by Ted White
It was starting to add up.
He’d given his destination as San Francisco, in Bay Complex. He was taking the Coast Road. Just sightseeing.
I decided San Francisco could wait until the next day.
The okay for my second trip to the west coast came through without any questions asked. I decided my promptness in returning from the first one had been a mark in my favor, but I really didn’t give a damn. Here I was, chasing down after-the-fact details, while something was going on out there, three thousand piddling miles away, and I couldn’t figure what it was.
It was raining when we landed in Oakland, and the outside temperature was in the middle fifties. Fortunately, I was spared any direct contact with the weather. I tubed over to San Francisco, and took a pod to the main branch office of the car-rental company. They do a thriving business on the west coast with people who want to explore the mountains and the still undeveloped shore areas.
I was expected, and a lush young woman with dusky nipples ushered me into the branch veep’s office.
“Your car hasn’t checked in as yet,” he told me after a handshake. Correy Burke was twenty years younger than I’d expected—a mere youth and not likely out of his mid-twenties. It made me bristle somewhere inside my Id: clean young kid makes it into Private Enterprise. He’d be retired and sitting on a handsome fortune before, I was halfway to my pension. To give him his due, he seemed to sense the awkwardness of our relative ages and positions, and he was pretty nice to me. In itself that was a surprise.
“When do you expect them?” I asked.
“Them?” he repeated. “We have it down for a single—a Mr. Linebarger….”
“I’m assuming he has three guests,” I said.
“Oh, well… that would make a difference in our rate differential,” he said, unobtrusively fingering a few buttons on his private console, and no doubt taking notes. Oh, he’d earned his position—that was obvious. He looked up again. “Sorry,” he said. “About the projected hour of arrival—it depends a good deal on that particular run. It’s the original Camino Real, you know—the Pacific Coast Road, we usually call it. Runs right along the coast. Historical—and unimproved. I’ve known folks to do it in a day—others have taken two, three days. Depends, also, on whether they stop often, or even lay over for a while.” He smiled. “Our rates are based on both mileage and elapsed time. We encourage them to enjoy themselves, not to rush things. After all, with scenery like that, you want to let it really soak in, right?”
“So you really don’t know when they’ll get in, is that right?”
“That pretty well sums it up, yes.”
“But you’ll have a watch out—?”
“Oh, indeed. In fact, I’ll have a special query on that car. We’ll have it checked out for additional occupancy, you see.” He consulted his infomat. “Yes, I see we have sufficient funds or deposit to cover it.” He smiled up at me again. “We always encourage a heavy deposit on trips like these. Makes it more painless to spend it after you’ve transferred your credit on a provisional basis, anyway.”
Yes sir, that boy was going right to the top of the heap.
He suggested I tube down to Monterey, where the car would actually be coming in. “We don’t allow cars on city streets, you know,” he told me, as if I was some hick who hadn’t come from the first city to ban private vehicular traffic well over a century ago. So I went down to Monterey, and found the rental garage nicely located on the southern edge of the Greater Bay Complex, a convenient pod-lane stacked with waiting pods close by.
And then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
After a while, I was bored out of my mind.
I was here because it was important to apprehend our two original runaways. I had no illusions about my abilities to do that; I had a court-issued restraining order ready to serve on Dian whenever I next saw her for desertion of a government job and betrayal of Bureau (ho, ho) secrets to a registered alien (small irony, that). I also had a Planetary Arrest to serve on Bjonn, since as an alien he had no citizenship and no rights here on Earth. It was a ticklish point, and one I was sure the legal department had agonized over, but it boiled down to the fact that Bjonn had been here on good behavior, and it was now felt he’d abused our hospitality. His dealings as an Emissary would necessarily be formally restricted from now on.
After we caught them, that is.
After I caught them.
If I did. Or, rather.… When I did.
Finally, a man at the garage suggested I get a room for the night. “We’ll let you know when they pull in,” he said. “You don’t have to sit around here all night.”
So I took a room in a nearby hotel, a nearly featureless cubicle with an eating nook off one side, a bed in the middle, and a 3-D facing the foot of the bed. Out of desperation, I turned on the 3-D.
An apparent hole opened up in the wall of the room behind the 3-D, and ghostly images moved about in it. The control was on the stand built into the bed’s headboard, and I fiddled with it until the tuning was accurate and I had both sound and solid color. The 3-D stage was small—a cube no more than two feet on each side—but, after all, this was just a cheap hotel room. The set was probably twenty years old. The sound didn’t synch perfectly to the figures—every time a player crossed the middle of the stage to the left side, his voice came from the far left—but that probably meant a couple of speaker-strips in the wallpaper were dead. So what else was new?
I had inadvertently tuned into one of the pirate channels—which probably explained the difficulty in properly tuning it. I’d heard rumors that you couldn’t pick up a pirate channel on hotel sets or other “public” sets, that they had been fixed to reject pirate signals. But maybe the source of this signal was too close. Most of them broadcast from moving ships in the Pacific, beaming for one of the big overhead direct-relay satellites, and thus getting pretty close to worldwide coverage, but perhaps this one was broadcasting locally, on direct line-of-sight, ship to shore.
