Copyright: RADIUS © Ewan Grantham and Assoc. 02/95


noRADIUS ¸ Ewan Grantham and Assoc. 02/95yesTRUERADIUS - February 1995yesyesyesyesradius04yesyes18/02/95


Table of Contents

A Word From The Editor

FICTION:

The Harbinger  .......................................................................................  by Linda J. Dunn

How I Became the Galactic Ambassador Without Really Trying  ..........  by Kent Brewster

It's The Little Differences  ......................................................................  by David Bollinger

POETRY:

VIEW FROM THE MESA  ..........................................................................  by s.c. virtes

SHARELIT:

Readme for B-Dream  ..............................................................................  by Rich La Bonte

SPONSORS:   (Note, those underlined/in green have a message attached. Click to select.)

David Bollinger, Charlie C. Choy, CompuServe IMPs, Tim Esias, Ewan Grantham & Associates

Magic Carpet Con III, Point Productions

RADIUS Credits:

Editor	Ewan Grantham

Copy Editor	Lisa Collins

Editorial Board	Hiding under assumed names...


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Point Productions

Tim Esias

Magic Carpet Con III

Ewan Grantham & Associates

RADIUS COVER

Dunn Illos

Kent Brewster Illo

David B. Illo


A Word From The Editor

A Quick Review of Stuff

As many of you noticed, we now have a few more people helping out with getting RADIUS put together.  Hats particularly go off to Lisa Collins for her terrific job of copy editing.  You will definitely notice the changes starting in the March issue, though you may catch a little something here and there in this issue.

For those of you who hadn't heard, we ARE going to be continuing with free subscriptions, and paid advertising.  That's somewhat different than what we said in the December issue, but we've had a chance to rework our plans and scope, and the sponsorships show that we are heading in the right direction.

Remember that if you are interested in being a sponsor, or purchasing Classified or Displayed advertising, you need to send me e-mail at grantham@MR.NET with a subject of ADS INFO.  Starting in March we will be adding some additional methods of distribution which will help get stories and ads alike before a larger audience.  If you haven't already looked, click on any of the underlined/green-colored sponsors to see their message.

Hopefully the next issue will premiere some of our "Animated Illustrations".  Because of the way animations work, this may require some additional effort to see them, but I think the effort will be worth any hassle.  Most likely we will use the .FLC format as there appear to be players for virtually all platforms.  If you know of a Mac or X-Windows player on CIS or the Internet, please let me know so I can point people there.

Finally, remember that we ALWAYS encourage feedback.  If we get enough, we might even start a "Letters" page.

Radiantly yours,

Ewan Grantham


The Harbinger by Linda Dunn
The Harbinger

 by Linda J. Dunn

Mary covered her ears as the Banshee's scream echoed through the computer room.

What would it be this time?  One of the mainframes or just another bridge box?  She looked around for a clue so there would be something tangible to report instead of just a gut feeling that something was about to fail.

But it was no use.  Everything looked perfectly normal except for all the fairies in the computer room.

They weren't really there, of course.

Mary had to step over a pixie to reach the notebook Rosie had asked her to retrieve from the room.  She tried not to look at the pixie as she picked up the notebook and stepped over the creature again.  Mary shivered and stared through the fairy as though it wasn't there.  She must always remember they weren't really there.

It's dangerous to see fairies.  Bad things happen when they know you see them.

Her brother saw fairies once.  He disappeared into fairyland and never returned.

No.  That wasn't true.  Remember?  That was just another part of your sickness.  You're better now.  You don't have false memories and you don't see fairies.

She shook her head and opened the door to escape.   The automated mail cart rolled by and a Goblin sitting on top waved and laughed before going back to reshuffling the mail.

Mary took a deep breath and stepped into the hallway.

She started wandering slowly down the corridor, looking straight ahead and refusing to pay attention to the little sprites dancing in the hall.  Maybe if she took her time the crisis would hit before she reached her destination.

No such luck.

"Not again?"  Bob took one look at her and rolled his eyes.

Mary felt all the blood rushing to her face as everyone turned to stare.

"Okay."  Jake leaned back and propped both feet on his desk.  "What broke this time?"

Mary took a deep breath and tried to keep the shakiness out of her voice.  "Nothing.  Yet.  But you said next time I had that funny feeling that something was about to break I should tell you before it broke instead of letting you hear through the grapevine that I predicted it."

Jake grinned and she could hear Bob chuckling softly behind her.  Mary knew she was just asking for trouble and should just keep her damn mouth shut, but she couldn't stand the ridicule.

"Look, I can't explain how or what but I've got a funny feeling that something on the network is about to die."

"Strange choice of words," Jake said.  He glared at Bob and motioned for Mary to sit down.  "Have a seat.  We'll just wait a little while and see if you really can predict network failures."

Jake swung his feet off the desk and stared into his monitor.  "Let's see if anything looks suspicious."

Mary sat down and laid Rosie's notebook on Jake's desk.  She peered over his shoulder and could almost swear she saw a little Bogle step into the middle of the video display and stick out his tongue.

She shivered and hugged herself.

"Everything looks fine so far."  Jake looked up from the screen and this time Mary was certain the Bogle was dancing around and mocking her.  "How long does it usually take between the time you get this gut feeling and the time something actually breaks?"

Mary felt her cheeks burning again.  She mentally kicked herself for ever telling Dave her secret but when you love someone you tell them things you should keep to yourself.

She told Dave.  Dave told Bruce, Bruce told Larry, and Larry told Jake.  They thought it was all some kind of grand joke.

Mary took a deep breath and waited.

"Shit!"  Jake fumbled around for a minute to slide both feet off his desk and stand up.  "The mail server just crashed.  Check it out and make sure it reboots.  Okay?"

He turned toward Mary with an odd expression on his face that reminded her of the time her dad caught her riding the big black dog around their yard.

"How did you know?"

Mary shrugged.  "I just get a feeling before something goes wrong."

"Were you in the room earlier?"

"What?"

Jake licked his lips and leaned against the desk.  "By any chance, did you happen to go into the computer room today and just happen to notice something was wrong with the mail server?"

"You think I caused this!"  She stood up and started toward the door.  She had to get to the restroom before someone saw her crying.  "Damn Dave!  Damn him to hell!"

"Wait a minute."  Jake grabbed her arm and spun her around.  "Look.  I'm sorry."

Mary shook her head.  "I've got to go."

He hesitated a minute.  "This is serious, you know.  It's not a game we're playing.  Lots of people depend upon those connections being there."

Mary took a deep breath.  "Am I on the authorized list?"

"Huh?"

"Can I even get into that computer room?"  She pulled off her badge and handed it to him.  "Here.  Those rooms are all coded to badges, right?  Take this to security and have them give you my code.  Try it.  I was in the computer room at the other end of the plant getting Rosie's notebook when I heard--got a feeling that something was wrong.  If you're so sure I'm just playing games, find out if I've got the means with which to play them."

Jake took her badge and stared at it before looking up at her.  "If you don't mind, Mary.  I would like to do just that."

"Fine!"  She turned on her heel and fled upstairs to the restroom.  After about five minutes, the lights went out and she had to open the door to the stall and wander out so they would turn on again.  Damn motion-sensing lights!

She hated technology.  Why did her dad have to lose the farm?   Why did he have to die?  And why oh why did she have to fall in love with a jerk who told everybody everything about her?

Mary splashed water on her face before venturing back to her desk and putting on the telephone headset.

"Where have you been?" Rosie whispered.  "The phones have been ringing off the hook."

