Sukuma-Taylor put a finger to his chin. “That’s very interesting. There’s another question, but I really don’t know how to—”
“You want to know what it feels like to die. Is that it?” The Afro nodded. “Damned if I know. I don’t remember anything about the crash. I have been told since that the son of a bitch who hit me head-on was drunk and that he came through it alive. I don’t think the Vlathu erased the memory, but I don’t have it.”
Sam’s response plunged the Afro into deep thought. Meanwhile, we had gained the top of the rise, and the rain was subsiding. Dark walls of rock lined the road; the Skyway had lucked into a natural pass. Just then, the headbeams dimmed, then came back to full voltage. The engine began complaining in a low gravelly murmur
“Jake, we have plasma instability,” Sam announced.
“Not a moment too soon.” I sighed. “I think it’s all downhill from here. What are you reading?”
“Everything I’m getting says we have a kink-instability developing. Temperature dropping. Yeah, the longitudinal current in the plasma is way over the Kruskal limit. Wait, the backup coils are cutting in. Back to normal now … hold on. Just a minute. Hell, there it goes again. Shut her down, Jake.”
“How much power in the accumulators?”
“We’re full up. We can get by on the auxiliary motor, as long as we’ve climbed our last hill.”
Chapter 7
WE MADE IT.
We coasted down the other side of the range. Beyond the headbeams the land looked very different, rocky and wild. Short, wide-trunked trees hung in dark foliage bordered the road. We drove across wide plateaus, hugged the rim of gaping dark areas that seemed to be canyons. The rain stopped, and the outside temperature plunged. Stars appeared, and the spectacular frozen explosion of a gas nebula was painted across a broad arc of sky. There were no recognizable constellations, for we were eight hundred light-years or so down from Terra on the Orion arm, antispinward. Goliath’s primary was not even a catalog number.
These were the boonies, all right.
We even lost the Skyway. It ended abruptly under a massive rockslide, but not before we were warned off by flashing road barriers and shunted onto a crisp, new Colonial Transportation Department highway. The road took us into Maxwellville in half an hour.
The hospital was surprisingly well-equipped. The seriously injured man was semi-comatose and in shock, but they shoved enough tubes into his body to wake a corpse, and brought his blood count up with plasma and iso-PRBCs. They even managed to save his foot. The rest of us they treated and released, after re-dressing and spot-welding our wounds and shooting us full of broad-spectrum antixenobiotics. To be extra sure, we all spent time under a “password” beam, which fried any foreign organism in our bodies that couldn’t produce genetic identification proving Terran origin.
Then we got the bill. I swallowed hard and pulled out my Guild Hospitalization Plan card, which had lapsed. They took the agreement number, but didn’t like it. Sukuma-Tayler insisted that he take care of it. So I let him, telling him I would pay him back.
I went back to the cab.
“John’s asked us to come out to their ranch,” I told Sam. “What do you think?”
“Fine for you. I’ll be in the garage.”
I scowled. “I forgot. I hate to be so far away from you. But motels are out. And when the mail rig gets into town, the local constable might be looking for us.”
“Better find out when the next mail is due.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath. “Sam, we keep piling up questions with no answers.”
“For instance?”
I went back to get a few things in the aft cabin. I packed my duffel and zipped it up. “Well, for instance, what was that hoo-hah at Sonny’s all about, anyway? If Wilkes wants me dead, why doesn’t he make his move? Why all that mummery about a merger? What does the Rikkitikki have to do with all this, if anything?” I grabbed Darla’s pack, went forward, and sat in the driver’s seat. “And why in God’s name, if they wanted to surprise us at the motel, did they drive up like Colonial Militia on a drug raid? They’ve never heard of sneaking? They could have had us easily. But no, they bust in there with rollers crackling and guns drawn. And how did they know we were there?”
“The manager could have been on Wilkes’ payroll. The word may have been out for us.”
