by Mack Maloney
"Please explain," Hunter asked him.
The Astronaut sipped his Tang martini again and thought for a few moments. "Let me put it this way," he said. "The man you are seeking is indeed a bit of an enigma. A riddle. A mystery. He could be your greatest friend or your worst enemy. He's cultured, yet he's also a brute. He loves to drink, but he's God-fearing. He's an intellectual, but he wouldn't hesitate a moment to change history to suit his purposes. Or to fuel his amusement. He could be a cold-blooded killer. But in a way, he's just a big softy, too. He has this thing about him where he wants every story to have a happy ending, every dream to come true. But most of all, he was very jealous of the way we used to live — you and I and the rest of the people back in twentieth-century America, so long ago."
Hunter took it all in and thought he'd arrived at some kind of profile of his quarry.
"So, he's a madman then," he told the Astronaut.
The Ancient Astronaut paused another moment, and then shook his head no.
"A madman? Well, not exactly," he replied. "Actually, he's a Russian."
Two minutes later, Hunter was gone.
The DATT shimmered brightly as soon as he'd stepped in and activated its balky controls. It then began shuddering madly as it seemed to resist fading out as it was supposed to.
When it finally left, it did so with a mighty bang and a brilliant and disturbing flash of light, leaving behind a cloud containing a very nasty stench that smelled a little too much like burned hair and bone.
The dramatic departure stunned even the spy. Suddenly all eyes were on him.
Erikk especially turned back to the Imperial interloper. "If any harm comes to our friend…" he said, letting his words trail off.
The spy waved away his concerns. "I'm well aware of the power of the Third Empire," he said seriously. "And I have no desire to have it come down on my head."
Now an awkward silence descended on the room. With Hunter's considerable presence gone, the place seemed empty, barren. The Ancient Astronaut had faded out, too, making the presence of the Imperial spy even odder.
But then another thought came to Erikk. A very worried look washed across his face.
"We told Hawk about the Big Generator," he said. "And the SSG's plans for it. And what can happen if they succeed in their plans or if they screw it up. We told him how he can navigate the dizzylando, and what he should look for once he is down there."
"All true," one of the UPF officers said. "What is your concern then?"
Erikk thought for a long moment and then looked up at them.
"Did we forget to tell him about the blinks?" he asked.
Part Two
When Russians Dream
3
The noise was horrible.
Screaming…
Like high winds.
Like endless static.
Like he was back in Purgatory, hearing the cries of the dead again, just this time, at very high speed.
He had to shut them out, but it was so cramped inside the DATT tube, there wasn't enough room for him to raise his hands to put over his ears — if he had hands and ears, that is. That was also very distressing. He had no ears, so really he couldn't hear anything. He had no mouth, so he couldn't cry out. He had no hands, no feet, nothing to feel, nothing to feel with. But the screaming was still there.
It was the darkness that was the worst though. The DATT tube had just a slit for a window; it was no more than a half inch wide and barely four inches across. But it did him no good because he had no eyes, and so, he could not see.
He didn't know what he'd expected, as his body was taken apart and put back together several trillion times a second — this was how it made its way along the vibration net of the universal superstrings. Had he hoped to see stars flashing by? Or planets? Or some kind of new, uncharted celestial phenomena? Or perhaps a glimpse of the nanoworlds of subatoms and quicks, quacks, and quarks?
He wasn't sure. But in the end, he saw nothing at all during the transfer. Nothing but complete darkness. And it didn't help when halfway through, he imagined, in one tril-lionth of a trillionth of a second, that the sides of the tube were lined with crushed velvet cloth, not the old wrinkly plastic sheeting that had covered the interior when they first locked him inside this infernal box. And the smell, even though he had no nose, was that of spring lilies, favorite flower of the dead.
He was sure something had gone wrong. DATT transfers were supposed to be instantaneous, at least way back when this piece of crap technology was first built. But now, to Hunter's psyche, it seemed to keep going on and on and on…
Just when he was convinced that the DATT had indeed malfunctioned and he was now doomed to stay like this forever — cramped, in the dark, disassembled, with the eternal screaming taunting him — it all stopped.
Just stopped…
* * *
Dust…
He kicked up a mighty cloud of it on his arrival. A bit of light came through that tiny slit of a window now; that's how he knew he had his eyes back. But for the first few seconds, all Hunter could see was a blizzard of white powder on the other side, thick as snow, swirling past. What to do? He couldn't open the hatch. The dust would come in and smother him. He had no choice but to wait, hoping for it to disperse. Only then would he be able see exactly where he was.
He spent the next few moments checking his person, especially his appendages. It was a big surprise, but everything seemed to have survived the DATT transfer in good shape. He let out a long, slow breath of triumph. When he looked up again, the dust had settled, and his field of vision had cleared.
But he was shocked by what he saw. He'd been expecting to be transferred to an inhabited body. He'd just assumed he'd see a city, a settlement, a Ferris wheel — something that would confirm that he'd landed on the Alpha Moon. But the landscape he saw now through the tiny window was as barren as Earth's moon. Craters, valleys, high mountains, deep ravines, lots of dust — and absolutely no signs of life. Or atmosphere.
