Peter said nothing. Eventually, Brock looked at his watch and said, “Ah, hell, kid. You’ve taken enough lumps for one day. Why don’t you go home?”
“I’m all right, sir. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
“The customers must be getting used to it. They should be.” Brock shrugged again and waved one hand, as if it were a whisk-broom, toward Peter. “Anyway, it’s getting late. Go.”
* * * *
Years before, when Peter had been just a kid, he had acquired a baby moving van, complete even to the sailing ship logo on its side. For some reason, he had named it Oscar, and the name had stuck. Now Oscar’s pod hung a foot above the pavement, held there by a short cable hooked to a ring set in the curb. The tentacles shifted restlessly about the pod, picking food wrappers and other sorts of rubbish from the ground and tucking them into the two cargo pockets that flanked the gasbag. The gengineers had never removed the instinct to fill those pockets. It helped, they said, to suit the vans to their work. But it was as well the root of the luggage problem. It was also why every week or so Peter had to clean out his minivan’s pockets. If he forgot, the weight of the rubbish cost Oscar both lift and speed, and he could be late to work. Brock didn’t like excuses.
Peter opened the door to the pod and climbed into the bucket seat facing the control console. One button disengaged the mooring cable. A slide, connected through the console computer to the minivan’s nervous system, caused the genimal to release more hydrogen into its bag and lift above the parking lot. Another slide activated the propulsion fan at the rear of the pod, and Peter was on his way home. A simple tiller let him steer.
He had done some reading once. A jellyfish didn’t have much for a nervous system. The encyclopedia had called it a nerve net, a fishnet whose strands were nerve fibers, with nerve cells sitting at each intersection in the net. The net itself was spread throughout the creature’s body wall, and it was enough, the book had said, for something that needed only simple responses to simple stimuli. The most complex parts of the net were those associated with the light sensors around the rim of the gas bag.
The gengineers had complicated things when they had designed the vans. The thousands of identical single cells at the crossing points in the net were now thousands of identical groups of cells, ganglia, rudimentary brains that could handle fairly complicated stimuli and coordinate more complex responses. The control computers could plug in anywhere. With Mack trucks and Roachsters and Bald Eagles, they had to be wired directly into the brain. With a van, any ganglion would do.
The wild vans had no pods, no control computers, no propulsion systems besides the wind. Like balloonists, to change their course, they had to rise or fall to find a different wind, blowing in a different direction. Close to the ground, they could move upwind, slowly, by hauling themselves with their tentacles from tree to tree or rock to rock.
The wild vans should not have existed, for whenever two domesticated vans mated, their crews called in the location and their companies sent out harvesting crews to collect the eggs and rear them, safe from predatory birds, on netting-enclosed van ranches. But some eggs had escaped on the wind and survived, even when the vans had been new. Later, as the vans had proliferated, many eggs had simply been allowed to go free. And, once grown, they too had mated.
Now they roamed the world, especially in mountainous areas where they could find the high ledges they preferred for their nests. They preyed on hikers, fishermen, hunters, and Boy Scouts on jamborees, falling out of the sky to seize packs, dufflebags, whatever they could fit into their cargo pockets. They fed on game and what livestock had not yet been replaced by factory genimals.
Recently they had discovered the joys of airports. It was high time that something was done.
The mountains, home to the wild vans, were now visible only through cracks in the urban landscape. Peter was surrounded by Denver’s high-rises, festooned with balconies and blister-like floater garages. The streets below crawled with Armadons and Roachsters, Tortoises and Hoppers, Beetles and Macks; their garages were underground. Peter’s own building came into view, and he boosted Oscar to a higher level. When the minivan was close enough, its tentacles grasped a balcony railing, a garage door irised open, and Peter shut off the fan. He touched switches. The minivan drew some of its hydrogen out of its bag to storage in its tissues and shrank until it could fit into the space provided by the building’s architect for the smaller floaters.
