by John Barnes
And another part of me just missed her terribly—any version of Helen would have been better than the great aching void I felt now—and wanted to be done with all the adventures, and back in a safe world where nothing ever happened. I recognized the signs of impending self-pity, and concentrated, instead, on watching the landscape for any possible ambush. None showed up.
With four of us to do the job, it only took a few minutes to get the “new” Telkes batteries into the Chevy van. It started right up, and we were almost air-conditioned into comfort by the time we pulled into Radium Springs.
Terri flagged us down and pointed us into a parking lot. “We’ve been busy,” she said cheerfully, after we rolled to a stop. We were in the parking lot of the Honeymoon Motel, a place that I suspected had been more than a hotel when last occupied. “We have the other batteries out and stacked in the lobby, so we ought to have enough cruising range to get to Santa Fe tomorrow. We’ve got five crates of Coke, and some dehydrated food from an outdoor supply store. And it turns out this place has a well, a roof tank, and electric hot water. The hardware store had an inverter, and Iphwin’s got two Telkes batteries set up to power the pumps. We’re filling the water tank on the roof right now, and we’ll have hot and cold running water tonight. Plus there were no dead people and no rats or snakes in here, and there’s beds for everybody.”
“Nearly perfect,” Paula said. “Good job.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say perfect,” Terri said. “Some of the posters on the walls are really gross. Do men really like that kind of thing?”
We went inside. It was obvious that this place had been a whorehouse. Well, we would have somewhere comfortable to spend the night, and some food to go to bed on; and I hardly thought that the morals of the place would prove contagious on one night’s stay.
I spent the night in an immense four-poster surrounded by alternating mirrors and pictures of young women in too much makeup and an unlikely variety of costumes. We hadn’t bothered with getting power to the electric lights, and the sun was well down by the time I got to bed, so the shapes were very dim and shadowy.
* * * *
The next day, about halfway through the morning and as we were winding up the spectacular valley that cut into the desert there, drawing nearer to Hot Springs, Iphwin said, “There’s an experiment I’m supposed to do—seeing if I can contact the Iphwin program from inside America. It doesn’t know whether anyone can call out, only that it can’t call in.
“What I’d like to do is make a call from a pay phone, at the next little town or gas station we come to. Everyone else, stay way back and watch real close. Be ready to lay down covering fire, or maybe to just dump and run, because it’s just possible that I will set off some kind of alarm or alert. My progenitor thinks it can keep me or almost-me in this event sequence, and we won’t be talking—just seeing if we can talk—on the first try.”
“How do you feel about trying it?” Terri asked.
He shrugged. “It’s what I exist for, isn’t it?”
“That’s not an answer to the question. Lots of people come into the world for a reason, but it’s not their reason, and they shouldn’t be controlled by it. And this is going to put you and us in danger. You know that one reason why the machine-Iphwin is willing to do this is that it will still get information even if it loses the whole expedition, and it can always just create another one and try it again.”
“What Terri is saying,” Paula added, “is that it’s Iphwin Prime’s game but it’s your ass.”
Iphwin nodded. “I understand that. But I also don’t have the processing power or speed to cope with what we might find in Santa Fe. And if we’re overwhelmed there it will be too late. It’s a gamble, no question about that; if it works and we don’t trip any alarms, then we have all kinds of backup. If it doesn’t work, we—or at least you—know we’re on our own, and we get away and stay off the nets.”
“And if it’s a complete disaster?” I asked.
“That’s the least likely possibility. Besides, even if I try, the real highest probability is no dial tone and no connection of any kind, and then we can stop worrying and wondering about the whole issue.”
Terri and I argued with him about it for a while, but Paula gradually came around to Iphwin’s point of view, and I think if we had a leader it was Paula. Esmé and Jesús didn’t say much but they tended to back Paula. An hour later it was about four firm votes for Iphwin’s trying to make that call, to two lukewarm ones for waiting or giving the idea up. When an old gas station with a visible pay phone on a pole popped up over one of the many long rises, we slowed to a stop, dropped Iphwin off, and drove about a hundred yards further up the road, to get to the top of a hill where taking off would be easier.
We all sat in the van, with a back window opened; I was appointed the official watcher. I saw Iphwin pick up the phone, apparently get a dial tone, and dial. There was a faint shimmer, but it could have been the heat or eyestrain.
He hung up the phone and ran straight for us. “Well, at least he remembers where the van is—that’s a good sign,” Jesús said. “He can’t be too different from—”
Iphwin bounded the last few steps and dove into the van through the sliding door. Something in the way he was moving made me slam it shut as soon as he was in. “Get us out of here!” he gasped.
Not pausing to ask what was wrong, Paula stood on the pedal and popped the clutch, and we shot off downhill like a missile. The thought did come to me that this was a very old vehicle with no maintenance other than the old untrustworthy oil we’d poured into every possible port that morning. But it held up just fine. The lumping motion from uneven permatires even seemed to be smaller today, maybe because they were evening out and maybe because I was getting used to it.
