Mona was obviously thinking of making a run for it, but the thing was coming up too fast. She pulled away about a hundred meters or so, an effort, I suppose, to appear innocent.
Moments later, the "Skyway Patrol" car swooped in soundlessly, pulled off onto the shoulder between the cruiser and us.
The speaker boomed. The voice spoke in Intersystem. "STATE THE REASON FOR THIS INTERRUPTION OF TRAFFIC."
Imagine the most nonhuman voice possible, add all sorts of skin-crawling overtones from the extreme ends of the aural spectrum, then boost the signal till it breaks your ears. I turned down the gain on the amplifier.
"We are rendering assistance," Mona stated firmly, covering her nervousness. There was no question whom the Patrol car was addressing.
"STATE THE PROBLEM."
"The vehicle behind you was experiencing mechanical difficulty."
A pause. Then: "WE DETECT NONE."
"The problem has been corrected."
"DESCRIBE THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM."
Mona was resentful. "Why don't you ask them?"
"OCCUPANTS OF COMMERCIAL TRANSPORT VEHICLE: CAN YOU VERIFY THESE CONTENTIONS?"
"Yes, we can. We had a loss of magnetic confinement due to a defective electronic component. The component has been replaced."
"FALSE." The voice was emotionless. "WE DETECTED THE ARRIVAL OF TWO NEUTRINO EMISSION SOURCES WHILE PATROLLING THIS SECTION. NO LOSS OF FUSION REACTION WAS OBSERVED FROM EITHER SOURCE."
It was over. "Sorry, Mona. I did my best." I did not transmit that.
"OCCUPANT OF LAW-ENFORCEMENT VEHICLE:
YOU ARE AWARE THAT HALTING TRAFFIC ON THIS ROAD IS NOT TOLERATED."
It was not a question.
"EXCEPT FOR EMERGENCY PURPOSES OR MECHANICAL FAILURE, THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS. YOU ARE AWARE OF THE PENALTY. PREPARE TO END YOUR EXISTENCE. TIME WILL BE AFFORDED FOR RELIGIOUS CEREMONY OR CUSTOM. UPON THE FIFTIETH SOUNDING OF THE TONE, YOU WILL BE TERMINATED."
There began a bonging.
Mona was dead and she knew it, but her ass-end exploded in plasma flame and she took off. Instead of heading downroad, she swung sharply out over the dust-coated surface of the planetoid, trailing a spectacular plume of reddish-gray soil. She was trying to make it to the far side of a nearby rise for cover in the blind hope that the Patrol vehicle couldn't follow. Nobody knew enough about the "Roadbugs" to say one way or the other; none had ever been observed off-road. It was the only chance Mona had, and she took it.
But her engines went dead before she got two hundred meters away. The long, black interceptor sank into the dust. There followed a horrible silence, save for the lugubrious gong-ing.
Presently, Mona transmitted. "Jake, tell them. Tell them I was helping you. Please!"
"Mona, I'm sorry." There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do.
"I don't want to die like this," she said, her voice cracking. "Killed by one of those bugs. Oh, God."
Almost without thinking, I fired the explosive bolts on the missile rack above the cab, activated one, and let it check out its target. When the green light blinked on the control board, I fired. An invisible arm snatched the thing and flung it aside. It exploded harmlessly out in me moonscape.
…bong…bong…bong…bong…
"Jake?" She seemed composed now, strangely calm.
"Yes, Mona?"
"We… we had some pretty good times, didn't we?"
"We did. Yes, we did, Mona."
One sob broke through the repose, but was quickly covered by a voice turned bitter. "It wouldn't even let me get a shot off, the bastard."
…bong.. bong.. bong.. BONG!
"Goodbye, Jake."
"Goodbye."
The flash seared my retinas, left purple spots chasing each other in front of me. When I could see again, the interceptor was gone. A blackened pit lay where it had been.
The Roadbug was already pulling away.
"OCCUPANTS OF COMMERCIAL TRANSPORT VEHICLE: YOU ARE FREE TO GO."
It left us sitting under a tiny red sun and a world of unspeakable beauty.
