Jack the Bodiless

by Julian May

  With my initial shock slowly receding, I realized that the bookstore should be the least of my worries. I whimpered, “We’ll be tracked down and arrested before we ever get out of New England—”

  “Not if I toss a few blivets into the system,” Marc said. “Uncle Rogi, don’t worry. I’ll see that you get to the Reserve safe and undetected. I’ve got everything worked out.”

  “Well, that’s just friggin’ dandy!” I said. “And I suppose when Teresa and me are all settled in and comfy in the cabin, with the critters gathering outside licking their chops, you’ll just fly back home and pretend nothing’s happened—and no one will suspect a thing. Not your father. Not Denis or Lucille or your gung ho Intendant uncles or aunts. Not Enforcer Chief Malatarsiss and her squad of Magistratum mindfuckers—when the family’s forced to drag you down to Concord and get your young brain peeled like a hard-boiled egg!”

  “Nobody,” said Marc calmly, “messes with my mind. And I told you I have a plan all worked out.”

  Teresa smiled, stood on tiptoe, and kissed my cheek. “I’m so glad you’re going to stand by me, Rogi. You know, I was just the least bit apprehensive about having to cut the wood.” Her charm melted me like a Popsicle on a griddle. She whirled away into her adjacent bedroom to secure the additional items, and I flung up my arms in surrender.

  “Oh, hell. The three of you have got me backed into a corner, and you know it.”

  Marc had the grace to grin. “Ace coercers—me and Mama and Jack.”

  The young devil was so confident he had me buffaloed that he didn’t even probe my mind. And a damn good thing, too, because I wasn’t thinking of the baby at all as Coercer Number Three …

  I turned away from Marc and stared out the streetside window of the studio, letting my wits freewheel in total discombobulation. Suddenly I spotted a small white ovoid and a larger scarlet one drifting past the tower of the Catholic church.

  “Here comes the Hertz service egg towing that rent-a-rho you ordered,” I observed. “I suppose I’d better go down and sign it out.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Marc said, “to help with the details.”

  I might have known he had some fairly unusual details in mind.

  The Hertz agent waiting for us outside was a pretty young thing in her twenties, normal-minded as they come, and the name tag on her uniform blazer said Siri Olafsdottir. Marc’s coercion turned Siri’s smile to stone and her lushly fringed eyes into green glass. She stood in the driveway between the two parked eggs and my old Volvo with the canoe on the roof, a credit-card machine in one outstretched hand and a dangling set of plass rhocraft keys in the other, as motionless as a stop-frame hologram image in a Tri-D commercial. Marc had not only paralyzed her but also erased her memory of coming to Hanover, and he later extended the amnesia to include subsequent events involving lawbreaking Remillards. Little pearls of sweat formed on Siri’s downy upper lip while she waited in the summer heat, oblivious to any skulduggery.

  My terrible young relative sat himself down in the driver’s seat of the woman’s service egg, getting ready to bamboozle the Hertz firm’s computer.

  “We tell it she never came here. We tell it that the red 2051 Nissan Peregrine GXX with New Hampshire tag BWS 229 is in the shop for regular maintenance and will stay there for twenty-four hours.” He began to mutter into the command mike.

  Resigned to my fate, I detached the keys gently from poor Siri’s fingers and opened the red egg. It was a luxury model with an oversized boot. We were going to travel in style. I wondered how Marc planned to fudge North American Air Traffic Control and the ever-vigilant skytroopers, to say nothing of the rho-field neutralizers, the warm-body detectors, and the other alarm systems that guarded the perimeter of the Reserve itself.

  “Patience,” the juvenile delinquent said. “First we send this good woman on her way.” He climbed out of the service craft and said to the Hertz agent: Into your egg.

  She obeyed like a lovely robot.

  Now start up and fly back to Burlington International. You have been out for coffee. You never came here. You never saw us.

