I rolled over onto the shoulder lane as the Bug whooshed by, then steered out toward the fast track again.
"There's gotta be something unusual on the other side of that portal," Sam ventured. "What, though?"
"A new fast food joint," I said.
"Yeah, and the Bugs want it all to themselves. That one shouted the same warning at us."
"Play it back," I told him. Sam did so. The message was identical. "Why are they just warning us? Why don't they stop us?"
The answer came about twenty minutes later. We had been cruising along while keeping a wary eye on our pursuers, who had faded back to the edge of scanner range. Suddenly, weird pulses of light flashed in the mist ahead. I braked hard and pulled over to the shoulder lane.
A shimmering, diaphanous tunnel of blue fire covered the roadway ahead, extending for as far as we could see. Crackling discharges snaked through it and dazzling starbursts of energy appeared within. The phenomenon straddled the roadway like an arched canopy, its walls formed by flaming prominences and rainbows of pale luminescence. There was something almost biblical about it―like a manifestation of the wrath of Yahweh. I half expected a booming voice to say, "BEYOND THIS POINT THOU SHALT NOT GO." But words were unnecessary; the message was clear.
"No wonder the Bugs didn't bother to shoo us away," Sam said. "No one in his right mind would drive through that."
"Oh, I don't know," I said airily. "It could be a car wash."
"Where's the slot for the fifty-credit piece?"
I came to a complete stop about three truck-lengths away. The rest of the squadron had kept formation but now were edging back into the fast lane to get a better look.
"What the bloody hell is it?" Sean was first to ask. "I mean it's obvious what it is, but what's it made of?"
I sat watching the dancing plumes of fire for a few seconds before answering. "I don't know. Plasma, pure force, maybe. Who knows. But can someone come up with a convincing argument that this thing doesn't extend all the way to the portal?"
"Not I," Sean said.
"Doubt if we can go around it," Carl said.
"I should think," Yuri offered, "that to be an effective barrier it would have to extend all the way to the commit markers. Don't you agree?"
"Unfortunately, yes," I said.
"Our 'friends' have stopped," Sam announced. "Wonder if they can see it through the smog."
"Well, if they can't, what they're seeing on the scanners is probably puzzling the hell out of them. Which is good." I took a deep breath. "Okay, gang, what are we gonna do?"
"I say we turn and have it out with 'em," Carl voted. "No way do I want them chasing us off-road."
"We'd be tangling with five vehicles, four of them we know to be heavily armored and possibly heavily armed," I said. "What chance would we stand?"
"With what I've got? Come on. Let's take 'em."
"Carl, I have no doubt you and Lori would be able to get through, but I'm thinking of the rest of the members of this expedition. We're out of missiles, Sean and Liam's buggy is unarmed. If it were just me and Sam―"
"Jake."
I turned around to look at Susan. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she had stopped crying. She regarded me now with kind of grim determination that was almost disturbing in the way it transformed her basically pleasant features. It was a Susan I had not seen before.
"Don't let those bastards take us," she said. "Do anything you have to."
I nodded. "That's all I wanted to hear." Flicking the mike back on, I said, "Right. Let's get 'em."
"Hooray!"
"Tell you what we're going to do," I continued. "Carl, you take the vanguard, and I'll lead the infantry behind you. Sean and Yuri, I want you right up against my starboard beam all the way, and if you see anything parked off road on that side, drop back and hug my tail. Got it?"
"Affirmative."
"Right you are."
"Carl?"
"Yeah."
"Can you conjure up a Green Balloon?"
"Sure can."
"Shoot one at 'em. Without scanners, they won't see us until we're on top of them."
"We'll have to hang back a while," Carl said. "We can't follow too close or it'll knock our gear out―not mine, just yours. The Chevy's immune to it."
"Can you regulate the speed of that thing?"
"Yeah, but even at maximum it's pretty stow."
"Well, give it all it's got."
"Right."
