They passed a sputtering flare. Red saw the sign with the blue ziggurat as he drove his elbow against Chadwick's head, knocking him back into his own seat. His hand shot forward then, nipping the switch back to automatic drive as he began the turn into the exit
The brakes were immediately seized as Flowers announced, "Roadblock!"
The tires screamed. The land to the left of the road fell away sharply. The slope to the right was more gradual, if rockstrewn, above the yellow earth . ..
Red twisted the wheel to the left. It turned right
"Sorry, boss," Flowers said. "One of us is wrong, and I hope it's you."
Something soft and heavy enveloped him as they left the road and hit the slope. He heard the door open. He was ejected.
Falling, hitting the ground, rolling ... He lost consciousness. For how long he could not tell, though it did not seem a great while.
He could hear the crackling of flames. There also
seemed to be some distant shouts. He took several deep breaths. He stretched and relaxed. Nothing seemed to
be broken ...
He began struggling with his cocoon. It was a tough, white, foamy substance.
The shouts came nearer. More than one voice, but he still could not make out what they were saying.
He worked his hands around to his stomach, up toward his chest. There was a sudden pang along the left side of his ribcage.
He caught hold of the fabric before him, scratched at it, dug in with his fingers, drew upon it. Slowly it parted. He adjusted his grip, pulled harder.
It tore open. He spread his arms and pushed downward. It came away from his shoulders. He began to crawl out. He heard Leila's voice calling his name. He saw her running toward him.
He turned away and looked down the slope to where his truck lay on its side, burning. He tried to rise, but his foot caught in the spongy material and he slipped back into a sitting position on the grass, catching himself with his arms. His side still throbbed.
"No," he said as he watched the truck burn. "No..."
A hand rested on his shoulder. He did not look up.
"Reyd?..."
"No," he repeated.
Below them, the truck suddenly blossomed into a ball of fire. Moments later, a wave of heat arrived. Red raised his left hand just as Randy came up and halted several paces away.
"You could have been in there .. ." Leila began.
His hand shot forward, a finger extended.
The flames fell back. A tower of smoke rose. Something seemed to be moving within it, traveling a slow spiral upward.
"There," he said. Then, "Now I understand."
A huge gray-green dragon-form rose above the smoldering vehicle.
"It was Chadwick whose time had come," she said. "All of your actions were meant to serve him."
Red nodded without taking his eyes from the twisting, drifting shape. All of its movements were graceful, and somehow verged on the erotic. It was an air-dance of freedom, release, abandon.
Abruptly, it halted and looked their way. It spread its wings and drifted toward them. When it was very near, it managed, somehow, to hover.
"Thank you, children," it said, in a voice rich and melodious. "You have done for me that which I did not know to do for myself."
It circled slowly above them.
"What is the secret?" Red asked. "I remembered more than you did. I thought I was arranging things for myself."
It looked upward to where another dark form was now drifting.
"Events, child. Events, and their unconscious manipulation," it replied. "I cannot advise you, for we are all different. Keep looking, if you feel you must. For you, that may be the way. But your time is not yet come. When it does, help may come from anywhere— a friend, an enemy, a stranger, a relative ... As for me, I am going home now. Let us hope to meet again one day."
It twisted sharply and began to rise in the morning light, its scales gleaming like golden mirrors. It began to move its wings, slowly at first, then faster, climbing, dwindling as they watched. Another winged form passed near it. Soon they were gone from sight.
Red lowered his face into his hands for a moment. The wind had shifted and the smell of his burning vehicle came to him now.
"Will someone please come and pick me up?" came a small voice from down the hillside, "before thisdamned vegetation takes fire?"
"Flowers?" he said, dropping his hands and beginning
to rise.
But the young man was there before him. He retrieved the book, encased in an ejection pod, and carried it back up the hillside. Red stared at him.
"Reyd, I'd like you to meet your son Randy," Leila
said.
Red frowned.
"Where you from, boy?"
"Cleveland, C Twenty."
"I'll be damned ....lake—or Carthage?"
"Yeah. But I'm using Dorakeen now."
Red stepped forward and took Randy by the shoulders, looked into his eyes.
"I'd say so, I'd really say so, and you're welcome to it. ' What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you. Leaves showed me the way. Then I met Leila—"
"I hate to break this up," Leila said, "but we'd better move that car up there before someone else comes along."
"Yes."
They turned back toward the feeder road.
"Uh— What should I call you? Father?"
"Red. Just Red." He looked at Leila. "My head is suddenly clear. Something like a fog seems to have gone."
"That was the last dark bird," she replied.
"You know, I'd have missed Randy here, if that had been me."
"Yes."
"Let's go to Ur for a beer. They always have good beer in Ur."
"Okay with me," Randy said. "There are a lot of things I want to ask you."
"Sure. There are plenty of things I want to ask you— and we have plans to make."
