Paradox Alley

by John Dechancie

  Darla came running in. “Carl left,” she said breathlessly. “Took the Chevy.”

  “What?” I yelped. “Where’d he go?”

  “He was raving that he’d had enough crazy stuff and that he was going to get Lori and go away somewhere and forget all this. I tried to stop him, but he was already pulling out of the cul-de-sac.”

  “Great,” I said. “Arthur, do you have another communicator?”

  Arthur crossed to the opposite bulkhead and did the same trick, pulling a smaller oblong out of the wall. He handed it to me.

  I said, “Is there any way to track Carl’s Chevy?”

  “Do you know what type of propulsion system it has?”

  “Of course not. Hell, I’d never catch him, anyway. But it’s a good bet he’ll find Lori. So just guide me to her.”

  “Should I take the ship up? I’ve got the outside surface tuned properly now. It should be radar transparent. And with the camouflage, we’ll be fairly inconspicuous.”

  “Yeah, for a flying saucer. Just stand by. Dave, I’ll take the VW and go after him, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Okay,” Dave said nervously. “I’ll stay here in the dimension of imagination.”

  “Hm? Right.”

  A balmy, subtropical California night, traffic-choked and many-peopled. We raced north on the San Diego Freeway. By this time I could dart and weave between lanes like a native.

  “I wish there were some way for Arthur to contact Lori,” I said.

  “It might be awkward for her if Arthur’s voice suddenly came out of her handbag,” Darla ventured.

  “It might. Again, where did Lori say they were going?”

  “Out somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, to watch a drag race.”

  “A which?”

  “Drag race?” Darla flipped both hands palms up. “Do you have any idea—”

  “It has something to do with automobiles, but beyond that…”

  “In this culture,” I said, “what doesn’t have something to do with automobiles?”

  Traffic thickened as we got into the valley. I was used to the incessant rush of traffic by now. The automobiles no longer looked hopelessly antique to me. I rather liked their rococo flourishes and useless adornments: tail assemblies that stuck up like shark fins, massive and totally functionless chromium “bumpers,” kitsch statuary mounted on hoods, whitestriped tires, garish paint schemes, buffed wax finishes, radio whip antennae, blinding tail-light configurations, and other embellishments.

  “Arthur?” Darla called into the communicator. “Are you tracking them?”

  “They haven’t moved. You are now about five kilometers west of their position.”

  I took the next cutoff and headed east on Roscoe Boulevard, then made a series of lefts and rights at Arthur’s direction as he zeroed us in on the signal emitted by the communicator that Lori was carrying. We passed a big parking lot adjacent to a brilliantly lighted outdoor stadium.

  “This might be it,” Darla said.

  Howling engine sounds came to us from the other side of a curving grandstand. I hung a U-turn and headed back. The sign at the entrance to the lot read VALLEY DRAGWAY.

  “You’re right on,” Arthur said.

  It cost fifty cents to park. We got out, I locked up the VW and we jogged toward the entrance to the track, an opening in a corrugated metal fence blocked by turnstiles and a ticket booth. As we neared the booth, Darla stopped. She pointed left toward a row of cars. I looked and spotted Carl’s Chevy.

  “Which one is it?” Darla wondered. “The double’s?”

  “No way to tell. Let’s look around. If we find another one, that means our Carl’s here.”

  We searched the immediate area but came up empty. It would have taken us an hour to cover the whole lot.

  “He might have parked out on the street,” I said. “Let’s go in.”

  The ticket girl said that there were only a few heats left to run, but sold us two tickets anyway. We bumped through the turnstile and walked through a concession area littered with scraps of sticky paper, coming to a passageway between two sections of grandstand. We mounted steps and came out into the seating area.