“Yeah, maybe. But it still doesn’t make any sense. None of it does, including the wild stories—which everybody but us seems to have heard.” I shook my head wearily. “What a weird couple of days.” I remembered the lost key, and took the spare out of the box. I loaded up the squib with fresh charges. I undraped my leather jacket from the seat and put it on. The night was cool, but sunrise was not far off. We had spent most of the night in the hospital. I slipped the spare key into my jacket pocket.
“Where is everybody?” Sam asked.
“Waiting in the hospital lobby. I’ll go tell John we’re coming with him, after we bring you to the doctor.”
Dawn came and Maxwellville came alive. We drove to a nearby vehicle dealership, where Sukuma-Tayler rented a Gadabout, hydrogen-burning, for the trip to the ranch which was supposed to be about fifty kilometers south of town. He and his troupe followed us as we drove around looking for a garage. We found one, and the name of the place had a familiar ring to it.
The garage was a pop-up dome with an adjacent trailer serving as both home and office. No one was home (the place was a mess). The dome was deserted, or so I thought. A lone roadster was up on jacks hear the far end. As I drew closer, a pair of boots came out from under it, then legs, then the rest of Stinky Gonzales.
“Jake?” He squinted at me. “Jake! What the punk are you doin’ here? How the punk are you, anyway?”
Stinky spoke Intersystem better than anyone I knew; in fact, he was the only person I knew who could speak it idiomatically. His use of the billingsgate was nothing less than masterly. He had been born and raised on a world where Intersystem was the lingua franca as well as the official tongue. There are a few of those. The last time I’d seen him, though, had been on Oberon, an Inglo-speaking world.
“What the punk are you doing here?” I answered in English, though keeping to his favorite vocabulary. “You finally get run off Oberon?”
He laughed. “You son of a punkin’ bitch. What the punk do you think I’m doin’ here? Tryin’ to earn a punkin’ living! Hey, how you been, anyway? You gettin’ any?”
“My share, and no more. Busy?”
He gestured around expansively at the empty garage. “Oh, yeah, I’m so punkin’ busy I ain’t got time to wank it. They’re piled up like stack-cats around here.” The reference was to a multi-gendered animal native to his home planet; the species is noted for its acrobatic mating rituals. “What the hell you talking about? I just got set up here not two weeks ago. Gotta give it some time to—” He suddenly looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “Hey … what’s all this crazy merte I been hearin’ about you?”
“What crazy merte is that, Stinky?”
“I don’t know. All this punkin’ roadbuzz about you havin’ a Roadmap or somethin’. Goofy stuff.”
“That’s exactly what it is.” I slapped him on the shoulder. “Got some business for you. Sam’s ailing.”
“Well, let’s throw him against the wall and see if he sticks. Bring him in.”
I went outside and told John to take everybody to breakfast. There was a little diner not two blocks away. Then I eased Sam into the garage. It was a tight fit.
Twenty minutes later Sam was in pieces all over the dome. The engine was stripped of shielding and laid bare to the toros. During the process, I discovered to my nasal discomfort that Stinky was still worthy of the nickname only his friends could call him with impunity.
Stinky tapped the engine with his flex-torque wrench, a clinical scowl clouding his features. “I don’t know, Jake. This punkin’ thing might have to go.”
“The torus?” I yelped. “Christ, you’
re talking big money, Stinky.”
“Hey, do you want me to tell you punkin’ fairy tales or do you want the truth? The punkin’ confinement tubing is hotter than a [reference here to the sexual habits of the human inhabitants of a planet called Free] during Ecstasy Week.” He crossed his arms and looked the rig over distastefully. “Hey, Jake. How come you don’t get an alien rig? This thing’s a piece of merte.” He shook his head. “What do you want with this punkin’ Terran merte anyway? Look at this thing.” He reached and tapped a cylindrical component. “An ohmic preheater.” He snorted. “I mean, that’s a punkin’ joke. Nobody uses them anymore, even on Terran models.” He crossed his arms and clucked disapprovingly. “I don’t know how you get around in this pile of scrap.” He looked at me, then hastened to add, “Hey, I don’t mean no offense to Sam.”
I was impatient. “Right. What do you think’s wrong with it?”