"Upstairs," Mary answered.  "I wasn't feeling very well."

Rosie stared at her a moment and her face softened just a bit.  "Dave again?"

She shook her head.   "No.  I'm not seeing him anymore."

"Since when?"

Mary took a deep breath and felt tears welling up again.  "Since about two days ago."

Rosie nodded.  "It's for the best."

Mary hesitated a second before asking the question which had troubled her since she'd learned.  "Rosie?  Why didn't anyone tell me Dave was married?"

Rosie's mouth fell open as everyone else turned to stare.

"I thought you knew," Nadine answered for her.  "We all thought you knew."

Mary shook her head, biting her lower lip to keep from crying again.  "He doesn't wear a wedding ring."

Rosie leaned her forehead against her monitor and mumbled something Mary couldn't hear.  Nadine answered the next call while Sandy tried to look like she wasn't listening.

After a few minutes, Rosie lifted her head and said, "For future reference, most of the married men around here don't wear rings."

"Yeah."  Sandy looked around the corner of her cubicle.  "Too bad it's not required by law."

"They should put it through their noses," Rosie said.

She turned to Mary.  "I'm sorry.  We all owe you an apology.  Will you forgive us?"

Mary nodded then turned her head away quickly as she saw a brownie walk into the office.  Let them think she was just upset about Dave.  They'd lose all sympathy for her if they knew the real reason behind why she couldn't face them.

"Mary?"

She looked up to see Jake holding her badge.

He turned to Rosie and handed her the notebook.  "I think this is yours.  I need to borrow Mary for just a few minutes."

Is something wrong?"  Rosie started to stand but sat back down as Jake shook his head.  "We just confirmed Mary couldn't get into the mail server's computer room with her badge."  He took a deep breath and tried to smile but Mary could read the suspicion in his eyes.  "Everyone who had access to that room is here today and had their badges with them at all times."

Rosie asked,  "What broke on the server?"

Jake's face turned a rich shade of red.  "Just a glitch."  He turned to Mary.  "Care to take a break from the phones?"

Rosie nodded and Mary removed her headset and followed them out the door.  Jake opened the door to the computer room and pointed toward the Green Lady of Caerphilly who was weaving her way back and forth among the older equipment.  Her leaves blew upward each time she stepped over the air conditioning tiles.

The Green Lady of Caerphilly haunts ruins.  Given the age of some of this equipment, it's an appropriate place for her.

But she's not really here, Mary reminded herself.  She's not!  Fairies are imaginary creatures and only crazy people see them.  We don't want to be committed again, do we?

"I thought we'd have more privacy in here," Jake said.

Mary nodded.  She knew what was coming now.  When her family lost the farm and moved into town, the school counselor said her imaginary friends were just a way of coping with change.

When her dad died of a heart attack and her mom turned to alcohol, everyone attributed Mary's ramblings about fairies to depression.

After Billy disappeared one night and never returned, the welfare department charged her mom with child neglect, certain she'd killed her own child in an alcoholic rage.  Mary was taken to a foster home and everyone there at last recognized the truth others had overlooked.

Mary was just plain crazy.

They locked her away in a mental ward, then turned her loose when the state cut off funding.  Suddenly, she was declared "mentally restored" and some state rehabilitation organization found her this job answering phones.

"What's going on around here, Mary?"

She took a deep breath.  "I can't explain it.  Sometimes I just know when something's going to die."

"You keep saying 'die'.  Why?"

Mary watched his face closely to see his reaction.  "Do you think I'm crazy?"

"Crazy?  No.  Why?"

"You read my records, didn't you?"

He sighed and stared down at his feet.  "Yeah.  You were hired under the disability program.  It said 'mentally restored'."

She let out a deep breath.  So he did know.

"I was just a kid.  We lost our home.  My dad died.  My mom turned into a drunk.  And when my younger brother disappeared, Mom was convicted of killing him.  Tell me those aren't good reasons to take a little vacation from reality."

Jake looked away and stared at the server.  "Dave said you always knew right before something failed on the network."

Mary sat up straight and stared into Jake's eyes.  "I didn't know he was married."

"I'm really not interested--"

"Look, I made a stupid mistake and said some things I shouldn't have and they got blown all out of proportion.  Okay, so sometimes I know when the network's going to have problems.  Don't you ever have hunches?"

Jake shook his head.  "Never."

Mary sighed and let her head droop on her shoulders.  "Am I the only person in the world with an imagination?"

"Maybe."  Jake drummed his fingers along the wall.  "Look, it's like this.  I thought you and Dave were playing some kind of a gag but this is far too serious to be a joke."  Jake hesitated a moment before adding, "And you just don't strike me as the kind of person who plays jokes."

He shook his head.  "I've never met anyone who could predict network failures.  He grinned, then said, "But my brother does real well at the race track."

As Mary opened her mouth to speak, he added, "But that's largely because he majored in math.  Laws of probability and all that stuff.  He's real good at calculations."

"So you don't believe me?"  Mary waited for the figurative ax to fall.

"I don't know what to believe."

Mary looked up as a woman in green walked through the wall of the computer room.  The Banshee opened her mouth to scream and, instinctively, Mary clasped her hands over her ears and closed her eyes.

What followed was an ear-splitting shrill cry that left Mary shaking with fear.  Surely the Banshee realized Mary had both seen and heard her.

She opened her eyes slowly to see the back of Jake's head.  He was staring over his shoulder at the place where the Banshee had been.

"You heard her, too?"  Mary's voice broke as she let out a sigh of relief.  "I'm not going crazy.  Thank god, I'm not going crazy.  You saw her, too."

Jake turned around and stared at her.  "Saw who?"

Bob turned off his monitor and yawned.  "Going to stop by the bar tonight?"

Jake shook his head.  "Nah.  I'll just grab something to eat and head home."

Bob stopped in the doorway and looked back at Jake.  "So what did happen in there?  Did she really flip out like they said?"

Jake shook his head.  "Mary just had a little emotional breakdown, that's all.  She cried up a storm.  Rosie and the girls said she'd had a bad day and I guess this was just too much for her.  Still...."

"What?"  Bob turned around and leaned against the doorframe.

He took a deep breath.  "The bridge box did fail right after she stared at something behind me."

Bob grinned.  "Ah, come on, Jake.  You're not going to start that again, are you?"

Jake leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk.  "No.  Not really.  I just wonder."

Bob laughed and waved goodbye as he walked out the door.  Jake stared at the monitor on his desk and for just a brief moment he thought he saw some little smurf-like creature riding one of those flying toasters.

Jake rubbed his eyes and shut off the monitor.   Maybe he should stop by the bar after all.  He could really use a stiff drink.

On the way there, he made a slight detour and found himself driving past Mary's apartment.  He parked his car in a vacant spot and sat there for a while, thinking about the day's events, before taking a deep breath and venturing toward her apartment.

It was a screwball idea.  But if it worked, everyone would benefit.

Mary didn't even flinch as the Banshee appeared and screamed.  Smiling, she keyed in the number for Jake's pager and punched "666", their agreed-upon code.  The Banshee's image wavered and faded as Mary stepped carefully past a leprechaun dancing in the hallway.

It was easy to ignore the fairies now that she recognized them for what they were,  subconscious reflections of her own emotional state.  Now that she was in a happier mood, the fairies surrounding her were cheerful and industrious.  No more prank-playing fairies or ugly little goblins.  She was in control of which type of fairies surrounded her, and the Banshee was her servant, notifying her of everything that went wrong at work.

