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quickly learned that was no way.
    â€™Course I thought that might open the door for me to sort of find out if Fly would see me as anything other than a dumb kid or a computer geek. That wentnowhere fast. No one can make me feel like a kid quicker than Fly Taggart.
    â€œI don’t care that civilization has almost collapsed,” he told me one time when I let him see me dressing, or undressing—I forget which. “I have my own rules,” he said. “My own personal code of conduct. A kid your age shouldn’t even be thinking about such things. Now cut it out!” He said a lot more, but I tuned him out. Lucky for him that his personal code was exactly the same as that of other adults. He called it the “your actions” principle, or the YA rule for short.
    Fly was just like all the other adults I’d known, except that he was a better shot. A full-grown man is telling me what I shouldn’t be thinking about. Typical! At least Dr. Ackerman didn’t do that to me. But I sure didn’t want him to pump me about my marine friends. I didn’t want to tell him that I think Fly would rather fire a plasma rifle than make love to anyone. My opinion’s none of Ackerman’s business.
    I didn’t want the doc to know that I’d rather be a scientist than a marine. That’s probably no big secret. I don’t want ever, ever, ever to be a marine. I hate the haircuts.

6
    â€œY ou’ll find this fascinating, Jill,” Dr. Ackerman promised as he led me to a massive table covered by a gigantic plastic sheet. About the only thing missing was an electrical machine buzzing and zapping from one of the old movies.
    â€œThere are too many of them to be defeated by firepower!” He sounded like the president of the Council of Twelve from the Mormon compound. But he didn’t go on to talk about the power of prayer. “After what your friends told us, we must face the reality of an unlimited number of these creatures. The bio-vats witnessed by Taggart and Sanders—”
    â€œThat was before I met them.”
    â€œYes, we were briefed, you know. They saw those vats in space—on Deimos, to be exact. The aliens can replace their creatures indefinitely, and they keep improving their models. So . . .” Ackerman had a great sense of the theatrical, playing for an audience that was only me. Reminding me of a stage magician, he reached out with both hands and yanked the big sheet off the thing on the table.
    Large pieces of steam demon were spread out on aheavy slab. The table had to be very strong to support the weight. “It’s not rotting?” I said, blurting out the first words that came into my head.
    â€œThey don’t decay naturally. The zombies decompose, of course, because of their original human tissue.” He slipped a pair of surgical gloves on and prodded the red side of the big chest lying there all by itself. It looked like the world’s biggest piece of partially chewed bubble gum.
    â€œThere’s no smell,” I volunteered.
    â€œNo odor, right. Not with a cyberdemon.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œI forgot. You call them something else, don’t you?”
    â€œSteam demons.”
    â€œYes, well, we’re standardizing the terminology for official government science. Now take the cacodemons, for instance.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œYou call them pumpkins. I confess I like that name myself, what with the Halloween associations, but it won’t do for an official name.”
    â€œDo you have any cacodemons here?”
    He shook his head. “They dissolve shortly after the tissues are disrupted. When we try to secure samples for analysis, we’re left with only a test tube of liquid and powder. So tell me, Jill, what do you make of the cyber . . . er, the steam demon?”
    â€œThe name ‘cyberdemon’ makes sense,” I agreed. I didn’t tell him what I