5
" You have no cause to feel bad," Sam comforted me as we raced toward the tollbooths. "You did what you could. You tried. I was a little worried about how the Roadbug would react to that missile."
"I know. So was I," I said. "I shouldn't have done it. It was useless, and I knew it. I didn't have the right to risk Darla's and Cheetah's lives."
"I would have done the same," Darla said quietly.
"Thanks, Darla. Still…"
"Oh, c'mon, son. Mona knew the risk. She knew there's only one rule of this road: "Thou shall not close the road, nor interrupt traffic on any section thereof!' And she knew the Roadbugs enforce it to the letter."
"What right do they have to enforce anything?" I countered angrily. "Who the hell are they, anyway?"
Sam didn't answer, because there was no answer. Chalk up another mystery. Two theories were currently in vogue. The Roadbugs were either machines created by the Roadbuilders themselves, or they were vehicles whose unseen drivers wanted to keep the roads clear for their own purposes. Personally, I was for the latter theory. All indications were that the Skyway was millions of years old, and machines ― no matter how advanced ― just don't function that long… or so it seemed to me. But if there were flesh-and-blood beings inside those bug cars, they hadn't shown themselves yet, and I doubted they ever would.
The cylinders were all around, and we felt their persistent grabbing. The aperture swallowed us.
The next planet was a big one, a high-G world, as the sign before the tollbooths had warned, but going in an instant from.3 to 1.45 G was more than a little rough. The planet's acceleration sucked us down into our seats. I groaned and tried to straighten my spine, now turned rubber.
"Whuff!" Darla slumped in her seat. Cheetah bore up stoically.
"Jesus, even I can feel it," Sam said. "Somehow."
We arrived on a vast savannah of dry grass and bare patches of dust rolling out endlessly. Stunted trees dotted the plain. To our right and far away, a herd of bulky animals loped behind shimmering curtains of heat. The sun was low to our left, but bore down arduously. The sky was blue, slapped with watery brushstrokes of bright haze. Migration trails intersected the road. At one point, a dry-wash had undercut the highway itself, leaving exposed and suspended the five-meter-thick slab of metal roadbed. The gap was not great, and the road had no need to drop a supporting stanchion, as it could do when necessary. How it did such things was but another puzzle.
Great black birds, if birds they were, wheeled in the bald-white sky near the sun, searching. No prey or carrion was evident. Here and there along the side of the road were high mounds of powdery earth ― warrens? hives? There were no signs of human habitation, though the planet was on the lists for colonization. The place did not look inviting. To settle such a world would be to resign oneself to the sorry fact that doing anything would require half again as much effort as on a 1G world: lifting a load of firewood, hefting an axe, mounting a flight of stairs. But humans had adapted to harsher conditions on many worlds. I imagined what future generations of this world would look like ― short, swarthy, powerfully muscled, fond of khaki, glued into their wide-brimmed bush hats, opinionated, sure of themselves, proud. Perhaps. Diversity was sure to be the rule as human beings spread among the stars, and the differences might one day become more than cultural. Organisms are products of their environment, and when environments diverge…
The road shot ahead, unswerving, pointing to a low black band that rimmed the horizon. Mountains.
"What's the name" of this place?" I asked. "What do the maps say?"
"Goliath," Sam said.
"Ah."
We drove for a while, until I realized how ravenously hungry
I was.
"Anyone for eats?"
"Me!" piped Darla.
"Soup's on!"
We went back to the galley and fixed a quick brunch: ham-salad sandwiches, giant
kosher deli pickles from New Zion ("Ham salad and kosher pickles?" Darla wondered. "We'll be struck dead." "Eat fast!" I said), potato salad, cherry yogurt, all fresh from the cooler. I had stocked up back on TC–I, shortly before hitting the road. We ate heartily.
I stopped in the middle of a mouthful of pickle. "How boorish of me. I forgot about Cheetah."
"Don't worry, she's okay ― and that's not her real name."
"Huh? Darla, she can't eat human food. The polypeptides are all wrong."
"She brought her own. Go look."
I went forward, and sure enough there was Cheetah, munching wombat salad, or whatever it was, little green shoots with pink pulpy heads. I went back.
"When did she have time to ―?"
