Free Time Was by Steve Perry Page A

saw the print of the guard suddenly on the ice. One cheek and the side of his nose were pressed against it, enlarged, like a child’s against a store window, and his rifle was trapped beneath him.
    Janus straightened and walked around the hole. The guard lay under his feet. The ice turned pink: The icewater on the surface had diluted the blood.
    Janus looked up. The guard lay, arms stretched above his head, like a ballet dancer.
    Janus no longer felt anything when he killed. Gore no longer startled him.
    God, it was so hard to breathe; he sensed his reason going. Get out. Janus stepped over the hole into the other world. The suit ascended.
    Hooking his inflated legs over the edge, then drawing his floating body out with short pulls of the spikes, Janus lay, suited, in the water beside the hole, looking at sky. He ripped his mask aside and breathed.
    Janus pressed his suit valve down, deflated it.
    He stood up, slowly.
    The enormous weight of his body returned as the Earth’s pull reasserted itself. He had not weighed more than ten pounds during the last thirty minutes, and now he weighed one hundred and seventy. It was like being yoked with cannonballs. The extra fifty pounds of his tank was a crushing weight on his back.
    Janus looked down at the water and felt dizzy, looked up at sky and felt confused— out of his element.
    The guard lay next to him in a red pool already partly frozen. Janus put down his pistol. He would hide the man in the water.
    As soon as the Anaconda left Janus’s hands he heard someone say, “Hold it right there.”
    Idiot!
    Why had he thought there’d be only two guards? Hover-cars moved fast and furiously, could cover half a mile in a few seconds. The sound of shooting must have been heard for miles along the ice! They probably fired up the first of the hover-cars before he’d even escaped the compound. Oh, you moronic horse’s ass!
    The ice was forming white crystals around Janus’s suit. The skin on his face tightened: Ice crystals were covering it. He had to dry off.
    He was preparing himself to turn and face them down—he thought now only in terms of them because to think otherwise could be lethal at this point—and had just begun to pivot when he saw a thin leather strap come flying down across his field of vision. He managed to get his hand up in time to prevent the strip from constricting around his throat.
    Janus spun around, his would-be strangler holding tight, and saw that there was, indeed, a fourth guard. This one had a pistol and was trying to aim at Janus’s head but there was too much movement right now for the guy to get off a good shot. Any hit right now would just be lucky, even though the guy could take Janus with it if he was quick enough, which he wasn’t, but that was all right with Janus because right now he was dominated by pain both from within and without, and pain changed his world, put a cloud around him that he couldn’t see through, preventing him from acting in accordance with logic and experience and training.
    For a moment, as the thin leather strap cut into the flesh of his hand, Janus was feeble and clouded and clumsy and ripe for death.
    Standing stock-still, a target on a shooting range.
    But the other guard, the kid with the gun, was too slow and the moment went by.
    Janus’s brain began to clear. You’re the best there is! he raged at himself. Maybe you’re getting too old for much more of this shit, but right now you are STILL THE BEST THERE IS and you have to do something NOW!
    He hit those words hard in his mind because the kid with the pistol was moving around, trying to get a decent aim again, and so what if his mind was clearing up, a bullet could crush clear tissue as well as cloudy, and the Strangler behind him was strong, almost as strong as Janus, and he had to use that to advantage somehow, had to do something extraordinary, something remarkable, unique and awe-inspiring, that was