When there was nothing left, the phenomenon dissipated, fading into the air. All that remained were smoking fragments in the sand. Thin smoke rose from where the tree had been.
I found that I’d been gripping the wheel very tightly. I relaxed and sat back.
After a long silence Roland said, “So that was Fido.”
“Yeah.” I suppressed a shudder. The thing had really gotten to me. “Any ideas?”
Roland thought about it. “Energy matrix of some kind.” What had gotten to me was the maniacal single-mindedness of the thing. True, its target had been only a tree, but I had the feeling it would have done the same job on anything in the known universe. Anything. And not stop till the job was done. “I take it that by ‘matrix’ you mean energy molded by some kind of stasis field?”
“Either that, or it was an unimaginable sort of life form.”
“Life form? Good God.” Right then I admitted to myself that this vehicle was giving me a good case of the leaping creeps.
“Actually,” Roland said, “I don’t have a clue as to what it might have been.”
“Yeah.” I had no idea either, and wanted to drop the subject. I got out of the car, a little unsteadily. Up and down the shore as well as inland, people and beings were clambering into their buggies and moving away. I didn’t blame them. John, Susan, Darla, and Winnie were lying prone in the sand, looking up at me with shocked bewilderment, except Winnie, who still had her head tucked under Darla’s arm.
“Sorry, folks,” I said. “Should have warned you, but we weren’t expecting anything like”—I motioned over my shoulder—“whatever the hell that was.”
They all began to pick themselves up. I went back to inspect the rear of the car, where the storage compartment was. There’s another term for this area, but it eluded me. Black clumps of solidified tackyball still clung to the metal, some to the back window. I hit them with the heel of my hand until they snapped off. It had been a big gamble, but I had banked on the possibility that the hull of this strange vehicle would not admit a permanent bond. I’d won. The stuff had bonded superficially, but wasn’t up to taking a sudden shear stress. I wondered if we’d seen the end of the surprises the car had in store.
I went around to the front again, stepping over the drawings Winnie had etched in the sand, now partially erased. From what I could see, the figures were vaguely spiral.
I got in behind the wheel. John was now sitting where Roland had been.
“Well,” I said, “I guess we hang around here for a while.” Right then I noticed something, cocking my ears. “Hey, isn’t the motor running?” The engine idled so quietly it was hard to tell.
“I shut it off,” John told me. “When you got out after we stopped, you didn’t look like you were … I’m sorry, did I do something wrong?” He looked deflated. “Again?” he added dismally.
“No, no, I should have said something. It’s just that there should be anti-theft devices on this buggy. But I can’t understand how the weapons were operating. Oh, I see.” The key had a setting marked AUX. John hadn’t turned it back all the way. “Hm. Wonder what happens if I try to start it again?” John didn’t look as if he understood the implications. Against my better judgment, I turned the key.
The air was full of cats, big cats with fur that stood straight up, crackling with static charges that needled every square inch of my skin. I leaped out of the car, hit beach, and rolled. The effect stopped the instant I was out, but I felt scratchy and raw all over. I looked up to see the car come alive. With two quick, solid bangs, the doors slammed shut by themselves and the windows rolled up. In seconds the vehicle was locked up tight.
Only John and I had been inside. Presently, he came limping around the car, brushing sand from his bare chest. His hair was salted with sand as well, and he stopped to bend over and brush it out. I got slowly to my feet, wondering why I sometimes do the things I do. John came up to me.
“Jake?”
“Yes, John.”
“I just want to say…” He groped for words. “You’re the most unboring person I’ve ever met. I don’t know how else to put it.” He gimped off.
A left-handed compliment, or a right-fisted insult?
On second thought, I never do a damn thing. It keeps on happening to me.
Chapter 12
I FELT AMBIVALENT about losing the Chevy. On one hand I was almost glad to be rid of the thing and its bottomless bag of unsettling surprises; on the other, I hate to walk, which is what we did. We hoofed it down to where the Goliath spur cut the island almost in two. Farther south the vehicle density was higher, and I figured that whatever was coming to fetch everyone off the island would come in there. I was right; there was a harbor of sorts three quarters of the way down the concave curve of the crescent on the eastern shore. (By now I knew my intuitive orientation had at least a chance of being right—the sun was declining on the other side of the island now, and to me that was west. Strange that most planets do seem to rotate to the east.)
I stood looking westward, back along the stretch of road to the far shore and out along the causeway curving off into the not-green sea. I thought I could see the causeway end out there, a few hundred meters beyond the ingress point.
“Roland, how far do you think it is from where we ingressed to where we stopped?”
He shaded his eyes against the sun and looked west, then glanced toward the near shore, then back. “Two klicks, maybe less.”
“And what do you estimate our speed was when we shot through?”
“Mach point eight, but I wasn’t looking.”
“Neither was I, but that sounds good. So, we went from around two hundred fifty meters per second to zero in a little under two klicks. What’s that work out to in Gs, eyeballs-out? Mind you, I didn’t start braking immediately.”
I could almost see the electrons flow. I had Roland down as either a natural lightning calculator or a microcalc implantee. At times—just for seconds—his eyes went cold and siliconish. He answered quickly. “Too many.” He shook his head, puzzled. “It doesn’t figure. Can’t be right.”
