Hide and seek by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online

“With your cooperation or without it.”
     
“I could arrest you for interfering.”
     
“Forget what a sap that would make of you,” he said hotly, “since it was you that brought me along. Just think about how much time you’ll waste trying to find me after I disappear.”
    Sparta said nothing. He had no idea how easy it would be for her to find him, no matter how cleverly he disguised himself, no matter what steps he took to cover his trail. She could follow the touch and smell of him, the warm tracks of him, anywhere he tried to run. That he had fought her to a draw impressed her, for she had fought as hard as was humanly possible. But she did not want him to know how far she was from simply human, or that she had not used against him the abilities that set her apart.
    Not that she was stronger or better coordinated than he. Her muscles were smaller and her ordinary nerve impulses were no quicker than his, but this was compensated in the normal way of things by her smaller size and mass, her ability to move the parts of her body faster through space in simple obedience to the laws of physics. Weightlifters are not good gymnasts; sumo wrestlers are not good at karate. But between her and him it was an even match, more even than it might have been.
    Things had been done to her brain, among other organs. The natural human brain had evolved to its species-specific state in grasslands and open forests. The ancestors of humans effortlessly performed simultaneous partial differential equations, continually matching and revising trajectories while running alongside fleeing zebras and wildebeests while pelting them with rocks, or swinging from branch to branch, plucking an occasional fruit along the way–and our relatives can still be observed doing it, in the great parks of Africa and the Amazon. We humans retain some of this ability, if only a shadow.
    We are very good at throwing things, much better than our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees–good at hurling spears, shooting arrows, aiming guns, playing horseshoes, and so forth. We are almost as good at catching things. Perhaps the most extraordinary demonstration of the human brain’s capacity to compute and match trajectories occurred in the mid-20th century when an athlete named Mays, playing the traditional American game called baseball, positioned himself–while running as fast as he could–beneath a small white horsehide-covered sphere which, struck by an ashwood club, had been lofted into the air some hundreds of feet on an unpredictable parabola. Mays–still running, not turning around, and shortly before colliding with a wall marking the boundary of the playing field–caught the ball as it descended over his left shoulder into his glove.
    Probably no natural human before Mays or since could have done that. But Sparta, if the need arose, could do the equivalent. The tiny dense knot of cells that nestled in her forebrain just a little to the side of where the Hindus place the eye of the soul was a processor that integrated trajectories and made many other kinds of calculations faster, far faster, than the brain itself. Had she made use of this knot of cells, had she switched it into her mental circuits, Sparta could have read every move Blake Redfield made before he had well started it; she could have ground his face into the mat ten seconds after their match had begun.
She had stayed human voluntarily and done her best. Which was as good as they naturally come. And Blake had done his best, which was equally good.
    “Okay,” she said. “You can work on your own. If you promise to keep in touch.” She didn’t tell him he was right, that he was probably as formidable as anything the enemy could bring against him. And if they were armed, which was likely–well, he would be too.
The look on his face was peculiar. “I promised that already.”
     
“I know you, Blake,” she said.
    He leaned toward her, and as his lips parted there was a softness about