“What? Oh, I understand. Wait a minute. If it’s a true replica, the speedometer wouldn’t read that high.”
“The needle buried itself at 100, then came up the other side again, and the numbers changed. This buggy’s a replica as far as looks, but under the engine hous—I mean the hood—she’s something else again. I’m waiting to get to the Skyway to see what she can do.”
“Better step on it now. Something’s gaining on you.”
“Okay.” I thought it was about time for fourth gear. I slid it in smoothly and the car surged ahead, pressing us back into our seats. The numbers on the speedometer now ranged from, 200 to 300. I urged the car onward and the needle crept up to 250.
“God, I can’t believe this old rattletrap—” I looked at the speedometer again and did a take. “What? Now this thing reads like a machometer!”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It is a machometer.”
“And it’s not a reaction-drive vehicle?”
“Negative. I’m at Mach point three five and holding. Sam, how’s the Skyway up ahead for high-speed travel?”
“It’s all straightaway to the portal, but be careful. You know what they say. No ground vehicle is safe anywhere at over Mach point five.”
“Right, but let ‘em eat my dust for a while back there.” “They’re still gaining.”
“They are? Sam, get moving!” “Say again?”
“Get rolling now. If they’re still gaining, it’s a Militia interceptor, and I know exactly who’s driving it.” The ambush hadn’t been Petrovsky’s doing. That had been Elmo reasserting his authority. But Petrovsky was on his own now, that wide Slavic nose pushed to the scent. “No chance of us meeting anywhere on Goliath. Get moving toward Seven Suns and we’ll play it by ear from there.”
“Hold on, now, I’m getting more than one blip. There’s the fast-moving one, and then there’re two behind him, a little slower. ”
The Reticulans, with a backup vehicle?
“And tailing them at a fairly good clip is another one.”
The Ryxx, maybe.
“And behind them…”
“More?” Well, hell. “Move it out, Sam. You’ll have a lot more speed on the other side. Vacuum.”
“You don’t know what Stinky did to me. Feel like a new man. I haven’t opened it up yet, but my cruising speed’s up by at least thirty percent. Stinky outdid himself this time.”
“Good, but get rolling!”
“Okay, okay!”
In no time we reached the old Skyway, pointing straight and true toward a limitless horizon. The machometer crept upward—but what about aerodynamics? The vehicle’s shape was rounded, “streamlined” was the word that came to mind, but the surface didn’t look capable of slicing an air mass at Mach one. There were no stabilizer foils, no GE flange, nothing. There’d be heavy turbulence ahead if I kept pushing, and possible disaster. But how was the car staying on the road at the speed we were doing now? And in Goliath’s soupy air to boot? To say there was more to this vehicle than met the eye was an understatement by several degrees.
“Sam, are you grabbing slab?”
“That I am, son. I’m tracking you at Mach point four. Where’s the fire?”
“Up my kazoo. By the way, what happened at Stinky’s?”
“Well, it’s a long story.”
“Edit it severely.”
“Right. Stinky worked on me all day yesterday, then into evening. He said it was a challenge. It was way after dark when he finished, and I insisted he rehook me to the trailer and let me squeeze into the garage. I hadn’t heard from you, and I thought it best. He balked at that, but gave in. It was a tight fit. Anyway, about an hour later I hear somebody breaking into the place. So I took off, not bothering to open doors. Stinky’s garage is now naturally air-conditioned.”
I winced. Stinky would go for the jugular next time he clapped eyes on me. “Got you. Then what?”
“Then nothing. I took off in the general direction John had said his farm was in, but couldn’t find anything. I had half a mind to give you a buzz, but it just didn’t seem like a good idea.”
“You were right. Would’ve given you away. Besides, I had the beeper turned off. God knows why, but I thought it’d take them a while to trace us to John’s place, thought we were safe. But, go on.”
“Well, there isn’t much more. Wandered all night in the bush. Spotted a couple blips once, powered down and made like a rock. Airborne bandits, and they passed right overhead. The cops?”
