“You just get off, then,” Les says. “I don’t care how, you get off.” Les chops the man on the side of the head and he falls to the ground. Martin and Les leave him in the alley and walk around the corner. As they continue down the street, an armored police cruiser passes them. Martin watches the cruiser silently.

  “Try and tell me they ain’t seen that dude before,” says Les. “How much he payin’ them?”

  “He’ll just go somewhere else now,” Martin says, “and his customers’ll follow.” The whole action seems pointless now, and Martin is convinced he will see the pusher again on the streets, next day or the day after, with new clothes and new junk. His customers would be tense, and there wasn’t enough room in rehabilitation programs for all of them.

  “We’ll find him, or someone else will,” Les says. His lean face is contorted with suppressed rage. “That dude’s a dead man.”

  “I can’t believe it,” said the young policewoman. She stared at the table of rifles, then at Jake Moran. “I didn’t think there was an arsenal like this left in the country.” Her dark eyes were filled with horror.

  “I wonder where they came from,” said Jake. “It’s gotta be somewhere in the country, they couldn’t get them through Customs unless they did it piece by piece. Maybe not even then. The F.B.I.’s checking it out.” Something’s up, he thought to himself. He wondered how many other weapons were around, wondered if this was all of them or only a small number. Jake felt numb.

  “Why?” the woman asked. “We don’t kill, we don’t carry anything like this. Why? I don’t understand. Things are better, aren’t they? What do people want?”

  “They’ll get life and a million years for this,” Jake muttered.

  “You just tell me what the hell you’re doing here,” Martin says softly. Larry Friedman stands in the doorway, looking uncertain, trying to appear friendly. His big arms hang at his sides. “Pardon our air,” Martin goes on. “We can’t afford air filters like you rich white folks.” The words seem to escape his lips involuntarily, and he suddenly wishes he could recall them or leave them unsaid.

  Martin watches his old friend. Larry, with his thick brown beard and sad brown eyes, reminds Martin of a sheep dog. “Your brother said you’d be here,” Larry says. “Look, I have to talk with you.” Martin lets him inside, then slams the door.

  “We got to talk, Ida, why don’t you go in the bedroom and watch the screen with the kids.” Ida stands up.

  “Hey, Larry,” she says. “I ain’t seen you for almost a year, ever since Lamont’s funeral.”

  “I guess I’ve been busy.”

  Ida’s eyes narrow. “You sure must of been busy, honey,” she mutters. Then she turns quickly, grazing her knee on the side of the old couch. She walks into the bedroom and slams the door. A small piece of plaster falls off the wall and breaks on the floor.

  Larry sits on the old couch, narrowly avoiding a spring protruding from the cushion.

  “What the hell do you want,” Martin says, seating himself in an old wooden chair.

  “I’m worried,” Larry says.

  “Now why would you be worried?”

  Larry moves a little on the couch. “Don’t ask me where I’ve heard it, but I know something’s going on around here. Soon as I heard they picked up some guys with bullet-shooters near here, I knew it was true.”

  “What was true,” says Martin.

  “Come on, Marty, something’s going to happen here. Don’t get mixed up in it.”

  Martin sits in his chair, clenching his hands in anger. “Now why would I get mixed up in such a thing? Things are real fine. Why, the crime rate gets lower every year.”

  Larry twists a ring nervously. “Look, I got worried, you’re my friend.”

  “Friend!” Martin stands up. “You tell me if you’ve been doing anything. You people think it’s all fine just as long as no one bothers you.”

  “Marty, things’ll—”

  “Now you listen,” Martin says angrily. “You go in there and tell Ida that because rich paranoids had to be protected, her husband had to die.”

  “But that was—”

  “So shot full of tranks he couldn’t even walk down the street and protect himself from a bunch of hopped-up kids, a big guy like Lamont Sanders. You listen, as long as you folks feel secure, nothing’s going to be done around here, nothing, except having our best black brothers monitored and tranked, even without a trial, or because they pleaded guilty to get out. You go down to the Coffins and look at them, all in rows getting their social conditioning, and then go talk to the kids and the women and ask them how many programs been cut and when they think they’re going to get out of here.” Martin lowers his voice. “Why, we can’t even die now, with those unreal weapons, we can’t even get out that way. They won’t even shoot us.”