“That’s what I thought, but it has to be right.”
“But we didn’t feel that kind of deceleration. Normal panicstop G’s, yes, but…” He thought about it. “Which could only mean that our strange vehicle doesn’t feel constrained by ordinary physical laws like conservation of momentum.”
“Right, which is impossible, or so I’m told.” I remembered something. “One thing—I was in no shape to think about it at the time, but I felt a wave of heat hit me when I first got out of the car. At first I thought it was the sun, but it got cooler as I walked away from the car. Could’ve been my imagination—”
“No, you’re right, the car was radiating heat for a while after we stopped. Very noticeable, but when I touched the hull, it was only slightly warm.”
“A superradiator substance, probably, but that’s not surprising, given the speeds it can hit in an atmosphere. Tell me this, d’you think the car could have been converting unspent momentum directly into heat?”
He shrugged. “Why not? I’m inclined to believe almost anything at this point.”
I scratched my three-day growth of beard. “Yeah. Spooky, though, isn’t it?”
“Um … Spooky. Yes.”
The others were waiting for us on the other side of the road. It had been a long trek, and we still had a piece to go until we made the harbor, or so we’d been told.
“Trouble, ja?” one elderly woman with a German accent had asked us. “Vehicle break down?”
“Uh, yes. Tell me, is it true that there’s no way back to the Terran Maze from here?”
She laughed, showing a gold incisor. The sight of it threw me until I figured out what it was. When had dentists given up that peculiar technique? A century ago? Two?
“Oh, nein, nein, nein, kamrada, no, no, no.” Apparently it was a damn silly question. “Gott, no,” she said, still laughing. “Impossible. You take wrong portal, j
a? Make mistake.”
“Yeah, I guess we did. Thanks.”
“You go down zere,” she said, pointing south. “Zey vill haf boat comink, ja? Ferryboat.”
“Thanks. Are you taking the ferry also?”
“Ja, ve alzo.” She anticipated my next question. “Ve stay up here till boat is comink,” she went on, waving with disdain toward the lower end of the island. “Too much people. Aliens.”
Her life companion smiled at me. He was a little older, bald, and wore eye-lenses… glasses, spectacles. We left them chuckling to each other, as if they’d now heard everything. Walking away, I reflected on the fact that there seemed to be a lot of middle-aged and older types around. Antigeronics hard to get here? Gold teeth, spectacles—okay, things were primitive, but what about the vehicles?
“Jake!” It was John, calling to me across the road. “The women want a privy call. Must find some cover, you know.”
“Right.”
“Someone’s coming,” Roland said, pointing to the western causeway.
“Sam!”
“No, a roadster… two.”
I shaded my eyes and looked. Two green dots were heading toward us. Reticulans, right on schedule.
I practically threw Roland across the road. We needed cover fast, but there was nothing in sight but a slight rise a good minute’s run down the sand. I yelled for everyone to run like hell, and they did with no questions asked. They were learning.
Flattened in the sand just over the top of the rise, I watched two insect-green roadsters cruise across the island and come to a stop at the edge of the eastern beach. The lead vehicle was the one with the trailer, and the backup was more like a limo, bigger, with an extra rear seat, plus plenty of aft storage. The shadowy figures behind the tinted ports in the rear didn’t look like Reticulans, but I couldn’t tell if they were humans or not. Both vehicles pulled off the road, probably to talk things over. After a minute or so, they crossed the Skyway and headed north, perhaps following our distinctive tire tracks. Were they? No, that trail skirting the beach was well-traveled. Our trace should have been obscured by then. When they saw the submerged roadway, it was fifty-fifty that they’d head north. Still …
When they were out of sight, I got up and brushed the sand from my chest. I was now shirtless and jacketless, having left my brown leather second skin in the Chevy, along with Petrovsky’s pistol. Force of habit had saved Sam’s key for me, since I don’t usually leave it lying around. I had whatever gods who were on my side to thank for the presence of mind to have put it in my pants pocket.
I walked down the other side of the hill and had a mild temper tantrum. Darla watched me kick sand, pick up a stick, and beat a poor patch of land-weed into pulp, then fling the stick away.
She walked over to me. “Finally getting to you?”
“Merte!” I said. “Shit! Piss!” I kicked more sand. “Hell and goddamn,” I finished, done with it.
She thought it was very amusing. I did too, after a moment. I looked at her. She was in briefs and halter, wearing her knee-high boots, carrying the jumpsuit in a roll under her arm. Roland was carrying her backpack. If my mind had been less occupied, I would have had trouble not staring at her. Roland was staring, not that I blamed him. The briefs were very sheer. Susan was topless and was by any standard an eyeful as well, but she wasn’t drawing a glance from him. But then, Susan was a known quantity, so to speak.
“Darla, how are those damn bugs following us?”
“I don’t know. It’s very strange, but they are a Snatchgang, aren’t they?”
The others pricked up their ears. I wished Darla hadn’t said it, but now they knew, if they hadn’t before. Snatchgangs go after one quarry, and one only, so the Teelies weren’t in danger, unless the Rikkis had a mind to use them to get to me—which, when I thought about it, was indeed a possibility.