"I never did get around to explaining why she's here, did I? And you never asked, either. That's what I like about you, Jake; you never question, never complain. You go along with the flow, except when you're pushed. Anyway, when you called I was talking to her, and she said that her 'time' was drawing near. I took it to mean the end of her life, but she wouldn't elaborate. I could sense that she was unhappy. Desperately so."
"She certainly wasn't being treated well at the motel," I said. "As a matter of fact, the pustulant little bedsore who ran the place was―"
"I know. I knew by the way he talked to her." She took a bite of sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. "Cheetah had told me that none of her people had ever left the planet ― 'pass through the great trees at the edge of the sky' is the way they think of the portals ― and that one day, before the end of her time, she would like to be the first."
"Seems to me I've seen her kind off-world."
"Right, but she doesn't realize that." Darla turned the notion over in her mind. "No, on second thought, she meant her clan, not her species. I told you how attached they are to their families."
"Got you."
"So, when I got the call, I asked her to come with us. That simply. I've had second thoughts about it since, of course. I really don't have the foggiest notion what to do with her. I was thinking vaguely of finding a home for her ― but, practical brain that you are, you pointed out the problem of biochemical incompatibility."
"It's not insurmountable," I said. "Her new family, whoever they might be, would have to invest in a biomolecular synthesizer and program it to produce suitable protein material for her. We all know it's a bother to eat the glop, especially when it's not textured and flavor-rendered properly ― any human traveling outside Terran space knows it ― but she might survive, with a little love, and a lot of Hothouse-brand ketchup."
Darla showed concern. "I hope you're right. I've already gotten attached to her. She's so warm, open…. By the way, you're high in her pantheon of Great Beings. You saved her from a beating, and she's eternally grateful."
I polished my fingernails on my shirt. "Well, all in a hero's day, you know. Rescuing fair maidens, screaming like a banshee upon being bitten by a nasty ol' bug, faulting, almost getting my ass shot off because I had to play it proud instead of safe. I should have backed away from Wilkes' table."
"That's you, Jake. Dumb, but proud!"
"I thank you. But you were telling me about Cheetah and how she got here."
"Didn't I finish? Oh, yes. I told her she was welcome to come along with us, and while I was packing she disappeared. By the time I finished, she returned with an armful of fruit and such. I stowed the stuff in my bag, and…"
"She knows biochemistry?"
"Huh? No, certainly not. Maybe she's taken journeys before. Perhaps her tribe migrated now and then. I don't know."
"I thought they stuck pretty much to their home turf." "Then, I don't know how she knew to bring food. But I'll ask her."
I drained the last of my coffee. It was of a good bean, grown on Nuova Colombia. "You also mentioned something about Cheetah's real name. How did she get tagged with the handle of a fictional Terran chimpanzee?"
"That's what the motel people called her." She raised an ironical eyebrow. "Cute, what? Fit in with the theme, I guess. You know, it's amazing how popular those Burroughs books still are after ― what is it, going on two hundred years? Anyway, her proper moniker is Winwah-hah-wee-wahwee. She told me it means Soft-Green-is-the-Place-Where-She-Sleeps. At least, that's my rendition of it. Her translation was a bit garbled."
"Okay, then, 'Winnie' it is, now and forevermore. I got up and stretched. The kinks were gradually working out.
"There's one more thing," Darla said.
"About Chee ― I mean, about Winnie?"
"Yes. It was something about you and Sam. She said she was confused at first about Sam, about exactly what he was, until she realized that he was… well, that his spirit permeated the rig, if you follow me. Then she said she sensed something about you. Something she didn't like."
I shrugged. "Oh, well. A man who's hated by children and cute furry animals can't be all bad." '
"Don't be silly. She loves you ― I told you that. No, it's something concerning you. Something about what happened to you or what will happen…. I can't say for sure."
"Premonition?"
She chewed on her lip. "No." She shook her head. "No, forget about the 'happen' stuff. She didn't use those words. It wasn't a prediction, a precognitive intuition or anything. It was just something 'around' you. That's how she put it. The only thing coherent I could get out of her was that she didn't like your jacket because it smelled bad."
I sniffed my underarms. "Well, I guess if your friends can't tell you, who can?"
