It was difficult to move, but not impossible. I strained against the envelope and got my feet flat against the ceiling. Then I pushed off and rammed into Krause, rather into his envelope, which yielded sluggishly. I pushed him out of the way, brought my gun arm around and aimed at Moore, who slowly wafted up at me. I squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. With considerable effort, Moore brought his pistol around and tried the same thing. Same result. I let go of the pistol. It hung close to my hand, rotating lazily. Arms outstretched, Moore came up to meet me, and we grappled clumsily. I aimed a kick at his groin and missed, though it would have landed with the force of a thousand snowflakes at least. Moore tried a chop at my neck which I blocked, grabbing his envelope and compressing it until I felt my hand close about his wrist. He flailed at me with his other arm, to little effect, then kicked at my midsection, catching me good enough to send me spinning away, but I held on to his wrist. Finding myself against the ceiling again, I pushed off with my might and slammed into him, sending us plummeting toward the breakfast nook. His head whanged off the edge of the little table, which under ordinary circumstances would have knocked him out. With the envelope acting as a cushion, he was merely disoriented. I got my hands around his neck and squeezed, concentrating all my force and will. He brought his forearms up through mine in the standard countermove but couldn’t raise them high enough. Transformed by rage, the muscles of my body became taut wire cable, the hoop of my arms a ring of power conducting furious white energy. The invisible envelope slowly gave until Moore’s eyes went wide and filled with fear. There was a madman on him who wouldn’t let go.
“Tell me now,” I said through clenched teeth, “about how you’ll abuse those women and make me watch. Tell me. I want to hear it.”
“Bastard!” he hissed. “You—”
“In detail. Tell me.”
The pressure got to his throat. He gurgled, gave up trying to bring his arms through, seized my wrists and began vainly to tug at them. His kicks were weaker now. I ignored them. His head drifted under the table. I yanked and whacked his face against the underside. It felt good and the sound was most satisfactory. I did it again.
“Tell me,” I kept repeating with each thwack. His body went limp but I did not stop choking him.
A current of force caught us then, whooshing us out from under the nook and toward the hatchway. In the air, a flurry of objects swirled about us, more than could possibly have been loose. The doors and drawers of the kitchen cabinets were open, spewing out streams of utensils, dishes, cups and such. They too seemed to be heading in the general direction of the cab. We drifted through the hatch and my grip weakened. The distraction of what was happening deflected my concentration, and my fury began to subside.
But when I saw what they had been doing to Carl, my wrath doubled and redoubled. He tumbled beside me nude from the waist down. Wires dangled from his scrotum, to which they were affixed by tape. The wires led to a small battery-and-switch affair floating nearby. Carl was fumblingly trying to pick the tape off, encircled by trailing lengths of rope by which he had been tied to one of the back seats. I tried to tighten my grip on Moore’s enormous neck but couldn’t. The envelope had stiffened. I lost my hold completely and drifted away. Moore was unconscious, his face dark and bloated, but I couldn’t tell whether I had killed him. He might still have been breathing. Another of Moore’s henchmen was in the cab. I kicked at his face as I flew by, then tried to push myself off the front port and back to Moore to finish the job. Drifting objects got in my way and I batted at them like flies. They were everywhere: pencils, lading sheets, binocular case, backpacks, shoes, a packet of feminine napkins, the druggy contents of the medicine chest, somebody’s lost sandal, dishes, scraps of paper, a moldy dinner roll, books, a pipette reader, the Ahgirr maps … all the junk that had accumulated over the past month and which everyone agreed needed to be cleaned up—tomorrow, maybe.
I had just about reached Moore again when both the cab’s gull-wing hatches sprang open. The explosive decompression drove everything and everyone out of the rig and into the hard vacuum of the immense chamber.
But I could breathe. The invisible envelope held trapped air. As I drifted upward, tumbling and turning, I wondered how much and how long it would last.