  “Marty, don’t do something stupid, please.”

  Martin walks across the room and puts a hand on Larry’s shoulder. “I’m not going to,” he says softly. “You hear talk and get carried away. Nothing’s going on, you’re worrying about nothing.” Larry looks up at him uncertainly.

  Martin makes an effort to smile. “You better get going,” he says. “You got things to do. Go on. Go on, Larry.”

  “And this one,” said the instructing officer, “is commonly called the ‘barter.’ ” He took the tiny dart off the table and showed it to the group of cadets crowded around the weapons display. “When it hits the subject, he will vomit uncontrollably for at least twenty minutes and be effectively disabled.” He looked around at the cadets. “You may wonder why we use so many different things, paralyzing barbs, tranks, barters, and the rest. Why not concentrate on one thing? Well, we’re better off if the subject’s not sure what will be hitting him. He could conceivably have an antidote to one thing, and might have taken it before committing his crime or disturbance. But no one is likely to take antidotes to all these things. If he did, why, he’d be helpless anyway, unable to function with so much stuff in him.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said one of the male cadets. The officer turned and looked at the young man. “It seems to me,” the cadet went on, “that some of this stuff is pretty brutal, especially things like that.” The cadet gestured toward a “nutcracker,” one of the paralyzing rods carried by police on patrol.

  The officer grimaced slightly. A soft one, he thought, taking a mental note of the name pinned on the cadet’s uniform. “Well, son,” he said aloud, “we have a saying around here, ‘Better to kill them our way than their way.’ ” A few cadets snickered. “We’re merciful,” he went on. “We just take them out of action.”

  “Don’t go,” she says, fear showing in her large dark eyes. “I can’t lose you, too, not now. Don’t.”

  “I have to go, Ida.”

  She seems to accept it finally, body slumping against the wall in resignation. Martin hesitates, but only for a moment, then flees from her tears.

  He moves through the dead streets silently and swiftly to the warehouse, autumn wind penetrating his thin jacket. Above, he can see the glittering latticeworks being built over the central mass of the city, the look of the future. Below, he can feel the subterranean rumblings of the subway, the sounds of a beast trapped underground.

  How many men are here? Fifty? A hundred? And how many at other places? He stands in the warehouse, and a brother hands him a rifle. He puts on a gas mask.

  “Remember one thing,” a deep voice says from the shadows, “one man on a hill can hold off fifty if he has to. We’re going in pairs.” Martin shoves the rifle down his pants leg, hides the belt of ammo under his jacket.

  He crouches on the roof with that skinny sister. Is she sixteen? Maybe not even that. He can barely remember the journey through the streets to the roof. The girl told him something about herself on the way. He tries to recall what it was and cannot. Her name was Belinda, she has told him that, and also that she has foraged for herself since the age of thirteen. That must be it. There is no one to mourn her, he thinks. She doesn’t look scared. His stomach is frozen into a fist.

  “They sure gonna know now.” Her voice sounds skinny, too, but she looks like she can handle the gun.

  No.

  Murderers.

  There must be another way. The Man’s foot is on his neck, and he’s pushing until Martin feels he is dying. There must be something else. A trank weapon makes a man a pawn to be taken off the board quietly, no muss or fuss.

  He holds the real gun. He feels its urgency in his hands and in his stomach. He feels its hate and finality.

  He knows they won’t see him until there’s blood, they won’t hear him until there’s death. No one’s tranquilized until he’s dead. There must be another way.

  Martin loads the rifle and lies there with the girl, waiting, until he sees men coming out of the police station below, across the street, tiny shadows on a surface made yellow by nearby lamps. Wait a minute. Something is inside him talking, trying to stop him, but he pushes it aside.

