by John Boyd
She spoke the truth. He had seen her darting among the parked cars after he had broken the Corsican’s wrist. And she had Turpin too. His loyalty to her was maniacal. If Slade was trying to get her jailed to make his security tasks easier, he would not be around long enough to guard her. Turpin would see to that.
At eight o’clock Laudermilk arrived to relieve the watch, bringing Kyra’s uniform freshly pressed and starched. Before taking his suitcase to the car, Breedlove stood looking around him, trying to remember the room as it was now with the books, the bookcase, and with Kyra seated on the sofa, reading, with the light throwing a halo around her hair.
Laudermilk interrupted his reveries.
“Wear these when you’re driving the hot car,” he said, handing Breedlove a pair of silk gloves. “You won’t leave prints.”
Breedlove pocketed the gloves, lifted his suitcase, and left the room.
An overcast had rolled in from the ocean by the time he had driven into downtown Seattle. The low-hanging clouds sopped up the city lights, and the few pedestrians abroad on the Sunday-night sidewalks scurried from streetlamp to streetlamp. He parked behind the rental agency, took his bags into the office, and settled his account. At 8:32 he stood outside on the sidewalk with his bags and wearing his silk gloves. At 8:32 a dark-colored sedan pulled up at the curb, and Turpin swung around from the driver’s side.
“Throw your bags in the back seat. You drive.”
As Breedlove complied, Turpin took a small walkie-talkie from his coat pocket, extended its antenna, and spoke into it, saying, “Checkpoint able, all clear.”
Breedlove was under the wheel when Turpin took his seat, closed the door, and handed the ranger an envelope. “Your tickets, confirmed, on the eleven-thirty flight to Spokane. The car belongs to a man who’s spending the weekend in San Francisco.”
As he pulled away from the curb, Breedlove said to the one agent who had his complete confidence, “Dick, there are elements to this plan I don’t like. Technically, you know, we’re committing treason.”
“Technically Christ was a criminal.”
“But Christ had no earthly ambitions.”
Turpin caught the thrust of his remarks and said, “Don’t worry about Slade. Kyra and I discussed that matter this morning, and all possibilities have been provided for.”
So the possibility of betrayal had occurred to Kyra early, and she had been ordering probabilities since this morning. Suddenly invigorated, Breedlove dropped Turpin off at the hospital with a cheerful “Good luck.” Caught up now in the spirit of the enterprise, he was eager for the night’s adventure, with an eagerness that mildly alarmed him; he was beginning to enjoy his temporary job as an undercover agent.
Everything was moving with precision. Very probably the car he drove would never be reported as stolen. At most its owner might think that someone had siphoned his gas tank. Laudermilk had got the uniform and identification for Kyra with no trouble, and the first checkpoint had been passed on schedule. He reached checkpoint baker exactly on schedule. At 9:02 he turned the corner at the intersection near the motel and saw Kyra under the streetlamp, looking pert and efficient in her cape and nurse’s cap. Somewhere in the shrubbery behind her Laudermilk crouched with his pistol at the ready.
Breedlove pulled up, threw open the door, and called, “May I give you a lift, ma’am?”
“Ma’am” was a code word to reassure the watcher in the bushes. Slade had figured no masher would use that term of address. Kyra slid into the seat beside him, and he continued the charade with a “Where to, ma’am?”
But for Kyra the fun and games were over—he could tell from the insistence in her voice.
“Move fast, Breedlove. Go directly to the airport. Slade’s setting a trap for me. The hospital’s swarming with police, and there’s nothing Turpin can do about it but kill Slade and I don’t want that to happen—for Little Richard’s sake.”
She was talking fast, without equivocations, and he knew she was telling the truth. What a comment this, he thought with a sinking heart, on the loyalty and trustworthiness of human beings. “How’d you find this out?”
“Gravy told me. Ben enlisted his aid, figuring an Army career man due for promotion in two weeks wouldn’t jeopardize his job with treason, but it wasn’t really Ben’s fault. His pride was hurt. He found out that my petition was going to be rejected after all his promises, and that your government was going to keep me from my people on the meadow. Your biologists knew I was helpless without them. Slade was leading us to the hospital’s morgue, not its radiology lab, and karate experts would have been there waiting for Little Richard. We’ll have time to get on the ten o’clock flight to Spokane before Ben is alerted to the fact that I’m not coming at all. Gravy bought our tickets. We’ll be traveling first class as Mr. and Mrs. Paige, spelled with an i.”
