by Dean Ing
"Mentholated jelly," he said. "A horse can't smell anything past it. Espinel taught me that."
"Kerosene works okay, but not so good," Espinel said shyly. "Lufo, can you ride with that rib stove in?"
"He won't have to for a week," said Thompson, "but he may have to do some digging."
Lufo: "What for? The launcher?"
"No, to bury that damn' pony. It'll draw buzzards."
"I had no choice," said Espinel.
"You did right," Lufo said quickly.
"Don't worry about the pony," Sandy put in. "I can butcher it out, and what I don't smoke or tan will go into my compost heap."
"I hadn't thought about that. You've got your own cottage industry here, don't you," Thompson said admiringly.
"Yes—but keep wiping your ponies' noses," Sandy warned. "As long as they're here they'll be spooky."
"You must have one hell of a compost heap," Thompson joked.
"It has an air about it," Sandy admitted. "And those big bundles of yours have an air, too—of mystery. What is it, some kind of secret weapon?"
Silence. Then, "She'll see it anyhow," Thompson mused.
"And she'll be an accomplice, which should keep her quiet," Lufo said, grunting in pain as he stood up. "Let's go get the stuff. We can lay it out inside the soddy while Espinel stakes the horses out."
"You've really piqued my curiosity," Sandy murmured, watching as the men carried the bundles in.
"Young and the Feds wouldn't put it quite that way," said Thompson, peeling back the polymer from one bundle. "They know Mexico can't afford holo satellites, and they didn't expect anybody to build an antenna thirty-five klicks high along the border. This one strayed too far into Wild Country and somebody nailed it with a laser—but it landed a few klicks North of here. We hoped to get it back across the Rio Grande for repairs but now I'm afraid I'll have to fly it back." He spread his hands above the naked bundle as if it were self-explanatory.
Sandy saw a protective framework of cot ton wood, bound carefully with cord. Inside was an intricate gossamer structure covered with an almost invisible film and supported within the framework by a jury-rig of rubber bands as protection against shock or abrasion. Nevertheless, the elegant structure was ripped and buckled in places. Certain that she had misunderstood something, Sandy said, "You're telling me this is part of a tower that's thirty-five kilometers high?"
"Does the same job—and relays holo programs that the Feds manage to keep off their captive networks in Streamlined America," Thompson nodded. "That includes anything Governor Jim Street and the Indys have to say about little matters like industrial cartels, strike-breaking goon squads, and a team of what seem to be government assassins. What the governor has here," he tapped the gossamer structure lightly, "is a medium that's out of control. Blanton Young's control," he amended, beaming. "It's called a Boucher relay."
Sandy smiled while she wrinkled her forehead in amused disbelief. "But—but it looks like a huge model airplane!"
Thompson's hand formed an 'OK' in the air. "Dead center," he said.
Chapter 16
The Boucher relay was no model, but clearly reflected its modeler's origins. Kukon and MacCready, both pioneers, had both drawn on model techniques to develop aircraft that were ultralight for their times. It had been a third modeler, Boucher, who proved that balsa and plastic film could be mated to solar cells for a permanent media relay in the sky.
Essentially the Boucher relay was an incredibly lightweight aircraft driven by an electric motor, its wing panels glistening with the fire-opal glitter of featherweight photovoltaic cells. Catapulted like a sailplane, a Boucher craft used both multichannel radio control and sun-sensors to provide its orientation. The earliest of these superb devices had boasted wingspans of nearly ten meters with overall weights under ten kilos, thanks to handforming techniques.
For two generations, said Stan Thompson as he worked, Americans had been urged to buy prefab toys that gradually deprived fledging engineers of construction techniques, stress-analytical knowledge, and optimum performance—for no prefabricated gadget could compete against the best hand-crafted models. A 'Wakefield' model, hurtling almost vertically upward with a propeller driven by only forty grams of rubber band, was a culmination of science and art; and looked it. Soviet-influenced countries seemed to understand the research value of the small Wakefield models, for their craft often won Worldwide competition events and enriched their understanding of high-efficiency aircraft while Americans watched and ignored the implications.
By the end of the Twentieth cent, only a few enthusiasts built these gossamer brutes; but those few tended to be stress analysts, architects, aerodynamicists. Wakefield techniques tended to interest those who could combine the mind of a theorist and the hands of a watchmaker. Stan Thompson qualified on both counts.
