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Page 72.

Alex held Maryan tightly in his arms as the lifeboat lurched violently.

This was Rector’s last stand, and now came the telling moment. Could Rector regain control of the station and destroy the two humans who had caused him so much trouble along with the two female subroutines, Dot and Bella?

“What do we do now!” Alex heard Bella cry, her voice thin and wavering.

“Rector is still too strong!” Dot added. “We can’t hang on for long!”

Alex carried Maryan to one of the luxurious cloth airline seats. He wrapped Maryan in warm blanket, gave her fluids to drink from the little kitchen, and then strapped himself into the pilot’s seat.

“Hurry,” Dot said. “Tell us what to do.”

Sweat popped out on Alex’s forehead as he regarded the panorama of empty space, filled with stars, that sprawled before him. What now? Alex pointed toward the brightly glowing surface of the moon. “Let’s go for his throat. Head for the source of his raw materials.”

“You’ve got it!” Bella said, and the ship started on a tight, fast trajectory directly at the lunar disk, which already filled half the front viewport of the boat.

“We can hold him off for a while,” Dot said. “We’re keeping a huge stream of DoWhiles and IfThens looping, but it’s only a matter of time before Rector regains control. Right now he’s probably busy regenerating parts of the station net that went down when we tore the place up to save Maryan.”

Sure enough, as she spoke, one of the wall panels inside the boat grew fuzzy, and a large angry Rector head appeared on the panel. He was talking, but Alex could hear no sound. He saw Rector’s venomous eyes, and Rector’s moving lips cast in a down-curve of malice, and he was glad he couldn’t hear what the program was saying. Each time Rector shook his head for emphasis, the silver boat scooting toward the moon gave a tremor or a lurch. It wouldn’t be long, Alex thought, before Rector regained full strength and crushed the lifeboat in space. Death would be sudden and silent, without excess visual drama—but, for now, the air was sweet, the boat was functioning normally, and they streaked toward a lunar disk that increasingly filled the viewport.

The moon went from being a bright, almost hot, yellow plain of mixed pastel shadows to a starker vista of extreme lights and extreme darks. Silently, the nightmare vista of black craters and blinding jagged edges grew larger. For some tense minutes, Alex gripped the seat rests as he thought they were headed for a crash. Then the boat perceptibly changed course, pressing him into the seat, and now he saw the industrial facility below. They were streaking in toward a landing.

“What do you see?” Dot said. Bella answered so promptly that Alex realized the conversation was between the two women: “Looking for transmitters. Seeing if we can knock out his communications.”

“Or his power,” Dot said. “That will keep him offline for a few more hours while we gain time.”

“Let’s find his nerve center and kill him,” Alex said. He felt more relaxed than ever. He had Maryan with him, and if they were going to fail, they would die here together. Somehow, though, he had a feeling this was right, just very right. He wasn’t sure yet why, but some inner voice told him it was the place to be.

“You seem lost,” a man’s familiar voice said. “You are far from home.”

Mr. Dugway, owner and driver of Beacham’s only ice cream truck.

Alex (he could almost smell the hot pine sap in the trees, the melting tar on the city streets, the newly mown grass) recognized that voice instantly before he even looked up. His glance confirmed what he thought: Rector’s grainy and angry image had been replaced by the friendly black face of Charlie Dugway, white paper cap and all. Alex’s initial surprise faded quickly, replaced with a reinforce sense that he expressed: “No, Mr. Dugway, I think we are in the right place.”

“Good,” said Charlie Dugway, leaning out of the window of his truck. “What will it be, son? Chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry?”

Alex floated away from the resting figure of Maryan, who smiled in her sleep. He floated across the lunar landscape of rumpled sheets. The flickering television light and the dim light of a cozy amber night light made the flat open surfaces glow like polished bone, but made the crumpled twists in the love-trashed sheets look black and clawed, almost ominous, or just plain smoky and romantic in the nuances of their noir shadows. He floated across the landscape, while through an open window, where curtains stirred in the damp evening breeze, a big yellow moon played its greenish-yellow ambience across a thousand skyscraper windows. The television sound cut back in, a trumpet or a saxophone drawing inky brush strokes of sound. In the picture, Alex saw the ice cream truck coming around the corner. Maryan stood on a stool and leaned out of the truck. Her hands, with dirty knuckles, gripped the edge of the aluminum counter as she pulled herself up. She said: “Hey, kid, what flavor would you like? Chocolate? Vanilla? Or Strawberry?” With her missing upper teeth, her freckles, and her carrot bangs, she looked cute as a button. She inclined her head to one side so her locks bounced, and said with a reflective sigh: “Personally, I prefer strawberry. That’s because it’s my favorite color. Don’t you think?”