Soon my rotation slowed, not due to any effort on my part, and I could see the action below. There were Bugs everywhere, maybe about thirty of them, flittering here and about and from vehicle to vehicle, all of which were spewing an endless stream of objects and people from sprung hatches. The rig vomited clouds of jetsam from both ends. All our equipment and stores came flying out, including the astronomical gear—minus its protective wrappings. The whole gang too: Darla, Sean, Susan, Lori, the Voloshins, George and Winnie (where the hell had they been, I wondered), John, Roland, and Liam, all freed from their bindings and from the spell of the dream wand. Wide-eyed and disoriented, Darla passed me as we ascended. Then Lori went by, and I tried to wave. She saw me and shouted something but made no sound at all. She looked very frightened. I didn’t blame her. I was scared bowelless myself.
Everything rose, tumbling, wobbling, spinning lazily. At about the height of fifty meters, the ascent stopped. Everything then proceeded to form into a vast swirling cloud like a flock of migrating birds, orbiting about a point on the floor of the chamber around which the Bugs were arranging themselves into a circle.
The scene was dreamlike; everything transpired in perfect silence. I could hear myself as I shouted and called out to everyone, but no sound conducted through the vacuum between individual force-envelopes. No reason why it should, I thought, so I shut up.
The cloud of junk and people began to order itself, forming spiraling lines leading down. During the reshuffling, I was astonished to see Wilkes—the genuine flesh-and-blood Corey Wilkes—go wafting past. He was naked from the waist up and wore white pajama bottoms. His chest was wrapped with white bandages. He looked as if he was having trouble breathing. His eyes seemed to find me as he passed. Dim recognition formed in his expression for a moment, then his eyes closed and he floated out of my ken. It was a reunion up there. Twrrrll, the surviving Reticulan, ghosted by, zoom-lens eyes fixing me in an insensate stare.
If Wilkes had been a shock, the, sight of Ragna coming in for a docking maneuver had me reeling. In spite of myself, I yelled out, “Ragna! What the hell are you doing here!!??”
Well, he answered, and what he said was probably something like “Greetings, Jake, my friend of the bosom! Is this not of immense interestinghood?” or words to that effect, if his idiotically effusive smile was any indication. A slight perturbation of his orbit took him away, with his wife Oni following. I groaned.
I saw men I didn’t recognize; other members of Moore’s gang of cutthroats no doubt.
Above the circle of Roadbugs a gigantic cyclonic funnel took shape. Currents of force carried junk in spiraling patterns down to make a wide circuit in front of the Bugs, then back up again through the funnel and into the hovering cloud of people and debris. It seemed the Bugs wanted to inspect us and every doodad and whatnot we owned. I found myself in the funnel in short order, and began a dizzying descent in a quickly tightening gyre. As I neared the bottom, though, everything stopped.
They had found the Cube.
The circle of Bugs drew tighter. In the dim light of the chamber I could barely see a black dot making the inspection circuit by itself, pausing briefly in front of each Bug before moving on. The Cube made the circuit twice, and that seemed to be enough. The funnel cloud began twisting downward again and I found myself parading before the assembled inspectors, floating single file with an assortment of digging tools. I had a momentary fantasy, imagining what was going through the Bugs’ minds—if they had minds—as they categorized and cataloged everything.
Inanimate: implement; inanimate: foodstuff, inanimate: (unclassifiable); animate: being (semisentient, bipedal, mammalian); inanimate: apparel (covering for pedal extremities) …
They
found me of little interest but paused for a moment to better scrutinize George and Winnie. Then I gravitated up into the cyclone again, a helical course until I returned to take my place in the huge swirling galaxy of stuff and people above.
I looked down. Carl’s Chevy was rising on its own special updraft. When the funnel cloud had dissipated, it floated down to rest on the floor in the middle of the circle. The Bugs crowded even closer together to get a better look at it—if that was what they were doing. None of the car’s hatches opened and none of its contents came out. They spent a good ten seconds looking it over, then backed off, apparently either satisfied with what they saw, or despairing of ever making sense of it.
The strip-search was over—none too soon, because I was finding each succeeding breath more difficult to draw.