"We'll have to time it just right," Sam told me. "I'll track it and tell you when to go."
"Good. Are we all ready?"
"Set," Carl reported as he turned the Chevy around and began rolling slowly back uproad.
I did another U-turn and got in behind him.
After everyone was in position, I said, "Okay, Carl, let her go."
"Remember, it's gonna blank you guys out until it gets out of range. Even your engines."
"It can suppress nuclear reactions?" Sam asked wonderingly.
"That's right. Maybe it'd be better to shut 'em down."
With Sam's help, I scrammed the engine and did a quick power-down, but left the screens up on auxiliary power.
"Ready," I said. Sean and Yuri reported the same.
"Okay, here goes," Carl said evenly.
A sparkling, translucent, chromate-green sphere, about a meter and a half in diameter, sprang full-blown from the roof of Carl's automobile. Our screens instantly went down, along with the rest of the instruments that had been left on. The auxiliary motor died with a whine. The globe hovered above the roof for a split second, then took off directly over the rig.
"Hey," I yelled, though Carl couldn't hear me. "Wrong direction!"
Through the back window of the Chevy, I saw him throw up his hands in exasperation. Apparently, he had aimed the thing when the car had been turned the other way, and he'd forgotten. He stabbed at the dashboard to set up another launch, but before he could fire again the area to our rear let up with a series of quick, brilliant flashes. The ports polarized, but the ice-flats threw back a dazzling light. I couldn't see much through the rearview mirror.
The source of the flashing began to recede and auxiliary power returned. The communications board lit up.
"I'm back," Sam said. "That thing knocked me right out. What's happening?"
"Wow!" Carl shouted. "It's shorting out the barrier!"
"Shorting out" was as good a way to put it as any. Gliding over the road, the sphere was cancelling the barrier phenomenon as it went, drawing tendrils of fire to itself, absorbing them. The barrier was breaking apart, disintegrating in a wild display of pyrotechnics. Walls of incandescence wavered and tumbled, wraiths of lambent flame leaped skyward, then exploded into multicolored shards. Fountains of sparks poured from midair to cascade onto the roadway. Geysers of energy erupted, arched prominences arose and dissipated. The show was accompanied by sharp cracks of thunder and the sizzle of powerful electrical discharges.
Transfixed, I watched. When the disturbance disappeared into the smog I looked ahead to find that Carl was moving forward. I looked at the forward scanner screen. The five blips were still holding position. The Chevy scooted down the road. When it was just about to fade into the smog, another Green Balloon birthed itself from the roof. Carl swung the car into a hasty U-turn, tires screeching, and roared back. I fired up the engine.
"Let's go, gang!" Carl yelled as he tore by. "That balloon was trying to tell us something!"
"Just follow the bouncing ball, folks," Sam said merrily.
I said, "These kinds of things really don't happen to other people, do they?"
"No, son. You alone in the universe have been singled out."
"Why do you think that is?" I asked while swinging the rig around yet again.
"The gods are capricious."
"Thank you, O Oracle."
"I used to know an O'Oracle. Shamus O'Oracle. Owned a bar in Pittsburgh."
We followed the bouncing ball. Either Carl's estima
tions of its speed were wrong or the balloon was gaining energy from the encounter, because we couldn't keep up with it. Nothing but hazy air stood between us and the cylinders, which came into sight about ten minutes later. The balloon had done its job, having gobbled up the barrier all the way to the edge of the dome of airlessness maintained by the force fields surrounding the portal. The Green Balloon was nowhere to be seen, though. Either it had faded away or had gone on through the aperture, which immediately brought up a question: Had it, if the latter were true, interfered with the force field or, God forfend, with the portal machinery itself? But now was not the time to pose the question, let alone answer it. The cylinders were there, as was the aperture they created, and we shot through with nothing on our screens to indicate that anyone had a mind to follow.
Sam's reaction to what greeted us on the other side of the portal was something like, "Wha―? Huh???!!"
I immediately forgot all about the Green Balloon.
