25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 28

But in the middle of the process of moving the pump, Blazes McFlynn steps back, folds his arms across the chest of his lava suit, and says, "Coffee break."

Mattison stares at him incredulously. "What the f.u.c.k did you say?"

"Time out, is what I said. You think it's a snap, hauling this monster around? I'm tired. I'm a crippled man, Matty. I got to sit down for a while and take a breather."

"The lava is changing direction. There's a park and a reservoir and a freeway in the path of danger now."

"So?" McFlynn says. "What's that mean to me?"

Mattison is so astonished that for a moment he can't speak. If this is a joke, it's a d.a.m.n lousy one. He needs McFlynn badly, and McFlynn has to know that. Mattison, flabbergasted, gapes and gestures in helpless pantomime.

McFlynn says, "Not my park. Not my freeway. I don't even know where the f.u.c.k we are right now. But my bad leg is aching like a holy son of a b.i.t.c.h and I want to sit down and rest and that's that."

"I'll sit you down, all right," Mattison says, recovering his voice finally. "I'll sit you down inside a volcano, you obstreperous lazy son of a b.i.t.c.h. I'll drop you in on your head." He knows that he is not supposed to speak to the inmates this way, and that everybody else is listening in and someone is bound to talk and he will very likely be reprimanded later on by Donna, but he can't help himself. He doesn't pretend to be a saint and McFlynn's sudden rebellion has p.i.s.sed him off _almost_ to the breaking point. Almost. What he really would like to do now is put one hand under McFlynn's left armpit and one hand under the right one and pick him up and carry him to the lava and dangle his feet over the fiery-hot flow for a moment and then let go.

Very likely that is exactly what Mattison would have tried to do two years ago, if he and McFlynn had found themselves in this situation two years ago; but it is a measure of the progress he has been making that he merely fantasizes tossing McFlynn into the lava, now, instead of actually doing it. The fantasy is so vivid that for a dizzy moment he believes that he is actually doing it, and he gets a savage rush of glee from the spectacle of McFlynn disappearing, melting away as he goes under, into the blazing river of molten magma.

But actually doing it would be extremely poor procedural technique. And also McFlynn is not exactly a weakling and Mattison is aware that he might find himself involved in a non-trivial fight if he tries anything. Mattison has never lost a fight in his life, but it is some time since he has been in one, and he may be out of practice; and in any case there's no time now, with the lava about to overflow his dam, to f.u.c.k around getting into fights with people like Blazes McFlynn.

So what he does, instead, is turn his back on McFlynn, swallowing the rest of what he would like to say and do to him, and indicate to Prochaska, Hawks, and Snow, who have been watching the whole dispute in silence, that they will have to finish moving the pump without McFlynn's help. They all know what that means, that McFlynn has shafted them thoroughly by dumping his share of this tremendous job on their shoulders, and they are righteously angry. A certain amount of venting occurs, which Mattison decides would be best to permit. Hawks tells McFlynn that he's a motherf.u.c.king goof-off and Prochaska says something guttural and probably highly uncomplimentary in what is probably Czech, and even Snow, not famous for hard work himself, gives McFlynn the hand-across-bent-forearm chop. McFlynn doesn't seem to give a d.a.m.n. He replies to the whole bunch of them with an upthrust finger and a lazy, contemptuous smirk that makes Mattison think that the next event is going to be a crazy free-for-all; but no, no, they all ostentatiously turn their backs on him too and continue the job of guiding the pump toward its new position.

It's a miserably hard job. The pump is on a wheeled carriage, sure, but it isn't designed to be moved in an arc as narrow as this, and they really have to bust their humps to swing it into its new position. The men grunt and groan and gasp as they bend and push. Mattison, who as the biggest and strongest of the group has taken up the key position, can feel things popping in his arms and shoulders as he puts his whole weight into the job. And all the while McFlynn stands to one side, watching.

The pump is more than halfway into place when McFlynn comes limping over as though he has graciously decided that he will join them in the work after all.

"Look who's here," says Hawks. "You motherf.u.c.ker son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Can I be of any a.s.sistance?" McFlynn says grandly.

