Read To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga) for Free Online

he were in hiding, watching for prey. The cycle on the cube was not long. Insects crawled on the leaves nearby, a huge butterfly flopped through drunkenly, the wind sighed in the clean, green trees. Then Blake saw movement through the tree trunks, and the Alpha-wave projectors made the adrenaline surge in his bloodstream. He was suddenly tense. A deer walked slowly into the clearing, a doe with delicate markings. She stopped, looked around, dipped her head to chomp some grass, looked around again. Blake was startled when the brush before his face parted, as if his own hand had moved it. The deer's head went up, and a second later the animal was bounding away, to disappear in a few seconds. The brush stopped moving, the forest returned to its noisy silence, and the same butterfly flopped through again.
    Not bad, thought Blake. I wonder where he found such a parkland to use for his basic photographic imagery. Places like that are hard to find. He moved on to the next window and the second sensatron.
    Here was a dawn world, with strange prehistoric ferns that seemed outsized. There was a murky pool of water in the foreground, dark and topped with scum. Suddenly the placid scene erupted. The head of a great gray-green brontosaurus rose, dripping and munching on slimy greens. The reptilian head loomed close, then turned ponderously and looked over his shoulder. With a crunching sound, a Tyrannosaurus Rex stalked out from behind some rocks, and the subsonic music quickened in Blake's ears. Another monster from the past roared challenge offsereen, and the herbivore in the foreground ducked away. There was the smell of sweat and decaying vegetation.
    Suddenly Blake felt pressure against his kidney, and hands grabbed his arms. Fool! Blake was annoyed with himself. After-hours on a darkened commercial level, what else can I expect but a mugging?
    His assailants twisted him around roughly. One was thin, with the erratic twitch of an Eroticene addict gone past the help of any antidote. The other, young and elegant in a cheap, trendy way, wore a sleek and shiny white suit with a fashionably padded crotch. Both were smiling, but the addict's grin had a mean twist to it.
    "Your money or your life," the one in white said.
    "Stand and deliver," the addict said in a gravely voice that dissolved into a high-pitched giggle.
    They've been watching too many historical tapes, Blake thought. "I only have credit tabs," he said. No one uses cash anymore, at least no one legitimate – or not often. But surely they know that, too.
    The slim one in white laughed abnormally loud, and right in Blake's ear. He waved a knife around and Blake stared at it. It shone in the light from the cubes. The Tyrannosaurus Rex was rolling around on the bottom of the cube with a spiny-backed reptile Blake had not seen enough of to identify.
    "I guess you'll have to pay a forfeit," the one in white said. He brought the knife close, and brushed the point against Blake's throat.
    It had been a long time since Blake's two years in the service and his two years of militia, when he had been called out to quell food riots and fight in little brushfire wars between ethnic arks. It had been even longer since the bravos in his ark section had challenged him on the way to school. Violence was just not part of Blake's world anymore. He had almost forgotten that special surge of fear and the thrill that such situations brought. There were accidents in his world, such as a fail-safe system failing on someone's aircar, or someone at a party falling a few levels and bloodying a neighbor's dome or being squished on his terrace. But that violence was not personal, it was just part of modern living, like elevator failure or a fouled computer readout.
    His adrenaline surged and Blake started thinking fast. He knew these scrubs didn't want money. Indeed, they would have been very surprised to find any. If he were a woman, they might rape – not out of passion but out of boredom, or out of