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The sudden drop in gravity had lurched Leo completely off his feet. He went sailing off the catwalk and into empty air.
David hauled himself across the catwalk and launched his body after Leo's. The black man saw that he was going to
crash into a massive glass-walled retort and his old football instincts made him lower his head and hunch his
shoulders. He banged into it heavily and bounced off, legs failing. But the rifle was still solidly in his hands.
David practiced all his life in low-gravity games pushed off the glass retort as easily as a swimmer reverses
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direction at the end of the pool. He sailed out after Leo and banged into the big man'5 back.
"Let me help you, for God's sake," David said.
Leo was gulping for air, struggling, twisting around, trying to get the gun between himself and David.
"Ain't never been a white-ass son-of-a-bitch a black man could trust!"
BEN BOVA " 474
But David clung to his back. "I don't want to kill you. You saved my life more than once. I want to save yours. If you
don't let me ..."
Suddenly Leo screamed a blood-chilling animal howl of agony and fear that echoed off the shadowy glass and metal
shapes that loomed all around them. He doubled over, blood bursting from his nose. The rifle spun away.
My God, he's having a heart attack!
David saw that their long leap through the empty air was taking them down into one of the boiling vats below. Leo
was oblivious to everything except the pain torturing him. He thrashed madly as they fell, tearing at his chest and
shoulder with his right hand.
Twisting their twined bodies around, David kicked hard enough to alter their trajectory slightly. They hit the side of
the vat heavily, with David sandwiched painfully between the hot steel and Leo's pain-wracked body. They slid the
rest of the way down to the floor plates.
Leo lay there sobbing with agony, every muscle in his body knotting. David wormed out from under him, his own
back bruised and stiff.
He could hear the rifle clattering as it still fell in a long, low-gravity glide. He needed that rifle.
But Leo was dying. He writhed on the metal flooring, nothing but a low, breathless moan escaping from his gaping
lips.
I'll have to find the rifle later.With his communicator, David located the nearest first-aid station, raced along the dark,
looming vats to yank it off its wall stanchions, and ran back to Leo. The communicator linked him to the pod's
emergency medical computer, and David quickly slipped an oxygen mask over Leo's face, hyposprayed the proper
drugs into the black man's arm, and then snapped pressure cuffs over his legs to help pump the blood back up from his
extremities.
"You'll be all right," David kept muttering. "You'll be all right."
"Damn ... honkie bastard," Leo gasped.
"Damned foolish black-man," David whispered back at him. "All this killing . . . what did it get you?"
COLONY " 475
"Its ... our country, man." Leo's voice was muffled by the oxygen mask, but David was bent low enough over the black
man's face to hear him clearly as he injected more medicines directly into his chest."Our country ... not just theirs. But
they wouldn't let us have our share. We wanted ... t'get... what's ours."
"By tearing everything apart? That doesn't make sense."
"Whaddaya know ... about it.. . white-ass? You try ... bein' black ... a couple hundred years ..."
His voice faded away. His eyes closed. David never noticed as he continued to work feverishly over Leo's prostrate
form.
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Bill Palmquist stood by the living room window and stared out at the neat rows of furrows that stretched as far as the
eye could see. The tilled land was just starting to turn green with new shoots of corn. But the fields were untended.
Not a person or a machine moved along the long, cultivated rows.
"Come back to bed, honey," Ruth's voice called from the bedroom. "You haven't slept all night."
"Okay," he said. But he couldn't move from the window.
Then she was beside him, her plain pink housecoat around her shoulders. She rested her head against his shoulder
and he could feel the soft warmth of her body.
"Come on, honey. You know they told us to stay inside until the trouble was over."
Bill shook his head. "But we can't just let the crops sit there. We've got work to do. This is an important time in the
growing cycle."
"You wouldn't leave me here all alone, would you?" Ruth asked.
He slid an arm around her. "Of course not. But..."
"Nobody else is going out to the fields," she said.
"I know... .Look!'"
Her body stiffened as she saw what he was pointing to. A terrorist, dressed in olive-green fatigues, was sauntering
along the dirt lane that bordered the cultivated fields. From their fourth-floor window it was hard to tell if the guerrilla
BEN BOVA 476
was a man or a woman. But they could see very clearly the long-barreled automatic rifle slung over the guerrilla's
shoulder.
"He's heading for our building!" Ruth whispered, terror in her voice.
Bill held her closer, his mind cataloging everything in the apartment that could be used as a weapon. Nothing much
against an automatic rifle.
But then he said, "Look, he's staggering."
"Drunk?" Ruth wondered.
"He doesn't... he looks like he's in pain. Maybe he's hurt."
The guerrilla suddenly sprawled facedown on the dirt lane. The rifle slid partway off his arm. He didn't move.
Bill headed for the door.
"Lock yourself in behind me," he said to Ruth, "and get on the phone to everybody in the building. I'm going to get
that gun. Maybe we can at least defend ourselves."
Bahjat awoke to a blazing headache. When she tried to sit up, the office swam wildly around her until she let her head
sink back.
She had slept on a desktop with a thick notebook for a pillow. She felt hot, burning, the way she had felt back when
she and David had been fugitives in Argentina could it have been only a few months ago? It seemed like years. He
had saved her life then. He had risked his own to save hers.
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And now here she was, sick again. Dying. This time because of David.Lovers and enemies, Bahjat thought.Instead of
bringing life to each other, we bring death.
Wearily, she sat up and swung her legs over the desk's edge.
Evelyn was stretched out on the floor, asleep, breathing heavily, her face shining with perspiration. Hamoud sat in a
chair, pistol in hand, and stared blankly out through the office windows to the maze of laboratory apparatus below
them.
"How long did I sleep?" Bahjat asked. Her throat felt raw and dry. Tendrils of fire laced through her body.
COLONY " 477
"Several hours," Hamoud said, not taking his eyes away from the windows.
"Still no sign of him?"
"Nothing. Not a sound, even, since the shots and the screams."
Very carefully, Bahjat got down from the desk and stood on her feet. When the gravity had suddenly changed, the
three of them had been flung across the room. Walking had become difficult; an ordinary step tended to lift one right
off the floor.
"How do you feel?" Bahjat asked him.
Hamoud grunted. "I have a fever. But it is not serious. I am stronger than most... even stronger than the giant."
"Perhaps he killed David."
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