As he entered from the balcony, there was the sound of a key in the hall door. He eyed the door with a smile, for there was only one person who could be there. “Hi, Janna.”
“I saw you floating in.” Janna was his age, blonde, heavier than was either fashionable or healthy—but not, though they joked about it, heavy enough to sink Oscar. “You’re home early.”
“Not that early. Brock’s not that generous.” He hung his jacket in the bedroom closet and led the way to the kitchen. “Want a drink?”
He poured while Janna rummaged for a box of snack crackers and sliced cheese. Then he told her what the wild vans had done.
She shook her head. “I’d like to see that. The jets too, for that matter.”
“I’ll take you out there anytime.”
A cracker snapped between her fingers. She picked the crumbs off her skirt, ate them, and licked her fingers. “You know I can’t do that.” She looked nervous, as she did whenever he, or anyone else, suggested she leave the building. She was an agoraphobe.
* * * *
They were lovers, but Janna rarely stayed the night. She preferred, she said, to wake up in her own bed, alone, surrounded by her own things, with her cat curled up against her side. If Peter was in her place, she would even send him home, generally before midnight and with a joke about him too turning into a pumpkin if he didn’t obey.
Peter therefore also slept alone, and often restlessly. Sometimes he was so restless that dreams were enough to awaken him. Those were the nights when he remembered his dreams, and the mornings when he would fly Oscar to work in a state of mild bemusement.
This time the dreams were strong. His unconscious mind reversed Janna’s agoraphobia, her fear of open spaces, to claustrophobia and imposed it on him: He was imprisoned in her belly, hurling himself frantically, screaming all the while, against the walls of her flesh. He wanted to get out, to escape, to be free, but there was no exit, never any exit, though he battered himself against her for so long that his beard grew to his knees and his nails became crooked daggers that tore at her flesh and exposed her nerves so that he could pluck at them and.…
When he woke, he knew immediately what to do about the wild moving vans. He spent the trip to the airport marveling at the sheer fertility of the unconscious and knowing that he would never dare to tell Janna of how she had prompted this particular brainstorm.
When he arrived, the wind was from the mountains. That meant the wild vans could make another raid and that, if only he could be ready.… But no. It would take more than a few hours to prepare. He would have to convince Brock, and ask a van rancher for the loan of the necessary equipment, and wait for the shipment to arrive. Only then could he hope to do what he had dreamed of.
* * * *
Peter’s supervisor had proved to be less of a problem than the young man had feared. “Nothing else works,” Brock had said. “So why not? But you do it yourself. No delegating. If you’ve got the nerve.”
“I’ll need a couple of assistants. Volunteers.”
“Don’t look at me that way. It’s your idea. Besides, I did my time in Columbia.”
“But.…”
“Try the other juniors.”
Now, days later, Peter sat in a packing crate in the shade beside the terminal. Two other crates were near his own. They contained Mike Garland, another of the airport’s security men, and Trudy Wetherall, a log
clerk from baggage-handling who was a rock-climber on the side. He had tried to find another security agent, but when they had heard the details of his scheme, all but Mike had refused. They knew what happened to any pets that happened to be among kidnapped luggage. He had asked the baggage handlers, then, but only Trudy had dared to go along with him. Now the three of them waited for the next raid by the wild vans.
Peter wore a hunting knife, freshly honed, in a sheath on his belt. He sat in a narrow, tourist-class passenger seat that had been stored in the terminal decades before, when some mechanical jetliner had been reconfigured for cargo. Such conversions, and their converse, had once been common; now the ground crews simply replaced the big birds’ strap-on pods, the “tin cans” in which they packed either passengers or freight, depending on the need.
The seat was bolted to the bottom of the crate. The lap-belt was cinched taut across Peter’s lap. In the carry-on space beneath the seat rested a small suitcase with a dull aluminum surface and a leather handle. Facing Peter, and illuminated by the dim bulb of a single battery-powered lamp strapped to his forehead, was the interior surface of a lavatory door taken, like the seats, from an old airliner. The door had replaced one side of the crate. When the time came, he would unstrap, pull the sliding latch aside, and step out. So too would Mike and Trudy emerge from their identical hideaways.
