of crunchy and crinkly trash underfoot, Hartma

For all he knew he could be in the Eastern sector, which was a hell of a cheery thought. On the other hand, he'd been in German homes before. This one smelled wrong, somehow.

There were three other overt jokers in the room, one swathed from head to feet in a dusty-looking cowled robe, one covered with yellowish chitin dotted with tiny red pimples, a third the furry one he'd seen next to the van. The three young nats in Hartma

His power felt others behind him. That was strange. He wasn't usually able to taste another's emotions, unless that one was broadcasting strongly, or was a puppet. He sensed a peculiar squirming in the power inside him.

He glanced back. Two more back there, nats to the eye, though the scrawny youth leaning on the stained wall next to the radiator had an odd look to him. A man in his mid-thirties sat next to him in a gaudy plastic chair with his hands in the pockets of an overcoat. Hartma

That's odd, he thought. Maybe tension had heightened his normal perceptions; maybe he was imagining things. But something was coming off that kid as he gri

A shoe crunched debris. He turned, found himself looking up at an enormous nat dressed in suit coat and trousers of an odd tan-green, almost military. The man had no tie; his shirt collar hung unbuttoned around a thick neck, open to a spray of grizzled blond chest hair. Big hands rested on his hips with the coattails swept up behind, like something out of a little theater production of Inherit the Wind. His long hair lay combed back from a high forehead.

He smiled. He had one of those rugged ugly faces women fall for and men believe.

"A very great pleasure to meet you, Senator." It was the rolling sea swell of the voice he'd heard urge Gimli to remove his blindfold.

"You have the advantage."

"That's true. Oh, but I daresay my name won't be unfamiliar to you. I am Wolfgang Prahler."

Behind Hartma

"What exactly is going on here?" Hartma

Prahler's laugh resonated up from deep in his chest. "Very good. But have you not figured it out? It was never intended you should reach the banquet, Senator. You were, as you Americans say, set up."

"Drawn to the bait and trapped," said a slight redheaded woman who wore a black turtleneck and jeans. "Set cheese for a rat; set a fine banquet to catch a fine lord."

"Rats and lords," a voice repeated. "A fine rat. A fine lord." It giggled. It was a male voice, cracked and adolescent: the leather boy. Hartma

He feared this one. More than the others, Prahler, these casual youths with guns. Even Gimli.

"You went to all this trouble to help Gimli here settle an old, imaginary score?" he made himself say. "That's generous of you."

"We're doing this for the revolution," said a youthful nat with a blond flattop and a heat-lamp tan and the air of having worked hard to memorize the line. His turtleneck and jeans were molded around an athlete's figure. He stood by the wall caressing the muzzle brake of a Soviet assault rifle grounded by his foot.

"You're of no significance, Senator," the woman said. She flipped her square-cut bangs off her forehead. "Simply a tool. What your naive egotism tells you notwithstanding."

"Who the hell are you people?"

"We bear the sacred name of the Red Army Fraction," she told him. She hovered over a stocky youngster who sat cross-legged fiddling with a radio perched on a warped wooden nightstand. He wouldn't meet Hartma