ackman's itself, might not exist  at all for
him. Bobby  Earl Cline laid a hand on his shoulder; Tiny didn't notice.  The
planes were at opposite ends of the room, laboriously gaining altitude. Deke
jammed his against the ceiling, dim through the smoky haze. He spared Tiny a
quick glance, and  their eyes  locked.  Cold  against cold.  "Let's see your
best," Deke muttered through clenched teeth.
     They drove their planes  together. The hype was  peaking now, and  Deke
could see Tiny's tracers crawling through the air between the planes. He had
to  put his Spad into the line of fire  to get  off a fair burst, then twist
and bank so the  Fokker's bullets would slip by his undercarriage. Tiny  was
every bit as hot, dodging Deke's fire and passing so close to the Spad their
landing gears almost tangled as they passed.
     Deke  was  looping  his  Spad in a  punishingly  tight  turn  when  the
hallucinations hit. The felt writhed and twisted  became the  green  hell of
Bolivian rain forest that Tiny had  flown combat over. The walls receded  to
gray infinity,  and he felt the metal confinement of  a  cybernetic  jumpjet
close in around him.
     But Deke had done his homework. He was expecting the hallucinations and
knew he could deal with them. The military would  never  pass on a drug that
couldn't  be fought through.  Spad  and Fokker looped into another  pass. He
could read  the tensions in Tiny Montgomery's face, the  echoes of combat in
deep  jungle  sky.  They  drove their  planes  together, feeling the torqued
tensions that fed straight from instrumentation to hindbrain, the adrenaline
pumps kicking in behind the armpits, the cold, fast freedom of airflow  over
jetskin mingling with the smells of hot metal  and  fear sweat. Tracers tore
past his face, and he pulled back, seeing the Spad zoom by the Fokker again,
both untouched. The kickers  were  just going ape, waving hats  and stomping
feet, acting like God's own fools. Deke locked glances with Tiny again.
     Malice  rose  up in  him,  and  though his every  nerve was taut as the
carbon-crystal  whiskers  that  kept  the  jumpjets from  falling  apart  in
superman  turns over the Andes, he counterfeited a casual smile and  winked,
jerking his head slightly to one side, as if to say "Lookahere."
     Tiny glanced to  the side. It was only for a fraction of a  second, but
that was enough.  Deke pulled  as fast and  tight an Immelmann right on  the
edge of theoretical tolerance as had  ever been seen on  the circuit, and he
was hanging on Tiny's tail.
     Let's see  you  get  out of  this one, sucker. Tiny  rammed  his  plane
straight  down at the green, and Deke  followed  after. He held his fire. He
had Tiny where he wanted him.
     Running. Just  like  he'd  been on  his  every combat mission. High  on
exhilaration and hype, maybe, but running scared. They were down to the felt
now,  flying  treetop-level.  Break, Deke thought, and jacked up the  speed.
Peripherally, he could  see Bobby Earl Cline,  and there was a funny look on
the man's face. A pleading kind of look. Tiny's composure was shot; his face
was twisted and tormented.
     Now Tiny panicked and dove his plane in among  the crowd. The  biplanes
looped and twisted between the kickers. Some jerked back involuntarily,  and
others laughingly  swatted at  them  with their hands. But  there  was a hot
glint of  terror  in Tiny's eyes that  spoke of  an  eternity  of  fear  and
confinement, two edges sawing away at each other endlessly. .
     The fear was death in the air, the confinement a locking away in metal,
first of  the aircraft,  then  of the chair. Deke  could read  it all in his
face: Combat was  the only out Tiny had had, and he'd taken it every  chance
he got. Until some anonymous nationalista  with an antique SAM tore  him out
of  that blue-green Bolivian sky and  slammed  him straight down to Richmond
Road and Jackman's and the smiling killer boy  he faced  this  one last time
across the faded cloth.
     Deke rocked up on his toes, face burning with that million-dollar smile
that was the trademark of the drug that had already fried Tiny before anyone
ever  bothered to blow him out  of the  sky  in a hot  tangle  of  metal and
mangled flesh. It all came together then. He saw  that flying  was  all that
held Tiny together. That daily brush of  fingertips  against death, and then
rising  up  from the  metal  coffin, alive  again.  He'd  been holding  back
collapse by  sheer  force of will. Break that willpower, and mortality would
come pouring out and drown him. Tiny would lean over and throw up in his own
lap.
     And Deke drove it home....  There was a  moment  of  stunned silence as
Tiny's last plane vanished in a flash of light. "I did  it," Deke whispered.
Then, louder, "Son of a bitch, I did it!"
     Across  the  table  from  him, Tiny twisted in his chair,  arms jerking
spastically; his head lolled over on  one shoulder.  Behind him,  Bobby Earl
Cline stared straight at Deke, his eyes hot coals.
     The gambler snatched up the Max and wrapped its  ribbon around a  stack
of  laminateds.  Without  warning,  he  flung  the  bundle  at Deke's  face.
Effortlessly, casually, Deke plucked it from the air.
     For  an instant, then, it looked like the  gambler would  come  at him,
right across the pool table. He  was  stopped by a tug on his sleeve. "Bobby
Earl,"  Tiny  whispered, his voice choking with humiliation, "you  gotta get
me... out of here. "
     Stiffly, angrily, Cline wheeled his friend  around, and then away, into
shadow. Deke threw  back  his head  and laughed.  By  God,  he felt good! He
stuffed the Max into a shirt pocket, where it hung cold and heavy. The money
he crammed into his jeans. Man, he had to jump  with it, his triumph leaping
up through him like a wild thing, fine and strong as the flanks of a buck in
the deep woods he'd  seen  from a Greyhound once, and for this one moment it
seemed that everything was worth it somehow, all the pain  and  misery  he'd
gone through to finally win.
     But Jackman's  was  silent. Nobody  cheered. Nobody  crowded around  to
congratulate him. He sobered, and silent, hostile faces swam into focus. Not
one of these kickers was  on his  side. They radiated contempt, even hatred.
For an  interminably  drawn-out  moment  the  air  trembled  with  potential
violence . .  . and then someone turned to  the side,  hawked up phlegm, and
spat on the floor. The crowd  broke up, muttering, one by one  drifting into
the darkness.
     Deke didn't move. A muscle in one leg began to twitch, harbinger of the
coming hype  crash. The top of his  head felt numb, and  there was an  awful
taste in his mouth. For a second he had  to  hang on to  the table with both
hands to keep from falling down forever, into the living shadow beneath him,
as he hung impaled by the prize buck's  dead eyes in the photo under the Dr.
Pepper clock.
     A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate.
To  get drunk  or stoned and  talk it  up, going over  the victory time  and
again, contradicting  himself, making  up  details, laughing and bragging. A
starry old night like this called for big talk.
     But  standing there with all  of  Jackman's  silent and vast  and empty
around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to.
     Nobody at all.