“Off the troops!

“There's still time! As long as one of you isn't all the way brainwashed, there's a chance. You are not alone! We are a large, organized resistance movement...come join us...trash their barracks...bomb their armories...off the Fascist varks! Freedom is now, grab it, while they're chasing their tails! Off the varks...”

The squirters had been positioned in likely sectors. When the mini-radar units triangulated, found a potential lurking place and locked, they were ready. His bollixer gave out one solid buzzing pulse, and he knew they'd locked on him. He slipped the bull back on its harness and fumbled for the flap of his holster. It came away with a Velcro fabric-sound and he wrenched the squirt gun out. The wire-stock was folded across the body of the weapon and he snapped it open, locking it in place.

Get out of here, he told himself.

Shut up, he answered. Off the varksl

Hey, pass on that. I don't want to get killed.

Scared, mother chicken?

Yeah I'm scared. You want to get your ass shot up, that's your craziness, you silly wimp. But don't take me with you!

The interior monologue came to an abrupt end. Off to Joe Bob's right three squirters came sliding through the crabgrass, firing as they came. It wouldn't have mattered, anyhow. Where Joe Bob went, Joe Bob went with.

The squirt charges hit the fence and popped, snicking, spattering, everywhere but the space Joe Bob had cut out in the shape of a church window. He yanked loose the jumper cable and jammed it into the rucksack, sliding backward on his stomach and firing over their heads.

I thought you were the bigger killer?

Shut up, damn you! I missed, that's all.

You missed, my tail! You just don't want to see blood.

Sliding, sliding, sculling backward, all arms and legs; and the squirts kept on coming. We are a large, organized resistance movement, he had bullhorned. He had lied. He was alone. He was the last. After him, there might not be another for a hundred years. Squirt charges tore raw gashes in the earth around him.

Scared! I don't want to get killed.

The chopper rose from over his sight horizon, rose straight up and came on a dead line for his position. He heard a soft, whining sound and Scared! breezed through his mind again.

Gully. Down into it. Lying on his back, the angle of the grassy bank obscuring him from the chopper, but putting him blindside to the squirt squad. He breathed deeply, washed his lips with his tongue, too dry to help and he waited.

The chopper came right over and quivered as it turned for a strafing run. He braced the squirt gun against the bank of the gully and pulled the trigger, held it back as a solid line of charges raced up the air. He tracked ahead of the chopper, leading it. The machine moved directly into the path of fire. The first charges washed over the nose of the chopper, smearing the surface like oxidized chrome plate. Electrical storms, tiny whirlpools of energy flickered over the chopper, crazing the ports, blotting out the scene below to the pilot and his gunner. The squirt charges drank from the electrical output of the ship and drilled through the hull, struck the power source and the chopper suddenly exploded. Gouts of twisted metal, still flickering with squirt life, rained down across the campus. The squirters went to ground, dug in, to escape the burning metal shrapnel.

With the sound of death still echoing, Joe Bob Hickey ran down the length of the gully, into the woods, and gone.

It has been said before, and will be said again, but never as simply or humanely as Thoreau said it: "He serves the state best, who opposes the state most."

(Aluminum acetate, a chemical compound which, in the form of its natural salt, Al(C2H3O2)3, obtained as a white, water-soluble amorphous powder, is used chiefly in medicine as an astringent and as an antiseptic. In the form of its basic salt, obtained as a white, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, it is used chiefly in the textile industry as a waterproofing agent, as a fireproofing agent, and as a mordant. A mordant can be several things, two of the most important being an adhesive substance for binding gold or silver leaf to a surface; and an acid or other corrosive substance used in etching to eat out the lines.)

Joe Bob Hickey as aluminum acetate. Mordant. Acid etching at a corroded surface.

Deep night found him in terrible pain, far from the burning ruin of the University. Stumbling beneath the gargantuan Soleri pylons of the continental tramway. Falling, striking, tumbling over and over in his stumble. Down a gravel-bed into deep weeds and the smell of sour creek. Hands came to him in the dark, and turned him face-up. Light flickered and a voice said, “He's bleeding,” and another voice, cracked and husky, said, “He's sideing a squirter,” and a third voice said, “Don't touch him, come on,” and the first voice said again, “He's bleeding,” and the light was applied to the end of a cigar stub just as it burned down. And then there was deep darkness again.

Joe Bob began to hurt. How long he had been hurting he didn't know, but he realized it had been going on for some time. Then he opened his eyes, and saw firelight dancing dimpling dimly in front of him. He was propped up against the base of a sumac tree. A hand came out of the mist that surrounded him, seemed to come right out of the fire, and a voice he had heard once before said, “Here. Take a suck on this.” A plastic bottle of something hot was held to his lips, and another hand he could not see lifted his head slightly, and he drank. It was a kind of soupness that tasted of grass.

But it made him feel better.

“I used some of the shpritz from the can in your knapsack. Something got you pretty bad, fella. Right across the back. You was bleeding pretty bad. Seems to be mending okay. That shpritz.”

Joe Bob went back to sleep. Easier this time.

Later, in a softer, cooler time, he woke again. The campfire was out. He could see clearly what there was to see. Dawn was coming up. But how could that be...another dawn? Had he run all through the day, evading the varks sent to track him down? It had to be just that. Dawn, he had been crouched outside the fence, ready to trip the charges. He remembered that. And the explosions. And the squirt team, and the chopper, and

He didn't want to think about things falling out of the sky, burning, sparking.

Running, a full day and a night of running. There had been pain. Terrible pain. He moved his body slightly, and felt the raw throb across his back. A piece of the burning chopper must have caught him as he fled; but he had kept going. And now he was here, somewhere else. Where? Filtered light, down through cool waiting trees.

He looked around the clearing. Shapes under blankets. Half a dozen, no, seven. And the campfire just smoldering embers now. He lay there, unable to move, and waited for the day.

The first one to rise was an old man with a dirty stipple of beard, perhaps three days' worth, and a poached egg for an eye. He limped over to Joe Bob-who had closed his eyes to slits-and stared at him. Then he reached down, adjusted the unraveling blanket, and turned to the cooling campfire.

He was building up the fire for breakfast when two of the others rolled out of their wrappings. One was quite tall, wearing a hook for a hand, and the other was as old as the first man. He was naked inside his blankets, and hairless from head to foot. He was pink, very pink, and his skin was soft. He looked incongruous : the head of an old man, with the wrinkled, pink body of a week-old baby.

Of the other four, only one was normal, undamaged. Joe Bob thought that till he realized the normal one was incapable of speech. The remaining three were a hunchback with a plastic dome on his back that flickered and contained bands of color that shifted and changed hue with his moods; a black man with squirt burns down one entire side of his face, giving him the appearance of someone standing forever half in shadow; and a woman who might have been forty or seventy, it was impossible to tell, with one inch wide window strips in her wrists and ankles, whose joints seemed to bend in the directions opposite normal.