* *

The World screen showed dim color patches too, but for the moment I was
more interested in the other.

The button armies marched right up to the lower edge of the screens and
right away I got the crazy hunch that they were connected with spots on
the map. Push the button for a certain spot and the plane would go
there! Why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus around
it (or else my eyes were going bad) as if to say, "Push me and we go to
Atlantic Highlands."

A crazy notion as I say and no sensible way to handle a plane's
navigation according to any standards I could imagine, but then as I've
also said this plane didn't seem to be designed according to any
standards but rather in line with one man's ideas, including his whims.

At any rate that was my hunch about the buttons and the screens. It
tantalized rather than helped, for the only button that seemed to be
marked in any way was the one (guessing by color) for Atlantic
Highlands, and I certainly didn't want to go there. Like Alamos, Atla-Hi
has the reputation for being a mysteriously dangerous place. Not openly
mean and death-on-Deathlanders like Walla Walla or Porter, but buggers
who swing too close to Atla-Hi have a way of never turning up again. You
never expect to see again two out of three buggers who pass in the
night, but for three out of three to keep disappearing is against
statistics.

Alice was beside me now, scanning things over too, and from the way she
frowned and what not I gathered she had caught my hunch and also shared
my puzzlement.

Now was the time, all right, when we needed an instruction manual and
not one in Chinese neither!

Pop swallowed a mouthful and said, "Yep, now'd be a good time to have
him back for a minute, to explain things a bit. Oh, don't take offense,
Ray, I know how it was for you and for you too, Alice. I know the both
of you _had_ to murder him, it wasn't a matter of free choice, it's the
way us Deathlanders are built. Just the same, it'd be nice to have a way
of killing 'em and keeping them on hand at the same time. I remember
feeling that way after murdering the Alamoser I told you about. You see,
I come down with the very fever I'd faked and almost died of it, while
the man who could have cured me easy wouldn't do nothing but perfume the
landscape with the help of a gang of anaerobic bacteria. Stubborn
single-minded cuss!"

* * * * *

The first part of