It was just like Jake had told her three weeks ago: Everything was just a matter of attitude and how you adapted to it.

Jake winked as he walked by and gestured, "Thumbs Up".  Mary grinned madly and flashed back the victory sign.  She tried to stop smiling as Rosie walked by and noticed the looks she and Jake exchanged, but it was impossible.

When you're in love, your eyes say it all.

Mary smiled as she walked confidently into the office and sat down at her desk.  Rosie followed her, hesitated for a moment, then bent over to whisper softly.  "Jake's married."

Mary nodded and smiled.  "I know."  She felt slightly drunk with happiness as she added, "But his brother Gary isn't.  The four of us are getting together at the track again tonight after dinner."

She leaned forward and whispered something she felt like shouting from the rooftop.  "I've finally met someone who really understands me."

Rosie smiled and patted her hand.  "I'm delighted to hear everything's working out so well for you.  I know exactly how you must feel."

But you don't, Mary thought as Rosie returned to her desk.  No one else can possibly ever understand.

Except Gary.

Gary doesn't predict horse races.  He controls them with his talent and he's teaching me how to control things with my talent, too.

Someday I'll be in charge of the network.  And when that happens, we'll never have any down time again.  Ever!


How I Became the Galactic Ambassador Without Really Trying

 by Kent Brewster

What?  Oh.  Sorry.  Where's the mike?

There.  Is that better?  Okay.  Um, what were we talking about?

All right.  The beginning.  Let's see.  This would have been about June of '82, right around the end of my second year of junior college.  Lots of weird stuff happened that summer.  First my dad got killed on the freeway; some No Business As Usual terrorist on an overpass dropped a pumpkin through the windshield of his 914 one Friday afternoon.

And Mom married her boss about a month after that, and he decided I'd been freeloading long enough.  Son of a bitch was chasing her around his desk for the last five years; he'd caught her, finally, and dictated his terms.  She was set for life.  But me, I was out on my ear, twenty years old, root, hog, or die.

The acceptance letter that showed up from Stanford didn't mean a thing; the Boss took a look at it, smiled, and asked me where I was going to get the money--

<91 words omitted>

What?  Oh.  Sorry.  Bad memories.

When it started, I was working swing shift at the <company name omitted> bottle shop.  Man, we had that place wired so tight!  Unbelievably dangerous work, up to our asses in toxic waste, no masks, no goggles, no nothing.  And we'd just chuck all that crap in the dumpster, or haul it out onto the golf course and poison some ducks.  What we were making was compressed gas bottles, like for divers and firemen, and emergency oxygen for miners.  The whole second shift was working on this one huge order that was supposed to take all summer, 50,000 of these tiny little Ocenco coal miner bottles that were supposed give you about twenty minutes of air if the roof caved in, just about enough time to say your prayers and shit your pants--

<132 words omitted>

Sorry.  Just whack me again if I get too far offtrack, okay?  What we did was take an aluminum bottle, chuck it up on this huge machine, and wind resin-soaked fiberglass roving around it, in alternating layers, circulars and longitudinals, circs and longos, the short way and the long way.  The machine was basically a lathe big enough to spin a fire hydrant around its long axis and flip the whole thing end-over-end maybe five times a second, all at the same time.  You also had six or eight big spools of fiberglass or Kevlar, all running at just the right tension through a resin pot full of just the right mixture of epoxy.  And then there was a big bucket of this powdery white crap called Cab-O-Sil that helped seat the line on the wet bottle, and an exhaust hood running up to the roof so you wouldn't inhale enough of it to send you home sick.  The whole thing was maybe eight feet wide, fifteen feet tall, and ran at about a hundred decibels when everything was working perfectly, which it never was.

Confused?  Yeah.  I was, too, the first time I saw one.

You needed five hands to wind bottles:  one to ride the line, one to run the speed control, one to adjust the resin, one to slap on the Cab-O-Sil, and a spare, in case one of the first four got cut off.  Which did happen, but only once.

And that was a miracle, let me tell you.  I've never seen so much dope in the workplace in my life, and hope I never do again.  Swing shift ran from 2:30 to midnight, with an hour for dinner at six and a half-hour break at nine.  We'd head over to the Tree to eat dinner and get high, and then come back for more at break time.  The Tree was this oak tree in a closed-up Hewlett-Packard parking lot out on Middlefield, about two blocks down from where we were.  Funny thing is, the tree's cut down and there's a work-furlough jail there these days; half the guys I'm telling you about went on to do weekends there at one time or another--

<1076 words omitted>

--and then Phred got busted, right there in the parking lot.  Three cops followed him in one day and pinned him to the roof of his crappy old Nova.  Story was he'd tried to double-cross his girlfriend out of a bunch of money and coke and she turned him in.  Anyway, Phearless Phred took a long vacation at Elmwood, taking us to the short but memorable term of Wild Bill Grimes.

Grimes delivered one shaky lecture about no grabassing in the shop and things continued as per usual.  Be there by two, be winding by two-thirty.  Maintain your slow eight-bottle-an-hour pace--simulate breakdowns if you have to--until five, when the dayshift suits and engineers took off.  And then crank it up, absolutely bust your ass and wind quota-and-a-half, sixty Ocencos, before second break at nine.

And then the fun began.  Pallet jack races.  Full-contact basketball.  Beer slides.  Mouse hockey.  Multiple runs to the Tree.  Field trips to the Brass Rail, and this was before Sunnyvale clamped down and made the girls cover their tits and quit dancing in your lap--

<852 words omitted>

--but where the Troll came in was the day I got my hand chopped off.

What?  Yeah, I know!  I'm getting to that.  Listen, it'll be a lot easier if you just let me tell it.  I'm having a hard enough time keeping all this stuff straight as it is without you guys interrupting all the time.

Okay.  So I'm back in the back corner on number three just before sundown, sweating my ass off 'cause it's about a hundred and thirty back there.  And I've got KOME cranked up on the radio right behind my head; Dennis Erectus is playing "Africa", by Toto, remember those guys?  And there's this Playboy centerfold named Lonny Chin stuck up in the inside of my exhaust stack, and I'm cranking through circs on this big Scott 2-hour bottle, a special deal that I later found out went into the artificial heart machine that kept that Barney Clark guy alive for an extra hundred hours.

Circs on a big bottle are easy; you just stand there and hold your resin sponge against the side and take off the excess slop as the bottle spins and the arm rides up and down.  So I'm bored stiff, and Toto really sucks, and just out of the corner of my eye I read Lonny's birthdate, and it's sometime in 1963, which makes her the first Playmate I can recall who is younger than me.

 	And I'm standing there thinking Christ, what did she get, thirty grand for spreading her knees? and feeling sorry for myself, shoveling shit for $5.25 an hour--

--and the machine goes whakk! and jerks straight from circs into longos, spinning the arm end-over-end about five times before the lines tangle tight enough to jerk it to a stop and fry the main speed control.  The bottle then starts to spin in circ mode again at maximum RPM.

Caught in the lines are three things:  the resin pot, a large wad of Kimwipes I am using instead of a sponge, and my right hand, neatly noosed off at the wrist by a loop of thousand-pound-test fiberglass roving.

I fall flat on my ass, raising a cloud of Cab-O-Sil.  One big spurt of blood jumps in a hot jet from my wrist, splashing up against the bottle and spinning back out into my face in a fine spray.  The machine is still roaring, winding a big red lump into the side of the bottle.  Everything wobbles and goes gray for a few seconds.