He threw up his arms. “How the punk should I know? I gotta hook up the sensors and look at the thing. Okay, so you got a kink-instability. That’s only a symptom. What if it’s this preheater? They don’t make parts like that any more. I’ll have to rig up something. Or it could be the vacuum pump. Or the current pickup, or the RF breakdown transformer. Punkin’ hell, it could be anything.” He shrugged, giving in. “Oh; hell, Jake, I’ll do my best. Should be able to do something with it. After I get her fixed, I’ll degauss it for you.”
I thumped his back. “Knew I could count on you, Stinky.”
“I know, I’m such a punkin’ genius.” He glanced at the exposure tab on his filthy shirt front. “Hey! I better get my rad-suit on and you better get outta here before we both get our sferos cooked off.”
“Okay. Sam’ll keep in touch with me. Let him know, okay?”
“Okay, Jake.”
I turned to go.
“Jake!” Stinky called after me.
“What?”
“You’re walkin’ kind of funny. You all right?”
“We met up with some bugs out on the plains. Things about this long, with—”
“Oh, hoplite crabs. I don’t know why they call ‘em that, but that’s what they call ‘em.”
“Right, hoplite crabs. They told us at the hospital.”
“You gotta watch out for those things.”
“Uh, we … Yeah. See you.”
The gang was waiting for me outside in the Gadabout. I climbed in, and in doing so, I got the itchy, antsy feeling that something was crawling on me. I gave myself the once-over, but found nothing. Too many small, nasty things lately. Nerves.
After running some errands in town, mainly to pick up groceries and sundries, we drove out of town. The mail question was settled when we drove by the Maxwellville post office and saw the mail rig unloading at a side dock. Doubtless it contained a communiqué about us.
Also before leaving, we dropped off two of the group, the Abo man and a Hindu woman, at a motel. They’d been having a low-key argument with Sukuma-Tayler. The two did not care for the way things had been going. They wanted time to think things over, “get in touch with the Plan,” is the way they put it. The implied meaning of the phrase struck me as rather diffuse. Sukuma-Tayler didn’t say good-bye to them, but he didn’t appear to be overly distressed at their leaving.
A short stretch of Colonial highway ended in a dirt road that conveyed us bouncingly along for what seemed like hours, winding around high buttes and towering sheer cliffs, until it split into a Y.
Sukuma-Tayler stopped the Gaddy and threw up his hands. “As usual,” he said sardonically, “directions given barely approximate directions taken. Anybody care to guess which way we should go?” He turned to the Oriental man in the front seat. “Roland?”
Roland poked his head out the window, trying to find the sun. “Hard to get your bearings on a new planet … especially when you don’t know the axial inclination. Do you have the Guidebook, John?”
“The what inclination?”
“Let’s see,” Roland said, shielding his eyes, “the sun’s there. So, that means … uh—” He scratched his head.
“Well,” I put in, “Maxwellville’s in the opposite direction, of where we want to go, and so is the Skyway.” Without knowing why, I turned to Winnie. “Where’s the Skyway, honey?”
“That way!” she piped, pointing to our right.
Eyes turned rearward. After a moment’s hesitation, John started the Gaddy forward again, and took the left fork.
By now we had a depopulated crew: me, Darla, Winnie, the Oriental, and a Caucasian woman, to whom we were introduced for the first time—Roland Yee and Susan D’Archangelo—plus our Afro leader. The man in the hospital, we learned, was named Sten Hansen.
Susan was light-haired, thin, had hazel eyes and a pixie nose that crinkled when she smiled—a young face, but I put her on the downhill side of thirty, probably having forgone her first series of antigeronic treatments for financial, religious, or ethical reasons. I still had only a shell of an idea as to what Teleological Pantheism might mean or contain. Yee was younger, had short, straight black hair that stuck out in spikes toward the top of his head. He was very easygoing and pleasant, as they all were.
Winnie was right, and eventually we got to the “ranch,” which Sukuma-Tayler recognized from pictures. There was only one structure, the house, plopped in the middle of a wide expanse of tableland landscaped in low brush and some very odd-looking trees. The place was partially completed, a freeform Duraform shell with only half the windows in, and those on the leeward side.
