Joe Haldeman Buying Time

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actual bars insinuates himself, by association, backwards into our heart. What
a strange thought. Yet I did feel this closeness to someone about whom I knew
absolutely nothing except that he abducted me for Charles Briskin, eats right-
handed and masturbates left-handed.
"What is your name?"
"You don't have to know that."
"I don't know what to call you."
"Don't call me anything." He turned away, looking resentful or petulant, and
switched on the cube. He did feel some guilt, I realized.
"Why me, rather than Dallas?" I asked, and braced myself for the answer.
Dallas wasn't worth anything dead.
"Like I say, I wasn't after the million pounds. Sir Charles said if we could
only take one alive, it was to be you."
That was bad: he must know about Baird Ulric. They would want to examine me,
compare his methods with the clinics'. After all this, was I going to die
anyhow, and on a dissecting table?
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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman
"He wouldn't say why. He called us on the way out and changed the primary
target from him to you.
Murray the man you killed thought that he figured Mr. Barr would come charging
after you anyhow.
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I think it's simpler than that. For some reason, you are more important than
him."
He looked at me quizzically and I shrugged. "Who knows why a crazy man wants
what he wants?"
"He is not crazy. He's a visionary."
"Whatever you say. You have the gun."
"I do indeed. You might give that some thought." He thumbed the cube input
button. "News: abduction, Ceres."
"No references since 6 March 2078. Continue?"
"No." He turned to me. "They never have acknowledged that you disappeared.
That's very interesting."
"We lived a completely hermetic existence," I said, "being afraid of people
like you. If Dallas was knocked out the way I was, nobody yet knows we're
gone."
"Possible."
Then a memory came like a blow. "No. There was that other man. The one who met
you at the air lock.
Did he "
"He was just a lowlife we recruited up in SORF, a fairly competent pilot.
Never knew who you were. All he knew was that there were two dead people
downstairs, and he'd better not be found with them."
"But Dallas wasn't dead."
"No; he got the same dosage as you. I suppose it would wear off sooner, since
he's bigger. So he's probably looking for you by now."
"If he has any sanity left. Lying helpless for twenty years watching a body
decompose."
He raised his eyebrows. "It really did feel like twenty years?"
"At least." Dallas had practiced Zen, though, when he was younger. He spent a
year in Antarctica just watching the wind blow the snow around. I hoped he
could still find that, to help him through.
"What did you think about? A million ways to kill me?"
It took me a minute to come back to him. I was with
Dallas, the way the granular snow rattled against the ice floes, the sudden
smell of the penguins that day the hairs in his nose freezing when he stepped
outside the tent and breathed the midnight sun the aching slow cra-a-a-ack of
the iceberg calving food freezing solid while he ate.
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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman
"What? Excuse me." I shivered with the Antarctic cold. How did that happen?
"Did you think about a million ways to kill me?"
"No. That's not my nature." A little truth. "I thought of many ways to hurt
you, to embarrass you.
Usually involving the dart gun."
"You can disabuse yourself of that. I've been immunized against the zombi
drug." That was a quick lie, an obvious bluff. He wasn't a good improviser.
"At least I didn't take advantage of you. That would have been easy."
"You thought about it." Pretty obviously, at the time.
"Of course. Not violent rape, but, uh & " He waved a hand at his lack of
romantic vocabulary.
"I would have killed you. If I survived the experience, I would have killed
you."
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