I grab my wrist, carefully not looking at it.  I slip in greasy red mud and get to my knees.  I crawl about six feet on the cement floor, picking up metal shavings in my knees and elbows.  It starts to really hurt, like somebody is holding my arm over a barbecue.  I kneewalk out to the main floor--

--and find it empty.  Those cocksuckers have all split out for somewhere.  The Tree, probably.

I start to cry.  I'm going to die on my knees in a puddle of my own blood in a fucking machine shop for $5.25 an hour.  And the last goddamn thing I ever hear is going to be that faggot lead singer screeching "Aaa-fri-kuh-HUH!"

And then this ugly little guy steps in through the big plastic flaps in the roll-up door.  He's five-foot-nothing, wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt over a turtleneck sweater, Ben Davis overalls, waffle stompers, and an orange ski vest.  He might be part black and part Vietnamese or Cambodian or something; his hair is a lopsided kinky mass and his face and hands are a weird olive-green color under the heliarc shop lights.  Even through all those clothes he's not sweating a bit.

His eyes get really big when he sees my stump.  He doesn't say anything, just steps by me and grabs a quarter-full resin bucket, which is about the size of a pint of ice cream.  Sets it down next to me.  Then he grabs a full can of activator, twists the top off, and dumps a big glug of it down into the bucket.  The paper bucket starts to crackle and hiss and send out steam that smells like horse piss--

--and then the little guy grabs my chopped-off wrist and jams it into the bucket.

This hurts a lot.  The resin is going off at a massively greater-than-normal rate, producing extreme heat and stickiness.  No matter how loud I scream and flail it won't come off; the epoxy sets up fast and hot and hard and will not let go.

And then he picks up the phone, punches 911, and splits--

<517 words omitted>

--my hospital room was full of suits, all looking down at me like you'd look at stale roadkill.  Big suits, with red and yellow high-security stripes on their badges.  <Name omitted>, our division chief, was there, which prevented them from just quietly canning me on the spot; he was one of the very few good guys.

<Name omitted> wanted me to tell what happened.  Where everybody was, why Grimes wasn't there when the cops showed up.  The hard look on the rest of the suits was enough to warn me, though; I played as dumb as possible, especially when questions started to fly from the rest of them.  Where were the other guys, Grimes especially?  I didn't know.  Maybe they took an early dinner break.  Did I have any reason to believe that illegal drugs or alcohol were being possessed or consumed on the premises?  No, sir.  Was I aware of the possible criminal and civil penalties if OSHA or the Department of Defense found out that said drugs or alcohol were indeed posessed or consumed on the premises?  Yes, sir.  Was I willing to now submit to a urine test for said illegal drugs and alcohol?  Yes, sir, go right ahead--there's a catheter leading to a pissbag under the bed.  You should probably know that I've been on Demerol for thirty-six hours, though, and that's bound to screw up your results--

<1253 words omitted>

--so they wound up firing Grimes and making me the swing shift lead.  I couldn't wind anymore, couldn't sand, couldn't paint, couldn't peel masking tape, couldn't sweep the floor; hell, I could barely write.

So naturally they tripled my pay and made me the boss.  And the insurance company settled up for the same thirty grand that my girlfriend Lonny got for taking a staple through her navel.

That's a really interesting page in your employee handbook, by the way--if you're ever in the mood for a sick laugh, go back and read the laundry list of what they'll give you for each body part you lose.  What do they call that?  Maimed.  I was maimed.  Christ, what a horrible word that is.

A week later I got a hero's welcome back:  a keg party under the Tree.  At which I announced my first managerial decision, that we were going to tone down the process of getting wasted at work, and waved my stump around as the reason why.  And nobody argued, for a change.

My second decision was my first hire.  It was the ugly little dude who'd saved my life.  The name he wrote on his app was Ngoc Cao Tranh; the boys in the shop took one look at him and rechristened him the Troll.  He took to it immediately, smiling and nodding and looking whenever somebody singled him out.  According to his app--written in very neat English--his only work experience was as chief engineer on a boat.  This boat was the sixty-foot trawler he and about six hundred other people had taken on a wallowing three-month-long ride through the China Sea, from Vietnam to the Phillipines.  He was fifteen at the time.  He told me all this in a soft, whispered monotone; his spoken English was perfect as well.  Evidently he'd been through some fairly hairy action; his hairline wasn't right, like he'd had his scalp taken off and put back on crooked, and he also had big patches of burned tissue on the backs of both hands.  Plus other scars in other places; he was easily the unhealthiest-looking dude I'd ever seen walking around under his own power.  Nobody really thought his elevator went all the way to the top floor--I mean, how many guys do you know who take a shot of acetone in their coffee?

He was, however, the single best mechanic I've ever met.  Those twisted little hands were magic; a simple laying-on was generally enough to bring a stubborn machine back to life, instead of having to shut down and call the Service Guy, who was on permanent loan from the factory in Salt Lake City and hating it--

<1443 words omitted>

--which brings me to what I did with the cash.

Rather than putting it up my nose, I bought a house in Mountain View.  1775 Martell Avenue, an eyesore rental in a decent enough neighborhood.

I wasn't making enough to pay the mortgage, but I never really meant to do it alone.  I rented rooms to six or eight of the bottle shop yahoos over the months; the house on Martell quickly acquired legendary party-pad status.  It was the only way I could get those guys to knock off the dope at work, or at least knock off most of it.  Every night after work the party started, continuing past Letterman until about 4 a.m., when everybody crashed until noon and had a couple hours to get back to work.  Most of them even paid their rent on time; only one ever gave me any major trouble.  That was Pencil.

Pencil McGee was the skinniest, twitchiest human being on the planet, thanks to a crank habit of truly epic proportions that got him busted from aerospace engineer all the way down to bottle winder.  Six foot five and about a hundred and thirty pounds dripping wet, Pencil was one of those imitation tough-guys complete with long dirty hair, big black biker moustache, chipped front tooth, and a badly-drawn Harley tattoo on his shoulder--you know, that ensemble that says to the world "Please, whatever you do, do not hire me for any reason."

He drove a beat-to-death Ranchero with a glasspack 289 that really pissed off the neighbors.  And he had a dog.  Angus.  Angus McGee.  The stupidest dog in the world.  Have you ever seen a dog trip and fall down?  That's how stupid Angus was.

Angus was an old black Labrador retriever, deaf and damn near blind.  Angus had been with Pencil since college, when Pencil and his frat brothers had thought it might be a cool idea to register Angus for the draft and a few classes.  The process kind of snowballed after that; four years later, without anybody really knowing how, Angus had his own Social Security number and a BS degree in communications from Chico State.

By the summer of 1982, Angus was a registered Republican, voting by absentee ballot, usually for Zippy the Pinhead.  He owned subscriptions to Screw, Mother Jones, Sky & Telescope, and The American Spectator.  He was a member in good standing of the Columbia Record and Tape Club plus numerous outstanding local singles organizations, and sent a pickle jar full of pennies to Channel 54 every time they ran a Prisoner marathon.

Angus got called for jury duty on the same day the suits discovered that the Troll's paperwork was bogus.  Nobody named Ngoc Cao Tranh ever got off that boat alive--Filpino pirates took off all the women and sunk it with all remaining hands, somewhere in the South China Sea.

Pencil shit the bed; he was still on probation and would have wound up back in jail for sure over a phony ID scam.  And I wasn't much better off--<company name omitted> was building a lot of black-budget stuff before anybody knew there was such a thing, so they had to be kind of careful about hiring foreign nationals.

So I fired the Troll and hired Angus.