  The grandstand was crescent-shaped. A long, straight strip of asphalt began in the middle of the crescent and ended about two thirds of a kilometer out in brush-covered flats. Two bizarre vehicles, which were nothing more than long, low, open metal carriages with overgrown motors mounted on them, were poised at the starting line, bellowing like dinosaurs and shooting blue flames. An array of lights on a pole changed color, and the two things took off like demons loosed from hell, trailing smoke and fire. They reached the end of the course in no time, and parachutes blossomed from their back ends. The noise was incredible. A pall of gray haze hung over the track, and the air was pungent with fuel exhaust and the smell of burnt rubber. An announcement was made and a roar went up from the crowd.

  “What’s this all about?” Darla shouted above the din as two more outrageous vehicles approached the starting line.

  “A display of exotic automotive technology,” I said, “or a circus. Probably both. Let’s look around.”

  “What do we say if we run into Lori?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “We wink and act as if we don’t know her. But we stick close, and if our Carl shows up, we try to intercept him. And don’t ask me what we do if Carl Two catches sight of Carl One. I’m playing this strictly by ear, and my goddamn ears are killing me.”

  “Right.”

  We climbed to the last row and walked along an aisle, looking down over the heads of patrons. Besides the smoke and the fumes, I smelled women’s perfume, tobacco, and cooking grease. It was a good crowd for a Tuesday night.

  There were a good many young couples, some of which, at first glance, I mistook for Lori and Carl Two. Kids seemed to dress alike in this time and place. Maybe they do in all times and places. The grandstand was a huge affair and the crowd thinned out toward the far end of the crescent. No Lori in sight. We doubled back a ways, then went down-steps and walked along the bottom aisle, looking up and scanning for three familiar faces, two of which would be identical.

  We saw nobody.

  “Where could they be?” Darla fretted.

  “Don’t know. It’s a huge place. Maybe we just missed spotting them. Let’s go back to the concession area.”

  The hot-dog stand was closing down for the night, and people were leaving the track in steadily increasing numbers, filing through an exit on the other side of the concession area. I sent Darla to check the women’s room while I glanced in the men’s. The latter was being used, but not by either Carl. Darla reported no luck. I told her to stand by the exit while I went back to search the grandstand one more time. The voice over the loudspeakers announced the last race, to be run by two vehicles which looked a shade more conventional. I walked along the middle aisle scanning up and down the grandstand. “Jake?” came a quiet voice inside my pocket.

  “Arthur?” I answered. A man in a green T-shirt turned his head to me with a curious look. “Wait a minute,” I said.

  I took steps up to the last row, found some empty seats, and sat down. I took out the communicator.

  “Go ahead,” I spoke into it.

  “I’m tracking the other beacon. It has left your area.”

  I wondered how we had missed them. “Right. We’re leaving.”

  Hurrying back, I spotted Carl. It was our Carl—I recognized his clothes. He was caught in a crush of people at the head of the stairway leading down to the concession area. Just as I was about to close with him, he turned and saw me, then forced his way through the crowd, plunging down the steps. I followed, leaving jostled, angry teenagers in my wake.

  As he neared the exit gate, Carl saw Darla and slowed. I caught up with him. Darla ran over.

  “They left, Carl,” I told him.

  “I know,” he said, continuing toward the exit.

  “Did you see them?”

  “No, th
ey weren’t up in the stands.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I finally remembered. Most of that night is fuzzy to me. We went to the races, but we didn’t sit in the stands. I found out a buddy of mine was racing, and we went down to the pits. I still don’t remember everything, but we must have left by the pit entrance and walked around back to the parking lot.”

  “Let them go, Carl;” I said.

  “I have to be there tonight,” he said vehemently.

  “Carl, you can’t,” I said. “Look. Forces are operating here that we have no control over. I don’t know what would happen if you intervened and prevented the abduction. Nobody knows, but it’s a good bet that the universe wouldn’t be the name. You might throw it entirely out of whack.”

  We walked through the exit and out into the parking lot. “I know,” Carl answered. “I still have to be there.”

  “Carl, what is it with you? Something is bothering you, something you haven’t let on yet.”