Sandy Grange watched Thompson uncrate the ultralight craft with dwindling disbelief and growing appreciation as he spoke. "What Boucher proved was that you could build an aircraft that would fly for years," Thompson said, pausing to cluck over a cracked spar. "Once you get the little bugger up above the weather, fifteen klicks or so, there's not much to impede sunlight."
"Except nightfall," Sandy murmured.
"That's where Boucher's vision came in. He designed 'em to climb so high that, by nightfall, they're over thirty klicks high. They go like hell in that thin air but so what? They're radio-controlled and they keep circling—more or less geostationary over some chosen spot.
"With such ridiculous wing-loading, the sink-rate is lower than a lizard's navel, and the aircraft carries storage cells to keep the propeller going at night. By dawn, it's still fifteen klicks up and sunlight recharges the accumulators—which are over there in the fuselage," he said, nodding to the package Lufo was unwrapping. "So up it goes again until nightfall."
"I don't see any propeller in front," she said.
"It's a pusher. The first Boucher relays were conventional, but this rig is a 'Daytripper'—designed around the rectenna for a holo system. The fuselage must be almost a meter wide to hold that gear, so somebody thought of making a lifting-body fuselage. Actually it's a triple-delta shape with air-control vanes to keep airflow where you need it for maximum lift. The Day tripper has a nine-meter span, with a butterfly tail up front for still more lift, and wings at the rear. The technical term is 'canard'," he finishd.
Pregnant silence from Sandy before, "That means 'hoax' in French, doesn't it?"
He blinked. "Does it?"
Her gaze was a challenge. "Are you pulling my leg, Mr. Thompson? Look at it from my view: I'm being offered four hundred pesos so you can use my soddy to repair an airplane that flies forever.
But you brought it here on pack-horses! And if that doesn't stick in my craw, you ask me to swallow the idea that it beams forbidden media into Wild Country."
Stan Thompson pulled out ancient bifocals, chortling as he adjusted them. "Actually, they're scheduled to come down in Mexico once a year for maintenance—but yes, that's about it. We knew this one had gone off-course and landed in this area, and for our purposes, for a low profile, a horse is still the best way to travel. I figured I could trouble-shoot the Daytripper and get it launched again, but I found it had been damaged too much. First by a beam of some sort that melted part of the film, and then in landing. Took us days to find it.
"I decided it'd be easier to dismantle it and take it back to Mexico for repairs, but I was wrong; it won't take rough handling.
"Now I either repair it and launch it from here—primitive as our accommodations are for it—or we destroy a hundred thousand pesos' worth of Boucher relay and go back empty-handed."
"Well, I'll believe it when I see it," Sandy replied.
Lufo had been listening. Now he pointed to Sandy's old holovision set. "Does your holo work?"
"Usually. For the past week I haven't been able to get XEPN, the Piedras Negras chan—." She turned back, mouth open slightly, to gaze at the disassembled craft. "Well I
be damned," she whispered.
"Nine days, to be exact," Thompson muttered. "By the time I get it back on station, a lot of nice folks in Wild Country will have been without Indy media for two weeks."
"I thought you were working for the Mexicans."
"I am—because Governor Street asked me to. How else can he get media coverage into Streamlined America?"
Sandy mulled that over for long minutes. The credentials of James Street were well-known: Major General, USA, (ret.); Governor of Texas; Undersecretary of State; then unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency on the Independent ticket. In Texas he was still 'the governor', a man who could sit a horse or kiss a baby with the best of them. But Street's anti-Federalist rhetoric had hardened after the war; Blanton Young labeled his trenchant truths as sedition, and saw that the label became official. Old Jim Street found himself branded a rebel fugitive from justice, and knew what brand of justice he could expect. Thus the official label became the fact: James Street was the guidonbearer for rebel forces in Wild Country.
"Most of the news on the governor confuses me," Sandy said finally. "I heard on FBN that he's a dying man."
"Sure you did. He isn't," Lufo assured her. "Who d'you think plans strategy for the unions?"
"I hadn't thought about it. But I should think the governor's too old to be sneaking around the country like that."
