by Mack Maloney
The first half-dozen racers were variants of the standard Empire Starfighter, the ubiquitous F-176A model, also called the Holy Fighter. It was a needle-nosed wedge, thirty-six feet long and twelve feet wide at the aft. This was the basic Empire design. Blended body, no wings, no tail.
Contestants could adorn their racers in any way they wished; many were predictably outlandish. One of these first racers was colored bright red with checkerboard squares of black and white decorating its aft section. Another racer was sun yellow with blistering orange flames trailing down its back. A third was glowing deep red from its needle nose to its nontail. Three others opted for variations on the always sinister in toto dull-black scheme.
Six more racers came onto the track. They were Starfighters, too, but not the standard F-176A model.
These beauties were rebuilds of a Starfighter design from nearly three hundred years before, known as the F-32B. They were a bit larger, a bit bulkier, but they also sported elegant color schemes, more glowing than shine, and had distinctively large cockpits and antique ID scrolling. These half-dozen racers were regarded as the class of the race, the elegance. They received a thunderous cheer as they glided toward the starting area.
Then came the thirteenth entry.
It did not float out of the waiting area. It rolled, on three strange black things that looked more like toys than attachments to an Earth Race entrant. Few people in the million knew these things were called wheels. Their use had died out thousands of years ago.
This was, of course, Hawk Hunter’s flying machine. It looked huge at fifty-five feet, its wings flapping as it bounced its way along the red-dirt track. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was that Hunter’s canopy was not a tiny piece of squared-off superglass but a relatively large tear drop bubble. Unlike the other racers, the citizens could clearly see Hunter within his cockpit, pushing buttons, yanking levers. What’s more, his craft was not painted in the living hues of the other dozen entrants. Rather it was sporting three simple colors: red on the nose, white on the wings, blue on the tail and body. Like the wheel, this color scheme had not been seen on Earth in thousands of years.
Dead silence fell upon the huge stadium when Hunter’s aircraft appeared. The crowd was stunned by the sight of the odd-looking machine. At first they didn’t know whether to cheer, applaud, or salute.
Then it began to sink in — and the laughter started.
If one million people cheering at once sounded like waves crashing on a shore, that many people laughing sounded more like thunder. Low-pitched, rumbling, building, building into a sonic roar that suddenly stopped… only to start up again a quick breath later.
The stadium was in hysterics now. It had been a closely guarded secret that a maccus had been entered in the race. This was another archaic term that could mean several things, including “unusual one,” or “different from the rest.” But there was another translation that was on everyone’s mind and in everyone’s throats now.
This was the definition of maccus as jester, loon.
A clown… with wings.
Nowhere was the laughter so intense than in the galleries surrounding the Imperial Seat. This area was thick with some of the most high-ranking officers in the Empire. Each one was spit-polished and medal-heavy, each one vying to get as close to the Imperial Family as possible. The sight of the strange participant sent gales through the gallery. Whose unit was this thing from? Is it too late to bet against it?
Down near the starting line, though, two men in the million were not laughing. Actually Erx and Berx were on the verge of tears. The aircraft that had looked so strange and sleek on Fools 6 just looked strange here. Strange and old. Both explorers had bet substantial purses on Hunter’s machine; even more important, they’d been harboring dreams of basking in Hunter’s reflected glory. But all this seemed very much in jeopardy now. Compared to the hovering Star-fighters, Hunter’s contraption looked ridiculous.
Erx and Berx knew that Calandrx, in pulling his own strings with the race organizers, had managed to get Hunter entered as the maccus. But they’d thought he and his strange craft would have been greeted as something new, different, extraordinary, even spellbinding. Never did they consider that their new friend would be greeted with such overwhelming ridicule and abuse. But that’s exactly what was happening now.
“This is not good, my brother,” Erx said as the derisive laughter swelled even farther. “Not good at all.”
The thirteen racers nudged their way up to the neon starting beam. Hunter took the longest to get into position, needing more than a few adjustments of his nose wheel before getting exactly even with the other participants. This only served to throw the crowd into more fits of laughter. Taunting chants of maccus! filled the stadium. Erx and Berx sank even lower into their boots.
“Fear not, my brothers!” a voice boomed in their ears, strong and clear above the roar. “Our time is finally at hand!”
They swung around to see that Calandrx had come up behind them. Unlike them, he was all smiles. The explorers were mildly astonished to see the elderly pilot. How had he been able to find them in this enormous crowd?
“I knew you two would gravitate right to the center of the critical mass,” he told them with a hearty slap to each of their backs. “And a fine location it is, too. Now we three brothers will be in a perfect position to see the extraordinary happen.”
“How can you glow so?” Erx asked him, having to shout above the sustained roar of the raucous crowd.
“The entire Galaxy is laughing at our friend. The man who is carrying our wagers. We could all be very poor this time tomorrow. Your levity is baffling.”
“And you two don’t realize what you miss when you go to sleep,” Calandrx replied tartly, taking the flask from Berx’s hand and helping himself to some slow-ship wine.
