Hot Times in Magma City: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Eight by Silverberg Robert

Author:Silverberg, Robert [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Omnibus, SSC, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Anthologies, sf
ISBN: 9781596065895
Amazon: B00FTDLR1O
Goodreads: 20612165
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2013-08-31T07:00:00+00:00

After breakfast the boy went over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”

Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”

Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “That nice. You take it?”

“Better than walking there, isn’t it?”

A quick knowing glance. “You crazy if you go with her, man.”

Demeris said, frowning, “Why is that?”

The boy put his hand over his mouth and muffled a laugh. “That woman, she a Spook, man. You mean you don’t see that? Only a damn fool go traveling around with a Spook.”

Demeris was stunned for a moment, and then angry. “Don’t play around with me,” he said, irritated.

“Yeah, man. I’m playing. It’s a joke. Just a joke.” The boy’s voice was flat, chilly, bearing its own built-in contradiction. The contempt in his dark hard eyes was unmistakable now. “Look, you go ride with her if you like. Let her do whatever she wants with you once she got you out there in the desert. Isn’t none of my goddamn business. Fucking Free Country guys, you all got shit for brains.”

Demeris squinted at him, shaken now, not sure what to believe. The kid’s cold-eyed certainty carried tremendous force. But it made no sense to him that this Jill could be an alien. Her voice, her bearing, everything about her, were too convincingly real. The Spooks couldn’t imitate humans that well, could they?

Had they?

“You know this thing for a fact?” Demeris asked.

“For a fact I don’t know shit,” the boy said. “I never see her before, not that I can say. She come around and she wants us to put her up for the night, that’s okay. We put her up. We don’t care what she is if she can pay the price. But anybody with any sense, he can smell Spook on her. That’s all I tell you. You do whatever you fucking like, man.”

The boy strolled away. Demeris stared after him, shaking his head. He felt a tremor of bewilderment and shock, as though he had abruptly found himself looking over the edge of an abyss.

Then came another jolt of anger. Jill a Spook? It couldn’t be. Everything about her seemed human.

But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. Over on the other side, really paranoid people carried witch-charms around with them to detect Spooks who might be roaming Free Country in disguise, little gadgets that were supposed to sound an alarm when aliens came near you, but Demeris had never taken such things seriously. It stood to reason, though, that people living out here in Spook Land would be sensitive to the presence of a Spook among them, however well disguised it might be. They wouldn’t need any witch-charms to tell them. They had had a hundred fifty years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.

The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.

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