When someone finally knocked on the crate’s door, he suppressed an absurd impulse to call out, “Occupied!” He managed a quieter “Yes?” and felt his heart leap at the reply: “They’re in sight.”
The crate tipped and rocked as a fork-lift raised it off the ground, trundled it toward the target zone, and set it in its place. Peter’s world grew quiet, except for the hiss of compressed air from the bottle strapped to the crate above and behind his head. He could hear not even the positioning of his two fellow commandos, for they had been moved at the same time as he. Nor were there the creakings of baggage carts or the cursing chatter of the handlers, for they were in hiding, waiting to see what would happen to the three asses in their premature coffins. That thought brought a grim smile to his lips. Maybe he had indeed made a mistake. A fatal mistake. But it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
His heartbeat was loud in his ears. Then, even louder, came a sound as of wind in the rigging of a small sailboat, or in telephone wires, or perhaps in the twigless branches of some long-dead tree. Peter’s crate lurched again, and tipped, and he was on his side, held in place only by his seatbelt. He licked suddenly dry lips. The crate scraped across the pavement. There was a lifting sensation, and he knew that, so far, his plan had worked. He, and presumably Mike and Trudy as well, had passed for luggage. The wild vans had been fooled, and now they too were “lost luggage,” as lost in fact as any Twinkletoes if the rest of his scheme failed.
His crate settled on its side. The arm of his seat pressed painfully into his side until he got a hand into position to take some of his weight. How long would he be like this? He had told Mike and Trudy to wait an hour before making their moves because he wanted the vans to home undisturbed on their nest.
He made himself wait for every second of that hour-long eternity, while his arm cramped and his shoulder burned. Finally, however, his watch said the time was up, and he could free himself from his belt, squat, and try to push the crate’s makeshift door open. There was resistance, but he managed until sunlight, dimmed by the thickness of surrounding flesh but still nearly as bright as his headlamp, showed him that the door was blocked by the van’s own folded tissues.
Of course, he told himself. He should have foreseen this. There was nothing to hold a cargo pocket open except its contents. It was just like the pocket in his pants, where the cloth folded around his keys, or his hand.
The doors to the crates should open inward, but there was no room. Sliding doors might be better. As things were, he would have to push the door outward, and its sharp corners would dig into the creature’s flesh.
He dared not push too hard or too far. He feared that too much unwonted motion in the pocket might tell the van that something was wrong. A tentacle would snake through the slit-like opening to investigate. He would be plucked out. And then.… He hadn’t brought a parachute because it had seemed unlikely that, if he were caught, he would be dropped. The vans were carnivores.
But he had to get out of the crate if he were to do his job. He turned, gathered up his aluminum case, and pushed at the door again. When the gap was just barely big enough, he squeezed through it to stand, unprotected, claustrophobically enfolded by the van’s inner surfaces, cool and slick like a damp rubber blanket. He tried to breathe, but there was no air space around him. He would have to work fast, and then retreat to the crate and its air supply.
The light was dimmer to his left. He turned to face in that direction, toward the inner wall of the thing’s vast body, the wall in which, had said the rancher who had loaned him what was in the case, the van’s nerve net was densest and most accessible.
He drew his knife and slashed the surface before him.
The van shuddered. The puckered slit that was the gateway to the van’s cargo pocket opened, and the pocket’s walls drew apart just enough to leave him standing in a narrow slit. He drew a grateful breath. Another. And then he froze, mouth open, body motionless, as a tentacle as thick as his thigh swung into view and groped for the opening.
He came back to life with a sudden spasm. He slashed again, and the rubbery surface parted. He dropped the knife. He grabbed the edges of the wound, already oozing translucent fluid, and tore, his fingers probing, his head twisting this way, that way, to throw the beam from his headlamp into every crevice.