It was the perfect crime--the Troll wound up with a new name, real paper, and a place to live, and Pencil got off the hook.  And our luck held; the Troll drew a high lottery number and got a three-year exemption from jury duty.

Shortly after that, the Troll moved into the garage for the same rent everybody else was paying for a real bedroom.  He duct-taped a bunch of tinfoil over the windows and hung an industrial-strength lock on the door.  Then he started bringing in all kinds of cast-off junk from the shop, scrap metal, bottles that didn't QC, old car batteries, drums of half-cooked resin--if it smelled bad or made a loud clang when you dropped it on the floor, the Troll would haul it home.  The few times I got a glimpse inside before he taped up a couple of tarps behind the door, it looked like a bomb had gone off in a machine shop.  And he kept it unbelievably hot.  He had five of those quartz-element heaters buzzing away at all times and it still wasn't hot enough for him.

The boys figured he was growing dope, of course.  Or brewing his own booze, or cooking crank.  Or something.  They wouldn't let him alone, either; a couple of them besides Pencil were medium-serious crankheads and naturally wanted to avoid paying the exorbitant rates the Hell's Angels charged.  And the Troll wasn't wise enough in the ways of the world to understand that the Angels would beat the crap out of and then kill anybody who infringed on their monopoly--

What?  No, no.  Not crack, crank.  C-R-A-N-K.  You know, methamphetamine.  Speed.  The nastiest, most unforgiving shit you never want to get hooked on.  It's the only street dope I know of that has absolutely no roots in biology; crank doesn't begin life as a pretty little leaf or flower.  Crank starts out as a bunch of swimming pool chemicals and industrial solvents and then gets worse, usually in a jailhouse toilet somewhere near Bakersfield.

Anyway, the boys went after the Troll to run them off a kilo or so, just for their personal use, of course.  And for their friends.  And acquaintances.  And anybody who couldn't scrape together the hundred and twenty bucks for an eightball from Tiny Mike, our local Angel field representative.

There really wasn't much I could do about it except chuck the Troll out on his hairy little ass.  And that, as Pencil pointed out with a nasty grin, was an unsatisfactory solution, since I was the mastermind of the paper-fakery scheme that had landed the Troll his job.  Wouldn't want those details to come out, now, would we?

Anyway, after a couple of false starts and a small fire, the Troll started cooking up minor quantities of wonderfully pure crank, following the time-honored recipe in the Anarchist's Cookbook--

What?  Yeah, I tried it.  Of course I tried it!  It was free dope; who wouldn't?  I mean, damn few people have ever done crank that wasn't stepped on with baking powder or worse.  This stuff was pure white lightning, a diamond-hard 220-volt airhammer blast of champagne powder rammed straight up your nose to the back of your brain.

I didn't like the explosive hangovers, though, or that gnawing gimme-some-more feeling I got right after doing up a line.  And it made me do some very stupid things; I finally gave it up after one very speedy evening down at the Camino Bowl when I rolled forty frames in twenty minutes, screaming "Come on!" at the pinsetter all the way through.  Damn near crippled my remaining hand--

<742 words omitted>

--so the Golden Age wound up lasting, oh, I don't know, about three months, through summer and into early fall.  Three very cool months, to be sure, months of working hard, staying stoned, eating like hogs, and partying to the death of the very last brain cell.

What killed it was when the women caught on.  Chicks on crank are very dangerous creatures; something about their metabolism or hormones makes them very susceptible to getting hooked, fast and hard.  And when they get hooked they turn mean.  Anybody gets between them and their next set of rails better watch out--more guys wind up in jail 'cause their old lady narked on them than the cops ever even dreamed of catching.

The leader of the local chick-pack was this twitchy broad with a hook nose and sunken eyes and black-rooted hair ironed into the flattened remains of last year's Farrah hairdo.  Julie something-or-other.  This Julie creature danced at the Brass Rail, Richard's Lounge, and the Hiphugger before her ribs got to sticking out too far to look decent in a string bikini.  Julie was what you call scooter trash, a crank whore for whatever biker or thief or pimp was currently holding.  Rumor had it that she could suck a cueball through a soda straw; Pencil had been sniffing after her for years, too broke to hold her interest for more than the time it took to shove a dollar bill down her nonexistent cleavage.

This changed, of course, when Pencil hit the Troll's motherlode.  Suddenly, he and Julie were engaged.  And Julie had a huge circle of friends, mostly other cranked-up chicks that called themselves "dancers" and "escorts" and "companions" and "outcall masseuses".  They weren't all total scags like Julie, either--a few of them were these amazing Penthouse-quality babes, sweet-faced and long-legged and big-titted, the high-voltage kind that makes it feel like somebody punched you in the stomach when they looked you in the eye.  And they acted amazingly interested in us, you know, our sad little industrial-park lifestyle.

This was bullshit, of course, and we knew it.  What they were really interested in was the dope.  And one kilo every couple of weeks just wasn't enough to go around any more.

The Troll didn't want to hear about it.  He was asshole deep in his mystery project; that and the ten hours a day he spent at work kept him busy at all times.  I don't think anybody ever saw the little guy asleep; I know for a fact he didn't own anything resembling a bed.  Anytime anybody tried to sneak into the garage he'd pop out from behind one of his machines, picking his busted teeth with a wicked Buck knife one of the boys had given him--

<947 words omitted>

--so we were all supposed to drive up to Lake Shasta for the two weeks bracketing the Labor Day holiday.  And, never just doing something when we could possibly overdo it, we sold off half a key of the Troll's latest batch and rented three top-of-the-line Winnebagos for the trip.  Pencil scored the loan of a medium-fast ski boat from a friend with a heavy habit and poor cash flow; this and a pair of the very first Kawasaki 550 jet-skis came along on trailers, just for the ride.  The plan was to rent a couple of houseboats and drift around, partying our asses off, engaging in loud, smelly, environment-wrecking fun each day and tying up in a different cove to fry our tiny little brains every night.

It was a great plan.  I wrote it myself.

But, as it turned out, I caught myself a mighty fine dose of the stomach flu the night before liftoff.  Maybe you've had stomach bugs before--it's like somebody knocked over a fire hydrant in your belly and suddenly there's hot and cold running sewage coming out of both ends of your body.  Trouble is, you don't know which end to hold over the toilet first.  Every time you puke, you shit your pants--

<448 words mercifully omitted>

--jerked awake in front of the TV set a week later, sometime around 3 a.m.  The guy who owned all the 7-11 stores in the world was giving Jerry Lewis a check for eighteen bazillion dollars in return for a big, sweaty hug.  Me, I was feeling better; I'd kept a light dinner down that night, thank Whoever, and was thinking about actually getting up and spending the night in bed rather than on the rug in the bathroom.

  	But something wasn't right.  I had a ringing in my ears that wasn't a flu hallucination.

And then it came again.

The flat, distinctive sound of pistol fire.  Semi-auto, by the sound, three quickly snapped shots followed by a crash like garbage cans being knocked over.

In my garage.

I jumped up and almost fell over.  I'd fallen asleep with one leg crossed over the other, cutting off the circulation below the knee.  And I was still pretty woozy from the flu.  I staggered Frankenstein-style to the nearest wall and hung on while the house rocked around me.  Then, through the open window, I spotted a trio of black and chrome Harley hogs parked on the sidewalk, right in front of my driveway.

"Get that little motherfucker!"  The voice was deep, male, pissed off, and familiar.  Tiny Mike, it had to be, finally here to collect his piece of the action.

