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The Community, as creatures born in the Hive called their new civilization, would soon possess a secret base from which to move outward relentlessly across the continent and then swiftly across the world Coress, the end of history, the end of all the repulsiveof a planned future that, according to a precise timetable, would lead one day to the absolute perfection of all things
The Coht, left the living room to join the Communitarian Warren Snyder, aited for hie The real Warren, paralyzed in the living-rooram director of KBOW, the only radio station in town
Early in every violent revolution, those ould overthrow the current order must seize control of all means of communication in order to deny the eneht facilitate resistance Everyone working the evening shift at KBOW must be controlled and then conveyed to one of the centers where the people of Rainbow Falls were being vigorously processed
The replicant Judy remained behind with the Judy who docilely in the living roonment was to wait here until a transport arrived to collect the brain-pierced trio and take them to their destruction
Even if the members of the Snyder family had been in control of their faculties, they would not have been acceptable cos were, after all, not merely base animals like any creatures of the fields and woods; they were by far the worst of all species in the world, so vain as to clais, so utterly deranged as to believe that they were born with souls and wereso as to fulfill a cosmic destiny, when in fact they were a cancer in the bosom of Nature
In spite of their pretensions, they were meat Just meat Blood and bone andmore
Communitarian Judy despised them She loathed the way they lived, too, with no concern for the nus
The living-room carpet was only the ard Lint She counted six bits of lint just in the area bordered by the two armchairs and the coffee table in front of the sofa And not merely specks of lint Cat hairs, as well The cat had fled through a pet flap in the kitchen door, but its hairs were everywhere
Order was an important principle, no less important than focus and efficiency Indeed, efficiency was not achievable in a state of disorder Order must be imposed before perfect efficiency could be achieved This was a truth deeply progra for the transport that would haul away the Snyders was not an efficient use of time As Judy paced back and forth across the filthy carpet, stopping now and then to part the poorly hung draperies and search the street for a sign of the scheduled truck, she was acutely aware that progress waited to be made on countless fronts, that there was a world to be conquered and changed, and that she was at theto the heroic efforts of the Coot the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and swept all the exposed areas of carpet until she could see no lint, no stray thread, no single cat hair But then, through the glass top of the coffee table, she gliht have been a peanut that had been dropped by one of the Snyders and had rolled under the furniture
Agitated, she dragged the coffee table away from the sofa where two of her prisoners obediently waited, and she exposed the carpet under it for closer inspection In addition to the peanut, she found a dead fly The insect appeared to be dry, brittle, as if it had been under the table for days and would cru touched
The peanut and the fly were not the su that she could not identify
"Lift your feet! Lift thee of expression in their slack faces, they obeyed, raising their knees high and their feet off the floor
With Communitarian fervor, Judy vacuumed the carpet in front of the sofa When she saw that Warren, in the armchair, had raised his feet, she also swept that area
Inevitably, she began to wonder what dust and debris ht have built up on the baseboard behind the sofa and on the carpet under it She had visions of extreme disorder
She went to theand parted the draperies, in which the folds had not been ironed with sufficient care to ensure that they would hang unifor the wintry street A patrol car cruised slowly past the house All the police in toere already Communitarians, had been for the better part of the day, but that fact did not cal would assure her that the planned takeover of the toas proceeding in an efficient manner: the arrival of the transport and the crew that would collect the Snyder fa away froed the entire space a disaster
Chapter 2
Silent legions of snow e to Rainbow Falls, Montana, conquering the black streets Like clouds of battle ss and the towering evergreens Soon streetscapes and landscapes would be ghostly and bleak, apocalyptic visions of a dead future
Oblivious of the cold, Deucalion roamed the snoept town as only he, in all the world, could travel The terrible lightning that shocked hiinal laboratory, ht hi of the quantum structure of reality, an intuitive awareness of the weave in the foundation fabric of all things He knew that the universe was iely intimate place, that distance was both a fact and an illusion, that in truth every point in the universe was next door to every other point A Tibetan monastery on the opposite side of the world from Rainbow Falls was in another sense only one step away, if you kne to take that step
Deucalion kne, and in an instant he transitioned from an alleyway behind Jim James Bakery to the roof of the Rainbow Theater This town of fifteen thousand souls had an Old West feel because s dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they had flat roofs with parapets of the kind that bad guys and sheriffs hid behind during gunfights in oldin town rose above four stories, and the theater ranked ah in the falling snow, Deucalion could see east and west along Cody Street Most businesses were closing early because of the storhted Only a few vehicles were parked along the curbs; and traffic had fallen to a fraction of what it had been just half an hour earlier
The large panel truck with o section was one of only four vehiclesCody Street Other identical trucks operated elsewhere in the town Earlier Deucalion had learned the nature of the task in which the hard-eyed, two- subdued citizens of Rainbow Falls to facilities where they would be killed
The victims had been replaced by lookalikes created in Victor’s facility so State Route 311, which locals called the End Tihway, a twenty-four-mile loop of wide two-lane blacktop that dated back to the Cold War That road apparently served nothing along its remote wooded route except for an array of missile silos that had been decommissioned after the fall of the Soviet Union and had been in some cases abandoned and in other cases sold off to corporations for use as low-hue vaults for sensitive records Many locals were convinced that the silos were but a shway, that other secret subterranean facilities had been built deep to withstandVictor’s lair this time would not be easy
No doubt the first people to be replaced by replicants and murdered had been those in the police department and in elected offices Victor would take control of the town fro citizen Deucalion had already seen captive e herded into one of the blue-and-white transports, whereafter they were taken to a warehouse for disposal
When the truck down on Cody turned north on Russell Street, Deucalion stepped off the roof of the theater and directly, boldly, ated-steel step that served the passenger door of the vehicle Surprised, thefast to an assist bar on the wall of the cab, Deucalion wrenched open the door, which barely cleared his great bulk, reached inside with one hand, seized the passenger by the throat, crushed his windpipe, pulled him off the seat, and threw hihed no more than a hollow plastic department-store mannequin
"Alear your seat belt," he ht, he discovered that the current generation of Victor’s creations were not as hardy as the New Race speciod produced years previously in New Orleans Those individuals had been difficult to take down even with an Urban Sniper, a police-only shotgun that fired slugs instead of buckshot These Montana replicants were nevertheless tougher than huh they were easy prey for Deucalion, whose strength considerably exceeded theirs