It took a while for what we were seeing to sink in. We had ingressed onto a limitless, mathematically level plain, its surface shiny and metallic, suffused with a pale blue tinge. The sky was a glory of stars bejeweling curtains of luminous gas. A spectacular globular cluster hung a few degrees off the zenith. Rivers of dark dust carved their courses in the firmament. The terrain was flat, impossibly flat. Not a rock, not a rill broke the uniformity, not a rise or a dip, however slight. It was the biggest billiard ball in the universe.
But all of that was the least of it. Sam had gasped for another reason.
There was no road under us.
Rather, the surface was one big road.
"Sam?" I said casually. "Where the hell are we?"
"Son, I'm speechless. In all my years on the Skyway, I've never seen anything like it."
"But where's the road?" I said.
"Your guess is as good as mine. We may be on it, though."
"What do you mean?"
"There may be some way to sense it―except I've tried everything already and I'm damned if I can see it."
" Are you scanning anything out there?" I asked.
"Nothing, absolutely nothing. I can't make a good guess as to how far away the horizon is."
After thinking a moment, I said, "Take a fix on a star up ahead. Maintain our course that way. I don't think I've drifted too much since we ingressed."
"Got one."
"You have the conn."
"Aye, aye."
"I'm going to assume there is a road under us, even though we may not be able to detect it―not a road, I guess, but a way. A direction to go in."
"Good idea. Hey, what's this? A dome, for pity's sake."
A "dome" is the faint microwave image that betrays the presence of a portal's force field shell. The cylinders themselves don't give off any electromagnetic radiation that's easily detectable at a distance, and they reflect none.
"Where?" I said.
"Thirty degrees to port."
It was unusual to find a portal so near an ingress point; however, this was hardly an average stretch of Skyway.
I got on the horn.
"People, we've detected a portal very near here. I'm for shooting it. Like to get off this bowling ball as soon as possible. What say you all?"
Everybody said let's get off this bowling ball, like, immediately.
"Follow me," I ordered.
Sam made the turn. I eased back into the captain chair for a short rest. We had been on the road for only a few hours, but I was a trifle tired. Getting old.
"I'll be switched. Another one."
"Portal?" I asked.
"Yup. And another. They're popping up over the horizon. Well, now at least I can get a fix… let's see. You may be interested to know that the heavenly body we presently inhabit is a little over five thousand kilometers in diameter."
"Pretty big," I mused. "And covered with portals. Interesting. But let's go ahead and shoot this near one, per our plan."
"Our plan? Wait, let me put stronger sneer quotes around that. Our 'plan'? "
"Such as it is. Roland, what o you think we have here? Any ideas?"
"Some fairly definite ones," Roland answered. "Remember all those Roadbugs we saw coming here?"
"Yeah, and I think I know what you're driving at."
"It all adds up. Access to this place was barred to all traffic but the Bugs. We get through by a fluke and find something completely different from every Skyway planet we've seen. It's obvious that the road with the barrier was a service road. And this…" He swept his arm out expansively.
"This," I finished for him, "must be the Garage Planet of the Roadbugs."
Chapter 17
"Or a garage planet," Roland went on. "One of many in a vast network servicing the whole Skyway system."
"With a web of service roads connecting them," I said. "Stands to reason."
"I wonder if this is the main garage for the Milky Way―do you think?"
"Maybe," I answered, "if we're still in the Milky Way."
Roland looked through the forward port at the sky. "No telling where we are, but if we're still in our galaxy, we may be very near the galactic nucleus."
"Let's hope not too near. A galactic-core black hole throws out a lot of hard radiation."
"If you're worried," Sam said, "the counters are absolutely silent. Not even cosmic-ray background. Either we've got equipment failure―which would contradict what I'm reading―or this planet has radiation shielding."
"Interesting," I said. "Wonder what it means?"
"Imagine a radiation shield covering a whole planet," Roland marveled. "And one that can stop high-energy particles, too." He shook his head. "But why? What needs to be protected here?"