He tries to take up a position against the side of the pump carriage between Hawks and Prochaska. Hawks turns squarely toward McFlynn and seems to be thinking about throwing a punch at him. Mattison, who has been worried about this possibility since McFlynn made his announcement, poises himself to step in, but Hawks gets his anger under control just in time. Muttering to himself, he turns back in Prochaska's direction. There is just enough room for McFlynn to shove his way in between Hawks and Mattison. He braces himself and puts his shoulder against the carriage, making a big show of throwing all his strength into the task.

"Hey, be careful not to strain yourself, now!" Mattison tells him.

"f.u.c.k you, Matty," McFlynn says sulkily. "That's all I have to say, just f.u.c.k you."

"You're welcome," says Mattison, as with the aid of McFlynn's added strength they finally manage to finish swinging the big pump around and lock it on its track.

The men step back from it, wheezing, sucking in breath after their heavy exertions. But the incident isn't over. Prochaska goes up to McFlynn and says something else to him in the harsh language that Mattison a.s.sumes is Czech. McFlynn gives Prochaska the finger again. Maybe there's going to be a fight after all. No. They are content to glare, it seems. Mattison glances at McFlynn and sees, through the faceplate of his suit, that the expression on McFlynn's face has become unexpectedly complicated. He looks defiant but maybe just a little shamefaced too. An attack of conscience? A bit of guilt over his stupid dereliction kicking in at last, now that he realizes that he actually was needed badly just now and f.u.c.ked everybody over by c.r.a.pping out? Better late than never, Mattison figures.

Prochaska still isn't finished letting McFlynn know what he thinks of him, though: he throws in a couple of harsh new Slavic expletives, and McFlynn, who probably has no more of an idea of what Prochaska is saying to him than Mattison does, dourly gives him back some muttered threats salted with the standard Anglo-Saxonisms.

Things are starting to get a little out of hand, Mattison thinks. He needs to do something, although he's not sure what. But he has a lava flow to worry about, first.

The lava, in fact, is getting a little out of hand also. Not that it has started to flow in any serious way toward Whatchamacallit Park and Whozis Reservoir, not yet. A thin little eddy of it has begun to dribble off that way over the right-hand edge of Mattison's dam, but nothing significant. The main flow is still traveling from east to west. The real problem is that new flows are starting to emerge from the ground alongside the original source, and there are now six or seven streams instead of three. Red gleams are showing through the gray and black of the dam, indicating that the hot new lava is finding its way between sections of the hardened stuff. That means that what is coming out now is thinner than before.

Thin lava moves faster than thick lava. Sometimes it can move _very_ fast. The direction of the flow can get a little unpredictable, too.

The pump is in place in its new location and ready to start throwing water, but it needs to have the water, first. Mattison is still waiting for confirmation that the hoses behind him have been moved and hooked to different hydrants. He can see Nicky Herzog a short distance down one of the side streets to his right, kneeling next to a section of thick hose as he fumbles around with a connector.

"Are we okay?" Mattison asks him.

"Just about ready," Herzog replies. He straightens up and begins to give the hand signal indicating that the water line is completely set up. But suddenly he seems to freeze in place, and starts swinging around jerkily in a very odd way, going from side to side from the waist up without moving his legs at all. Also Herzog has begun flinging his arms rigidly above his head, one at a time, as if he is suddenly getting tickled by an electric current.

For a moment Mattison can't figure out what's going on. Then he sees that the rightmost lava stream, the one that had already begun to escape a little from the dam, has been joined by one of the newer and thinner streams and has greatly increased in volume and velocity. It has changed direction, too, and is running straight at Herzog in a great hurry, traveling at him in two p.r.o.ngs separated by a green Toyota utility van that somebody has abandoned in the middle of the street.

Herzog is in the direct line of the flow, and he knows it, and he is scared silly.

Mattison sees immediately that Herzog has a couple of choices that make some sense. He could go to his left, which would involve a slightly scary jump of about three feet over the lesser p.r.o.ng of the new lava stream, and take refuge in an alleyway that looks likely to be secure against the immediate trajectory of the stream because there are brick buildings on either side of it. Or he could simply turn around and run like h.e.l.l down the street he's in, hoping to outleg the advancing flow, which is moving swiftly but maybe not quite as swiftly as he could manage to go. Both of these options have certain risks, but each of them holds out the possibility of survival, too.