“The same. Sam, you were nearer than you thought. But if that’s true, I can’t understand why I had trouble reading you.”
“Probably because I hid in a deep arroyo. Had a hell of a time getting out of there. What’s more, you called on FM.”
“Merte. Remind me to have the key redesigned so that the AM and FM select tabs are on opposite sides.”
The silence in the car was getting me down. “Anyone for Twenty Questions?” I asked, and felt immediately inappropriate. I glanced around to find Susan glowering at me. “Sorry,” I said lamely.
“Now you tell me your life story.””
“That is much too long a tale, Sam. Later.”
“Damn it, you never tell me anything.”
“Okay, a synopsis. The cops nabbed me, then someone sprang me. Don’t know who, but I think it was the Ryxx.” “The Ryxx? What the hell do they have to do with this?”
“Don’t know that either, exactly, but I have an idea. As I said, later.”
Roland surprised me by asking, “Jake, how did you get… uh, sprung?”
I told him about the neural-scrambler field. “Then someone tickled me with something to bring me around, and I got out.”
“Can you describe the symptoms?”
Darla and Winnie began talking in the back seat as I told him.
Roland smacked fist into palm. “Then, I didn’t fall asleep on watch!”
“Yeah?”
“I knew it! I’ve never done that, and I’ve stood watch more than most soldiers.”
“You’re telling me the same thing hit us last night?”
“No question. I remember sitting there by the fire, feeling a headache coming on. Then a buzzing sound … and then there was a strange interlude there. I wasn’t asleep. It was like an extended daydream. A reverie. And the next thing I knew you were kicking me and the flitters were on us.”
Which meant that it had been the Reticulans who had engineered my escape from the station. One more unfittable piece in an ever-growing puzzle.
Darla leaned over the seat. “Jake, from what Winnie tells me, Roland’s right. She wasn’t affected by the field, or the effect, or whatever it was.”
“Most likely it was attuned to human neural patterns,” I ventured. “I’ll buy that. What else did she say?”
“She said she heard someone walk up to the house. She got frightened, tried to wake us, but we were out cold. Then she ran outside and hid in the bush.”
“Did she see anything?”
“No, but she says she knows that two humans came into the house, and one nonhuman. She says the nonhuman frightened her a great deal. The smell was bad.”
“Does she have any idea what they did?”
Darla asked her. I realized then that, while I couldn’t understand Winnie most of the time, Darla never seemed to have any trouble.
“She doesn’t know,” Darla reported. She looked over my shoulder and then said, “Jake, how fast are we going?”
I looked. The needle had just edged past Mach point five. “Wow,” was all I could say.
“Jesus Christ!” John shouted.
I looked up. Sam was ahead. I swerved to the left and we passed him like he was painted on the road.
“Slow down, speed demon!” Sam’s voice came from the dashboard under the windscreen, where I had thrown the key. “Crazy kids! No sense of responsibility.” He chuckled. “You’re right. That buggy is a blast from the past. Look’s like a middle twentieth-cen
tury Chevrolet to me. I’m no expert though, on these things.”
I eased up on the pedal, and the needle fell off to saner speeds. “How’s our pursuit doing?”
“He’s pacing us now. Knows he can’t catch you.”
“Yeah, but he can catch you, Sam. Dump the load. Unhook the trailer.”
“Not on your life, son. We’re paid to deliver goods, not leave ‘em strewn over a hundred klicks of road. Besides, he’s after you now, not me.”
“Sam, I’m not so sure of that. If I had any sort of priceless artifact, especially a map, wouldn’t I leave it with you? Why do you think they wanted to search you? Petrovsky might try to disable you and do just that.”
“Who the hell’s Petrovsky?”
“Sorry. The guy nipping at our tail.”
“I can handle any cop who has a notion to breach my road rights. ”
“Sam, you know you can’t. So, cut the crap and dump it.”
“Is that any way to talk to your father? Moreover, my disrespectful son, you forget something. I’m still mostly machine—in fact, let’s face it I’m nothing but, or so they tell me. Machines must obey programming. And I can’t circumvent your tricky anti-hijack program. Only you can detach the trailer with your thumbprint.”