By the bottom of the hill we were moving at about eighty miles an hour, and we shot back up it never getting below sixty. The old van wasn’t built to do much more than that, but we were at least getting all the speed that it did have.
After two more long hills, Iphwin gasped out, “Any side road we can find would be a good idea,” and Paula took us down the first old ranch track that came up. We bumped and slammed along that at a slower speed until we were out of sight of the highway, made a couple more jogs, and found, after a few miles of driving past cattle skeletons partially covered by decayed hides, a gate that took us a few minutes to pry open. A few more miles brought us to an old county road that climbed up out of the valley.
On the way, Iphwin told us what had happened while he was on the phone. First of all, he had gotten right through, and his mechanical counterpart had told him that there was an enormous amount of random noise and decades-delayed messages coming out of the former United States, much of it addressed to servers that no longer existed. A sizable number of messages, mostly badly garbled, were from the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness in Santa Fe, so we had a better reason than ever to go there. “That was all good news. Then Billie Beard got on the line. Which means that she’s onto us. I don’t know if she can operate or do anything, here, and I don’t know if my progenitor can do anything to block her or at least keep her from figuring out where we are—but I didn’t want to stick around to find out, either.”
“Damn straight,” Paula said. “And a good thing.”
The county road was winding around in a narrow canyon, following a dry creek bed, and when it emerged into an open area, we were all startled for a moment.
“When do you suppose they built that?” Esmé asked, finally, in a strangled voice.
In front of us was a gigantic highway, four lanes, with no visible entrances or exits—the county road ran under it, under a bridge—and the whole thing was in beautiful condition. It glowed warmly in the morning sun, like the best friend you ever had.
“In the worlds I came from, that’s called an autobahn, and they only have them in the German Reich,” I said. “Built back before cars were self-driving. You needed several times as much room on the road wit
h human reaction times, not to mention human error rates.”
Esmé grunted. “There’s no such thing in the worlds I came from.”
Paula nodded slowly and said, “I think I heard of something like this, as a proposal to link Moscow and Vladivostok, sometime in the next century—unless high-speed rail beat it out. Well. Imagine putting something like this way out in the desert here. But it seems to be going north to Santa Fe and it’s almost got to save us some time. Now how do we get up onto it?”
It turned out that when we went through the bridge to check on the other side, there was a “frontage road” that ran parallel to the huge highway; we followed that for a couple of miles till we came to a place where only a high curb and some dirt separated the two. By that time we knew the big road was called I-25, and that it went to Santa Fe, since it had distances to Santa Fe posted.
“Should we pull over and just bump our way over that curb?” Paula asked.
“It keeps getting lower,” I suggested, “so—oh!”
There was a sign that directed us to get into the left lane to get onto I-25 North. We followed that lane and in less than a minute we were on the big highway, headed north. Paula cautiously played around and found that she could get the van to do about seventy miles per hour without shaking us up too much. “I still don’t know why they built this road, but I’m glad they did,” she said. “Maybe this was an event sequence that got robots relatively late, and so America built these things before whatever it was happened.”
“Or maybe there’s an obvious answer that we’ll learn once we find out where and when we are,” I said. “Meanwhile at least we’re making good time.”
The landscape was, weirdly, not familiar; it took me a while to remember that most of the Westerns I had grown up seeing were in black and white, and besides had been shot mainly in south California. They had captured some spectacular scenery, but nothing like the wild array of jagged shapes that seemed to leap and dance in the desert light here; California has mountains and deserts, but New Mexico is a desert ripped by mountains. And as far as we could tell, on that magnificent highway that leaped ravines and slashed through hillsides on pillars of shining white concrete, we were alone.
“Iphwin,” I said, “I have a thought to ask you about. When did the various event sequences first begin using quantum systems to communicate?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Not much before 2015, I think, in any event sequence that contained America. Not much after 2050 in any of the event sequences we’ll have had contact with. The presence of a United States of America sort of dictates a given technical level, and of course if they don’t have it yet then we aren’t yet bleeding over into their reality, nor they into ours.”
“So it coincides,” I pointed out, “with the disappearance of America.”
“Very roughly,” he said. “There must be a thousand other things that coincide with it. And everything we know about the quantum switching process would argue that since exchanges and shuffles between very similar event sequences are far and away the most common, on the average the number of people moving out of America via the phone, net, or self-piloted vehicle must have been about the same as the number coming in. It’s a random process, after all.”
“Random unless you select,” I said. “Same way you got all of us into one world—you just kept shuffling till it happened.”
“Trouble,” Paula said. We were just topping a rise, and when I leaned forward to see what was happening, I nearly fell forward because she was pumping the brake like crazy and downshifting clear to first gear. At the bottom of the hill, stretching clear across the road, and bank to bank, was a pile of wrecked cars, ten or twelve high.