"Maybe the fact that we're in a different region of the galaxy has something to do with it," I suggested. Then I shrugged.
"Who knows? And who cares, for that matter?" I folded my arms, snuggled into the seat and closed my eyes. "I'm going to try to catch a wink or two."
"You do that," Sam said cheerily. "Nothing to eyeball out there anyway. Best to let me handle it."
So I did for about the next ten minutes. I didn't sleep, though. The matter of what happened to the Green Balloon reasserted itself, and I realized something. The technology of Carl's automobile was at least equal to if not greater than the technology of the Roadbuilders. This was nothing less than a revelation. Such a state of affairs was unprecedented in the known sections of the Skyway. The technological achievements of the Roadbuilders were generally thought to be unequalled in the universe. No one had any hard evidence in support of the notion, but there was an intuitive feel of truth to it. The portals were impossible constructs, yet they existed. It was difficult to conceive that the race who had created them had not had mastery of the basic forces of the universe.
Fact: Cruising along behind us was an artifact, a machine, which had neutralized a Roadbuilder security mechanism.
Fact: The owner, or supposed owner, of this artifact was a twenty-year-old human being who claimed to have been born on Earth over one hundred and fifty years ago, and who also claimed to have been shanghaied by some sort of time-traveling extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Fact: The artifact was in the form of an antiquated vehicle, specifically that of a 1957 Chevrolet Impala (!).
Supposition: The occupants of the extraterrestrial spacecraft had built the artifact according to its present owner's specifications and quite possibly at his behest. (Carl had said only that "aliens" had built his automobile, but based on what Carl had implied, the inference that his captors had built it for him was easy enough to draw, unless I was misremembering.)
Item: Carl talked, acted, and appeared to be who and what he said he was: an American of the twentieth century displaced in time and space. (Not a fact, but a series of observations.)
Hypothesis: Carl was kidnapped by the Roadbuilders.
But to what end? Insufficient data.
Hypothesis: Carl was abducted by beings who had no direct a
ccess to the Skyway and who had developed interstellar space travel.
Why? To check out the Skyway.
Why did they bag Carl? They needed a spy.
Huh?
This was getting me nowhere. Obviously a long talk with Carl was in order. Until then…
Something out there against the star-field… black shapes outlined in glowing gas…
Sam swung us hard to starboard before I could grab back the controls.
"You saw it too, huh?"
"Yeah! Jesus."
We had been approaching the portal array from the side. You ought not to do that sort of thing.
"Well," I said, "we're off the beaten path, if there is one."
"Now we know that Roadbugs don't need roads," Roland commented.
"Here's a question," Sam said. "How are we going to shoot a portal without a straight road for an approach path, a guide lane, commit markers, and the rest of it, when we can't even see the cylinders?"
"Carl's instruments can probably handle it," I said. "I hope. Let's ask him."
I got on the horn and did.
"No problem," Carl said confidently. "This car has ways of detecting cylinders nobody else has."
The cylinders are tricky things to read. They suck up just about everything in the way of electromagnetic radiation and emit almost nothing that can be picked up without sensitive laboratory equipment. This side of the commit point, however, you can register small tidal stresses that can give you a fairly good idea of how to approach the portal. Personally, I don't trust most commercial instrumentation. I have relied on instruments when weather conditions have dictated it, but in those instances the orientation signals from the commit markers had made things fairly easy. Here, there were no commit markers. I had never negotiated a portal on cylinder-scanning instruments alone.
We sailed on into the starlit night for a while, discussing the ramifications of Carl's automobile's astonishing capabilities. Roland and John agreed that the car's technology had to be a match for the Roadbuilders'.
"But who could the manufacturers have been?" John said. "Some race in the Expanded Maze? The Ryxx, perhaps?"
"The Ryxx have starships," I said, "but rumor has it that they're fusion-powered sub-lightspeed crafts."
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