“Okay, they’re a Gang, but how did they trail us through a potluck … and why?”
“Could they have scanned us?”
“They were behind Sam, and even he might have lost us. And Sam didn’t shoot the portal, so they didn’t follow him through. No, they’re using some exotic tracking technique, known only to Gangers. But what is it?”
Darla considered it. “Chemical trace? Pheromones?”
“Possibly. But can they detect minute quantities of the stuff over hundreds of kilometers of airless void?”
“Some Terran insects can be sensitive to a few molecules in a cubic klick of air, so maybe—”
“Yeah, but Rikkis aren’t insects; they’re highly evolved life forms. Even bear their young live, like us.”
“I was going to say that with the aid of technology, maybe they could do the same through vacuum.”
I stroked her shoulder. “Sorry, love. I’m being testy, I know. Your point’s well taken. But…” I looked up at the sky and massaged the back of my neck. “God, am I tired.” I yawned and got hung up in the middle of it, couldn’t stop. “Excuse me,” I said, finally recovering. “One thing, though. When did they tag me?”
“At the restaurant? Sonny’s?”
I’d been thinking about that for quite a while. “Yeah, the restaurant. But I never got near the Rikki. If they were spraying the stuff at me, it would have landed on other people too. Muddled the trace.”
Darla bit her lip, shook her head. “I dunno, but they must’ve done it somehow, Jake. We know it wasn’t Sam they tagged. It was you, your person, somehow.”
“What were they doing at the farm, retagging me because the first one didn’t take, or wore off?”
“Sounds plausible. Maybe they were just looking for the map. You asked why they followed us through a potluck. It could only be because now they’re sure you have the map, or know where you can get it.”
“Yeah, everyone must be absolutely convinced of that now. I guess it did look like we deliberately ducked through that portal, with Petrovsky literally trying to drag us back. Okay, so maybe nobody saw that part of it, but we sure didn’t hesitate any.”
“No, we didn’t. And now the Roadmap myth is reality.” I nodded. It was, and I had made it so by trying to debunk it.
I sighed. “Let’s get moving.”
“Good. I’m going to wet my pants if we don’t.”
Roland came down from the crest of the knoll, where he’d been watching the road. “Another vehicle went by,” he reported.
“Ryxx?” I asked.
“No, a human driving, a man. Strange, the buggy looked familiar. I think I saw it back on Goliath, but I don’t know where.” He scratched his head. “Oh, I remember. It was in the dealership lot. An old piece of mene. The dealer tried to dump it on us, cash sale; instead of a rental.”
“One man, you say?” Now who the blazes could that be?
“Oh, the hell with it,” Darla said suddenly, and squatted in the weeds. “I can’t wait. Gentlemen, please…?”
I said, “Huh? Oh.” I turned to John and Roland. “Okay, troops, eyes front.”
“God, men are so lucky,” Susan said, taking her station near Darla.
Lucky? Okay, so we can write our names in the sand. It’s not exactly an art form.
As we neared the harbor we found more aliens, most of them sealed up inside their vehicles, unable to step out on this planet without technological aid. Through the viewports we saw squidlike things swimming in a watery medium, blobs of gelatin sitting comfortably in a fog of yellow gas, many more forms that we couldn’t make out at all. Some beings motioned enigmatically to us as we passed, raising tentacles, claws. Others followed us with conical eyestalks, observing. From most there was no reaction.
The island was a trade-fair of vehicle design. There were objects lying about that didn’t look like vehicles at all, odd geometrical shapes and flowing, melted things giving no clue as to how they moved. There were humans here too, waiting patiently like everyone else. And rigs as well, strangely enough. I asked one starrigger when the ferry was due in.
“She’ll be in,” w
as all he said, and spat in the sand.
“Thanks.” I walked away.
The harbor was large but did not look deep, though the water’s clearness may have been distorting. I was puzzled by the fact that there wasn’t a dock or pier or anything in sight. Instead, at the apex of the deep indentation that formed the harbor, a graded section of beach angled steeply into the water. The sand looked packed and hard there.
“What do you make of it?” I asked Roland.
“A hydroskiff?”
I rubbed the scratchy stubble of my beard. “Funny, when I heard ‘ferryboat’ I thought of just that, a water-displacing vessel of some kind. Besides, you’d want flat beach to pull up on.”
“Right. Things seem primitive enough here, at least as far as humans are concerned. Maybe it is a boat.”
“Well,” I yawned, “we’ll see eventually.” I plopped myself down on the sand.
Winnie was drawing again, and this time I watched her. She made one big spiral figure, smaller ones nearby, and linked them with lines. I was intrigued, and asked Darla if Winnie had explained.
“Something to do with her tribal mythology,” Darla told me. “Haven’t figured out what it’s all about.” Her answer gave me the ever-so-slight feeling that she was being evasive in some way. But no, she was just tired and didn’t want to be bothered. Still, I wondered. Winnie now was drawing lines within the big spiral. I went over to her, knelt in the sand, and asked her as clearly as I could what she was doing.
Starrigger Page 18