“Please clarify,” Berx told him. “Before that wine takes effect.”
Calandrx grinned. All was right in his universe, at least for the moment.
“Did our friend out there ever tell you that when he flew for you on Fools 6, his throttle was opened to only one-eighth speed?”
Both Erx and Berx shook their heads no.
“And did you know that we conducted an experiment six days ago this night, after you fell asleep in my garden?”
“How could we know if neither you or Hawk told us?” Erx complained.
Calandrx shrugged.
“That’s true — but sometimes good things must be held in confidence,” he said. “Even from old friends.”
He drained Berx’s flask, then licked the spout with his tongue.
“But now all you have to do is prepare yourself, my brothers,” he said. “For we are about to see a display guaranteed to put a lie to this rowdy behavior around us.”
Erx and Berx just stared back at him.
“But what experiment are you talking about?” Erx pressed him.
Calandrx wiped his mouth on Berx’s sleeve.
“I’m tempted to say — but my words would ruin it for your eyes.” He handed Erx one of his ancient wooden matches. “Hold this…”
Then he pointed out at Hunter, who was still trying to maneuver his way to his starting point. People were throwing expended food packs and empty wine flasks at him now.
“When he leaves, strike the match.”
Before Erx could reply, the countdown commenced. Speaking slowly, sensually, the Emperor’s stunning daughter, Xara, began counting back from ten. Her sultry voice did the impossible. It quieted the crowd instantly.
When she spoke the word zero, it oozed off her lips. Then the starting beam blinked.
In one motion, the wheels on Hunter’s flying machine lifted off the ground and he hit his throttle.
There was a bright flash — and before the twelve other racers even moved, Hunter was already gone, leaving only a thin trail of smoke behind him.
15
The real trouble started for Hunter right after he hit the first transdimensional screen.
U
p until that point, the flight had been just like his trip around the planet a week before. His throttles were pushed right to the max, as Calandrx had suggested. The sensation was one of going extremely fast, but with zero blurring or head trips. He could see everything on the ground in perfect focus, clear and crisp — it was just dropping off behind him very, very quickly.
But at the same time, it seemed to him like no time had elapsed since he’d rocketed out of the stadium. In some ways he was still back there, maybe just a billionth of a trillionth of a micrometer past the starting beam. He was here, but he was also still leaving there. It would seem impossible — and yet there was a perfectly good explanation for it. For as Hunter would eventually come to find out, whenever he pushed his machine’s throttle to maximum power, he ceased traveling in regular time — and began traveling in an entirely different piece of time and space. That’s why everything seemed to be happening all at once.
That’s why he was going so fast.
And that’s why it was hard to gauge exactly how much regular time had elapsed before he hit the first blue screen.
* * *
Once out of Big Bright City, the terranium earth below him had turned uniform, pastoral, even dazzling in some places. Lush forests, gently rolling hills covered with flora, the most incidental canals and lakes shimmering in aqua blue — indeed, everything seemed to be a shade of either yellow, green, or blue. As he made his way west, there were no clouds, and certainly no bad weather. Only once did he turn around to see if anyone was behind him, but there was no one in sight.
When the first screen appeared, it came up fast and unexpected, as advertised. He’d just passed over a very wide canal that seemed to cut the upper half of the western continent in two. Flying at about two miles high, one moment the sky ahead of him was clear; the next, it was replaced by a massive cloud of bluish mist with numerous lightning bolts running through it. Hunter hit the screen not a microsecond after seeing it. He was nearly blinded by the impact; it knocked him so far back in his seat, his crash helmet snapped off and slammed into the back of the canopy. His entire flying machine began shaking violently.
All the things he’d tightened down before the race were coming loose again — he could hear them. For several terrifying seconds he could see nothing but the panicky blurs of his panel lights bouncing madly before his eyes.
He instinctively grabbed his control column with both hands and held it as rigid as possible. It took a while, but the vibrations finally died down and the aircraft bucked its way back to flying straight and true.
His crash helmet bounced back down onto his lap and he hastily shoved it onto his head. Finally his vision cleared and he was able to see where he was.
At first it seemed like he was still flying over the heartland of the western continent — except now it was night. But something was very different here. The darkness was evenly scattered everywhere, and everything had a thin neon glow around it. This was not the Earth’s surface he was seeing below him now; this was a ghostly image of where he’d just come from. Not so much a mirror dimension, but an X-ray of one. He could even see through things. Even his flying machine seemed to be only partially there.
Even stranger was the sensation that he was actually moving inside a tiny bubble. The Earth, the sky, the stars — it was as if he could reach out and touch them with his fingertips.
Very strange.
Very claustrophobic.
Welcome to the thirteenth dimension.
But it got even more bizarre. The interior of his cockpit had been transformed, too. Many of his control panel’s readout screens were gone, to be replaced by stacks of weapon-targeting systems, gun triggers, and bomb-release levers. Hunter made the mistake of looking down at these things for more than a moment — it was purely on impulse. When he looked up again, he saw a huge ball of fire coming right at him.