"Mostly they come to him. And that's about all I want to say about it," Lufo ended gruffly.
Stan Thompson moved sadly between the separated pieces of the Boucher relay, sighing as though the device were an injured child. "It'll be a miracle if this ol' Daytripper makes another trip. Lufo, will you get my repair kit? May as well start now."
But Espinel had anticipated him, carrying the kit over his shoulder as he entered the soddy. Thompson took it with a nod, then turned back to stare at the latino. "Trouble?" Lufo had seen the look too; stepped to the doorway, his sidearm ready.
"I don' know," Espinel replied. "But I took a ride aroun' the perimeter. Miz Sandy, you got any pigs here?"
She swallowed hard, then spread her hands. "Where would I keep them?"
"I guess you wouldn'. But I see the biggest hog tracks I ever see in my life out there," Espinel said. "Un monstruo, prints big as my hand."
Lufo crossed himself. "I thought that damn' thing was just a Wild Country legend. No wonder the ponies were spooked!"
Thompson fitted a scalpel-like blade into a handle; began to slice film from a shattered wing spar. "What the devil are you talking about, Lufo?"
"The devil is right. Used to be a story about a Russian boar that escaped from a Texas Aggie research station near Sonora, North of here. Big as a pony, mean as a grizzly; sooner eat a man than look at him and has bowie knife tusks to do it with. Sandy Grange, where the hell are you going?"
She paused at the door to reply: "I, uh, have to find Childe. No, you stay there. I'll be all right."
"If you say so," Lufo said, doubting it, replacing the pistol with reluctance. He turned back to Espinel. "She's survived this long with that monster out there in the brush. Espinel, you sure about these tracks?"
Espinel essayed a wan smile, put his thumbs and middle fingers together to form an oval the size of a human hand.
"Mierda! So Ba'al is loose out here after all," said Lufo.
Thompson: "Who?"
"That's what they named him after he took a lot of slugs and killed some people. The false god; the devil; Ba'al. I hope that cute little rubia knows what she's doing out there. And we better mount a sentry at night; he might have a taste for horseflesh."
Chapter 17
Sandy's journal, 3 Jun'
The soddy is small for a rebel boarding house, but the pay—if I can believe them!—will be good. No fear I'll ever forget this day. Stan Thompson: healer's hands, monomaniacal in his work, preoccupied. I might be any age or gender for all he cares. Espinel: wiry, shy & deferential, not your average Mex bandit! It hurt him to shoot that pony. & Lufo Albeniz? A prototype, healthy laughing macho animal, moves like a big snake but crushes you with those dark mestizo eyes.
Nearly two hundred kilos of meat & serviceable hide but I'm exhausted. Childe took some leavings. Swears she can keep him placated & downwind as long as need be. Hope so. Don't want rebel blood on my hands. But if Lufo should try what I see in his glance, I'd whistle in a second.
Wouldn't I?
Chapter 18
Ten minutes after the plush executive hoverbus whirred from its lair under the IEE tower, Eve Simpson saw the southernmost tip of the Great Salt Lake pass on her right. That meant the bus was making better time since she'd urged Mills to wangle a police-freq. trip plotter. Once Eve tasted the lucullan comfort of the big fandriven bus, she refused to visit the desert lab in anything else. Besides, it needed no driver, skating smoothly above the potholed freeway with its onboard plotter in command.
With her police module, of course, other traffic was shuttled aside for Eve's passage, countermanding whatever other ideas the drivers might have. That way Eve could whirl along at. absolute top speed and the hell with optimum energy trip plots.
The hoverbus drew on narrowcast power transmitters along the freeway until Eve passed Nephi. After that it would automatically receive LOS—line-of-sight—recharges from the transmitters that began to dot high points in the heartland of Zionized, Streamlined America. Those LOS recharges were frequent, for Eve's demands on everything she used were rarely less than the maximum. She had punched in the Nephi-Salina-Green River route, for example, instead of the more direct Provo-Price-Green River route because she did not enjoy the faint side-loads on her great bulk when the bus took a twisty course.
Her chosen route was longer and took more power. So what? Eve had power to burn. If Marengo—poor haunted, hairy, heavy-hung Marengo—was as good as his word, she'd have still more power soon. And he'd damned well better come through or she'd cut his dose of dreamstuff. She liked to think Marengo Chabrier enjoyed her sexuality as much as he enjoyed taking a nice long hit; and therefore that was what she did think.