Something else went over in the garage with the liquid broken-glass crash of a case of beer hitting concrete.  "Ow!  Shit!"  Muffled thumps came through the wall, bodies throwing each other around, probably.  And then a final gunshot.

And then silence, and the sweet, hot smell of gasoline-fed smoke, and something else, something like a full rack of pork ribs burning in the oven.

I waited, frozen in place.  Nothing moved for what seemed like hours.  Finally I stirred, beating down the feeling of pins and needles in my leg, and tiptoed into the kitchen.

The door to the garage flew open as I reached for it.  A big puff of hot stink rolled out in my face and the Troll stood there, shaking, holding something that looked like a big black flashlight in his hand.  He pointed it at me and tensed his thumb over the button.

"Hey!  It's me!  It's all right."  He relaxed, letting me look into the garage.  It was hotter than hell in there, and dry as the Mojave desert.  Lit only by the buzzing red glow coming from his ring of quartz heaters, the place was a mess, full of black gassy smoke.  Stuff was thrown everywhere.  And there were three freshly dead bodies, unwashed ones in black leather vests.  Each had a hole burned in its chest big enough to chuck a dog through.

"What the fuck's happening?  I heard shots--"

--and then the firebomb went off.

Later on I guess you guys figured out that there were three of them, one at each window.  Only one actually went off; it blew the other two out into the street.  But one Molotov cocktail, as the saying goes, can ruin your whole day.

The inside of the garage was suddenly on fire.  The Troll dropped his flashlight and scurried over to a set of big metal cabinets that were burning away merrily.  The face of one was the control panel he'd salvaged from my old friend, winding machine number three.  He started slapping at the flames with his bare hands, only spreading the burning gas around and making it worse.  I stepped up and grabbed him from behind.

"Come on!  We've gotta get out!"

He threw an incredibly pointy elbow right into my tender gut, flooring me instantly.  And kept on working.  Little lights on the panel started to blink on and off; voltmeters jumped and twitched.  Sparks jumped and spat through a pair of neat bullet holes in the control panel; he swore in a language I didn't know, and hit the case, once, with the heel of his hand.  A deep hum started to shake the cement slab floor, like a super-powerful amplifier cranked to max with no instrument attached.

Choking on black smoke, I struggled to my feet.  Christ, but it was hot; flames roared all around us.  I could feel my hair crisping up and the skin on my face getting tight and shiny.

And something else.  Something that wasn't fire, not the regular kind.  Floating unsupported in the air, outlined in arc-welder's blue--the kind of painfully sharp spark they tell you not to look at 'cause it'll ruin your eyes--was a circle of dark red heat.

The hole in the air started out fist-sized and got bigger and bigger as the Troll worked his panel.  Manhole-sized looked to be as big as it would go; it seemed to take forever to get there.

Through the hole was a different place.

The sky was black, marbled with rippling waves of roiling red heat.  The land was colored all the possible shades of red, from darkest purple to flamingest bright pink.  And there were things that looked like trees, only they had soft branches like octopus arms, waving in the hot dry wind.

Somebody started pounding on the outer door with something solid as the Troll let go and stepped towards the hole.

And the hole snapped back to half-size.  The Troll shook his head and returned to the panel.  Opened the hole again.  And lost it, as soon as he took his hands off the speed control.

I wondered for a second why he hadn't automated the thing to the point where the hole would stay open wide enough for him to go through, but then it hit me.  The interdimensional whoozits wasn't done yet; if it was, we'd be butthole deep in ugly little guys.

It was very close, though; ninety days' worth of solid work plus unlimited spare parts from one of the best-connected defense firms in the Valley looked like it was just about ready to pay off.  Except, of course, for the dead Angels, and the bullet holes, and cops pounding on the door.  And the smell of burning gasoline in the air.

It was now or never.

I got up and stepped forward.  "Show me how," I said.

I'll never forget the look he gave me.  I guess you can go your whole life and never save anybody else's; most people do, from what I've seen.

He took my hand and set it over the speed control.  Tweaked it gently back and forth, and the hole expanded and contracted.  Then he took my stump and placed it over the circ-longo selector button, the same one that took my hand off.  The trick was to kind of surf the hole's contractions, and, when it reached one of its peaks, to reverse the speed control with a quick tap on the button.  Child's play, for a half-decent bottle winder.  Most likely impossible for a normal person.

Then the Troll backed off a step, reached up, and grabbed his forehead, just above the hairline.  And pulled, hard.

The flesh and hair gave way with a sick ripping sound, parting and peeling back like the skin on the world's biggest banana.  His face went one way and the back of his head went the other, and underneath it all was a bug-eyed monster.

Wet with slime that threw back slick reflections of electric blue and glowing red from the yawning hole in the air, the Troll's inner face belonged to a nightmare.  Earless and triangular, his skull bulged out, mushroom-shaped, over a pair of black, lidless eyes the size of eightballs.  Mouth and nose looked to be the same hole, a vertical slit that went from where a nose should have been to a point somewhere under his nonexistant chin.  Short black wormy-looking tendrils squirmed in and out from his mouth, tasting the air, dripping clear liquid.

His shoulders cracked and twisted and fell in.  His arms went limp and baggy.  Six-fingered hands poked out from where his head stuck out and shoved downwards, like he was taking off a turtleneck sweater by pulling the neckhole down over his waist.  His scaly head and shoulders threw off curls of wet, smelly steam into the superheated air, like a hot street in summer rain.

Shimmying like a belly-dancer escaping from a straitjacket, he worked his narrow hips free of his fleshy disguise.  And stepped out onto his tiptoes, daintily avoiding the spreading pool of very human-looking blood that oozed from the crumpled pile of skin and clothes.

Christ, but he was ugly.  Stoop-shouldered, scaly, and pot-bellied, like a malnourished African kid.  Hell, he probably was malnourished, now that I think about it.

The Troll took three quick mincing steps towards the hole, and stopped.  And turned back.  And did something strange.

 	He shook my hand.  The one that wasn't there, I mean.  Both of his spidery little hands closed over the end of my stump, squeezed once, and released.  Just like when he was fixing a stubborn machine.  His hands were very warm, warmer than even the superheated air around us.

Somebody broke out the big window at the back of the garage with a fire axe, sending a spray of fire-dripping diamonds across the garage.  The Troll spun and did a perfect racing dive, straight through the hole in the air.

And then the world blew up.

I came to out on the lawn, just as the fire department was deciding not to even try to put out the fire.  There were way too many barrels of flammable shit going off for them to save the place; they pulled back and tried to keep the neighboring houses from torching up.  I didn't know I was under arrest until I tried to stand up and a bulky individual from the county sheriff's office put his knee in my belly and shoved me back down again.

Note to my fellow arsonists, murderers, and drug lords:  puking on your arresting officer's shoes does not improve your case one bit.

They cuffed me, stuffed me, hauled me, and booked me.  And convicted me, after the speediest trial in local history.  The evidence was pretty damning:  three dead Angels in the middle of a burning drug factory, plus one deboned foreign national of dubious origin.  Had to be some cult thing, right?

Most of the boys never came back from Shasta; they were, by and large, smart enough to read a newspaper.  Pencil and Julie weren't, but pure dumb luck counts just as much as intelligence.  As soon as the cops got them alone in the back room they both turned state's evidence and put me away for twenty-to-whenever.  Last I heard from them--on a postcard from this freako commune in Waco--they both got religion in a big way.  And forgave me all my sins, and got married, which was what they deserved:  each other, for the rest of their miserable little lives.