  The vehicle’s door rolled shut. We stepped back as Siri lit the thing up. The faintly glowing purplish net of the safety-jacketed rho-field clothed the egg’s outer surface. The machine retracted its pads and hovered half a meter above the ground for a moment. The woman inside now acted perfectly normal—and paid no attention whatsoever to us. She jockeyed neatly out of the driveway, floated to the middle of the street, signaled properly, and swooshed straight up out of sight. A few dry yellow elm leaves swirled in the vortex, then settled back onto the pavement.

  Marc checked his wrist chronograph. “Nearly fourteen-thirty. You go get Mama, Uncle Rogi, while I do a few little modifications on our egg’s electronic ident system.”

  “Now, you listen here,” I protested. “Even though I do have a license, I’m not all that much of a hot-dogger flying these things—especially cross-country and vector-free. Usually, when I rent one, I just plug into a canned routing and put the thing on auto and take a nap or read until I get to my destination. But there are no Vee-routes up in the B.C. boonies where we’re heading. The last time I went to this place, I got picked up at the Bella Coola skyport by my friend Bill. I haven’t the least idea how to find the Reserve.”

  Marc had the egg’s tool kit out and was removing the panel of the navigation unit. “Don’t sweat it. I’ll be doing the flying.”

  “I might have known! Oh, well. What’s one more crime added to the stack?”

  “Get Mama,” Marc repeated. “You’ll be driving her in your car to the fairgrounds down on River Road. Stop at a convenience store along the way for a few picnic supplies. Make certain somebody in the store remembers seeing you. Park in the fairgrounds lot, down in the grove of trees near the riverbank. I’ll meet the two of you there with the egg, and we’ll transfer the equipment and be off.”

  “But how do you intend to—”

  That’s enough Uncle Rogi!

  His coercion rocked me back on my heels, but an instant later he was radiating soothing vibes and I was climbing the steps.

  “No one will see the egg here in our driveway,” he assured me. “No one will see it at the fairgrounds.” Trust me! “Now get upstairs and tell Mama she has three minutes to get down here. We’ve got a long way to go in a very short time.”

  The first thing Marc had done in his scheme to foil the bloodhounds was to change the transponder identification code of the Hertz egg (a mere Class Four felony), so that its license tag now became Vermont WRT 661 as far as the sensors of Area 603 Air Traffic Control Syscom were concerned. He flew the thing on manual to our rendezvous beside the Connecticut River and was there long before Teresa and I arrived in the groundcar, which gave him time to program a few more illegalities into assorted computer systems scattered across North America. His creativity blurred the rhocraft so that it blended into the scenery and remained unnoticeable to nonoperant observers, a virtuoso upgrade of an old trick long cherished by operant children.

  After the camping gear was loaded in the egg and the canoe hidden in some brush down by the river, we left my car parked in plain sight. The rhocraft, still screened from casual detection, took off at barely subsonic speed from the deserted lot, rose to the local programmed-airway entry altitude, 1,120 meters, and hovered.

  Marc let out a great exhalation of relief as he ceased the metacreative camouflaging of the vehicle, which was a bit of a mental strain for him at that age. Then he filed a perfectly ordinary flight plan that allegedly originated in our small local airfield a couple of kloms west of the fairgrounds. We filed for Boston Metro, just as though we were taking an ordinary jaunt to the big city. The display of the navigation unit came up with a menu of optional routes, based upon the heaviness of the traffic patterns at the moment, and invited the driver to make a selection.

  Marc chose one of them, saying “Express” into the mike.

  The unit said, “Traffic Contro
l regrets that express service to Boston on Vee-2A36 is unavailable at this time due to a minor system malfunction. We apologize for the inconvenience. Service is due to be restored within approximately two hours.”

  “Fastest alternate,” Marc said, unperturbed.

  “Thank you. We are programming. Your preset average velocity on the route displayed will be one thousand kilometers per hour. Your estimated travel time to Boston Metro periphery is ten minutes, twelve pip two seconds. Please confirm Vee-route and destination.”

  “Confirm,” said Marc. “Go.”

  The unit said, “Entering controlled airspace,” and the autopilot took over. The red egg went full inertialess and ascended to a cruising altitude of 12,300 meters before we could blink. The halfdome polarized, dimming the high-altitude sunlight, and the landscape of New Hampshire began to roll beneath us as we zoomed southeastward.