Am I in the right place?
He crossed his fingers and kicked opened the DATT's hatch. He'd arrived on the edge of a large impact crater. A quick check by his quadtrol said that yes, he was on some kind of moon, and that there was breathable air down here. In fact, the moon's puff was working at an impressive 89 percent. Still, Hunter hesitated before taking that first deep breath outside. The technology of the Ancient Engineers may have done a great job reviving this tiny place, but that had been thousands of years ago. Were the moon's invisible life support systems still intact? If they weren't, he'd be dead in seconds.
He let the moment of doubt pass. After everything they'd been through together, if he couldn't trust his quadtrol now, what could he trust? So he took that deep breath, then let it out slowly. It felt great going in and going out. There really was air here.
So far, so good.
He climbed out of the tube and stepped onto the surface. His boots sank a few inches into the fine white powder that seemed to be everywhere. It was strange, though, because when he looked up, he could see not the blue skies of a typical puffed body. What he saw instead were the stars in their full glory — and of course the massive presence of Saturn, at the moment hanging off to his right, taking up most of the horizon. Its major rings sliced through the sky right over his head. They made the rings surrounding Doomsday 212 look puny by comparison.
It was all incredibly beautiful. And obviously, he was on one of Saturn's many, many moons. But this place seemed dead. In every direction, he saw nothing but dust and desolation. Saturn had so many moons these days, both real and artificial. Had the DATT's preset controls been wrong? Had he landed on the wrong satellite? Or was he inside another mad vision, a delusion of his own making?
The quadtrol set him straight. It took about three milliseconds before confirming that he was indeed on the right satellite, the natural moon the Astronaut had called Alpha. What's more, he was at the right latitude for his purposes here. He was just a little off on th
e longitude.
In other words, he'd have to walk a bit.
Reassured by the quadtrol's conclusions, he brushed himself off and readjusted his reliable crash helmet on his head. Then he tapped his breast pocket twice. This was where he always kept his small American flag and the faded photograph of the mysterious Dominique. Two taps meant he was wishing himself luck. He was ready to start hiking.
But then he turned around, intent for some reason on closing the DATT tube's door. He was astonished by what he saw.
The tube was no longer a tube at all. It was a coffin.
Not something that looked like a coffin. But a real coffin.
Hunter froze for a moment, his breath caught in his throat. Then, slowly, he ran his hand along its polished wooden frame, its brass handles, its gleaming hinges. The inside was indeed crushed velvet, just like what was used to line the interior of coffins back in his former life. And he could still detect the scent of lilies coming from inside it.
What happened? Had he gone through something weird during his transfer? Had the DATT malfunctioned after all?
Was he even still alive?
Panic rising, he pulled out the quadtrol again and quickly asked it to check his vital signs. The device burped a couple times but then came back with all good readings. This did not convince him, though. Something about unexpectedly stepping out of a coffin on a very desolate rock had shaken him. It would have shaken anybody.
He asked the quadtrol once more for his life signs. Again, everything came back green. Then he asked it, "Am I still alive?" feeling foolish as soon as he did so. Its reply: "If you weren't, you would not have been able to ask the question."
He almost laughed. The quadtrol had become a wiseass. That was very reassuring.
He took a moment, collected himself, then slammed the coffin door shut. But then a thought came to him. He blinked… and when his eyes opened, the coffin had turned back into the DATT.
He froze again, a chill running right through him.
More madness, he thought. From within…
That's when he made a vow. No matter what happened down here, no matter what dangers he faced, or what success he might find, or even how quickly he had to escape, there was no way he was ever climbing into that thing again.
He started walking.
Heading north, the direction the quadtrol told him to go, he wondered again how the puff on the moon could be so stable, and yet the sky appeared void of any atmosphere at all.
And again, why did this place look so forbidding? It was supposed to be a dizzylando, an amusement park — or at least the entrance to one. But then again, maybe it was all a cover. Maybe the creator, in wanting to keep the whole concept here secret, made this place look as uninviting as possible.
Had someone landed here unintentionally in a spaceship, judging from the surroundings, only a fool would open his canopy, without getting proper readings. Just the sight of the place would send even the most hard-bitten space traveler reaching for the power button on their craft and the quickest way out of here. If indeed this had been the creator's intention, then he'd really hit the mark. Walk-ing alone way out here, Hunter felt like he was the last person left in the Galaxy.
He trooped along for about a half mile, crossing natural bridges over two ravines and scaling one small mountain. It was on the other side of this rise that he finally spotted something.
Something very odd.
Off on the horizon was a sign, designed to look like a huge arrow, made up of hundreds of blinking white lights. It was sitting on top of a small red building and was actually pointing to another lighted sign just above the building's entrance. This sign was written in Cyrillic lettering. Hunter pointed the quadtrol in its general direction and then pushed the query panel. According to the quadtrol, the sign read: Welcome to the Dizzylando.
"Must be the place," Hunter muttered.
It took him another twenty minutes to actually reach the building.