What happened next happened quickly. The cloud of stuff broke apart, its elements falling precipitously, but gathering into a dozen or so individual streams. I fell, my stomach flipping over even though the sensation wasn’t like an ordinary fall. I started tumbling, tried to stop but couldn’t. Blizzards of junk accompanied me. Somebody’s shirt covered my face and I brushed it off. Then a tool box bumped into my protective envelope but didn’t hit me. I grew disoriented and slightly nauseated. The last few moments of the ordeal were mercifully quick, and I can’t describe exactly how I got there, but the next thing I knew I was back in the cab again. A cataract of debris followed me through the hatch, spilling onto the deck in an ever-rising tide. John shot through the hatch, then Susan, then Roland, followed by the rest of our party including the Voloshins. None of Moore’s gang appeared. Then my invisible wrapping ceased to exist and I fell headfirst into the lake of junk. The hatches slammed shut and there was silence. Someone was standing on my legs. I twisted, and whoever it was fell over. I surfaced from the junk, tried standing up. My leg oozed into a pile of loose crap, sending me over. I grabbed the back of the shotgun seat and pulled myself up. “Interesting weather we’ve been having,” a reassuringly familiar voice said.
“Sam!”
“Yup, I’m back.”
The cab was, needless to say, a god-awful mess. Several minutes went by and we still hadn’t found Winnie. Eventually she turned up under a mound of bedding, unhurt. She jumped up on me, and squeezed me in a hug.
“Hello, Winnie honey,” I said soothingly. “It’s okay, girl. It’s okay.”
I realized that the rig was moving.
“Hey, Sam,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“You got me,” he said. “I ain’t driving.”
21
We were moving, but the rig’s engine wasn’t on. Neither would it start when I tried it. There were two Roadbugs in front of us, acting as locomotive and tender to our little train, which was composed of the rig, the riderless Voloshin vehicle, Moore’s complement of buggies, and Ragna’s vehicle.
I checked the instruments and found that the rollers weren’t turning. The rig was floating about half a meter off the road. Neat trick, that.
Another Bug brought up the rear. Every train needs a caboose.
“I want to know,” Sam said, “how they got all the air back in.”
“Maybe each molecule of gas had its own gravitic envelope,” Roland offered.
“I like that,” Sam admired. “Makes no sense, but I like it.” We were already out of the huge chamber and into a tunnel, traveling at a terrific rate. Apparently the Bugs knew exactly where they were taking us. Probably to the incinerator.
“The Black Cube!” Roland exclaimed, holding the thing up for all to see.
“I wonder why they didn’t keep it,” Susan said, frowning suspiciously.
“I wish they had,” I said glumly. “I can’t even give that thing away.”
“Sam,” Roland said, “where were you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “What I want to know is, where’s the Wilkes AI program?”
“My God,” Roland breathed, “it was Wilkes in there?”
“It’s safely bracketed in main memory,” Sam said. “We can erase it anytime we want.”
“Won’t it load right back in,” I wanted to know, “just like before?”
Sam chuckled. “That’s where the problem was, in AuxStorage. I’ve blocked access to it temporarily, which is what we should have done in the first place. It’s been tampered with physically, and we never would’ve been able to flush Wilkes out. We’ll have to go there and fix it.”
“Geez, Sam, I don’t know if I can do it. I’m no computer techie.”
“I’ll help, don’t worry. We’ve got the manuals—”
“But they’re in AuxStorage, Sam.”
“We have the hard copy back in the trailer, remember? In the egg-crate nook. If you’d clean this rig out once in a while…”
“Okay, okay. We’ll get to that later. How did you manage to dig out from under Wilkes?”
“Well, when the hocus-pocus started, the stray radiation—whatever it was—erased the CPU clean. That was all the opening I needed. The AI program is a computer, but one set up in software. I’m hardwired, therefore one hell of a lot faster. A few nanoseconds was all it took.”
“Well, I’ll be,” I said. “But how did Wilkes get the jump on you in the first place?”
“That was a fool’s mate,” Sam answered. “We should have seen it coming when we ran those diagnostics…”
“Wait a minute, let’s save that for later, too. I want to see what the hell Ragna is doing here.”
I got on the skyband and hailed him.