There! He saw a glistening strand of nerve, followed it to his right to a small knot of nerve tissue from which branched other strands. He stooped for his case, opened it, extracted a cable tipped with slender needles, and stripped protective sheaths from the needles.
He paused, knowing he shouldn’t, to look over his shoulder. There were now two tentacles at the mouth of the cargo pocket, and both were crawling over its lip. They were mere yards away.
He found the ganglion again. Here, one needle went. And there, the other. Now, he prayed, and he bent to the open case and flipped a switch. Red and green diodes blinked on. A narrow readout screen said, “PROBING.”
Was he close enough? He had been told he didn’t have to be precise. The circuitry in the case could focus the stimulus fields enough to compensate for considerable sloppiness. But.… The lights were still blinking. The screen still said, “PROBING.” And the crate was even now shaking under the exploring touch of a tentacle.
There was a small “beep” from the case. He looked down. The screen now said, “LINKED.” But—he looked—the van’s tentacles were still groping toward him. He squatted. The case held more than the circuitry he had already used, didn’t it? It was the van rancher’s equivalent of harness. There were controls, much like the ones for his own Oscar, but simpler, designed for use on a farm where one might have, at a moment’s notice, to convert a stock animal to a hauler of feed or fence poles and netting. If he pushed this, slid that.…
He looked again. The tentacles, already relaxed, were sliding toward the cargo pocket’s opening. He let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding, swore gratefully, and found the control setting that would keep the pocket dilated. Then he stepped toward the opening.
It was a clear day, almost cloudless, and the van had risen enough to find a steady wind toward the mountains. Peter’s stomach flipped at the sight of all that empty space beneath him, but he did not vomit or lose his grip on the edge of the van’s sphincter. Instead, he turned until he could see the mountains, rank on rank of folded granite, narrow seams veined with the silver of tumbling water and the green of distant trees, flat plateaus and ledges.
Below him, less than a mile ahead, a mountain side bulged to thrust into s
pace a semicircular shelf as broad as a football field. This was the wild vans’ nest. The shelf was covered with scattered, jumbled piles of ancient luggage. Suitcases and pet carriers were broken like the remnants of some otherworldly seafood dinner. Peter saw a wheelchair, one wheel spinning as wind pushed at its spokes. Clothing was scattered, drifted, faded, torn. More was spots of color, white, fluttering movement, spread across the mountainside beyond the shelf. The scene reminded him of photos he had seen of ancient dumps, before even the days of landfills when each day’s garbage was covered with dirt. He wondered whether the vans had magpie genes. That might account for their thieving and hoarding, but…
The weathered loot was piled more thickly near the borders of the mountain shelf. The central zone was nearly clear, the luggage that marked its edges clearly newer, more intact, less damaged. Where the bare ground showed, Peter could make out a scattering of small white objects, long and short, straight and curved, some round. He realized what they were—the remains of pets and perhaps a few campers—and shuddered. He realized how perfectly he had timed his emergence from hiding, his hijacking of the van. Any later would have been too late, for the van would have dropped his crate—and him—onto the plateau. And if he survived the impact, the crate would surely burst, revealing him to the carnivorous gasbag floating above him. He did not think he would last long.
There were other vans in the air nearby. One was already dipping toward the nest, and a figure was standing in the mouth of its left pocket, waving toward him. He peered. It was Trudy. But where was Mike?
Trudy shouted, and he realized that she was not waving just to say hello. Her hand and arm were pistoning urgently, screaming louder than a voice could possibly do that over there, look there, see…! Peter looked in the direction she was pointing, and there Mike was, hanging head-down, struggling, from a tentacle. As they watched, the van lifted the morsel it had found in its pocket toward the opening to its stomach. Peter tasted acid as a faint scream reached them, stretched agonizingly, and cut off. They could do nothing.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 6