  Within a few moments we were part of a stream of ever-increasing numbers of rhocraft that shared our airway. Marc and Teresa were blasé in the face of this spectacle—the boy was now studying a display of aeronautical charts, and Teresa, sprawled elegantly on the rear banquette, told us she was going to take a nap—but I was still unsophisticated enough about egg travel to stare at the swarm of different-sized aircraft flowing along in orderly lines on all sides, the position of each monitored and controlled by faraway computers. We were spaced ten meters apart: private vehicles of every sort, many decorated with spots, stripes, swirls, or other idiosyncratic ornamentation; taxis and other commercial transports; and large and small haulers and service craft with company logos emblazoned on their skins. The odd Simbiari saucer or Poltroyan cigar-shaped orbiter stood out in the mass of multicolored ovoids like an exotic toy in the midst of a flight of gaudy Easter eggs. Up here in the bright stratosphere where the sky was always clear, the faint reticulation of the vehicular rho-fields was invisible. In inertialess flight there was no sound of wind or mechanism, not even a sensation of movement unless one looked down or watched individual eggs glide toward the outer edge of the procession as the traffic computers shunted them to some new vector. Gradually, I began to relax, and even managed to drink a Pepsi from the sack of picnic food.

  When we were within a few minutes of Boston, our vicinity display showed a blue police-cruiser blip hard-charging up from behind us in free flight. I was aware of Marc tensing, his mind poised to exert coercion; but no official notification came up on our display or blared from the speaker, and no sigma tractor-beam laid hold of us. The cruiser, beacons scintillating, shot past us on the left like a cobalt meteor and disappeared.

  The navigator said, “ETA Boston Metro three minutes. Please indicate new Vee-route or give alternative command. Failure to exercise navigation decision will result in your vehicle being inserted into a holding pattern.”

  Marc said, “Destination Logan International Airport Departures.”

  “Departure for which carrier?” the unit inquired.

  “United,” said Marc.

  “Your estimated travel time to Logan International Airport United Departures via controlled airspace is four minutes seven pip two seconds. Please confirm destination.”

  “Confirm. Go.”

  Along with hundreds of other aircraft, we began to descend through a lumpy overcast and decelerate. In an orderly aerial promenade, the streams of eggs separated and went their individual ways, moving neatly through other columns of vehicles, traveling in other directions at other preset altitudes and velocities. It was raining in Boston; but Traffic Control routed the rhocraft around potentially dangerous cumulonimbus cells, and of course no other aspect of the stormy weather had any effect on the vehicles. There were plenty of private eggs heading for the airport, and several dozen accompanied us on our intricate course to the United underwater embarkation area.

  Teresa woke up as we landed on the shower-lashed entry pad and were diverted onto the conveyor that would carry us beneath Boston Harbor. She looked around at the familiar skyline in puzzlement. “But what are we doing here?”

  “Relax, Mama,” Marc said. “We’re only going to stay long enough for the sensors of the airport to log the fake identification of this egg in short-term memory. When we stop at the departure platform, I’ll change the egg’s transponder code again. After we exit, we’ll fly Vee-free away from the airport into Boston itself, then reenter controlled airspace from the MIT interchange in Cambridge, across the river.”

  “But why?” Teresa asked.

  “My plan should preclude anybody’s realizing that we left home by air. They’re all going to think that the three of us stayed in New Hampshire and went canoeing. But in case anyone should see through my scheme and try to trace our route out of state, I’m covering our tracks. You see, the authorities have a short-term record of every vehicle using the Vee-routes. Three days from now the record will be purged. If somebody thinks to sift Traffic’s memory before that, there’s a remote chance that they may spot the fact that the Vermont registration of this rhocraft is fake, thus fingering it as our getaway vehicle to Logan Airport. Once we arrive here, however, the bogus egg effectively disappears when I change its transponder code. And so do its passengers. You can fly almost anywhere on Earth from Logan, and if the gate attendant is suitably coerced, you can even do it without a ticket.”

  “I never would have thought of that,” she said.

