Don stared at the other man.

"Are you threatening me?"

Jace shook his head.

"Don, you surprise me. Actually, I was threatening you when I said I'd talk to your mother. She's so frail and sensitive these days, isn't she? It was a shame about the disappearance of your father. Learning about the filth her son's involved in, well, it might just about kill her, wouldn't you say?"

"That's it!" Don shouted.

"That's enough! I want you out of here!"

The repairman looked mildly surprised.

"No can do, Don. But if you keep interrupting me like this, I may have to call in some of my boys." The smile was back.

"They may have to be a little rougher with you than they were with poor Mrs. Mac Shea

Don rushed toward him.

"Oh, Don." Jace held the wire-cutters before him.

"These cut a lot more than just wires.

Don pulled the gun.

"Get out of here!"

"What?" Jace acted like people pulled guns on him every day.

"How can I leave before my job is done?

That wouldn't be professional at all."

His lack of fear only made Don more angry.

"Get out of here, or I'll kill you!"

The repairman shook his head firmly.

"I will not leave before I'm done, with you, your system, or your family. You knew that, Donny, from the moment I walked in here."

Don walked forward slowly, the gun aimed between the repairman's eyes.

"Move, or I'll kill you."

The smile was gone from Jace's face at last.

"Sir, I have to warn you that shooting repair personnel could void your service contract." He waited a beat before waving the wire-cutters.

"Of course, I could always kill you first." He glanced back at the control panel.

"And then I'll call up your mother and tell her how you died." He giggled" Of course, I'll make up the more interesting details."

The repairman thought that was hilarious. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Enough!" Don screamed.

The repairman agreed at last. He jumped up with a yell and lunged for Don.

Don shot him at point blank range. The repairman spasmed, the wire-cutters missing Don's ear by an inch. One bullet in the head, and he was dead.

"Whoo!" Don cheered, throwing the gun down on his chair. What a rush.

The repairman was the first to go, gone from the floor without even a drop of blood left behind. The room reestablished itself in under a minute. Besides the faint smell of burnt cordite, you wouldn't even know he fired a gun.

d.a.m.n, those new holographies were good. The bullet had punched a hole in the console. He supposed he shouldn't use a real weapon in these things, but, heck, a gun gave it a real feeling of danger. And the way he'd juiced up that program, it had almost gotten away from him.

Almost, but not quite. That was the important thing, to be back in control.

Besides, it didn't look like the bullet had hit anything vital. The new diagnostic repair program should fix it up in no time. And these repairs would be made behind the scenes, the way it should be.

Don took a deep breath.

Not a bad night at all; just about the best one he'd had. He could do it all over again.

The phone rang, right on cue.

"Donny?" Amy asked.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

He held up his end of the conversation, but something didn't feel right. Even though he said the words, he didn't really feel them.

After what had just happened, he needed to challenge himself.

Maybe if he made Amy a blonde.

THE KIDNAPPING OF.

RONITAHR.

by Alan Rodgers Alan Rodgers' short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Miskatonic University, Tales from the Great Turtle, Masques #3, and The Conspiracy Files. His first published short story, "The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead" won the Horror Writers a.s.sociation's Stoker Award for Best Novelette. He lives in Hollywood, California.

LONG before the trial, before the spectacle, before the kidnapping and the apprehension--before all of that there was a comet in the sky.

Some folks called it the Wise Kings' Star, and said it was the harbinger of the Second Coming. Other folks called it the Wishing Star, and said it was the candle of our dreams.

The scientists were uniformly less romantic.

"It's a menace," they said.

"An interplanetary body in an orbit that will intersect the Earth--catastrophically."

The reporters who translated that into English said it meant that we were all about to die.

"This is how the dinosaurs became extinct," Ted Koppel said on Nightline.

"A comet--or perhaps it

was a meteor of enormous size--hit ground in Yucatan, remaking our geography, and shattering the world. Weather patterns went into eclipse for centuries and whole ecologies collapsed. Could this be the fate that awaits us in the coming weeks? Will mankind go the way of the Tyrannosaur?"

His guests went on to bolster all of the most frightful speculations.

"We have ten weeks," said Dr. Ken Roman of the Inst.i.tute for Psychical Research in Tuskegee, Alabama.

"The comet's...o...b..t, of course, is relentless;