“I can get you back to the meadow, but where do you go from there?”
“Straight up. I have the cobalt in my bag. Gravy’s girl friend, the Navy nurse, was a radiology technician at the clinic, and she requisitioned the cobalt this afternoon and gave it to Gravy. It was that easy! Gravy said the only person to get sacked for his bag job was the bag he had to sack to get the cobalt.”
As she spoke she squirmed out of the cape and took off the nurse’s bonnet. Beneath the cape she was wearing the Polinski Creation.
Chapter Fifteen
From the Seattle airport the jet rose above the murk and climbed into starlight, rustling eastward. Breedlove ordered the free martinis that came with their seats, saying, “Figuring the surcharge for first-class fares, these drinks cost Laudermilk twenty dollars apiece.”
Sprawled on the seat beside him, Kyra said sleepily, “He always wanted to give me something to remember him by. Maybe this is it.” She stretched and yawned. “I’ll remember him, and all the men of earth, with kindness.”
“Even Slade?”
“Particularly Ben. He was almost hysterical with relief when he found that Fawn instead of me had been kidnapped… Maybe Fawn and I overdid the Huan Chung business.”
“What Huan Chung business?”
Fixing him with a lazy smile, she said, “Fawn wasn’t kidnapped. She slipped away for a weekend on the Quinault Reservation. It was she who signed Huan Chung’s name to the register while the night clerk was gone to the men’s room. I wanted to impress Ben with the danger to me to reinforce the appeal I had made to him earlier.”
“You fooled me,” Breedlove admitted. “Up to then I thought Huan Chung was only one of Slade’s fantasies.”
“Maybe it was, up to then. After that, we had Ben believing in his own creation… Aren’t the stars beautiful? Just think, tomorrow I’ll be out there among them.”
Her comment carried no note of anxiety, only wonder. Seemingly indifferent to the fate awaiting her, she leaned her head against his shoulder and fell instantly to sleep. It seemed to Breedlove her head had lain there only a minute before the cabin began to creak from decompression and the warning light began to flash. He fastened her seat belt without awakening her and heard the clunk of distending landing gear. She continued to sleep as they touched down and taxied toward the terminal, and in her profound sleep the luminosity seemed drained from her. When the jets ceased to rumble and the cabin doors were opened, she awakened torpidly to his repeated urgings.
No one opposed their entrance into the waiting room, where he went immediately to a telephone booth and called his father. He had decided not to attempt to rent a vehicle at the airport. By now Slade would realize that they were gone and would begin to make his moves to apprehend them. There would have to be no easily obtained description of the vehicle Breedlove was driving.
His father answered the phone, and Breedlove explained his situation in general terms, asked his father to have the farm Jeep gassed and waiting, and requested that his mother lay out one of his ranger uniforms. It was a short call, and Kyra waited outside the booth, slouched drowsily against a wall, the bag hanging nonchalant
ly from her shoulder. When he told her his family would be waiting to greet her, she smiled wanly. In the bright light of the waiting room her face looked chalky, and as she walked beside him to the luggage counter he noticed her usually bouncing stride had become languid and flowing.
Apprehensive and tense himself, it occurred to him that her apathy might be feigned to steady him, as a general might feign confidence to strengthen the morale of his soldiers. Certainly nothing about the semideserted Sunday—night airport looked sinister, but there had been nothing suspicious-looking, he reminded himself, outside Pierre’s restaurant when the Corsicans struck.
He lugged his suitcase to the taxi stand and tapped on the windshield of a cab to awaken its driver. As the cabbie was stowing Breedlove’s suitcase in the car’s trunk, the public announcement speaker rasped, “Will Ranger Thomas Breedlove take a personal and urgent telephone call in the manager’s office… Will Ranger Thomas Breedlove…”
The squawk box kept repeating the announcement in mechanical desperation as the cab pulled away and headed for the highway. Slade was acting out of character, Breedlove thought; he had committed a gross violation of security procedures by letting his quarry know that the chase had begun.
