Andrew Roller Presents
THE FADING UNIVERSE

CHAPTER SEVEN

	Marvin wondered idly what city they were in.  Well, he'd find out once the squad cars pulled up outside the factory.
	For weeks he and the others had been raiding municipalities throughout the universe, skipping through the Doors to get away.  Some urban areas employed patrols who monitored traffic as it passed through the Doors, but Marvin and his compatriots had, so far at least, managed to elude them.  His greatest concern was with other roving gangs of thieves.
	Marvin rubbed his scalp.  Perry had told him recently that if he massaged his head, moving the skin between his fingers, it would be stimulated to grow hair.  He glanced at Perry.  He couldn't remember having ever seen Perry comb his hair, let alone wash it.  Perry's hair was greasy and it stuck out in every direction.  "Perry would be better off bald," Marvin thought to himself.
	Perry scampered about, waving a pistol.
	"Get into position!  The cops will be here any minute," Perry cried, but his commands were superfluous, for everyone had already taken up his proper place.  The hostages were bunched up in the plant manager's office, guarded by Harrigan and Elsa.  Frankie lay atop a pile of wooden boxes, his rifle leveled at the street.  Flaherty crouched behind the broken cinder block wall of a vacant building across the road, waiting for a signal to detonate half a ton of dynamite.
	Marvin spotted Flaherty's face peeping out from behind the jagged facade of bricks.
	"Dammit!  You're supposed to keep yourself hidden, fatso," Marvin breathed.  He motioned to Flaherty to get down.

###

	Marvin heard Perry arguing with one of the prisoners.  He stepped inside the office.
	"Is there a problem?"  Marvin asked Elsa.
	"No, Perry's just treating a hostage to one of his babbling harangues," Elsa said.
	"Shut up, you tin-plated inflatable doll," Perry snapped at Elsa.
	Marvin's face flushed.  "Listen you, I resent that," he shouted at Perry.
	"Insubordination!"  Perry screamed.  "Start your own group, then.  Why don't you just go rob places by yourself with a whole flock of those automated cunts?"
	"Now, now," a portly, bearded hostage piped up.  "I think you're just angry with your friend because you don't want to admit that I'm correct," he said to Perry.
	"That's not so," Perry retorted.
	"Well, then, refute me," the man said smugly.
	"Listen, professor fussbudget,"
	"Fuddleston," the man corrected.  "Doctor Fuddleston, professor of ancient astronomy at Cornell University, chief consultant to Dresser Industries here," he said with a wave of his arm.
	"The stars are fixed in place," Perry said hotly.  "Each one of them is surrounded with a mesh of solar cells."
	"I'm not talking about the way things are today," the professor said.  "I was declaiming on the distant past."
	"And you're saying that at one time the stars were all flying away from each other?"  Perry asked.
	"Like spots on an expanding balloon, or raisins in the dough of a cake that's rising in an oven," Professor Fuddleston explained.
	"What a stupid thing to argue about," Marvin exclaimed.  "You wanna save this for another time?"  He asked Perry.  "After we're done here you and your friend can troop off to the library together."
	"So you don't believe me either," the professor said to Marvin.
	"Listen mister, I know what you're trying to do," Marvin said.
	"Then perhaps I can enlist your aid in convincing this youth that it was man, employing his reason and the strength of his cooperative efforts, that created the universe as we know it today."
	"And it's a rotten place, too," Elsa said.
	Suddenly the shrill whine of approaching sirens cut through the air.  Marvin spun about and peered outside.  Police cars pushed through a crowd of spectators that had assembled, and rolled into the parking lot that fronted the factory.  Officers jumped out of their vehicles and crouched behind them.  Others scurried among the squad cars, clearing the parking lot of onlookers; driving the spectators back and erecting wooden horses to cordon off the asphalt.  Marvin glimpsed a sharpshooter crawling through the upper story of a dilapidated building adjacent to the lot.  He knew there were a dozen more moving stealthily into position, concealed somewhere in the crumbling edifices that lined the street.  A police bullhorn cut through the murmur of the crowd.
	"We're not here to argue," the officer warned.  "Throw down your weapons!  Surrender your hostages!  We have you surrounded!"
	Perry cooly raised his left hand and signaled to Flaherty, across the street, to detonate the explosives.  Marvin turned away, clapped a hand over his ear, and waited.  Nothing happened.
	Marvin looked up worriedly.  Had a sharpshooter found Flaherty?
	"What's the matter?"  Perry asked shrilly.  "Marvin!  The TNT is the key to my entire plan!"
	Perry raised his left hand again and frantically repeated the signal.
	Marvin glimpsed a stream of urine falling onto the roof of a warehouse and traced it upward to a rotund figure standing on an I-beam that protruded out the far side of what remained of a building's seventh floor.
	"Flaherty's busy taking a piss!"  Marvin hissed.
	Frankie spotted Flaherty and shot over his head.  The boy jumped back in alarm.
	At once the police opened fire on Marvin, Perry, and Frankie.  As the youths dove for cover a startled Flaherty yanked up his trousers and dashed back to the detonation box.  He leapt atop it, his buttocks landing squarely upon the T-shaped handle.
	A crack of summer lightning reverberated through the street.  With an ominous rumble a building slowly toppled into the parking lot, crushing the police.  
	A handful of sharpshooters were all that remained to continue the enfilade against Marvin, Perry, and Frankie.  Several had been inside the building which collapsed, further reducing their number.  The survivors were so shaken that their shots went astray.  With deadly accuracy Frankie quickly picked them off.
	A minute later a haze of smoke hung over the silent street.  Perry grinned at Marvin.
	"I think whoever the city sends out next will be willing to negotiate," Perry said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