She rolled her eyes. "Jake."
"Sorry. But it's all a little vague, isn't it?"
"Yes, I suppose. But she seemed so sure."
"What she probably sensed was the lingering aura of my life of libertinage and debauchery."
Darla giggled. "You mean your life of fantasizing. I happen to know that you're just this side of a monk in such matters. You haven't even tried to kiss me."
"I haven't? Well…" I took her shoulders and pulled her. toward me, planted on those full pouting lips an unmonkish kiss of journeyman quality. She kissed back after the first fraction of a second. (I think I surprised her.) We continued in this fashion for some time.,
When things had gone as far as they could under present circumstances, we parted. Darla commenced a straightening-up ritual: smoothed her hair, adjusted her clothing, checked the state of her lip gloss in the warped reflection of a shiny; sugar canister. Her face was perenially made-up, perfectly, even at the worst of times. There was a certain composure about her, a kind of coolness ― which attracted me, I must, admit. Note: cool, not cold. Self-possessed. Well, there was no nonsense about her (not to say no sense of humor), no wasted motions, no false moves, no hesitations. I felt her incapable of uttering something even remotely insipid. The controlling factor was not intellectual, but was more in the way of being worldly, knowing, aware, hip, if you will, to use an archaic term. She was a veteran of the Skyway, but there wasn't a rollermark on her. I couldn't guess how old she was; anywhere from nineteen to thirty. But a special native wisdom sparkled in eyes that had seen more than they told. To use another hoary Terran colloquialism: she had been around. Yes, she had.
"I hate to break up anything momentous, kids," Sam discreetly announced over the aft-cabin speaker, "but there's something up ahead."
I went forward. We were continuing our race for the mountain range, which now hove over the horizon as a brown-gray mass with an intermittent edge of white. Snow-tipped peaks. They looked like mounds of day-old pudding, whipped-cream toppings gone stale and dried.
A vehicle, an old bus, was pulled off the road ahead, and it seemed to be experiencing mechanical problems. A group of people were gathered near the off-road side.
As we drew up I braked instinctively, as I usually do when I spot a breakdown; however, recent events had spooked me to the point where I considered passing them by. But no. One of the stranded passengers waved pleadingly ― a bearded black man who wore a loose robe that smacked of th
e sacerdotal ― and I pulled completely off the pavement at a prudent distance download, across one of those spontaneous bridges that spanned a deep dry-wash.
"Well, let's get a whiff of the stuff they call air here," I said reluctantly. "It's supposed to be rated EN-1B, which is as close as you can get. Sam, were those people wearing respirators or anything?"
"No, but take a nasal inhaler of CO;. You could hyperventilate under extreme exertion. There are a few in the glove box, I think."
The pumps sucked the good air out and let the bad come in. Mark you, Earth people: there is nothing like the first breath of alien atmosphere, no matter how near to Terran normal it is. The weird odors are most unsettling. Strange trace gases never meant for human olfactory systems tiptoe across your nasal membranes in spiked shoes. At best, you gag and choke and cough. At worst, you swoon and wake up with an assist mask slapped over your face, if you're lucky. But the atmosphere of Goliath wasn't all that' bad. It carried a whiff of iodine on a stench of decayed fruit, a strange combination to say the least, but the fruity smell masked the medicinal one enough to make it bearable. There wasn't a fruit tree in sight. On the bad side, there was a trace of a nose-tickling element, an irritant of some sort that kitchy-kooed the sinuses maddeningly close to the sneeze-point without getting them over the hump. But… I guess you get used to anything. In fact, the longer I breathed the stuff, the less I noticed its noxious qualities. There was good oxygen here to be sure, though at pressure a bit too high. Maybe ― mind you, just maybe ― a person could get to like running this sort of soup through his lungs.
The air I could live with; the heat was another matter. I wasn't ready for it, even after Hothouse. I sprang the hatch, and it was like opening an oven door. Talk about dry heat versus humid heat, and the misery indices of both didn't apply here. It was punking HOT and that's all there was to it. The heat smothered me, the planet strained my arches, and the sun began to pan-fry my skin in a sauce of sudden sweat.
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