  “That night, the night it happened,” Carl said. “Tonight. It’s about Debbie. The way she acted … the way I acted.”

  “Are you worried she’ll be hurt?” I said. “We’ve gone over that. Arthur told us that when your double pushes Debbie—Lori—out of the car, she’ll float. She won’t fall. She’ll still be in the gravitational beam the car is in. After Arthur tucks the Chevy into the small cargo bay, he’ll lower her down and we’ll pick her up.”

  “That’s just it,” Carl said. “I remember now. I didn’t push Debbie out of the car. That was where I was all screwed up in my memory of that night. I wasn’t trying to push her out. I was trying to keep her from jumping. But there was something else…” He stopped and looked around. “Oh, God.”

  “What is it?”

  “The car. It’s gone.”

  We were in the general area where Darla and I had found it. “This is where you parked yours?”

  “Yeah. He was parked way over on the other side, but when he was walking back this way from the pits, he must have seen the super-Chevy here and figured he remembered wrong. I do that all the time—forget where I parked. Now he’s got the super car.” He sighed, holding up a set of car keys. “This is the original key. It fits both cars, of course. And he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I made the super-Chevy identical to the ordinary one.”

  I didn’t know that to be a fact, but I did know that the vehicle he had created had been identical in every detail to the one he’d been driving when we met on the Skyway—the one I stole from him—down to the pair of fur-covered dice hanging from the rearview mirror.

  “How could you do that?” I asked.

  “I did the custom job on the original myself,” he said. “I spent two years doing it. Bought the thing when I was fifteen, before I could legally drive. I know every inch of that car.”

  I nodded. “Okay, then that solves the problem of how we make the switch. Your double’s already got the super-Chevy.”

  “Yeah. But there’s one more thing I have to do.”

  Carl turned to leave and I caught his arm. “Carl, don’t. You’re coming with us.”

  “Sorry, Jake, but—”

  He swung a wild left. I put up my forearm, but it was a feint, and I was slow to block his quick right jab. The punch landed squarely enough to daze me. Darla rushed in, but Carl had already begun sprinting away. Darla chased after him but couldn’t keep up. He disappeared into the streams of people exiting the track.

  Darla ran back. “Are you all right?”

  “Getting old,” I said. “He suckered me good.”

  “Should we go after him?”

  I rubbed my jaw, shaking my head. “No way to make a decision. We might screw things up by trying to prevent him from screwing things up. I’m coming around to thinking that nothing anybody does or tries to do can thwart fate from taking its course. This is turning into a Greek drama.”

  “I’ve always hated Greek drama,” Darla said.

  “Me, too. It’s those damn choruses breaking in and yapping all the time.”

  We found the Volkswagen and got in. We went nowhere. The exits were jammed up, and we had to wait in line. We were held up a good fifteen minutes, arid we tried to catch a glimpse of the other Chevy. Carl either had beaten the rush or was tied up at another exit.

  Finally we got out. When we were back on Roscoe Boulevard, I checked in with Arthur.

  “Lori is now bearing generally south,” Arthur informed me. “But she’s on a road paralleling that big express highway down there.”

  Darla leafed through the map of L.A. “Sepulveda,” she confirmed. “It intersects with Mulholland about a mile south of Sherman Oaks.”

  I turned left at the intersection of Sepulveda and Roscoe, heading south. We underpassed the Ventura Freeway and hit Ventura Boulevard, continuing straight. Sepulveda narrowed to two lanes, winding its way up into the Santa Monica Mountains. House lights glowed in canyons to either side.

  Darla turned on the dome light and looked at the analog wristwatch she had bought. “Eleven-thirty,” she said, and turned the light off.

  We had no timetable: Carl had said that he didn’t remember exactly what time the abduction had occurred. He guessed that it had happened around midnight.

  A pair of headlights grew in the rearview mirror. Carl passed us, doing at least seventy miles an hour. The original Chevy was a hot vehicle, too. I floored the pedal, and Dave’s VW coughed and gave its all, which was pitifully little. We chugged along in Carl’s wake until his tail-lights vanished around a bend.