	Frankie peered through a pair of digital binoculars at the low cliffs that meandered across an arid plain.  Wispy cirrus clouds formed white rivulets in the sky as they glided overhead.  Here no ceiling was visible.  The area had once been a vast, lush forest preserve, but more pressing needs in the centuries that followed had diverted the water supply; the pines and redwoods had withered and died.
	Frankie caught sight of a caravan as it trundled between the sere bluffs.  He studied it closely, attempting to determine what sort of cargo it carried.  Frankie spoke into a miniature microphone that was attached by a plastic rod to a headset.
	A voice crackled in Marvin's slim stereo headphones.
	"I've spotted four tractor trailers coming toward us," Frankie reported.
	Marvin looked up, scanning the ridge where the dwarf stood.
	"Great.  We'll be heading up right away," Marvin said.
	Soon Marvin, Elsa, and Flaherty were clambering up the face of a precipice which ran parallel to a dirt road.  Perry and Harrigan ascended the opposite bank of the ravine to join Frankie.
	Twenty minutes later the four trucks chugged into the canyon.
	"I wish I knew what those babies were hauling," Marvin remarked as he sighted down the barrel of his gun.
	"We'll find out soon enough," Elsa breathed.
	"It's a lot of SOMETHING," Flaherty said.
	At a signal from Perry an explosion ripped open the far end of the pass.  Tons of sand cascaded down upon the road, blocking it off.
	Marvin and the others cut loose with a salvo of laser beams, killing the drivers.
	"We got 'em," Marvin crowed.  He grabbed the tether that dangled down into the defile and bounded over the side.  
	Marvin was busily scampering earthward when a fusillade of plasma suddenly ripped open his back.  The force of the blast twirled him about.  Marvin felt his back slam against the chasm wall as he regurgitated a fountain of blood.
	For a moment Marvin hung motionless above the road, his hand clenched about the rope.  Below him a flood of soldiers were disembarking from the four stalled diesels.
	"Oh my God, it's a troop transport...We've ambushed an army convoy," Marvin spluttered, blood gushing down his chin.
	One by one the fingers of Marvin's outstretched hand revolted against the strenuous task they were being demanded to perform.  Marvin emitted an inaudible groan.  His palm separated from the line and he fell.

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