It was Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I watched it.
A good cast, I thought. Naturally, they played up the bawdy aspects of the play. Titania and Oberon were played nude, and Titania’s lovemaking with Bottom, the weaver cursed with the head of an ass, was dwelt upon in lascivious detail. I found the pornography disturbing, but the play was, after all, Shakespeare, and vastly superior to the mind-rot to be found on the legal channels. Sometimes I wondered why the only interesting programming came from the pirate channels—but then I reminded myself that the vast majority of the populace, on Public Care and with little enough to abate their boredom, must prefer the lulling opiates of public 3-D. After all, anything too provocative might just provoke discontent.
I watched until the play concluded, and then switched off the set. I’d had my yearly dose of 3-D and could now return to the real world content. Soon after, I drifted into a hazy shade of sleep….
… from which the infomat buzzer jerked me awake what seemed like only minutes later.
“Mr. Dameron?” It was somebody I hadn’t seen before, but he wore the uniform of the rental garage, and I could see the word “manager” emblazoned on a small badge he was wearing.
I blinked a couple of times and assured both of us that I was indeed Mr. Dameron.
“The car you were interested in just came in,” he said.
I glanced at the time: 01:10 hours. I sighed. “Are you holding them?” I asked.
“There’s just one man—the driver. We’ve told him he has a refund due and that we’re clearing it out. I don’t know how long we can stall him.…”
“Are you checking out the car?” I asked.
“Sir?”
“There were four people in that car,” I said, wondering if we had the wrong car, the wrong man, or what. “I understand you have ways of checking that out—and of adjusting the rates.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’ll have them check that out. I just came on duty an hou
r ago, and I didn’t find any memos on that. Thanks.”
“Okay,” I said, and thumbed off.
I dressed and went over to the garage. When I got there, the night manager and two men were standing in a semicircle around the chair of a frightened-looking boy.
As soon as I approached the group, I knew something was wrong. I’d read Linebarger’s biography, and he was a dark man in his late twenties. This kid could hardly be over graduation age, and he had red hair and very white skin, on which his freckles were pronounced blotches. He looked almost blue with fear, and he was hugging himself and shivering.
The three garagemen looked angry, but moved away in deference when I came up. The silence was hostile, and I guessed they’d found the evidence of additional passengers they’d-been looking for.
“All right, son,” I said, as I stood looking down at the boy. “What’s your name?”
His eyes were wide, and his skin so pale I could see the veins under it. “Uh, Tanner, sir. Le-Leroy Tanner.”
“How old are you, Leroy?”
“Nineteen, uh, sir.”
“Nineteen,” I repeated, for effect. “You didn’t hire this car, did you?”
“No, sir. No, I didn’t.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“Uh, will you tell me something, please? Am I in trouble? I mean—legal trouble?”
“You mean, do you need a lawyer? I don’t think so. Not if we can get this straightened out.” I saw the manager give me a nod. I didn’t return it, “We’re interested in the car.”
“I met this man,” he said. “He gave it to me. I mean, he told me I could have the use of it, if I turned it in up here. He said I might even get some credit transferred on it.”
“You met a man,” I said. “Tell me about that. Where did you meet him? And how?”
Chapter Nine
The next morning I took a rental car down the Coast Road, with young Leroy Tanner in the other seat beside me.
We were on automatic the first few miles, so I relaxed and turned to face him, picking up where we’d left off the night before. “You were hiking,” I said. “Up from Pacifica? Isn’t that quite a hike?”
He nodded, keeping his eyes on the road as though afraid to directly face me. “It seemed like a great way to do the summer,” he said. “When I started, anyway. By the time I met Mr. Linebarger, I guess I’d had about enough.”
“Tell me about it again. No pressure, just put it together the way you remember it.”
He nodded again, and his Adam’s apple throbbed convulsively, as if he was trying to swallow something too big for him. “Yeah,” he said. “Well.
“By the time I got to Lucia, I’d really had it, you know? You get maybe three hours of sunshine a day, and the rest is fog and drizzle. It comes in off the ocean in the afternoon, fogs you in all night, and doesn’t burn off until noon or later. I was damp all the time, and I had a cold—I still have a cold—and I still had a good way to go. So I thought, maybe I can get a lift, you know? Maybe somebody in a car will stop and pick me up. But they wouldn’t. I’d stand on one of those horseshoe curves, and I’d wave, and they’d just crawl right by me. So slow I could see in and see their faces, and they always stared ahead, like I wasn’t even there. I could’ve thrown myself right in front of them, and they’d just have run me over!” His voice cracked with emotion.
“It’s a private world,” I said. “People don’t like to be intruded upon.”
“I know,” he said, snuffling a little.-Maybe it was just his cold. “Well, anyway, I was up around Big Sur, and I was sitting in this fake lodge they have set up, you know, where they sell souvenirs and all that. I was just trying to get warm. And I saw this car pull in, and it had four seats, but just this man and woman in it. So I waited by the car until they came out, and I asked them, could I please have a ride. And the guy said—he was very nice about it—he said they’d like to, but they were on a short budget and couldn’t afford it. So I asked what he meant, and he said if I rode in their car they’d get charged for another person for the whole trip, and they couldn’t afford that. Well, I’ve got a card, of course, but not very much credit left for this month, and I was afraid it would run over what I had, because the rental on a car like this is pretty high from what I hear—”
“You hear right,” I said.