It was smaller than he'd imagined, set in the middle of the vast, barren plain. It appeared to be made out of pine, a rare commodity in the Galaxy over the centuries. A porch made of short planks fronted the rectangular structure. It had many windows, was painted bright red, and had a pair of steel rails running past the porch. It looked similar to something from Earth's ancient past, a place known as a railroad station.
The moon dust had permeated every corner and crevice on the outside of this place. Hunter's flight boots made an odd but vaguely familiar sound as he climbed up onto the porch. He stopped and studied the materials around him and realized this was not real wood after all, but a kind of synthesized material that had been made to look like wood. He believed that the sound of his boots hitting it was actually false as well, as this material was equipped with sensors that would imitate the sound of something hitting wood, just to lend authenticity. Very strange…
He stepped through the swinging doors. Just like the outside, the interior had been built as a re-creation of an ancient train station. Ticket windows, yellowed schedules, benches for the weary. But the inside also had many flashing lights of all colors, though mostly white. They were strung around all the windows, above and around the door, and crisscrossing the ceiling.
There was another lighted sign hanging on one wall. It read, Sledyuschaia ostanovka Zemlya Priklucheniy. Xvarit li tebe myzestva chtobi proderzatsya? The quadtrol knew most of the Russian words. Roughly translated, the sign said: Next stop: Adventure Land. Are you enough of a hero to take it?
Sitting on a very simple table in the middle of the room Hunter found the most ancient computer imaginable. It had a monitor, with a tiny screen made of glass — not super-glass. Just regular glass. There was a keyboard attached to it by a wire, another item rarely seen in the Galaxy these days. A power cord ran the length of the room, disappearing behind the far wall.
Hunter ran his quadtrol over this strange piece of machinery and asked it for a name. The quadtrol blinked back: "PC — personal computer."
He contemplated the machine for a moment. It seemed slightly familiar to him now. But in a million years he would never have believed it would actually still work. It took him several minutes just to locate the power switch. It was a recessed button — a button! — placed in the lower right hand corner of the monitor. Hunter gave it a push, expecting nothing more than a click. But slowly, the screen came to life.
He was more surprised when words actually started forming on the monitor's screen. Some were Cyrillic but others were in English, again welcoming him to the dizzy-lando. He selected a box which allowed him to continue in English. Two more words appeared: "Enter password…" Hunter was stumped, but just for a moment. Then he recalled the two vaguely familiar words the Astronaut had told him before he left: Sky Ghost. It took him nearly a minute to hunt and peck out the two words on the keyboard. Finally done, he pushed the Enter button.
The screen blinked, then a small icon of a clock appeared. Its second hand started moving very slowly. Hunter waited patiently, wiping the dust from his uniform's sleeves, studying his boots and thinking maybe it was time to get a new pair, even whistling a tune.
Five minutes crawled by. Finally a new screen appeared. He read the words — and groaned. It said: "Enter password again…"
It took him nearly a half hour to type his way through this and three more security walls, always entering the same password as instructed, and brushing off his uniform twice, while waiting for the old PC to keep regurgitating his entries. Finally, the word "Processing…" appeared on the screen. This was the longest wait of all. But again, after whistling what seemed to be an entire symphony, the screen changed and said, "Entry authorized…"
A device down at the bottom of the computer began churning. It was a printer of some sort. A piece of yellow paper slowly emerged from a slot in its side. The printing on it, again, was in English. It said, "Good for all rides. Get ticket punched after each feature." On the reverse side was a faded, out-of-focus picture of a man, possibly
midthirties, clean shaven face, bald head, cracked-tooth smile, and an absolutely insane look in his eyes. He was laughing, with his hands out in front of him, in a sort of greeting gesture. A name below the picture was too faded to read, but Hunter didn't need to see it to know who this was.
It's the Russian, he thought. The Mad Russian…
He stuffed the ticket into his pocket, and the computer screen changed again. Now it read, "Last Page " Below were two blank fields. He was instructed to fill them in. One wanted his name. He typed in "Hunter, Hawker," his given name. The second field asked, "What is your hobby?" Hunter hit the Enter button, hoping the information wouldn't be required. But the screen would not budge. He tried to override it again. Still no luck.
He returned to the original screen. What is your hobby? He wasn't even sure he'd ever had a hobby. He was beginning to feel a time creep now. Whatever he was supposed to do down here, he had to do quickly. But if the PC wouldn't let him proceed, then he would have to fill in this innocuous little field. Hobby? There was only one thing he could think of.
He typed in "Flying."
Then he hit the Enter key…
"Can you fly this thing?"
Hunter was standing in the same position as when he hit the Enter key on the computer. Right hand extended, looking almost straight down.
But everything around him had changed. He was no longer inside the Adventure Land station. Instead, he was standing on a cliff hanging above a very deep ravine. High, craggy peaks were all around him. Wisps of smoke were rising from every crevice in these mountains. The air smelled of sulfur and burned oil. The landscape below was forested, but rough and hilly. The sky above was purple and not blue, and filled with streams of electrical sparks instead of stars. The wind was blowing fiercely. There was much noise, confusion in the air. And the massive presence of Saturn was gone.
He was definitely not on the Alpha Moon anymore. But it wasn't Purgatory, either.