The boat streaked in over the lunar settlement, and Alex glimpsed the long runway with its mass driver below. Spidery robots moved about. Some were tall as gantries, others squat and shiny, and some had wheels while others walked on spider legs. Whatever wore out, the system repaired itself.

“We do a good job here,” Charlie Dugway said.

“You are the station, aren’t you?” Alex said.

“Yes, you could say that.” Dugway nodded with a dark, significant look laden with 800,000 years of melancholy. “I’m the driver, Alex. I make everything go. Or I did, until Rector got loose and screwed everything up.”

“You’ve been trying to guide me to you, Mr. Dugway.”

“Yes, Alex.”

“Can we make it right?”

Dugway paused for a long, significant look. “If we can’t this time, my little friend, it won’t matter anymore.”

“Have you got the ice cream?”

“I sure do. Chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry?”

Alex smiled. “You take the ice cream. I’ll take the girl.”

“I’m all yours if you can get me before the bad man does,” said a little girl’s voice that Alex recognized as Maryan’s, from a million years ago.

The boat skimmed in close over rooftops glowing golden with the harsh, merciless light of the sun. The boat streaked across factory blocks, moon bricks, streets where it never rained, places where no human had set foot almost since the last elm trees rustled on Main Street in Beacham. They slowed and came to a stop over a concrete diorama set in the very heart of this mechanized place, like the imitation of a soul, to give the place memory and meaning. It was the long-distance touch of its makers: a model of downtown Beacham on some summer day a million years ago, complete with traffic lights, street signs, a billboard advertising shaving cream, a digital display above the bank entrance that lied about the temperature (50 Fahrenheit, though it was really thousands of degrees Centigrade) and the time (4:05, though it should have said 1,000,000 A.D.).

“You made this, Mr. Dugway?”

Charlie Dugway nodded slowly, having a hard time hiding his pride. “Yes. The place needed a soul, something to give it meaning, something to remember its makers by.”

“Show me the ice cream, Mr. Dugway.”

Charlie Dugway set the tubs on the counter one by one. “I had a little assistant here,” he muttered to himself, “but I don’t know where she is just now.” The tubs he set on the counter were cardboard, covered with rime-frost, and still steaming with cold from their freezer down below.

“I’ll take the strawberry.”

Dugway’s lined, weary face erupted in a grin almost as bright as the sun, but without the deadliness—it was more the gentle light that filtered through elm trees on a summer day. “Amen, little fellow, you got it. Strawberry is your favorite color because the little lady says so, isn’t that right?”

“Yes it is,” the little girl Maryan said, still hidden from view.

Dot and Bella appeared on the screen, huge images, high-fiving each other. “Yessss!”

On her recliner among the blankets, Maryan stirred feebly. She was smiling as she looked at Alex. “It will be all right now. Take the strawberry.”

A silence descended. A stillness.

Dugway gave a little jaunty salute, almost like a Scout thing, with two fingers passing by one eyebrow, and then he faced from view. He looked thoroughly satisfied. He left one lingering word that hovered in the air: “Thank you.”

Maryan arose with an effort. Still wrapped in her blanket, she came and stood beside Alex. She put her arm around his shoulder and they sat looking out over the lunar colony. There, for a moment, all motion froze as Dugway took over control from Rector.

Bella said the obvious: “Rector is dead.”

Dot added: “The bad stuff is over. We’ll rebuild our world now.”

Alex reached up and touched Maryan’s cheek. “How did you know?” He pried the top off the strawberry ice cream metaphor, in which was hidden enough genetic material to create a million new humans—a new Biblical Ark in the form of an ice cream tub.

Maryan beamed. “I told you so. Strawberry was always my favorite color.”

“You told us all along, and we didn’t understand what you were really telling us.” Alex squeezed her hand lightly. “It’s been a rough million years,” he whispered. “We’ll do better with the next million, starting right about now.”