“—so I just thanked them. Then while I was watching them drive away, this quiet-looking man comes up to me. He’s tall, dark, and—oh, I dunno… he really seemed to Understand about things and to, uh, to care.
“He said he’d heard me talking to the other man, and he thought maybe he had an answer for my problems. We walked over to this other car, and he said, how would I like to drive it up to Monterey. He said he’d rented it down south, put down a big deposit on it, and now he had decided to stay in this area and he needed to get the car north and so I’d be helping him at the same time. He told me I could put the leftover credit from the deposit on my card.
“Only problem was, I didn’t know how to drive.”
“He taught you, then?”
“Yeah. It took a while before he was satisfied I’d be all right, but he was a good teacher, very patient, and I learned.” It isn’t really that hard to learn; I’d learned myself that morning, in the practice lot the rental company provides. The car had a go pedal and a stop pedal, and you point the tiller where you want it to go. It has a radar system that stops it if you look like you intend to run into something, or slows you down if you’re overtaking another car too fast. It has all the gadgets to keep you from hurting yourself, and automatic road-control on the approaches to the cities which guides you in automatically to the garages. It doesn’t take long to learn.
“And then you drove up,” I said. “To Monterey.”
“Yeah. I guess that was a mistake.”
The warning buzzer sounded; we were reaching the end of the automatic road. If I didn’t show signs of alertness and take over the controls the car would automatically stop and park itself. I went through the proper motions.
We were entering the Coast Road, now, and on what I’d been told was The Wrong Side—the ocean side. “Most people go down south and bring cars up,” the day manager had told me. “We have a hard time finding drivers going south. Something about driving along that sheer drop for a hundred miles scares them.” I could understand why. There wasn’t much beach along here—mostly just rocks, upthrust from the surf. The road twisted its way along the cliff face, sometimes climbing high above the water, sometimes dipping down to within a few yards of the booming rollers. Vegetation was sparse and twisted, the trees like gnarled old men reaching in vain for help and safety and shelter. Mist, looking like low-hanging clouds, sent fingers in over the coast, occasionally covering the windshield with tiny droplets of dew which the car automatically cleaned off each time.
Then the road swung inland, around the chin of a low ridge and into a set of deeply groved, heavily forested valleys. High above us the sky turned bright blue, and from somewhere out of sight the sun sent down shafts that set the woods steaming.
“This is Big Sur country,” the boy said. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“If you go for that sort of thing,” I said. The road was climbing now and I had to dodge cars parked on the edge of the road, barely off the pavement. Nature-lovers, I suppose.
We passed odd-looking houses, all detached and on their own acreage, some perched on hillsides of naked rock, others almost lost among the evergreens. They were all stamped with the eccentricity of individuality, and I felt the air of nonconformity, of deliberate oddity, which always alienated me. Some people flaunt it. The people who lived here certainly did.
“Where’s the town?” I asked.
“There isn’t any—not really, anyway,” Tanner said. “Just a cluster of stores and that fake lodge I told you about. They’re still up the road a bit.”
“You mean the people who live here are all scattered around the place?” I asked, gesturing at a typica
l house we were passing.
“That’s right,” he said, his tone a little defensive.
I shook my head and drove on.
“Here it is,” the boy said. I swung the car to the left, across the oncoming lane, and felt it brake itself as we crunched over cinders into a parking space. We stopped smoothly, just six inches from the barrier. It had obviously been placed there for exactly that reason. I saw no scars upon its timbers.
“This is where you met Linebarger, is it?” I said.
He said it was.
“Let’s climb out and take a look around,” I suggested. “If you see him, let me know. But don’t be really obvious about it.”
“Okay.” A little sullen.
The air was still damp and a little cool in the shade uncomfortably warm in the sun. I made my way into the “fake lodge” with all deliberate speed.
We talked to people, we hung around, we watched the cars that stopped, and we listened to the locals. And we saw and heard not one sign of Linebarger, Mills, Dian or Bjonn. I was beginning to feel foolishly frustrated, a vast sense of anticlimax hovering over me. Finally I decided to use an infomat and check in with my office. Maybe something had turned up.
I keyed in my own office infomat first, for messages. Instead there was a relay-click and Tucker’s face filled the screen again. “About time you thought of that,” he said.
I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “Now, what’s happened?”
“It isn’t what’s happened,” he drawled, “it’s what hasn’t happened. Just where are our friends, the Happiness Twins?”
“Dian and Bjonn?”
“I think those are the ones, yes.”
“Still missing,” I said. “I have them pinned down, though.”
“You do? Tell me about it.”
I did. Without skipping any important details, but as concisely as possible. I was feeling moderately proud of myself when Tucker snapped, “You mean to tell me you’ve drawn a big imaginary net around some hundred square miles of undeveloped area on all that flimsy piece of guesswork and circumstantial evidence?”