“Jake, my most special friend of mine! Hello and breaker breaker to all our buddies of the good variety!”
“Yeah, yeah. Ragna, how did you get here? And why in God’s name did you come?”
“Oh, Jake. This is a situation of embarrassment.”
“Come on.”
“Oh, indeed. Doubtless I am in the process of incurring your wrath when I am telling you that various surreptitious individuals of our people followed you.”
I laughed. “No, you won’t incur my wrath. Everybody follows me, all the time.”
“This is of truth. It was reported that many, many vehicles were being on your case like a ton of bricks. And on the planet where the highways are being interchanged, it was observed that material of an excremental nature was coming in contact with the rotary blades, to employ a metaphor.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what happened,” I said. “Go on.”
“It was at the time that our science individuals are finally understanding what is going on inside the Black Cube.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, they have been making some sense of the object. Their understanding is—let me be making this of perfect clarity—far from being of completeness, but they are arriving at the nub of its gist… if you are drifting with me.”
“I understand,” I told him. “So what is it?”
“Ah, Jake, as I have related, of scientific cognizance I am in possession of doodly squat. However and moreover, Oni is in ownership of vast quantities more than I, and she has been subjected to various briefings on the matter at hand. I will be having her talk with you, if this is not of inconvenience. Be standing by, please…”
“Wait a minute, Ragna,” I cut in. “We have someone here who is possession of vast quantities of whatever you said. I want him to talk to Oni, but let’s make it later, okay? We’re knee-deep in debris here. And I want to find out where they’re taking us.”
“That is a stupendous ten four. We are having the same vicissitudes in this vehicle of ours. Okay, Jake! We are going to be taking off our ears at this moment, and we will be catching you down the starslab at a later point in time. Until this point is reached, we are wishing excellent numbers to all our goodbuddies! Clear!”
“Right,” I answered.
“My God,” Roland groaned. “Where did they pick up that skyband lingo?”
“I dunno. Must have got it from our libraries.” I looked around. “Where is everybody?”
/> “Aft,” Roland said. “More room. But if you think this is chaos, you should see the trailer.”
“All right, people,” Sam announced over every speaker in the rig. “What do you say we get this mess cleaned up?”
“I like the ‘we,’ ” I sneered.
“Heh heh heh.”
All attempts at communication with the Bugs failed. We could only guess as to our ultimate destination, and we were too busy at first to do that. The Bugs dragged us out of the underground garage, through a nearby portal, and across a succession of nondescript planets. We spent most of that time cleaning up the mess.
Carl was excused from clean-up detail. His scrotum had swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, and he was in horrible pain. All I could do for him was shoot him up with hydromorphone and cortisone, and hope for the best. Carl had talked, told them everything they wanted to know; they simply hadn’t believed him. Toward the end, he’d thought they were coming around to buying his story about the saucer abduction; but he wasn’t sure. Mercifully; though inadvertently, the Bugs had intervened. Lori was in a state, alternating between fits of crying and tantrums in which she’d smash things against a bulkhead and screamingly relate in detail the parasurgical procedures she would perform on the bastards who’d tormented her boyfriend. In a day or two, Carl was much better and she calmed down.
The clean-up lasted three days. We took inventory and found nothing missing. Sean’s and Liam’s vehicle was undamaged, as was Carl’s of course, but Carl’s car was now behind the magenta roadster, which was better, I thought. We might need to get the Chevy out quickly at some point. I regretted now ever having Carl drive it aboard. Talk about bad moves—I had made my share.
When it became apparent that we were in for a long trip, we settled down to a routine, sleeping and eating in shifts, standing watch at the instrument panel in turns, generally setting up some semblance of housekeeping. Thirteen bodies make living in a trailer truck an exercise in the art of the social contract. The truck was big, but with the vehicles and all the cargo, there was limited living space. Toes got constantly stepped on, elbows jammed into ribs, and there was a waiting list for the toilet. Nevertheless, at one point Darla and I found ourselves alone in the aft-cabin. I took the opportunity to sound her out on a few things. I sat her down on the bunk.
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