  The girl aims her rifle, stop, and fires. A small figure topples forward into the street. Wait. She hits the man next to him, fires a third time. No. It’s real.

  They are running now, diving behind cars, retreating back into the building. It’s Martin’s turn. He aims the rifle, seeing a head and torso in the crosshairs. He aims carefully at the place just below the chin. What am I doing?

  He pulls the trigger. The bullet buries itself in soft flesh and the figure is thrown back from behind the car. Martin lowers his rifle and stares at the street below. Without the telescopic sight, the figure is too small to have ever been a living thing.

  He looks around the rooftops. The little sister is gone. He turns and flees, leaving the rifle. He can still feel the sensation of the bullet leaving his hands and puncturing the soft target. Something which was aware of itself, which knew its name from day to day, is dead.

  He leaps across to the next building and runs across the soft black tar roof. Sirens screech in the streets below and he thinks of a giant cat moving in the stone canyons, ready at any moment to rear up on its hind legs and see him running. As long as they don’t see him, Martin thinks, he can make it; as long as they don’t know who he is, he can evade them. He can head for the warehouse and put his mark on the score map. One faceless dead man. He imagines the red blood flowing on the yellow street surface, and shivers.

  Jake Moran looked at the city map for a moment, then at the monitoring board in front of Bill Graves.

  “They’re tracking the rooftops in all directions with infrared detectors,” Jake said, “looking for an evasive pattern. Then they feed it to a computer which compares it to past fugitive patterns for every sector of the city. There’s only so much you can do running around on rooftops. We’ll get him. Or them.”

  “Nothing on the board yet,” Graves said.

  Jake watched the lighted map. Snipers, he thought, it’s crazy. He tried not to think of the arsenal they had confiscated a little while ago. Maybe it’s just an isolated incident, he told himself. His guts weren’t buying that. They were coiled within him tightly, expectantly.

  “Maybe,” muttered Jake, “just maybe he knows a con. Tell me if anything lights up within the search circle.”

  “You think he’ll be that stupid, Jake?”

  Jake left without answering.

  Martin crouches quietly near a clothesline. The moon is bright. The city lights reach for the sky through a fog of dirt. The clothes seem to dance on the line near him, some waving passively, others gyrating grotesquely.

  He gets up and crosses the roof. He knows this building. The door leading to the stairs is always open. Martin steps into the lighted interior and starts down.

  It is very quiet. No one is in the hallways tonight. They are barricaded behind their doors, he thinks, and if anyone comes here asking questions, no one will have seen anything. He hurries down the staircase. As he reaches the fourth landing, he hears footsteps coming up the stairs toward him.

  He faces Rufus Jones.

  Rufus stares at him. Sweat dots the con’s forehead. “They know, you was one of the names on the broadcast. Some little girl told them.” Rufus is breathing heavily, and Martin knows that he is a beacon for the police. They will come for Rufus and question him. Rufus will tell why his monitor went off, tell him he has seen Martin. Rufus is not very strong.

  “Do they know about the warehouse,” Martin says softly. Rufus backs away. “Do they know about the warehouse,” he says more clearly. Rufus shakes his head.

  “You’re gonna kill me,” Rufus says. “You’re gonna stop my light from flashin’.” Suddenly the stocky man turns and begins to flee down the stairs. Martin runs after him, manages to grab Rufus by the collar. He slams him against the wall and knocks him out with a blow on the neck. Then he reaches inside the man’s shirt, ripping out the wires of the monitor.

  Martin continues down the stairs. Now they’ll know for sure. But he could not have killed Rufus. He would have to get a rifle at the warehouse and find a place to wait. They still have to find me, he thinks, I still have a chance. He runs down the stairs past locked apartment doors.

  Jake went back into the monitoring room, away from the confusion outside. Four wounded policemen and one policewoman were lying outside in the hall, still waiting for an ambulance. Jake found himself shaking. Bill Graves was mumbling at him about Rufus somebody.