Unfortunately Herzog, though a quick-witted enough fellow when it comes to sarcastic quips and insults, or to laying out a million-dollar story line for some movie-studio executive, is fundamentally a clueless little yutz as far as most normal aspects of life are concerned, and in his panic he makes a yutzy decision. Apparently he perceives the Toyota as an island of safety in the middle of all this madness, and, breaking at last from his paralysis, he jumps the wrong way across the narrower lava stream and with a berserk outlay of energy pulls himself up onto the hood of the green van. From there he clambers desperately to the Toyota's roof and begins to emit a G.o.dawful frightened caterwauling, high-pitched and strident, like an automobile burglar alarm that won't turn off.

What he has achieved by this is to strand himself in the middle of the lava flow. Maybe he expects that Mattison will now call in a police helicopter to lower a rope ladder to him, the way they would do in a movie, but there are no helicopters in the vicinity just now, and the lava that surrounds the Toyota isn't any special effect, either: it's a fast-flowing stream of actual red-hot molten magma, a couple of thousand degrees in temperature, which is widening and widening and very soon will be lapping up against the Toyota's wheels on both sides. At that point the Toyota is going to melt right down into the lava stream and Nicky Herzog is going to die a quick but very unpleasant death.

Mattison doesn't like the idea of losing a member of his crew, even a s.h.i.thead like Herzog. He knows that his crew is made up _entirely_ of s.h.i.theads, himself included, and the fact that Herzog is a s.h.i.thead does not invalidate him as a human being. Too much of the huuman race falls into the s.h.i.thead category, Mattison realizes. If n.o.body in the world ever lifted a finger to save s.h.i.theads from their own s.h.i.theadedness, then almost everybody would be in trouble. He himself, as Mattison is only too well aware, would still be compulsively cruising the bars along Wilshire and waking up the next morning under somebody's car port in Venice or Santa Monica. So he resolved some time back, quite early in his sobriety, to do whatever he could to help the s.h.i.theads of the world overcome their s.h.i.theadedness, starting with himself but extending even unto the likes of McFlynn and Herzog.

Nevertheless, Mattison is helpless in this instance. He is cut off from Herzog now by the larger of the two lava flows and he doesn't see a d.a.m.ned thing that he can do by way of rescuing him in time. A couple of minutes ago, maybe, yes, but now there's no chance. Even with an armored suit on, he can't just wade through a stream of hot fresh lava. He is going to have to stand right where he is and watch Herzog melt.

All of this a.n.a.lysis, the sizing up of the somber situation and the arriving at the melancholy conclusion, has taken about 2.53 seconds. Roughly 1.42 seconds later, while Mattison is still making his peace with the idea that Herzog is screwed, a lava-suited figure unexpectedly appears in the street where Herzog is trapped, emerging from the alleyway into which Herzog had failed to flee, and calls out, extending his arms to the terrified man on top of the van, "Jump! Jump!" And, when Herzog does nothing, yells again, angrily, "Come _on_, you p.r.i.c.k, jump! I'll catch you!"

Mattison isn't sure at first who the man who has come out of the alleyway is. Everybody looks basically like everybody else inside a lava suit, and it's not too easy to distinguish one voice from another over the suit radios, either. Mattison glances around, taking a quick inventory of his crew. Hawks right here, yes, and Prochaska, yes -- Can it be Clyde Snow, over there by the mouth of that alleyway? No. No. Snow is right over there, on the far side of the pump carriage. So it has to be Blazes McFlynn who right at this moment is standing at the very edge of a diabolically hot stream of lava and stretching his arms out toward the gibbering and wailing Nicky Herzog. McFlynn, yes, who has found some sort of detour between the adjacent buildings and made his way as close to the Toyota as it is possible to get. Incredible, Mattison thinks. Incredible.

"Jump, will you, you nitwit f.a.ggot!" McFlynn roars once more. "I can't stay here the whole f.u.c.king day!"

And Herzog jumps.

He does it with the same grace and panache with which he has handled most other aspects of his life, coming down in McFlynn's approximate direction with his body bent in some crazy corkscrew position and his arms and legs flailing wildly. McFlynn manages to grab one arm and one leg as Herzog sails by him heading nose-first for the lava, and hangs on to him. But, slight as Herzog is, the force of his jump is so great and the angle of his descent is so c.o.c.keyed that the impact on McFlynn causes the bigger man to stagger and spin around and begin to topple. Mattison, watching in horror, comprehends at once that McFlynn is going to fall forward into the lava stream still holding Herzog in his arms, and both men are going to die.

