Freeware

"That's Clever Hansi," said Joke quietly. "Willy built her a couple of years ago to guard the isopod. He used to have sex with her too. Corey thought it was fu

"Ick," said Darla. "Truly perv."

"Joke is there too?" cried Corey, hearing her voice. "I wish you women would come over to my isopod. Somebody should help me!" He picked up a long knife from the kitchen table and rose to his feet to confront Clever Hansi. "Back off, goddamn you! The rath and the Jubjub bird are mine! Get the fuck out of here or I'll cut off your head!" Corey lunged forward, savagely swinging the knife.

Clever Hansi leaped back and gibbered at the other Silly Putters in an unknown tongue that sounded like rich multilayered music, like an orchestra of sitars and flutes and gongs. "Tweet, thump, whang, a-byoooyooyoooom."

The Bandersnatch flanked around to one side to try and catch the rath, but Corey was too fast. With a brutal, swift gesture, Corey swung the knife and cut off the Bandersnatch's hand. The hand rose up onto its fingers and ran out of the kitchen like a tarantula, with the screeching Bandersnatch close behind.

"Anybody else?" roared Corey. "I built the bodies you starry motherfuckers are ru

After a tense moment, the posse of Putters turned and bounced back out of the kitchen. Corey slammed the door behind them, lifted the rath and the Jubjub bird back onto his table, and took another drag from his pipe. "I'd phone ISDN

myself, but the starry aliens took my uvvy away, and this vizzy phone can't call out. Are you coming over here or not?"

"We're supposed to go to the spaceport right now, Corey," said Joke. "There's an abductor ship landing that has a woman aboard, remember? Yoke and I are going to put her up."

"The spaceport?" said Corey. "I wouldn't recommend that."

"That's the main reason I wanted to call you," explained Darla. "To find out if we should turn back."

"You're already out on the surface?" said Corey. "God yes, you should turn back.

Even better, you should come see me. You're only half a mile from my isopod."

Corey's kitchen door flew open again. The frightened rath rooted its way under a stack of palimpsest on Corey's table, while the Jubjub bird frantically beat its useless wings. "Hold on for a minute," said Corey, grabbing his big knife.

The Bandersnatch came capering back in again, screeching and making faces at Corey. His severed hand was back in place, and he used the hand to give Corey the finger. Corey went after the Bandersnatch full-tilt, just like he was supposed to. In the twinkling of an eye, Clever Hansi had circled around behind Corey and stuffed the rath and the Jubjub bird into a pillowcase. Realizing he'd been had, Corey turned and lunged for Clever Hansi, but the Jabberwock flew into his face and the borogove wrapped itself around his ankles. Corey fell heavily onto the kitchen table, tipping it completely over. The uvvy link went dead on a last image of Corey's hookah and vizzy phone flying through the air.

"Oh, I hope he's all right," said Joke, holding her head. "Don't talk now. I have to listen to what Berenice and Emul think about this." They rode in silence for another minute, and then Joke cried out, "Oh no! Stop right now!"

Yoke braked the moon buggy so abruptly that it skidded in the dust. "What is it, Joke?" demanded Darla. The spaceport dome was about half a mile off. Darla could make out some moon buggies and spacesuited humans waiting on the field, also a few colorful moldies.

"Berenice and Emul say that Blaster's been infected too. By some freeware like with Rags and with Corey's Silly Putters. Except this one is called Quuz from the Sun. Look!"

Darla stared upward, following Joke's pointing finger. High above them was a bright sunlit object—the spaceship moldie grex Blaster lowering himself down on a wavering column of energy.

The last part happened very rapidly. With an extreme burst of energy, Blaster slowed his fall at an altitude of perhaps two thousand feet. The rocket's body undulated in fat bell-like curves, and the lower part formed itself into the shape of a bowl or a dish, a great dish aimed down at the spaceport.

A sudden blast of noise/information filled Darla's uvvy, the maddening skritchy dense sound of a DIM's direct info feed, a sound not meant for human ears.

Darla had heard the sound a few times before, like when getting a DIM-equipped appliance to dial in for software maintenance—and again this morning when Corey had infected Rags.

"Turn off," she screamed, but her crackling uvvy ignored her. She fought back an insane desire to rip the uvvy right out of her bubbletopper, for this would mean tearing a hole in her suit. Instead she squirmed and shrugged in a fruitless attempt to move the nape of her neck away from her uvvy's contacts. But then the uvvy chirp ended. There was a single brief whooping noise and then Darla was immersed in a dreamlike landscape of reticulated light—an undulating sea of fire that was patterned with networks of dark lines. Raging across this surface were whirlpools and whirlwinds and vast silent explosions. In this oddly silent vision, a huge fountain of flame was arching up overhead.

As she began slumping forward, Darla realized that she was suffocating. Her suit's DIM had stopped feeding her air. Through blurring eyes, she saw the buggy jerk sharply as its DIM tires lost their programming and went flat. The buggy tipped to one side, and Darla fell out of her seat. The shock of hitting the ground helped her to focus her scattered attention. There was an emergency manual override switch for the air regulator on her chest. Darla hit the air switch and lost track again—lost track of anything but the crashing oceans of fire that her uvvy was showing her.

Now Yoke and Joke were leaning over Darla, each of them lifting her by an arm.

With their uvvies busy showing visions, they couldn't talk to Darla, but they could gesture. Woozy Darla stared where they were pointing.

Blaster was only a hundred feet above the spaceport. Peering past the unreal fire images, Darla could tell that he was not aligned correctly—Blaster was going to land right on the spaceport dome! Meanwhile the possessed moldies on the spaceport field were crawling into the dome as fast as they could.

Silently, massively, Blaster lowered down toward the fragile spaceport dome.

And, oh God, Whitey was in there! At the last instant, the edge of the dome split open as a huge sluglike shape punched its way out, a mega-grex twenty times the volume of Blaster and standing nearly a hundred feet tall. A great fog of air laden with flash-frozen water vapor mushroomed out of the breach in the dome as Blaster dropped into the waiting mass of the dome's grex. For a moment the huge new group moldie stood wavering like the fruiting stalk of a slime mold, and then it went off-balance and fell ponderously to one side. The giant slug began humping about as if scavenging for food, churning up the wreckage of the dome. At this point, Darla's tortured uvvy went completely dead.

"Whitey!" screamed Darla. She wanted to run toward the ruined spaceport, but Yoke and Joke held her back. Joke pressed her bubbletopper against Darla so they could faintly talk.

"Hold on," said Joke. "I think I can still get the buggy to work." Blaster's signal had wiped out all the DIMs, but like the bubbletopper, the buggy had manual overrides for its DIM-controlled functions, and thanks to Berenice and Emul, Joke knew the proper switch settings. After a minute or two of fiddling, she had the little vehicle back in action. It moved awkwardly on its flat tires, but it moved.

The three women drove cautiously toward the ruined spaceport. The giant group moldie there had formed itself back into a whole and was nosing about in the wreckage of the space-dome, perhaps looking for missing moldies. There were many human corpses visible—people who'd been caught without a spacesuit, and people who'd been crushed. Desperately, Darla focused her attention on the few people who were still moving about. Suddenly one of them spotted the buggy and started ru