He was right, and I had forgotten completely. “Sorry, Dad.” Alarms blared from somewhere inside the vehicle, startling everybody. We then watched goggle-eyed as strange things began to happen to the instrument panel. Magically, the funny dials and gauges metamorphosed into more conventional-looking readouts, melting and reshaping as if worked by the hand of an unseen sculptor. It took but a few seconds, and the final result was a complete portal-approach display.
“Remarkable,” John said beside me, his bony knees sticking up sharply.
“Roland, change places with John. Give me a hand with these readouts.” They did. John breathed easier and stretched out, glad to get off the hump that housed the drive train… at least I thought that was what it was.
I missed the warning signs, a blur beside the road. The cylinders split the sky ahead, towering columns of unknowable energy and substance. As we watched, a phthisic finger of lightning crackled down from a clear sky to touch the lead left cylinder. Branching secondary tendrils snaked from it to link the others in a fiery web, and for a second an eerie bloom of pale blue light grew around the whole portal array, then shrunk back on itself, vanished.
I had only seen it happen once before. You can divide your life into sections marked off by the event of witnessing a portal call down a bolt from the clear blue. Everyone exhaled.
“Seat belts,?” I blurted. “Any safety harnesses in here?”
“No,” Darla said. “Don’t see any, except for this fimny hand strap hung between the windows.”
Strange. “Well, grab it, or something. Anything.” And then I remembered what was on the other side of the portal. “Windows? Are all the windows shut?”
Are all the windows shut? I couldn’t believe I was saying it. Could it be that this contraption wasn’t vacuum-worthy? But no. Its rightful owner had passed us on the Skyway; and he could only have come from Groombridge, the only portal leading to Goliath. Unless he’d been out on the plains punking around. But there was nothing out there but hoplite crabs and misery. The possibility lingered, but surely the windows weren’t glass…
“All shut, Jake,” Darla said. “As a matter of fact, the back window on Susan’s side was open just a slit, and I happened to catch it closing by itself when the needle went over one hundred. Now my window handle won’t budge.”
Things were happening too fast, and I was disoriented. The commit marker streaked past, and the guide lane skittered beneath us. We were streaking across a perilously thin edge of safety at a speed that was too fast for reaction, almost. But through the wheel I felt another controlling force, an assisting hand—an automatic system of some sort. The instrument panel was lit up in reassuring green, and things seemed to be going fine.
The cylinders whizzed by in a flickering blur, and we were through the aperture.
We arrived smoothly on a world of mirror—flat ice plains, broken by low outcroppings of dark rock and occasional fracture rills. The road cut straight ahead to a deceptively close horizon. It was dead night, but a million stars gave the ice a sheen by which you could pick out features of the landscape. And almost directly overhead there hung a chandelier of seven bright stars, brighter by far than any seen on most planets. I pressed my face against the window and looked up for a second or two.
There had been no surge of speed when the car had hit vacuum. I checked the machometer. Yes, only a slight increase. The car had some remarkable aerodynamic properties.
I tried calling Sam, but there was no answer. Too early. I had no idea how far behind he had been, and now I was worried.
Alarms sounded again. The sound was different this time. A scanner screen appeared on the panel, showing traffic ahead, and I slowed down. Soon we were down below Mach point three, and decelerating. I didn’t want to get too far ahead of Sam. There was now a decision to make: where to go? Seven Suns offered three portals, with three separate ingress points feeding into them: one from Goliath, two from other interstellar routes. One portal led back to the heart of the Terran Maze by a many-light-year jump, another to Ryxx territory. The third was potluck, so there were really only two choices, unless we felt very lucky.
“Sam, come in. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Captain. I’ve got a cop on my tail, though.”
I made a decision and braked. “I’m slowing down.”
“Negative! Get your butt through that Ryxx portal! Get out of T-Maze. It’s your only chance.”