McFlynn doesn't fall, though. He takes one ponderous lurching step forward, so that his left leg is no more than a few inches from the edge of the lava stream, and leans over bending almost double so that that leg accepts his full weight, and Herzog's weight as well. McFlynn's left leg, Mattison thinks, is the broken one, the one that is bent permanently outward after the 79-cent job of setting it that was done for him at the county hospital. McFlynn stands there leaning out and down for a very long moment, regaining his balance, adjusting to his burden, getting a better grip on Herzog. Then, straightening up and tilting himself backward, McFlynn pivots on his good leg and swings himself around in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc and goes tottering off triumphantly into the alleyway with Nicky Herzog's inert form draped over his shoulder.

Mattison has never seen anything like it. Herzog can't weigh more than a hundred forty pounds, but the suit adds maybe fifty pounds more, and McFlynn, though six feet tall and stockily built, probably weighs two-ten tops. And has a gimpy leg, no bulls.h.i.t there, a genuinely damaged limb on which he has just taken all of Herzog's weight as the little guy came plummeting down from that Toyota. It must have been some circus-acrobat trick that McFlynn used, Mattison decides, or else one of his stunt-man gimmicks, because there was no other way that he could have pulled the trick off. Mattison, big and strong as he is and with both his legs intact, doubts that even he would have been able to manage it.

McFlynn is coming around the far side of the pump carriage now, no longer carrying Herzog in his arms but simply dragging him along like a limp doll. McFlynn's face plate is open and Mattison can see that his eyes are shining like a madman's -- the adrenaline rush, no doubt -- and his cheeks are flushed and glossy with sweat from the excitement.

"Here," he says, and dumps Herzog down practically at Mattison's feet. "I thought the dumb a.s.shole was going to wait forever to make the jump."

"Hey, nice going," Mattison says, grinning. He b.a.l.l.s up his fist and clips McFlynn lightly on the forearm with it, a gesture of solidarity and companionship, one big man to another. McFlynn's face is aglow with the true redemptive gleam. That must have been why he did it, Mattison thinks: to cover over the business about refusing to help move the pump. Well, whatever. McFlynn is a total louse, a completely deplorable son of a b.i.t.c.h, but that was still a h.e.l.l of a thing to have done. "I thought you had gone off on your coffee break," Mattison says.

"f.u.c.k you, Matty," McFlynn tells him, and shambles away to one side.

Herzog is conscious, or approximately so, but he looks dazed. Mattison yanks his face plate open, snaps his fingers in front of his nose, gets him to open his eyes.

"Go over to the truck and sit down," Mattison orders him. "Chill out for a while. You're off duty."

"Yeah," says Herzog vaguely. "Yeah. Yeah."

And give yourself a couple of good shots of bourbon to calm yourself down while you're at it, Mattison thinks, but of course does not say. Christ, he wouldn't mind a little of that himself, just now. It is, however, not an available option.

"All right," he says, looking around at Hawks, Prochaska, Snow, and a couple of the others, Foust and Doheny, who have come up from the rear lines to see what's going on. "Where were we, now?"

The hose line that Herzog had been supervising has been obliterated by the new lava stream, of course, and the Toyota van is up to its door-handles now in lava too. But there are other hose lines coming in from other streets, and they still have a dam to build before they can call it a day.

Mattison is getting a little tired, now, after all the stuff with McFlynn and then with Herzog, but he can feel himself starting to function on automatic pilot. Groggily but with complete confidence he gets the water running again, and cuts through another handy alley so that he can set up a second line of lava logs along the new front, about thirty feet south of the Toyota. It takes about fifteen minutes of fast maneuvers and fancy dancing to choke it off entirely.

Then he can devote his attention to building the larger dam, the one that will contain this whole mess and shove the lava back on itself before it does any more damage. He plods back and forth, giving orders almost like a sleepwalker, telling people to move hoses around and change the throwing angle of the pump, and they do what he says like sleepwalkers themselves. This has been a very long day. They don't usually do two jobs the same day, and Mattison means to have Donna DiStefano say something to the Citizens Service administrators when he gets back.