In the interval of her absence the strangeness of Kyra’s arrival on earth had been absorbed by Breedlove’s family, but the wonder of her had grown in the telling. When she came again into the Breedlove living room, she came as an embodied myth. The welcome she received was touched with awe but with genuine devotion the greater part of it, and in the presence of the Breedloves she bestirred herself from her languor. She gave Breedlove’s mother the diamond she had bought in Seattle and told them, with an assurance that Breedlove questioned, that Slade would send them her books, for Breedlove, and her clothes for Matty.
Since she needed something to carry the cobalt in, she exchanged Matty’s denim book satchel for her shoulder bag, because Matty was still undecided about what career she should follow.
“Go to college and study chemistry,” Kyra counseled her, “then analyze the fabric in this shoulder bag and you’ll make a killing in textiles.”
None of the Breedloves hesitated in accepting her gifts. They knew of her destination, and her beneficence was too queenly to affront with hollow protestations. They went with her and Breedlove, now back in uniform, to the front porch to stand in the porchlight and wave good-bye. As they got into the Jeep, the telephone rang, and Mr. Breedlove went to answer it.
“Get moving,” Kyra commanded. “That’s Ben calling.”
Breedlove gunned the Jeep in response to the urgency in her voice even as he wondered why Slade should call his home. Did the Texan expect his father to arrest him?… As he swung onto the road, heading north, Breedlove saw his father emerge from the house, waving for them to return, but he pressed the accelerator to the floorboard. Darkness whipped by them in a sibilance of wind past the windshield as the Jeep rocketed forward.
As he drove, Breedlove began a cat-and-mouse game in his mind, figuring and countering the probable moves of his pursuers, as Kyra, beside him, fell asleep in a sitting position. Without compromising the secrecy surrounding Kyra, Slade could enlist the aid of the State Highway Patrol by making Breedlove the object of his search. Slade by now had learned from his father that he was wearing his ranger’s uniform and driving a Jeep, and Slade’s orders would be to pick him up and hold his companion for questioning. The patrolmen on Route 2 between Spokane and Newport would be alerted and the bridge over the Pend Oreille blocked.
But at the junction Breedlove swung northwest on Route 395 to Deer Park, then drove due east past sleeping farms and rejoined Route 2 near Milan, thus avoiding a major segment of a highway he took to be dangerous. A few miles north, he took 6B due north, bypassing Newport, and joined Route 6 on the west bank of the Pend Oreille. Even with his early start the longer route would prevent him from reaching the meadow until after sunrise, but no one would expect him to enter the Selkirk area from the north.
At 2:00 a.m. he crossed the river at Metaline Falls and took the gravel road across the mountains, breathing easier as he swung from the pavement to head east, now at fifty miles an hour. Despite the jouncing, Kyra still dozed erect beside him. At 3:30 he circled Helmer Mountain and edged into Canada along a five-mile stretch of road. When the road became macadam he was back in the States and a few miles west of Porthill, Idaho, but three miles from Porthill he swung south onto an old sawmill road, with Kyra still asleep beside him.
A chuckhole made him reach over to steady her and she awakened, muttering, “I feel dawn coming.”
“It is,” he said. “But we should be in Jones Meadow in another hour.”
Constantly shifting gears and maneuvering, he drove the vehicle on a climbing, twisting course along the overgrown road, and the trees beside the trail reflected the increasing altitude, growing stunted, then twisted, then sparse. Pale gray was tingeing the east as the vehicle jolted toward Sawyer’s Summit, and when they trundled over the shale near the crest, the dawn of a cloudless day was breaking.
Kyra awakened, saying, “Look at the glorious morning ‘flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye’!”
“Yes,” he agreed, “and I need all the light I can get. It’s easy to lose your bearings on this lunar landscape.”
Craning above the windshield, she ranged her ears in the manner of a blind person and said, “Go that way,” pointing. “Myra has set the howler going.”
“To guide you home?”
“No. To lure Crick home. He has run away. Well, you can have him, Breedlove, if you can catch him, because I’m leaving without him.”
“That’s a cold way of dismissing the boy,” Breedlove complained.