  He suddenly looked up at the big man. “Fifty cops,” he muttered, “fifty cops with slugs through their guts in four hours, Bill. It’s war now.” Jake glanced toward the hall. “But we’re better than them. We still won’t kill them, oh no. That’s gonna bother them. That’s gonna bother them a lot, when we bring them all in.”

  “How?”

  “We’re bringing in troops, we’ll start a block by block cleanup in the morning. They haven’t got a chance.”

  “I wanted to tell you,” Bill said, “about Rufus Jones.”

  “What about him.”

  “He’s a con. We picked up his light on the board a while ago. He confessed to seeing that guy Braithwaite. We’re already plotting where Braithwaite probably went.”

  Jake thought about the man named Braithwaite, and wondered which person he had shot. A crazy man. They would give him an indefinite sentence and send him up the river to the shrinks and he’ll start wishing he was in the Coffins after a while. “After we get them,” he said to Bill, “things’ll be quiet, if we have to get a court order to trank everybody in the area. No more of this.”

  “Tilt!” shouted a man near the map. “Whole damn board’s lit up!” Jake glanced over at it, saw the lights flashing, and almost grinned in satisfaction.

  Martin creeps toward the window of the small hut atop the water tower and looks outside. It is morning. The roof area below is the size of a football field. He is safe. They haven’t found him, and they wouldn’t think of looking for him here. They would roam the streets, check his friends. He could wait it out.

  He thinks of Ida. She would be sitting in her apartment, waiting for news about him. She would not cry or whimper about things. She will sit there and wait, and she will tell no one about him or what he might have done. He will go to her tonight if it is safe, and they will plan what to do together. He can trust her, at least.

  Suddenly he sees the soldiers at the far end of the huge roof. They are climbing over the edge using an old fire escape. He begins to count. Ten of them. He knows they are searching systematically. They don’t know that he is here yet, but they are sure to find him. There is no way to leave the water tower without being seen.

  He checks the rifle and waits.

  “We covered this area,” Jake said, gesturing at the map. “Just this much left, and thirty of them so far. We’ll get them all. We have enough soldiers to check every hole and sewer. Nothing can get out of this circle.” He slammed his fist against the desk top in front of Bill Graves.

  The big man looked startled. “Okay, Jake,” Graves said, “okay. Calm down.”

  “You know something?” Jake asked. “You know something?” he repeated.

  “What?”

  “We picked up a lot of their arsenal already, it’s at police stations all around this sector. We could go after them with their own damn rifles. We could call the Governor and ask her for permission to arm the soldiers and we’d get it. We could send them all out with rifles and almost no one would object except a few weak hearts.”

  Bill had stood up and was watching him. The big man’s eyes were filled with horror. “Jake . . .” he started to say.

  “You want to know why we don’t?” Jake almost shouted. Two other men turned from the board to look at him. “You want to know?” He paused. “Because we’re better than they are. Because no matter what they do, we’re not going to become animals and murderers like them! Because we’re the good guys, Bill, that’s why, because we’re civilized. We’re gonna round them up, and they’re gonna see that. They’re gonna see that if they have to spend the rest of their worthless lives in the can, and I’m gonna see personally that every shrink upstate makes them remember that every damn day they’re up there!”

  Bill was holding his shoulders. “Come on, Jake, sit down. You’re tired. I’ll get you some coffee. Sit down.”

  Jake sat. Bill looked at him for a few seconds, then left the room.

  After a few moments, Jake looked back at the board. The circle was growing tighter.

  Martin aims at the line of twelve soldiers and practices locating one target after another in rapid succession. In a few moments, they will be close enough. He peers at each of the targets in turn, sees one tall woman approaching the tower, sees a dark face on the helmeted figure behind her. A brother, he thinks, and then remembers that the brother too is a soldier.

  He swings the sight to the left, aims and fires, then moves the sight quickly from left to right, squeezing off one shot after another as fast as he can, not stopping to see if they hit.

  When he looks away from the sight, seven soldiers are down and crawling around on the black surface. Three others are fleeing for cover. All ten, Martin thinks, and then remembers that there are twelve of them now, and he cannot see two.