Endgame Read Free Page B

probably going to be the final curtain for Fly and Arlene, not to mention poor old Sears and Roebuck. They may be soulless and lousy soldiers, but put enough of them in a room shooting at us and we’re going down, babe.”
    Arlene reached into her breast pocket and pulled out two twelve-gauge shells, which she tossed over her shoulder to land perfectly in my lap. “I’ve saved the last two for us, Sarge; just let me know when you’re ready to Hemingway.”

2
    F orty-five days is a hell of a long time when we knew we were dropping into a dead zone, even for the Light Drop. Then again, it’s not really that long at all . . . when that’s probably our entire life expectancy.
    Arlene snapped out of her despair because she didn’t want to spend her last few weeks in a self-imposed hell, I guess. She had me, I had her; that’s how it was in the beginning, that looked to be how it would end. Except we both had Sears and Roebuck, and that’s where everything started to break down.
    We’re Marines above all, and we’re programmed like computers to protect and serve, you understand. That means we couldn’t just lock and load, stand back to back, and prepare to go down in a hail of Fred-fire when the ship cracked down and the cargo doors opened on Fredworld. We had this crazy idea that we had to protect those two—that one?—Alley Oop, Magilla Gorilla look-alike Klave, or at least try.
    Step one was to coax it, her, him, or them out of the damned stateroom. We tried the direct approach first: Arlene and I climbed “up” toward the central axis of the ship. The acceleration decreased to 0.2 g at the level of Sears and Roebuck’s quarters, barely enough to avoid my old problems with vertigo. I sure didn’t want to go any farther inboard, that was for damned sure.
    Arlene didn’t look bothered, though; various partsof her anatomy floated pretty free under her uniform, and she looked like she was loving it. I tried not to look at such temptations—fifty-eight days left; I wanted to spend it with my buddy, not trying to force a relationship that had never existed and never ought to exist.
    The “upper” corridors were like sewer pipes, corrugated and smelly. The Freds breathed slightly different air than we, but it didn’t seem poisonous (Sears and Roebuck swore we could breathe the Fred air). Very tall corridors, to accommodate the Freds when they were in their seed-depositing stage, like gigantic praying mantises . . . I couldn’t reach the roof even by jumping.
    Arlene and I slipped and slid down the hot slimy passageway; it took me a few moments to realize that the slime was decomposing leaves from their artichoke-heads.
    â€œYou know,” said my lance, when I told her my insight, “we don’t even know whether these are discarded leaves, or whether it’s the decomposed bodies of the Freds themselves. What happens to their bodies when they die? Do they have to put some preservative on them, like Egyptian mummies, to prevent this from happening?” She kicked a pile of glop in which were still visible the ragged framelines of Fred head-leaves.
    I shook my head. “I suppose we can keep an eye on the captain and see if he begins to deteriorate.”
    We figured out that slithering was the easiest way to move along the passageway without falling; it was like ice-skating through an oil slick, but we finally made it to the Sears and Roebuck stateroom.
    â€œStateroom” was an apt description; it was pretty stately. Because they had to accommodate the constantly changing size of the Freds, the rooms were built to monstrous scale, but with a nice mix of furniture styles. My own, next to Arlene’s downtoward the hull in heavier acceleration, had a couple of sit-kneels, a table I could only reach by standing and stretching, and a doughnut-shaped bed-couch.
    I had no idea what was inside Sears and