“It’s a trap and it might be a current trap—” Paula said, as she fought to get the car slowed down. “—but I hope it’s from sometime long ago.”
A shot burst through the windshield and pinged off the roof. There were bright flickers along the top of the pile—it looked like they had half a dozen shooters.
“This damned thing will roll if I do anything effective,” Paula grunted, crouching low. We were slowing rapidly now, but still that terrible wall was getting closer, and more shots were hitting the Chevy van. Jesús pushed me out of the way, yanked a window open, and returned fire, but shooting from the rocking, bouncing van, he hit nothing.
“Get the batteries against the back door and crouch down!” Paula shouted. I grabbed one and put it in place; beside me Terri and Esmé were doing the same. The back window rolled down and she shouted, “Jesús, I’m going to try a J-turn. Everyone, hold on!”
I wasn’t sure why she had shouted that specifically to Jesús until I saw him duck in from the side window and face the back. The van was bucking and pitching as its misshapen tires tried to slow it against its own momentum on the steep slope.
Paula drove onto the right shoulder and stepped on the clutch and brake; we skidded down the shoulder, and just as we came to a stop, the shots now hitting the van in great numbers and all of us crouching on the floorboards, Paula threw it into reverse and threw the wheel hard left. The van shot across both lanes of traffic, going backwards, until its rear end pointed at the snipers below; then Paula threw it into gear and stood on the accelerator, ratcheting slowly up through the gears. Jesús got off a few wild parting shots that probably went nowhere near the barrier below.
We roared back up the hill, and I hollered, “Who’s okay?”
“Me,” Paula said.
“Okay here,” Esmé said.
“Okay,” Terri said.
“Okay but very angry,” Jesús said.
And there was a long silence. “Oh, god damn it to hell,” I said, when I looked down. “Iphwin is hit.”
He was lying there, breathing fast, maybe conscious and maybe not, with a gory mess where his left shoulder had been. Probably the bullet had smashed the bone and driven fragments into the blood vessels around it; he was likely to be slowly bleeding to death, and from what I remembered of my Navy first aid, this kind of thing was just about impossible to stop.
We were halfway down the hill when Terri shouted, “Look up the next hill!”
There was a big truck parked there, and men with guns were getting out.
“Shit again,” Paula said. “We’re boxed in.” She was pulling to a stop as fast as she could. “Okay, everyone brace. There’s a ranch access road over to our left, and I’d just bet that that’s where we’re supposed to go but I don’t feel like meeting up with Billie Beard in a dry gulch. Therefore I’m gonna try to take us over an embankment and down that dry creek bed to the right. I don’t expect it to work, but if we roll I’ll try to roll it so the side door opens.”
We were already peeling out even as she spoke. “Use the van as a fort if you have to, but try to slip away just as soon as we wreck—maybe you can get away before they see you getting away.”
She made a sweeping S-turn so that we went over the edge of the shoulder nose first, and miraculously we skidded down the loose gravel and onto the grass without tipping. I thought she might have low-saddled us with one bumper on the shoulder and one on the ground and no wheels touching, but she gunned it and we dropped and then rolled forward.
The bed of the arroyo was firm packed sand and loose gravel, not ideal for a highway car, but I have to give that old van some credit—it stayed upright and it kept rolling.
The shots stopped hitting almost right away, and I noticed that the soil in the dry arroyo was just damp enough so that we didn’t leave a rooster tail of dust behind us. A lot would depend on how many of them there were and what contingencies they had gotten prepared for.
We whipped around a bend and Billie Beard—one of her, anyway—was standing there with a submachine gun. She sprayed us, and Jesús shot at her; I don’t know if she fell down or took cover. I heard Esmé’s low grunt, and turned to find that she was gut-shot, holding her belly. “Christ, that one was high,” she said.
“Just relax, as best you can,” I said, “a
nd as soon as we get away from these guys we’ll get you taken care of.”
“Hit high, high, high,” she repeated. “Might’ve been hit in the kidney, liver, large bowel... getting kind of dark and I’m fading out, but there’s not much blood coming out of me, so I think it’s going into the ab cavity. Messy way to go.”
I checked for an exit wound, and she didn’t have one; the bullet had gone in below the left side of her rib cage, not very far below, and I was afraid she was probably right; the bullet had gone in where it was likely to hit her liver, stomach, or kidneys, and probably also sever some major blood vessels.
I could do nothing for her, and nothing for Iphwin, who was now lying still but had a faint pulse. I had a hard time even keeping my balance back there as the Chevy van rocked and bucked from side to side.
“Ha!” Terri sang out. “Can we get up there?”
“One way or another, but I think the odds are better below it.”
I grabbed a seat back, with my blood-soaked hand leaving a horrid stain, and peered forward to see what they were looking at. We were passing under a high bridge, part of some small county road.