Big ragged-edged blocks of black stone are forming now all across the middle of the street and curving around toward the south where the runaway lava stream had been. So the thing is pretty well under control. By now another team of Citizens Service people has arrived, and Mattison figures that if he is as tired as he is, then the others in his crew, who don't have his superhuman physical endurance and are still hampered to some degree by the medical after-effects of their recently overcome bad habits, must be about ready to drop. He tells Barry Gibbons that he would like him to requests permission from Volcano Central to withdraw. It takes Gibbons about five minutes to get through -- Volcano Central must be having one whacko busy day -- but finally it comes through.

"All right, guys," Mattison sings out. "That's it for today. "Everybody back in the truck!"

They are silent, pretty much, on the way back. The San Dimas thing has been grueling for all of them. Mattison notices that Herzog is standing on one side of the truck and McFlynn on the other, facing in opposite directions. He wonders whether Herzog had had the good grace even to thank McFlynn for what he had done. Probably not. But Herzog is a s.h.i.thead, after all.

For a long time Mattison can't stop thinking about that little episode. About McFlynn's perversity, mainly. c.r.a.pping out on the rest of the pump team in a key moment without any reason, nonchalantly stepping to one side and leaving Prochaska and Hawks and Snow to do the heavy hauling without him, even though he must have known that his strength was needed. And then, just as light-heartedly, running into that alleyway to risk his life for Herzog, a man whom he despises and loves to torment. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Mattison pokes around at it from this way and that, and still he doesn't have a clue to what might have been going on in McFlynn's mind in either case.

Possibly nothing was going on in there, he decides finally. Perhaps McFlynn's actions don't make any sense even to McFlynn.

McFlynn has been a resident in the house long enough to know that everybody is supposed to be a team player, and even if you don't want to be, you need to _pretend_ to be. Letting the team down in the clutch is not a good way to ensure that you will get the help you need in your own time of need. On the other hand, there was no reason in the world why McFlynn had to do what he did for Herzog, except maybe that he was feeling sheepish about the pump-moving episode, and Mattison finds that a little hard to believe, McFlynn feeling sheepish about anything.

So maybe McFlynn is just an ornery, unpredictable guy who takes each moment as it comes. Maybe he felt like being a louse when they were moving the pump, and maybe he felt like being a hero when Herzog was about to die a horrible death. I don't know, Mattison thinks. That's cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to h.e.l.l with it.

It isn't Mattison's job to get inside people's heads, anyway. He's not a shrink, just a live-in caregiver, still too busy working on his own recovery to fret about the mysterious ways of his fellow mortals. He just has to keep them from hurting themselves and each other while they're living in the house. So he gives up thinking about McFlynn and Herzog and turns his attention instead to what is going on all around them, which actually is a little on the weird side.

They are almost at the western periphery of the Zone, now, having retraced their route through Azusa and Covina, then through towns whose names Mattison doesn't even know -- h.e.l.l, most of these places look alike, anyway, and unless you see the signs at the boundaries you don't know where one ends and the next begins -- and are approaching Temple City, San Gabriel, Alhambra, all those various flatland communities. Behind them, night is beginning to fall, it being nearly five o'clock and this being February. In the gathering darkness the new spurts of smoke atop Mount Pomona are pretty spectacular, lit as they are by streaks of fiery red from whatever is going on inside that cone today. But also, a little to the south of the big volcano, something else seems to be happening, something odd, because a glaring cloud of blue-white light has arisen down there. Mattison doesn't remember seeing blue-white stuff before. Some new kind of explosion? Are they nuking the lava flow, maybe? It looks strange, anyway. He'll find out about it on the evening news, if they are. Or maybe he won't.

Booming noises come from the southeast. A lot of tectonic garbage seems to be going into the sky back there too; he sees small red lava particles glowing against the dusk, and dark clouds too, ash and pumice, no doubt, and probably some nice-sized lava bombs being tossed aloft. And they experience two small earthquakes as they're driving back, one while they're going up Fair Oaks in Pasadena, another fifteen minutes later just as they're about to get on the westbound Ventura Freeway. Nothing surprising about that; five or six little quakes a day are standard now, what with all that magma moving around under the San Gabriel Valley. But the two so close together are further signs that things are getting even livelier in the Zone just as Mattison and his crew are going off duty. Hoo boy, Mattison thinks. Hot times in Magma City.