At Salina she adjusted the lounge pneumatics, lit a filtertip joint, selected a porn cassette from her shoulder bag and lay back, her own vastness diminished by the room-sized insulated compartment. The fact that viewing such salacious stuff was now punishable, and ownership of it a felony, only heightened its charm for Eve. Since that stupid fiasco in Santa Fe she'd been horny as a rhino and not much easier to please. Her demand for sexual acceptance to counter that event was not entirely subliminal; with Chabrier, she knew, she could slake her thirsts. If it hadn't been so much trouble, she'd have plotted some revenge on that emerald-eyed young hit-man, Quantrill. But there was plenty of time. Sooner or later he would wander across her right-of-way, an ant on her freeway, and then…
The little holodrama unfolded before her, the voluptuous cowgirl, Patty, flirting with the wrangler but clearly more interested in the erection of her pony. Presently the heroine—for in a sense she had to be one—found a way to rig a sling under her little stallion.
Eve began to enjoy herself—more so when she perceived the vibration that rose under her bass-fiddle buttocks when she sat in the right position. She toyed with the pneumatics. The vibration toyed with Eve. Patty toyed with her trusty, lusty steed; and as the hoverbus neared the highway summit it occurred to Eve that a lot of summits were approaching simultaneously.
Eve reached down with tender sausage fingers; womanipulated herself, laughing at the holo and at the world. She flicked off the audio and, in a fit of whimsy, began to sing an ancient ballad, 'Always,' in her clear sweet soprano. In this context of purest narcissism, every phrase seemed funnier than the last and, once she'd sung "… need a helping hand…" Eve rolled in her couch gasping with laughter and orgasmic release.
She flicked the pornodrama off then, suspecting fakery in the action. She wasn't sure it was possible to make it with a horse. Even if it was, she'd leave this little Cow Patty electronically stranded in mid-hump. It was a c
oncept as silly, as willful, as tacky as the holoporn itself. Eve gloried in that because she could afford to do it when most citizens did not dare even watch such things. Pleasure without consequences: the goal and the province of power.
Eve had reached a pillowy mellow before the bus passed a road sign: NO SERVICES NEXT 170 KM., and whipped down the grass-obscured surface of an ancient ranching road near Green River, Utah. Five klicks South of that turnoff, a decrepit-looking gate of steel pipe accepted a signal from the trip plotter and swung open until the bus whooshed by flinging its broad flat wake of dust and weed seed.
It never occurred to Eve that the bus might someday have a breakdown, leaving her stranded. Her position in such matters was that no machine would dare risk such wrath as hers.
Forty klicks further, beyond the warning signs, Eve spied the P-beam obelisks that defined and protected IEE's San Rafael desert lab. The bus did not pause, or need to. Finally she saw the two-story chain-link fence and the earthen berm inside. The lab, dug into the desert floor, was perfectly placed, roughly midway between three geographic features. They were called Goblin Valley, Dirty Devil River, and Labyrinth Canyon. The names were old and apt. As Boren Mills had once drily remarked, it was no tourist trap.
The last automatic gate swung aside and then Eve's hoverbus settled on concrete, near the elevator platform atop the berm. Chabrier waited for her, alone on an electric cart, wearing his bright tragic smile that she knew so well.
A tongue of ramp slid from the side of the bus and Chabrier, familiar with Eve's desires, backed the cart up onto the deep pile carpet. Only then did he step down, making his slight continental bow. "You are early, madame," he murmured.
Eve warmed to the attentions of Marengo Chabrier. His deepset gray eyes were hooded by eyebrows so thick and black that they met in a ledge above the strong nose. His lashes were luxuriant, his cheekbones Scythian, his mouth sensuous and as small as Eve's own. The open collar of his beige IEE coverall revealed what seemed to be a tee-shirt of black fleece, but was body hair. The stocky Chabrier was marvelously endowed with hair except, as Eve knew, the top of his head and two bare islands flanking his backbone. Eve envied Cow Patty for her pony a bit less; she herself had access to a gentle ape with two doctorates and a tongue that could clean a mayonnaise jar.