“I think I can handle him. This car is some kind of fusedup alien buggy with all kinds of surprises in it. Haven’t found the armaments yet, but I’ve a feeling I may be able to outshoot an interceptor. Whereas you—”
“Son, think a moment. What can this Petrovsky character do to me? If he pulls me over, so what? If he searches, what’ll he find? Meanwhile, you can get away.”
“He may impound you.”
“Again, so what? I’ll cool my rollers for a while till you get back.”
It did make sense. “Okay. I guess.” I didn’t like it.
“In fact, I’m kind of hoping he does pull me over. Maybe a Roadbug’ll come along and—Hold on.”
The key was silent for half a minute. Then I said, “Sam? What’s going on?”
“He passed me. I said he was after you.”
“Yeah.” I upped our speed as much as the traffic would allow. I was weaving in and out of lanes now, passing rigs, roadsters, alien conveyances of every sort and description. “One problem about ducking into Ryxx Maze, though. One of those blips you painted was a Ryxx vehicle.”
“They sprung you, now they’re chasing you. Logical.”
“I’ve learned through the Teelies here that it wasn’t the Ryxx who got me out.”
“Who did? I’m confused.”
“That makes three of us. I’m twice as confused as you. I think it was the Reticulans.”
“Oh, well, that explains everything.”
“Clear as shit, isn’t it?” Something occurred to me. “The thing that really puzzles me is how the Rikkis traced us to the Teelies’ farm. The Militia did it by making inquiries in town, but the Rikkis couldn’t have done that. And Petrovsky told me that he was following them.” I realized that Sam was in the dark about all of that. “Sorry, Sam. I’ll fill you in when we have time.”
“Oh no, go ahead. I’m writing this all down. What about Wilkes?”
“No idea. As far as I know, he’s out of this whole mess.”
“Well, that’s one less fly on the pile.” A pause. “Jake, you’d better see about what guns you can bring to bear on the cop.”
“It’ll be hard, on the run like this, but as I said, you wouldn’t believe what this buggy’s capable of.”
The turnoff for the T-Maze portal came up. The Skyway
split into one branch that curved gradually to the left and one that continued straight. Most of the traffic veered left, but I kept our bow pointed dead ahead. “Okay, there goes one option. Now it’s either Ryxx country or oblivion.”
“Are you sure the Ryxx are in on this snipe hunt?”
“I have it on good authority that they are.”
“Uh-huh. Beats me what you should do, then. Maybe you should’ve taken that turnoff.”
“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. If I head on through to Theron, it means another high-speed chase and few places to duck off-road, because of the bogs. Next up is Straightaway, which is all salt flats and no place to hide, then Doron, where there’s another Militia base. If you remember, we were guests there once.”
“Oh, yes. I remember. Hm.”
“So, I’d rather take my chances with the Ryxx. Besides, you used to have friends there. Maybe Krk-(whistle/click) knows something about this. Wasn’t that his name?”
“Approximately. Of course, it’s ‘she’ now. They all turn diploid in later life. But her nest is ten thousand klicks into the Maze. And that was a hell of a long time ago.”
Options were indeed dwindling. I half-entertained going offroad over the ice to find the T-Maze road—but I had five innocent lives to consider. I hadn’t begun to decide what to do with the Teelies. Maybe turning myself in would be the best thing after all. Finally clear up this mess. Except …
Except for the small matter of the Delphi series. But then, maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad. Hell. So what if it meant a stint in a psych motel, drooling and finger-painting the walls with my own feces? Couple of months learning all over again to go potty, wave bye-bye. Could do that standing on my head. I’d come out of there a new man.
Um … no thanks.
The traffic thinned. The terrain flattened even more, low ridges becoming more scarce. The car became a mite scurrying across a giant billiard ball. Above, the stars were crisp and clear, like clean little holes drilled through black velvet. Around us, in the biggest hockey rink ever, ice glistened in the interstellar night.
A warning tone sounded once again, this time a gonging bell that said, “Battle stations!” The instrument panel underwent still another transformation, while the scanner screen tracked a fast-moving blip. Looked like a floater missile.
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