It's beginning to rain a little, out here in Glendale where they are at the moment. Nothing big, just light sprinkles, enough to make the rush-hour traffic a little uglier but not to cause serious troubles. Mattison likes the rain. You get so little of it, ordinarily, in Los Angeles, eight or ten dry months at a time, sometimes, and right now, with everything that's going on behind him in the Zone, the rain seems sweet and pure, a blessing being scattered on the troubled land.

It's good to be going westward again, moving slowly through the evening commute toward what is still the normal part of Los Angeles, toward the sprawling city he grew up in. What is happening back there, the lava, the ash, the blue-white lights, seems unreal to him. This doesn't. Down there to his left are the high-rise towers of downtown, and the cl.u.s.tering stack of freeways meeting and going off in every which way. And straight ahead lie all the familiar places of his own particular life, Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys in this direction and Hollywood and Westwood and West L.A. in that one, and so on and on out to Santa Monica and Venice and Topanga and the Pacific Ocean.

If only they could drop a curtain across the face of the Zone, Mattison thinks. Or build a 50-foot-high wall, and seal it off completely. But no, they can't do that, and the lava will keep on coming, won't it, crawling westward and westward and westward until one of these days it comes shooting up under Rodeo Drive or knocks the San Diego Freeway off its pegs. What the h.e.l.l: we can only do what we can do, and the rest is up to G.o.d's mercy and wisdom, right? _Right_? Right?

They are practically back at the house, now.

The rain is getting worse. The sky ahead of them is starting to turn dark. The sky behind them is already black, except where the strange light of eruptions breaks through the night.

"McFlynn really p.i.s.sed me off today," he tells Donna DiStefano. "I entertained seriously hostile thoughts in his direction. In fact I had pretty strong fantasies about tossing him right into the lava. Truth, Donna."

The house director laughs. It's the famous Donna laugh, a big one, high up on the Richter scale. She is a hefty woman with warm friendly eyes and a huge amount of dark curling hair going halfway down her back. Nothing ever upsets her. She is supposed to have been addicted to something or other very major, fifteen or twenty years back, but n.o.body knows the details.

"It's a temptation, isn't it?" she says. "What a pill he is, eh? Was that before or after the Herzog rescue?"

"Before. A long time before. He was b.i.t.c.hing at me from lunchtime on." Mattison hasn't told her about the pump-moving incident. Probably he should; but he figures she already has heard about it, one way or another, and it isn't required of him to file report cards on every s.h.i.tty thing the residents of the house do while he's looking after them. "There was another time, later in the day, when it would have given me great pleasure to dangle him face first into the vent. But I prayed for patience instead and G.o.d was kind to me, or else we'd have had some vacancies in the house tonight."

"Some?"

"McFlynn and me, because he'd be dead and I'd be in jail. And Herzog too, because McFlynn was the only one in a position to rescue him just then. But here we all are, safe and sound."

"Don't worry about it," DiStefano says. "You did good today, Matty."

Yes. He knows that that's true. He did good. Every day, in every way, inch by inch, he does his best. And he's grateful every hour of his life that things have worked out for him in such a way that he has had the opportunity. As if G.o.d has sent volcanoes to Los Angeles as a personal gift to him, part of the recovery program of Calvin Thomas Mattison, Jr.

There's nothing on the news about unusual stuff in the Zone this evening. Usual stuff, yes, plenty of that, getting the usual perfunctory coverage, fumaroles opening here, lava vents there, houses destroyed in this town and that and that, new street blockages, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the blue-white light he saw was a just tremendous searchlight beam, from the opening of some new shopping mall in Anaheim or Fullerton. This crazy town, you never can tell.

He goes upstairs -- his little room, all his own. Reads for a while, thinks about his day, gets into bed. Sleeps like a baby. The alarm goes off at five, and he rises unprotestingly, showers, dresses, goes downstairs.

There are lights on all over the board. Blue for new fumaroles, here here and there, and another red one in the vicinity of Mount Pomona, and a whole epidemic of green dots announcing fresh lava cutting loose over what looks like the whole area. Mattison has never seen it look that bad. The crisis seems to be entering a new and very obnoxious phase. Volcano Central will be calling them out again today, sure as anything.

What the h.e.l.l. We do what we can, and hope for the best, one day at a time.

He puts together some breakfast for himself and waits for the -----------------------.

In the Clone Zone.

by Robert Silverberg.