Me, I lucked out.  I didn't go to the gas chamber, for one thing--there was evidence enough to suggest that Tiny Mike and his brother dirtbags had started the fracas that night.  No, I wound up right here, on the secure floor at good old Lompoc University.  They never even thought about putting me in population; the Angels have eyes and ears and fists everywhere these days.  So here I've sat for the last twelve years--

<1339 words omitted>

--who do you guys think you're shitting?  I was up late last night with my buddies Federico and James--the Fed's a Nuestra Familia kingpin and Jimmy got caught in that junk bond mess a couple of years back--and we saw the whole thing live on C-SPAN.  Ugly, stick-skinny Critters From Somewhere Else, opening up a big round hole in the air, right over the podium in the Senate.

And they want to talk to me, right?

Right?

Hey!  Somebody better give me a straight answer right now or this conversation is over.

Hah!  I knew it!  I knew they were back!

What?  No, I didn't see anything.  Nobody did.  The signal chopped off right after that Feinstein broad screamed and fainted.

I knew they were back because of this.  See?

Cool, huh?  It grew back last night.  Hurt like a bastard, too--like dipping it in gas and setting it on fire.  Yeah, yeah, I know--it's green and kinda scaly-looking.  And it's got six fingers, but lots of folks have six fingers where I'm going!


It's The Little Differences

 by David Bollinger

I booked passage on the ultra-luxurious starliner Sweet Louise expressly because it was ballyhooed as the safest liner in TransStar's fleet.  They even loaded my specially-built shuttle into the hangarbays for me, free of charge, should I find myself in need of a lifeboat during the trip.  Damned sweet of them, considering my considerable bulk--and considerable wealth.

We were twenty-seven days out from Vega when the raiders hit.  Ms. Felice Lynetto and I were discussing literature on the Promenade Deck.  One of the ship's stewards politely cleared a thirty-meter section of deck to make room for me.  I made a note to thank the Captain for the steward's courtesy, while I concentrated on keeping my tail still for his safety.  Those humans are so fragile.

The Promenade was one of the few areas of the liner where I had room to stretch out, and the view, through vast expanses of transparent hullmetal, was certainly gorgeous.  Ms. Lynetto and I watched the stars streak past and argued amicably.

"Alice Gal'boa's fantasies are the finest examples of Human literature extant, bar none," Ms. Lynetto insisted with some vehemence.

I twisted my neck around in the cramped space, the better to focus on Ms. Lynetto's feline form.  I sometimes have trouble seeing the more diminutive species.  Cautiously, I gave my head a toss to get my hair out of my eyes, then blinked at her slowly.

"Nonsense!" I spat, carefully.  "Everyone thinks they have to say that, whether they've read that dreck or not.  It's pure and simple literary snobbery to make a claim like that--especially when Gal'boa's Collected Works rests on the coffee tables of half the galaxy.  I will agree on one point; the illustrations are wonderful."

Ms. Lynetto stamped her feet and arched her back a bit.  Her long and lushly furred tail lashed back and forth.  The deck shuddered a bit and, for a wild moment, I thought Ms. Lynetto's fifty kilos were responsible.  I hadn't moved; it had to be her.

Then the shudder came again, harder.  I dented the overhead when I jerked up to look around--an instinctive reaction in my race.  Ms. Lynetto cringed back from me while the metallic echoes of the impact died away.

"Your attention, please!"  The ship's address system blared in my earholes.  "We are under attack by raiders.  There is no danger to the passengers, but we ask the passengers to proceed to the nearest lifestation, and standby.  I repeat--there is no danger.  This is merely a standard precaution."  Humans are terrible liars; this one's voice told me everything I needed to know.

I lowered my head to Ms. Lynetto's level and pitched my voice over the rising babble of the other passengers on the Promenade Deck.  "Climb onto my withers, Ms. Lynetto.  I'll take you to my shuttle.  We'll both be safe there."

Her eyes went wide and her vertical pupils dilated, reflecting golden highlights from within their depths.  She visibly grew in size, her fur fluffed out in fear.  She delayed for a moment, then grabbed a double-handful of my long, purple hair and began climbing.  I was distantly aware of needle-sharp claws digging into my hide as she climbed.  I kept my head low and began moving carefully down the deck.  The hangarbays weren't far away, but in the confusion, I didn't want to trample any of the other passengers scampering around on the Promenade.  I'm afraid that I persuaded many passengers to reverse course and flee ahead of me in the corridors.  Once we reached the hangarbays, I had room to stretch out and we made good time.

I charged up the shuttle ramp and heaved Ms. Lynetto into one of the passenger seats, then grabbed the hatch handle in my mouth and jerked it closed.  The credits I paid for that shuttle were well-spent; its on-board computer understood the situation and had fired the engines.  When the raider missile hit, the shuttle was ready.  It launched us into space and immediately attached us to a rather large chunk of the Sweet Louise that was riding the crest of the blast front, away from the raiders.  Smart shuttle.

By the time we made planetfall, we'd contacted LifeGuard Services and concluded negotiations for a rescue.  My shuttle wouldn't get us back to civilization in Ms. Lynetto's lifetime, and she agreed to pay sixty percent of the rescue fee.  A hundred years or so wouldn't mean much to me, other than a mild inconvenience.  Ms. Lynetto made for pleasant company, no matter how vociferously the shuttle's computer complained about synthesizing that much dirt.  We indulged in boisterous arguments over literary matters until the shuttle settled onto the soil of the planet where we would wait for LifeGuard Services.

I popped the hatch and rumbled out onto the surface, arcing my neck around to watch for Ms. Lynetto.  She peered around the corner, both curious and afraid, sniffing at the air.

"C'mon, Ms. Lynetto!  LifeGuard won't be here for at least a week.  We might as well have a look around.  It'll give the shuttle a chance to change your box, too."  I grinned at her--a gesture I learned from the Humans, where you bare your teeth and make "huffing" noises.  Ms. Lynetto laid her ears back in the breeze I made and I settled for showing her my flat teeth.  Cautiously, she padded out into the daylight on all fours, sniffing at the ground as she went.

This world was more like Earth than my own Cutter's World, or Ms. Lynetto's S'crath.  We'd landed in a wide, grassy area, with a good view for kilometers in every direction.  There were only a few trees around, scattered in widely dispersed groups, most of them no taller than I am.  LifeGuard Services would have no trouble finding us.

I'm pretty near-sighted, but I am good at seeing motion.  I lifted my head as high as I could and scanned the surrounding area.  Ms. Lynetto scampered back to the shuttle when I lifted up on my hind legs and balanced on my tail to get a few extra meters of height.  There was movement in the distance--maybe fifty animals moving toward us at a run.

It took some persuasion, but I convinced Ms. Lynetto that it would be safe for her to climb atop my broad head and take a closer look.  Her vision is much sharper than mine.

"They're big--about twice my size, with long, black fur and, uh, four legs," she said.  "They don't look very friendly."

"Ah, good!  Food!" I said, mostly in jest.  Still, I get tired of synthesized grasses and wood pulp.  Hostile animals would be a pleasant change.  Ms. Lynetto edged forward on my head to look down into one of my eyes, peering over my forehead ridge.  I guess she was trying to judge just how serious I was.

"You'd best get back in the shuttle, Ms. Lynetto.  This could get messy," I said as I swiveled my neck around and delivered her to the ramp like a huge flesh and blood crane.  She scampered aboard and pulled the hatch closed.