  But Paul would have.

  We were now gliding down a cerametal gullet in the wake of a little yellow Saab that had elaborate rosemaling motifs ringing its fulldome canopy. The young couple inside it were locked in a passionate public embrace, having neglected to turn on the privacy screening. Marc was scowling at them.

  “But then what do we do?” Teresa asked him. “How will we get to British Columbia?”

  “From Cambridge we set a new controlled express course to Montréal, filing our flight plan under the new license code. It’s very unlikely that we’ll be traced to Montréal, but just to be safe, we pull the same registration switch at Dorval Airport, where huge numbers of rhocraft move in and out every day. Then we hopscotch to Chicago and pull the stunt again at O’Hare. We Vee to Denver and switch, then on up to Vancouver and switch, and finally go to Williams Lake, British Columbia, where we change registration for the last time. Then it’s ex-Vee to the hideout and dump you two off, and I return via a completely different routing. If everything works as I’ve planned, I’ll be home in the wee hours tomorrow, and the plan will be working before anyone can sort out exactly what happened.”

  “Good heavens,” Teresa murmured. “How very complicated it all sounds.” She had never learned to fly. She thought navigation was a bore—and there were so many tedious rules you had to follow if you wanted to travel at usefully high speeds on the Vee-routes.

  Marc continued: “All of those traffic control zones except Williams Lake are very large metros, with hundreds of thousands of eggs flying on the computerized airways every day. I think the chances of the Magistratum seeing through my scheme and tracing us to the Williams Lake end of the sequence before the three days are up are nil. But even if they do, from there we’re going to free-fly the final distance—so theoretically, you and Uncle Rogi could be hiding anywhere from the Arctic shore to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Not even the Krondaku would try to comb an area that size with a rough body-scan. And I’ve got a way to foil the operant-signature farscanners that I’ll explain later.”

  “How long will the entire trip take?”

  “If we luck out and express all the jumps from Boston, it would take about three hours to get to Williams Lake. Another half hour or so at ex-Vee max will get us to Uncle Rogi’s friend’s place out in the bush at Nimpo Lake. We’ll probably kill another couple of hours en route getting the food and equipment, but we also gain three hours due to the time-zone differential. That far north, there should still be plenty of daylight left to fly in to the Reserve, and the weather up there is good. I just checked.”

  Teresa was mystified: “But, darling
, what difference does it make whether we land in the Reserve in daytime or at night? And why worry about the weather?”

  I knew the answer to that, and so did Marc. He told her soothingly, “Don’t be concerned about it, Mama. Just relax.”

  We were coming into the brightly lit airport departure gate, where there was the usual jam-up of private eggs and taxis and limos discharging travelers onto the platform. People were lined up at standby counters, looking depressed the way they always do. Piles of tagged luggage awaited the attention of overworked porter robots. Babies cried, business travelers slouched, outbound vacationers bounced about excitedly, and the airport police strolled around, keeping an eye on things and muttering into their wristcoms.

  The two people in the yellow egg ahead of us were mushing it up again. Like other private-vehicle arrivals, they would have five minutes of authorized parking before the Port Authority took note of their tag number and required a very good explanation for the prolonged stay. Cautionary signs were everywhere, reminding drivers to tell their guidance systems to exit when the warning flashed on the dashboard.

  “Oh, dear,” Teresa said, as we came to a stop. “I really think I ought to visit the loo.”

  Marc had the privacy screening up and was already tinkering feverishly with the transponder. “If you must,” he said evenly. “But if you take longer than the allotted five minutes, our ident gets logged in long-term memory, and a human cop comes over to scope us out. The cop could decide to cite us, and then he’d notice that the external license number of our egg and its transponder code don’t match—and we could all be dead.”

  She blinked. “I believe I can wait.”

  Marc finished his fiddling and slammed the panel back into place. The warning light had not even come on when he told the command mike: “Exit!”

  Smoothly, the conveyor took hold of our egg and sent it back toward the surface. A few minutes later we had reentered controlled airspace at Cambridge under the cloak of our new registration and were hurtling toward Montréal at 2000 kph.