“He’s only a male we don’t need any more. He likes it here, and he’s incapable of altering life on earth. He’s intelligent, and he’ll learn your language quickly, I’m sure. Look around for him next winter. If a cold snap hits he’ll hibernate, and it should be easy to spot his green hair against the snow.”
Nothing she said about the lost boy was unkind, but her detachment, if he chose to be hypercritical, might indicate she was fast losing her acquired human traits even as she seemed to be losing her human coloration. Perhaps it was a survival mechanism, this objectivity, or perhaps fatigue from the long night drive had altered his own sensibilities. After all, he couldn’t expect her to rend her hair and pound her breasts in lamentation over a child who had found what he sought, sanctuary on a friendly planet. Still, he thought it inappropriate that she should forget Crick altogether and call his attention to a flowering plant struggling from a crack in a granite wall with a “Look, Breedlove! How pretty.”
Below the rocky saddleback he crossed a swath of meadow, rolled over underbrush, and canted onto a pack trail wide enough for his vehicle. At six o’clock, in bright morning light, he drove onto Jones Meadow. The turf was dry now and as closely cropped as a fresh-mown lawn except for tufts of wire grass her people had left him for scouring his pans. He wheeled the Jeep to a stop in the bend of the creek a hundred yards downstream from the willow.
She was safe. No jet planes whined through the sky. No helicopters hovered over the surrounding peaks. Across the creek in the aspen grove the invisible needle of her space vehicle towered above them. Gazing around him at the peaceful scene, Breedlove felt the strong impression that he and Kyra had fled from pursuers existing only in their imagination.
She swung from the Jeep and leaned against the fender to remove her shoes, then to his mild astonishment she continued to undress, slipping out of her dress, unstrapping her bra, and folding the garments on the seat beside him. Finally, naked in the sunlight, she stood beside the vehicle in which he sat, transfixed, and apologized, “You know, Breedlove, I’ve been around you human beings for so long I feel self-conscious about undressing in front of you.”
“We’ve made you lose your innocence.”
“If I ever had any”—she smiled—“I’d be losing it from the way
you’re looking at me now… I’m sorry I can’t invite you in. With Crick gone the mood inside will be foul. It’ll take me only a few minutes to hook in the cobalt and wash this goop out of my hair. I’d like to tell you good-bye as I was when we met and on the mound where I found you. We’ll have time together while the steam pressure builds in the propulsion unit. All I’m taking from earth is the Bulfinch and Polinski. You can take my shoes and undergarments to Matty, or keep them, or donate them to a museum.”
She put the folded dress into the satchel, turned, and was gone, fording the creek in long bounds. Without glancing back, she disappeared into the aspen grove, leaving her undergarments, hosiery, and shoes on the seat beside him. He drove the vehicle upstream, parked it beneath a cluster of alder bushes, and walked to the mound. Arms folded across his chest, Breedlove stood looking out over the scene and thinking.
Away from Kyra, his mind began to function with its usual clarity, and he found himself wondering why Slade had telephoned him, first at the airport and then at home. The calls had been such gross violations of security procedures they did not fit Slade—unless they were the spontaneous reactions of an innocent man. Besides, if Slade had wanted Kyra in jail, he would have needed no byzantine hospital bag job to entrap her on a conspiracy charge,—he could have simply placed her in a jail cell on his own authority. Slade was a melodramatic actor and fantasist, but he was no cretin. And if he had been cooperating with authorities who wanted Kyra kept away from her people, the skies above the meadow would be crowded with helicopters from the Air Force, waiting to sight his Jeep.
Something had gone askew in Seattle, he decided, and if it wasn’t Ben Slade it would have to be Thomas Breedlove. A horseback theorist might assume he had been manipulated—by one who artfully understood every human being’s basic need for a Huan Chung.
Yet he could not bring himself to accuse Kyra of supplying his imagination with a handy villain to spur him in their flight, despite elements that pointed to her doing so. There would have been no need for Slade to pursue them if he truly wanted to assist Kyra off the planet—especially after he discovered that Laudermilk had furnished her with the cobalt—and obviously there had been no massive pursuit. Slade knew their destination and their estimated time of arrival, although Breedlove had made better time than he expected in racing from the imagined pursuit.