He was somehow able to yank his craft to the left just before the faux meteorite streaked by him. The violent maneuver saved him, but also caused the flying machine to go out of control. Suddenly he was nose down, spinning uncontrollably. The machine began shaking all over again.
This might be called a stall, he thought.
The distorted image of the distorted surface of the Earth was racing up to meet him. Hunter tried to yank back on the control column, but it did no good. He was still spiraling down toward the ground at very high speed. He had to think quickly; he was getting dizzy and felt close to blacking out. His hand wavered over the throttle for a moment. Calandrx had told him not to touch the power levels once he was airborne, as all kinds of unpredictable things might result. But Hunter was falling even faster now, and his incredibly powerful propulsion system was hurling him earthward that much quicker.
That’s when a strange thought hit him: Was there really this much gravity here in Dreamland?
Maybe.
But maybe not…
Hunter blinked his eyes once — and suddenly he was flying straight and level again. Control of his flying machine instantly returned to him. It had been some kind of an illusion, a mind trick of the type Calandrx had warned him about. He pulled up on the stick, just making sure it was real. Then he was looking up at the green-starred sky again.
That was a close one.
But now the surface of the Earth began to drop away even quicker than before. Hunter realized he was suddenly approaching space — or what looked like space. His instrument panel went mad. He could see numbers flashing by in Supertime speed just outside his cockpit glass. He was suddenly flying through a field of small gray moons — some were about five hundred feet across, some were smaller, all showing what appeared to be impact craters. But these moons were also swinging wildly, as if each one were dangling from some unseen string. Two were looming right up ahead of him now. Hunter had to ask himself a question: Should I go under, over, or between the two moons? But while he was considering his options, the two globes suddenly erupted in an explosion of red light. Hunter was startled. These things seemed to be headed right for him. But were they Z beams? Real ones?
He yanked the flying machine to the left just as the barrage went by him. In a flash he pulled on the control column and corkscrewed back up to his previous position. A second barrage was coming right at him. Another twist, another dive; the lethal-looking beams went right by his cockpit, so close he could feel their heat. Or so he imagined.
Hunter didn’t even have to think about what to do next. His instinct took over. He snapped his fingers and suddenly a weapons control was locked in his fist. He turned the flying machine twenty degrees off center and squeezed the trigger. Two blinding beams of yellow light erupted from his nose cone — weapons that weren’t really there. He squeezed again. Two more beams appeared. He squeezed again—now there were six beams of extremely bright Z rays flowing out of his nose.
Six…
It seemed to be the right number.
The beams smashed into the first moon; it went up in an orange flash and was gone. He flipped over.
There was no need to fight the second moon; Hunter simply streaked around it — and then found himself back over the X-ray image of the Earth again.
Another close one…
He looked down at his hands and saw the weapons control quickly dematerialize. When he looked up again, he found himself heading toward a set of gigantic mechanical teeth.
They had to be more than a hundred miles away, yet in this distorted world, they were quickly filling his entire field of vision. There was a mighty gleam coming off their razor-sharp edges; each tang was at least a mile long. They were moving up and down so quickly, a surge of static electricity was exploding outward each time the gigantic jaws came together and opened again. It was a scene right out of a nightmare.
And it was no optical illusion. Hunter could tell these things were real — or as real as anything could be inside the thirteenth dimension. No amount of blinking was going to make them disappear. And no matter how fast he was going, Hunter knew if on
e of these things came down on top of him, he and his flying machine would be crushed into oblivion.
He was suddenly right on them. In a heartbeat, the giant incisors were directly in front of him, closing shut. Again, his instinct took over. He stood his machine up on its wing and before he could even think about it, he streaked through the narrow opening just as the teeth snapped closed.
A really close one…
But the bad dream was not over, for once on the other side, he found himself facing another set of monstrous jaws, these fewer than fifty miles away. He just barely made it through them when a third set appeared, even closer to him. Then a fourth. And a fifth.
This was getting serious. Hunter was just barely getting through the monstrous obstructions before they clamped shut; each time, they were a bit closer to chomping off the tail of his aircraft. This went on for what seemed like forever, each time making it through the gigantic mandibles, but with less and less time to spare.
Finally the set in front of him clamped shut — and stayed shut. Hunter had nowhere to go but up. He yanked back on the controls and soon was looking deep into the night emerald sky — if there really was a night sky in Dreamland. The stars were most definitely green, and there seemed to be many more of them. No matter — this was not the time for stargazing. Hunter continued pulling back on his controls and soon was upside down; then, an instant later, was looking at the distorted colors of the ground again.
And I think that’s called a loop…
He wound up in nearly the same place from where he’d started the maneuver. The teeth were still closed.
Hunter squeezed his trigger, and the six weapons in his nose lit up again. They were so bright, they felt like they were burning away his eyes. His barrage hit the clenched jaw a nanosecond before his aircraft did. This was just enough time for them to blow a hole large enough for his machine to streak through. He twisted his way among the subatomic debris, then yanked the flying machine back to level again.
That was the end of the giant teeth.