A lot of weather had claimed squatters rights inside, along with local fauna. Floors and ceilings were etched with watermarks; dust dunes graced the comers; animal droppings added that homey touch. (If you are taking notes, dung is bright yellow on Goliath.) People had been here too. A hole chopped into the apex of the dome in the main living area had drawn smoke from campfires on the floor below, where blackened rocks ringed a pile of ash. Empty food cartons lay all over.
There was a kitchen, or rather a space for one, but no appliances had ever been installed.
“The people who owned the place ran out of construction funds,” Sukuma-Tayler told me. “Victims of the last credit drought, about two Standards ago. SystemBank foreclosed, and, well, the price was right, to coin a phrase.”
“What kind of temperatures do you get at night around here?”
“A little under ten degrees. Rarely gets below freezing.”
“Still, not exactly balmy.”
“I agree. Interested in leading a firewood-gathering squad?”
“No, but I’ll do it.”
The local version of burnable stuff was a reasonable facsimile of wood obtained from what I dubbed a “Wurlitzer tree.” Nobody got the joke, since no one had ever heard the name of the most famous make of theater organs of the early twentieth century.
From my childhood, I remembered that an eccentric neighbor of ours had reconstructed an ancient Wurlitzer in his basement. The tree looked like the diapason array of that old thing, vertically bunched hollow pipes of different lengths and diameters, from tiny piccolos to big roof-shaking pedal notes, all shooting up from a horseshoe-shaped trunk that reminded me of the keyboard console. There were hundreds of them out in the mesa. The smaller pipes made good kindling, and the big ones, split in half, made passable logs.
We spent the rest of the day cleaning out the house and making it more or less habitable. We even found an old pushbroom in a closet, which proved to be indispensable. The Teleologists had lost all their gear, and what they had bought in town didn’t go very far. They had replaced some personal effects, self-inflating sleeping eggs and such, but were short of useful implements. The place needed a lot of work, and they were nowhere near tooled-up for the job. But for now, all anyone was interested in was making things tolerable enough to bed down for the night.
I was cleaning out a small back bedroom when I heard someone squeal. I went out to the living area and found Susan standing over something on the floor, proddin
g it cautiously with the broom. It looked like something between a snake and a caterpillar, decorated in bright green-and-yellow stripes, about twenty-five centimeters long. Centipedelike pairs of legs ran along its unsegmented body. On the ends of the legs were tiny suckers. There was something strange about the head. Above a very nonreptilian face—the eyes were large and looked intelligent—a small pink bud protruded through an opening in the cranium. It was convoluted and looked like part of the brain. The animal was quivering convulsively, in its death throes. Part of its body was squashed just behind the head.
“Yik,” Susan gagged, poking the thing with morbid fascination.
“Where’d it come from?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I thought I felt something go squish when I was sweeping over there. I must’ve stepped on it.” She crinkled her face in disgust. “Ooo, its brains are coming out.”
“Was it on my jacket?” I said, pointing nearby to where it had apparently fallen from a wall hook. There was a footprint across the sleeve.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, I must have done that. But I can’t understand why I didn’t see the thing when it happened.” The animal stopped quivering, dead.
“Yik,” Susan said again.
I picked the thing up with a stick, went outside, and threw it into the brush.
Toward evening, Darla and I took a walk out on the mesa. By then the extra gravity seemed almost normal. We walked among the Wurlitzer trees while Goliath’s big yellow sun cranked down to become a dull red semicircle resting atop a low butte far out on the range. The sky turned cobalt blue, cloudless and virginal. No sounds walked with us except the wind that came up at dusk. Soon, a few sparkling stars came out, the thick atmosphere giving their light an added shimmer, and then the nebula made its appearance, grand and majestic as before.
We didn’t talk much, both bone-tired from a lost night’s sleep, mind-numb still from our recent escapades. But something was on my mind.
“Darla, something’s been puzzling me, among several dozen things. It’s about Winnie again.”
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