I started the Change.  My muscles burned as flesh moved around, flowing, changing, shifting.  Mass flowed into my hips, moving away from my forelegs and into my haunches, building huge, rippling muscles and razor-sharp gutting claws.  My tail grew both shorter and thicker, more muscular and more heavily armored.  I absorbed my long, purple hair and replaced it with green-tinted, thickened skin.  Pain burned up my forearms as they shrank down to a tenth their usual size and grew five slender fingers, each tipped with long claws.  My teeth ached as my jaws grew longer, and new, sharper, meat-tearing teeth replaced my usual flattened, herbivorous versions.

I lifted my head to the skies and shook the earth with a roar.  My vision, altered to suit a more predatory form, improved enough that I saw the creatures take pause, crouching in the long prairie grass to evaluate the situation.  They were indeed about twice Ms. Lynetto's size, making them around a tenth my current size.  Long muscular bodies, covered with shaggy black fur, matched long, tooth-filled snouts.  They sniffed at the ground and circled me, drawing closer by increments.  Abruptly, some decision had been made.  They began baying in chorus, high, yodeling cries.  Several darted in toward me.

Now capable of running much faster than my normal form, I charged forward, pounding the grass into the dirt under my clawed hind feet.  I covered the twenty meters or so to the charging animals in a matter of seconds and snatched the first one, whipped my neck, and threw it spinning, high into the air.  I chomped down on its mid-section when I caught it.  Blood squirted into the back of my throat and I crunched down again to tear the body in half for swallowing.  I swept around with my new tail and crushed three of the animals beneath its muscle.  When I dipped my head for another morsel, the animals fled.

I chased them for a bit, but with three dead ones behind me in the grass, it really wasn't worth the effort.  Eventually, satisfied the creatures would think twice about returning, I turned back to the shuttle after a final roar at the sky.  I made short work of the three leftovers.  They were still fresh enough that their taste was almost as good as the first.  I prefer them alive, but beggars can't be choosers.

When I returned to the shuttle, its cannon emplacements were extended and tracking me.  I guess Ms. Lynetto was a bit startled at the Change.

"It's just me, Ms. Lynetto.  Just me.  I don't think they'll bother us any further.  I sure enjoyed the exercise.  They're pretty good--taste a bit like wildebeest.  There's some left, if you'd like...."

I guess we still have some distance to go in the area of racial tolerance and inter-species understanding.  Ms. Lynetto spent the next week avoiding me, even after I resumed my normal form.  I think she preferred the time I spent grazing outside the shuttle.  We certainly didn't spend much more time discussing literature.  She developed an agreeable streak and didn't seem disposed to argue with me any longer.

Eventually, LifeGuard Services showed up and hauled us off the planet.  The best part was that I got to name the planet, since I commanded the first vessel to land there.  Planet Brontosaurus Rex--catchy name, if you ask me.


VIEW FROM THE MESA

 by s.c. virtes

cliffdiggers

ladderpeople

clutch the desert walls

like the smell of mesquite

early morning smoke tan faces

waiting for the sun.


Readme for B-Dream

 by Rich La Bonte

(Editor's Note: There is no charge for this month's SHARELIT section as the author of this product is distributing this world as freeware.  Enjoy!)

BDREAM.RUN

Created using the totally cool Domark Virtual Reality Studio from jolly ol' England.

Also included:

 a FREE batch file to run the thing. (You can modify it any way you want.)

 a FREE copy of Domark's RUNVGA.EXE to run the thing. (Don't rename this file.)

To run this program, make sure:

1.) you have a PC

2.) your PC is plugged in, and you have a mouse and a monitor

3.) your monitor has a 256-color 320x200 mode (MCGA or VGA are fine)

4.) your little amplified speakers (if you have 'em) are on

5.) your subconscious desire to experience a gentle nightmare is on

6.) the files named DREAM.BAT, RUNVGA.EXE and the file BDREAM.RUN are in yer path

5.) you have an AdLib compatible soundcard or internal speaker

4.) you like to get lost in cyberspace

3.) you know how to type DREAM.BAT and then press ENTER

2.) you choose mouse or joystick or keyboard when the startup menu appears

1.) you know how to quit back to DOS--BY PRESSING SHIFT AND THEN ESC, ok?

0.) oh, I haven't tested this with a joy, by the way, 'cause I don't have one for my PC.

PROGRAM(MING) NOTES

If you can call it programming--it's more like being inside a program, looking out.  If you don't hear any sound through your PC speaker, don't panic.  Sound isn't really essential, just cool as hell, eh?  It works without a card on some PCs, but not all, and you have to preset the Studio while you're creating, so I set for a card.  I have a Stereo-FX by ATI which makes me compatible with AdLib or Sound Blaster, and I didn't exactly pull it out, in case all you have is that dink internal thing.  Get serious!  You could try buying a card.  Or maybe some Q-Tips.

The (ahem) programmer would like to thank an AOL person named VirtualGem for putting the .STU, .PAL, and .NAM files in his ZIPped file called GEM1.ZIP, which I found on that service.  These files were very useful in helping me understand how some things worked, as I had been in Gem's space for weeks before buying VR Studio, and Domark is rather stuffy about their tutorial: they put it on a video, which you can't exactly watch while you're working, guys!   Also Gem's was the coolest use of Domark VR on AOL at the time.  You may note, however, that I didn't include my own uncompiled files here--mainly because I didn't want anybody stealing my truck!  Call it paranoia, if you like, but I live in Hollywood.  I also plan to use it again, you see.

There are keyboard equivalents to all the mouse stuff, (but let's get sophisticated and try to use a mouse, ok?).  Oh, hell, here they are, according to Domark.  Don't blame me if you slam into things trying it this way.

KEYBOARD "SHORTCUTS" (like you'll ever remember them!)

ARROW KEYS - move the crosshairs up, down, right, left

SPACE - fire into the crosshairs

O - move forward

K - move backward

H - move left

J - move right

R - move up (or fly up, when you're in the FDFIVRD "space" sequence)

F - move down (or fly down, etc.)

Q - turn around to the left (NOT the same as move left--you'll see)

W - turn around to the right (etc.)

P - look up

L - look down

I - snap back suddenly to an untilted position (risking whiplash, eh?)

U - U-turn (like, about-face with above rude abruptness)

ESC - by itself, it resets to the beginning of THE DREAM.

There are more, but you don't need them in the FDFIVRD.  Why didn't Domark just use keys that corresponded to their actions?  (Like D for down, yuh know.)  Hey, what do I care?  Use a mouse, that's what the good lord made 'em for.  Scientific labs use them--for all kinds of unholy things.  You can, too.

HOW TO PLAY THE GAME

It isn't one.  You don't kill anyone or get eaten.  You move around, as if in a dream.  Hence the filename, get it?  Verrry intellectual.  Yeah, right.  Like life isn't all a game, ofttimes badly played.

There are entrances and exits to each dream sequence.  Some are easy as hell to find, others are not.  (Sweat in yer dreams, don't yuh?)  Mostly you just go forward, or Collide, into these doorways to your (my) innermost quagmires, but sometimes you have to shoot them.  (They give you the gun, so you use it, ok.  But this is not Naked Lunch.  This is a NON-VIOLENT program!!!!)

You can shoot other stuff, and sometimes something will happen, but this ain't no Nintendo either.  It would be wise to try shooting when you reach the Heechee game room (see Frederick Pohl's Gateway series) or you'll never get out again.  (Hee, hee!)

There are a few barriers which no player can see--or pass.  (Like that dream where a cat is pissing on your keyboard, but there's nothing you can do to stop it.)

Have fun.  I did.


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