ucker right out of his magnetic
boots. Momentum was on my side; it was my new pal.
I threw the alien into two of its comrades. They didn't
act like pals. If they had any brains in those big chests,
they'd have reasoned out what I was doing, then
extrapolated from it and cooperated with one an-
other.
     What an irony. Arlene and I were two of the most
rabid individualists any collectivist could ever have
the misfortune to meet. The Klave collective had
thrown in with their antithesis, Homo sapiens,
against a common foe.
     Could the ultimate error of the bad guys be their
deconstructionism? They took everything apart, leav-
ing no basis for rational self-interest.
     Food for thought. Philosophy to while away the
time after we cleansed this ship of its owners. S&R
were using a different fighting technique. They were
mainly crushing their opponents, and ripping out
whole portions of the chest area. Arlene and I were
succeeding in making the Freds fight among them-
selves.
     Suddenly S&R called out a warning. The Fred
coming up beneath me apparently wore an insignia
S&R recognized as some kind of biological scientist, a
med-Fred. When this one grabbed me and pulled me
down, I could see that it understood something about
our species.
     Instead of jabbing its chopstick fingers toward my
chest, where it might puncture my heart, it went for
my brain, assuming the only real weakness of the
Freds must also be a human weakness.
     Never assume.
It jabbed one of its killer fingers into the area where
it had learned humans keep their brains--the head.
But this alien's research was slightly inadequate. The
needle of pain hurt like blazes, as it went through my
cheek, but he missed my brain by the side of a barn
door.
     Then it was my turn. I ripped into his head like it
was a piece of rotten cabbage. I think it screamed as I
kept working down, down, down to the part of a living
thing that can anticipate bad things before they hap-
pen. I laughed. I was getting back to doing what I do
best.
     By some miracle we cleaned out the section we were
in. Then we moved to the next. Although similar to
the Klave ship in terms of engineering, the inside of
this vessel was composed of separate compartments.
As we floated from one section to the next, like angels
of death, my theory received endless vindication: the
Freds were not communicating with each other!
We simply repeated the process until our arms and
legs were so tired we had to stop. Then we resumed
our attack, and still the pods had not communicated
with each other. Only at the end did we encounter a
different sort of Fred.
     This one might have been the captain of the ship.
He was the smartest, and he had a weapon that almost
wiped us out. "Look out for the Fred ray!" S&R
shouted in one of their clearest sentences, saving
Arlene and me from the brink of destruction. We
pushed each other out of harm's way. While we
bounced off the bulkheads and bobbed around like
corks in a bottle, a searing beam of white energy
missed us and melted one wall of the pod. Fortunately
the integrity of the ship's bulkhead was not compro-
mised.
     S&R took care of this Fred personally. Four strong
hands took the cabbage apart. Afterward we discov-
ered we should have taken this one down first. But
how were we to know this particular artichoke had
access to the ship's main computer? Damned thing
didn't even look like a computer. Looked like a
blender to me.
     The top Fred had programmed the ship to go ...
somewhere. There was nothing we could do to alter
the program. We'd succeeded in killing all the Freds.
But we were stuck on their Galaxy Express with a one-
way ticket. Arlene was not happy about this.



     Epilogue

     I will never see Albert again. I'd reconciled
myself to accepting him as a sixty-seven-year-old. I
could have still loved him. At least we would have
been together again.
     But Fly had to take the mission to the limit. I saw
that berserker look come over him after Hidalgo died,
and I understood. I also knew we might not have
come through alive without that fire in him. When I
can think again, I'll tell Fly I understand.
Now I can only feel my loss. By the time we arrive
at our destination and turn around, Albert will have
been in his grave for centuries. So I sit alone at one
end of the ship while Fly sits at the other. The Fred
ship has large picture windows.
     I watch the stars contract to a small red disk at the
center of the line of travel. Fly watches a similar disk,
but his is blue. We do not talk. He searches for words
that I do not want to hear.
     We both wonder what the human race will do in the
next several thousand years.