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THE AIRPORT was very new. It had a bright, shiny, major-world-capital feel, and for a moment Mondschein thought the plane had landed in Rio or Buenos Aires by mistake. But then he noticed the subtle signs of deception, the tackiness around the edges, the spongy junk behind the gleaming facades, and knew that he must indeed be in Tierra Alvarado.

"Senor Mondschein?" a deep male voice said, while he was still marching down the corridors that led to the immigration lounge. He turned and saw a short, wide-shouldered man in a beribboned green-and-red comic-opera uniform which he remembered after a moment was that of the Guardia de la Patria, the Maximum Leader's elite security corps. "I am Colonel Aristegui," he said. "You may come with me, please. It was a good journey? You are not overly fatigued?"

Aristegui didn't bother with pa.s.sport formalities. He led Mondschein through a steel doorway marked SEGURIDAD, INGRESO PROHIBIDO which admitted them to a series of bewildering pa.s.sageways and catwalks and spiral staircases. There was no veneer back here: everything was severely functional, gunmetal-gray walls, exposed rivets and struts, harsh unshielded light-fixtures that looked a century old. Here it comes, Mondschein thought: this man will take me to some deserted corner of the airstrip and touch his laser pistol to my temple and they will bury me in an unmarked grave, and that will be that, five minutes back in the country and I am out of the way forever.

The final visa approval had come through only the day before, the fifth of June, and just hours later Mondschein had boarded the Aero Alvarado flight that would take him in a single soaring supersonic arc nonstop from Zurich to his long-lost homeland on the west coast of South America. Mondschein hadn't set foot there in twenty-five years, not since the Maximum Leader had expelled him for life as a sort of upside-down reward for his extraordinary technological achievements: for it was Mondschein, at the turn of the century, who had turned his impoverished little country into the unchallenged world leader in the field of human cloning.

In those days it had been called the Republic of the Central Andes. The Maximum Leader had put it together out of parts of the shattered nations which in an earlier time, when things were very different in the world, had been known as Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. During his years of exile in Europe Mondschein had always preferred to speak of himself as a Peruvian, whenever he spoke of himself at all. But now the name of the country was Tierra Alvarado and its airline was Aero Alvarado and its capital was Ciudad Alvarado, Alvarado this and Alvarado that wherever you looked. That was all right, a fine old South American tradition. You expected a Maximum Leader to clap his own name on everything, to hang his portrait everywhere, to glorify himself in every imaginable way.

Alvarado had carried things a little further than most, though, by having two dozen living replicas of himself created, the better to serve his people. That had been Mondschein's final task as a citizen of the Republic, the supreme accomplishment of his art: to produce two dozen AAA Cla.s.s clones of the Maximum Leader. which could function as doubles for Alvarado at the dreary meetings of the Popular a.s.sembly, stand in for him at the interminable National Day of Liberation parades, and keep would-be a.s.sa.s.sins in a constant state of befuddlement. They were masterpieces, those two dozen Alvarados -- all but indistinguishable from the original, the only AAA Cla.s.s clones ever made. With their aid the Maximum Leader was able to maintain unblinking vigilance over the citizens of Tierra Alvarado -- twenty-four hours a day.

But Mondschein didn't care how many Alvarados he might be coming home to. Twenty, fifty, a hundred, what did that matter? Singular or plural, Alvarado still held the entire country in his pocket, as he had for the past generation and a half. That was the essential situation. Everything else was beside the point, a mere detail. To Mondschein the clones made no real difference at all.

In fact there was very little that did make a difference to Mondschein these days. He was getting old and slept badly most of the time and his days were an agony of acute homesickness. He wanted to speak his native language again, Spanish as it had been spoken in Peru and not the furry Spanish of Spain, and he wanted to breathe the sharp air of the high mountains and eat papas a la huancaina and anticuchos and a proper ceviche and maybe see the ancient walls of Cuzco once more and the clear dark water of Lake t.i.ticaca. It didn't seem likely to him that Alvarado had granted him a pardon after all this time simply for the sake of luring him back to face a firing squad. The safe conduct, which Mondschein hadn't in any way solicited but had been overjoyed to receive, was probably sincere: a sign that the old tyrant had mellowed at last. And if not, well, at least he would die on his native soil, which somehow seemed better than dying in Bern, Toulon, Madrid, Stockholm, Prague, wherever, any of the innumerable cities in which he had lived during his long years of exile.