Free The Missing Man (v4.1) by Katherine Maclean

away looking for a new sun. My descendants are
going to surf light waves in space. Nobody going to wipe me out, and nobody’s
going to make them into button pushers.”
    “Okay, I see it.” George got up and
paced, two steps one way, two steps the other way in the narrow room. “Who
are you working for, Larry? Who are you crying over? People who let themselves
be bribed into cutting off their descendants? They’re different from you. Do
they have guts enough to bother with? Are they worth getting your brain wiped
in a court of law? You’re right about history, I guess. I’m the kind of guy the
techs are trying to get rid of. You’re a tech type of guy yourself. Why don’t
you be a tech and forget about making trouble?”
    At the end of the room, faced away from Larry,
George stopped and stared at the wall. His fists clenched. “Kid, do you
know what kind of trouble you make?”
    “I see it on television,” Larry said.
    “Those are real people you killed.”
George still stared at the wall: “This afternoon I was giving artificial
respiration to a girl. She was bleeding from the eyes.” His voice knotted
up. Big muscles bulged on his arms and his fists whitened as he tried to talk.
“She was dead, they told me. She looked all right, except for her eyes. I
guess because I’m stupid.” He turned and his eyes glittered with tears and
with a kind of madness. He glanced around the small room looking for a thing to
use for a weapon.
    Larry took out his gun and pointed it at George,
hastily getting off the bed. “Oh oh, the past is real again. Time for me
to leave!” Holding the gun pointed steadily and carefully at George’s
face, he used his other hand to put on black goggles and slung the gas mask
around his neck. “Hold still, George, you don’t want a hole through your
face. If you fight me, who are you working for? Not your kind of people. Think,
man.” He backed to the door. George turned, still facing him, his big
hands away from his sides and ready, his eyes glittering with a mindless
alertness.
    Larry backed into the dark hall. “Don’t
follow. You don’t want to follow me. This gun has infrasights, shoots in the
dark. If you stick your head out the door, I might shoot it off. Just stand
there for ten minutes and don’t make any trouble. The gun is silenced. If I
have to shoot you, you don’t get any medal for being a dead hero. No one would
know.”
    The short teener backed down the dark corridor
and was gone. George still stood crouched, but he shook his head, like a man
trying to shake off something that had fallen over his eyes.
    He heard Larry bump into something a long way
down the corridor.
    “I would know,” a voice said from the
ceiling. Ahmed let himself down from a hole in the ceiling, hung by both long
arms and then dropped, landing catlike and silent. He was tall and sooty and
filthy and covered with cobwebs. He grinned and his teeth were white in a very
dark face. “You just missed a medal for being a dead hero. I thought you
were going to try to kill him.”
    He twiddled the dial of his wrist radio, plugged
an earphone into one ear and spoke into the wrist radio. “Flushed one.
He’s heading west on a cellar corridor from the center, wearing a gas mask and
infragoggles, armed and dangerous. He’s the kingpin, so try hard,
buddies.”
    George sat down on the edge of the bunk,
sweating. “I get too mad sometimes. I almost did try to kill him. What he
said was probably right. What he said.”
    Ahmed unplugged the speaker from his ear.
“I was mostly listening to you, good buddy. Very interesting philosophical
discussion you were putting out. I kept wanting to sneeze. How come you get
into philosophical arguments today and I just get beat up? Everything is
backward.”
    “You’re the smart one, Ahmed,” said
George slowly, accepting the fact that he had been protected. “Thanks for
watching.” He looked at his own hands, still worrying slowly on an idea.
“How come