"Plans?"
"Yes. The way I see it, the Greeks still have to win at Marathon."
"They did."
"What?"
"That's what the history books say."
"You got on at C Twenty. Where?"
"Near Akron."
"Can you retrace your route?"
"I think so."
"We're going to do it! Wait! We'll stop at Marathon first, to check the scorecard. Some new factor may have come into play."
"Red?"
"Yes?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"That's all right. I'll explain—"
"Mondamay will be looking for me," Flowers interrupted. "I think you'd better leave a message."
Red snapped his fingers.
"Right. You guys move the car. I'll be back in a minute."
He turned and jogged back down the slope, holding his side. He picked up a hot, twisted chunk of metal, to scratch HAVING LUNCH IN UR. -RED on the buckled door of his still-burning pickup.
"Does reality always seem a little out of step around him?" Randy asked.
"I never noticed anything strange," said Leila, patting her pockets, shrugging and exhaling a small flame to light her cigar, "until after the other fire. But he seems his normal self again, now," " 'De ce terrible paysage, tel que jamais mortel n'en
•fit, ce matin encore I'image, vague et lointaine, me ravit...'" Flowers began. "Perhaps I, too, am a dragon
—only dreaming I am a book."
"I wouldn't put it past you," said Leila, climbing into the car. "Leaves, meet Flowers."
There came a double burst of static.
Two
In a mountain fastness in C Eleven Abyssinia, Timyin Tin regarded the lovers.
Pressing close beside him, Chantris ran a dark pinion over the bandaged head and back of the tyrannosaurus.
"Poor dear. That's better now, isn't it?"
The tyrannosaurus moaned softly and leaned against her.
"Thank you for the use of this delightful bower," she told Mondamay, who had helped to dig t
hem from the ruins of Chadwick's palace, "and you, little man, for assisting us with transportation."
Timyin Tin bowed deeply.
"To be of service to a dragon of Bel'kwinith is almost too great an honor for this one to bear," he replied. "I wish you every joy in this place of your liking."
The tyrannosaurus grunted several times. The dragon laughed and caressed him.
"He's not much on brains," she confided. "But what a body!"
"I am pleased that you are pleased," said Mondamay. "We will leave you to your bliss now, for I must seek along the Road after my own love. This human destroyer has offered to assist me. After that, we will make pots and grow flowers. Timyin Tin—if you are ready, come mount my back."
"You might," said Chantris, blowing a small spiral of pale smoke, "check around the last exit to Babylon near the sign of the blue ziggurat. We dragons have ways of possessing peculiar information."
"I thank you for that," said Mondamay as Timyin Tin climbed onto his back and grasped his shoulders.
They rose into the air, bellows and shrieks of laughter filling the valley below them.
In a dirt-floored adobe building in Ur, Red, Leila and Randy, garbed in native garments, sat drinking the local brew from clay pots. A swarthy, stocky man, similarly clothed, approached. "Randy?" They looked up.
"Toba!" Randy said. "I owe you a drink. Sit down. You remember Leila. Do you know my father. Red Dorakeen?"
"Sort of," said Toba, shaking hands. "Your father? My, my!" "What are you doing in Ur?"
"I'm from these parts originally, and I'm between jobs just now. Thought I'd come back and visit the folks and set up some more work for myself."
He nodded toward the corner, where several burlap sacks leaned against the walls.
"What sort of work?" Red asked, lowering his crock and wiping his mouth.
"Oh, about sixty Cs up the Road I'm an archaeologist. Every now and then I come back to bury a few things. Then I go forward and dig them up again. I've already written the paper on this batch, actually. It's a pretty interesting piece on cultural diffusion. I've got some really nice artifacts from Mohenjo-Daro this time around."
"Isn't that—uh—sort of cheating?" Randy asked. "What do you mean?"
"Planting things that way— You're messing up the archaeological record."
"Why, no. As I said, I am from here. And they'll really be six thousand years old when I discover them."
"But won't you give people a distorted idea about Ur and Mohenjo-Daro?"
"I don't think so. That guy I was drinking with over in the corner is from Mohenjo-Daro. Met him at the 1939 World's Fair. I've done a lot of business with him
since." "It's a very—peculiar—occupation," Randy observed.
Toba shrugged.
"It's a living," he said. "I'm pleased to see you're still alive. Red."
Red smiled.
"It's an occupation," he said. "As a matter of fact, we were just discussing it..."
Somewhere, the Red Baron and Saint-Exupery were going at it over the French countryside. Joan saw their forms in the sky, like battling crucifixes...
A small man braked his black Volkswagen when he saw the blue pickup truck turn over and begin to burn. He watched for a time, then continued on ...
Alone, important and wise, the great dragons drift above Bel'kwinith, dreaming roadmaps.
The messenger collapsed on the steps of the Acropolis. He delivered the news from Marathon before he died.
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