  “Well, hell,” I said. “There goes the monkey wrench into the works.” I handed the communicator to Darla. “Check in with Arthur.”

  “Turn west off of your present route,” Arthur instructed us. At least that much was going according to plan. Carl had pinpointed the kidnapping site as being somewhere near San Vicente Mountain, the peak of which overlooked Mulholland west of Sepulveda.

  I missed the turnoff before the tunnel and had to double back. We went up a short ramp and got onto a dirt and gravel road—Mulholland Drive. It led us into a surprisingly remote-looking area. You’d never guess that one of the biggest cities the world had ever seen was just down the mountain. It wasn’t exactly desolate, but you, got the feeling that you were a long way from everything.

  The road was edged with scrub brush and an occasional prickly pear, and wound through groves of live oak and juniper. We drove along for several kilometers without seeing anything.

  “Jake? Darla?”

  “Yes, Arthur,” Darla answered.

  “The signal source has stopped at a point due west of you. You’re almost on top of it.”

  I slowed, though I couldn’t see thing. I coasted down a slight grade, searching my side of the road.

  “Arthur, where are you?” Darla asked.

  There was a slight delay, then: “Right above you. I have the phony airplane lights turned off.”

  “We don’t see the car,” Darla told him.

  “It’s parked about fifty meters off the road. Just to the right, up ahead.”

  I saw a gap in the brush—a narrow side road. I stopped. Darla said, “Arthur, are there any other vehicles in the area?”

  “None that I can see or detect.”

  “Let’s make sure,” I said, starting forward again and turning off onto the side road, which was little more than a horse trail leading us around the base of a hill. We passed under a large brooding tree and came out into a hollow.

  I saw a glint of candy-apple red in the sweep of the headlights as I turned around.

  “There they are,” Darla said. “Unless it’s Carl.”

  “You’re right on top of the signal,” Arthur said. No other vehicles were in sight.

  “Okay, this is it,” I said. “Arthur?”

  “Yes, Jake?”

  “Are you ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.” He sighed. “Dearie me, how do I get myself into these predicaments?”

 
; “Did Carl ever mention another vehicle being nearby when it happened?” Darla asked with some concern.

  “Not that I remember. Let’s head back around the hill and park. We’ll come back on foot.”

  I headed out of the clearing, following the trail back almost to where it made its T with Mulholland. I wedged the VW between two junipers and killed the motor.

  “You got that flashlight?”

  “Yup.” Darla held it up.

  I shut off the headlights and the night deepened around us. We got out and walked back up the trail. Insects clicked and snapped in the weeds. The city was a glow on the horizon, and a faint, distant roar. The air was dry and cool. Darla played the flashlight beam from side to side, searching. About halfway to the hollow we found a path leading up the hill, making its way among big gray boulders. Darla shut off the flashlight and we climbed up to the first switchback and hid behind the rocks. We looked down and listened.

  “Carl may have gotten cold feet,” I whispered.

  Darla nodded. “Let’s hope so.”

  We went down and continued on the trail, stopping when we reached the tree with the weeping branches. I put the communicator next to my lips.

  “Any time, Arthur.”

  “Roger.”

  I looked up through the branches, but couldn’t see anything. Nevertheless I somehow sensed the craft’s descent, felt its immense bulk growing black-on-black against the sky like some dark angel auguring doom. A shiver ran through me, and I began to appreciate the extent of the trauma Carl must have suffered. I couldn’t blame him a bit for having been scared out of his wits.

  I heard a voice coming from the parked Chevy. It was Carl Two. A door slammed, and the engine roared to life. The back tires spun briefly, then the engine died. The starter whined futilely, again and again. There was a shout. In the dim scattered light of the city-glow we saw the Chevy begin to levitate from the ground, its front end rising. We heard Lori’s voice, but she wasn’t screaming. She was shouting something at Carl.