"Your accent's pretty thick itself," Marge noted.
"What accent? I ain't got no accent. You must t'ink I'm from New Yawk or maybe da Bronx. Dey got accents!"
"Out here, you're the one with the accent and you better hadn't forget it. What happened to you, anyway? Are you hurt?"
"Got a bruised wing is all. I ain't gonna be able to fly noplace for a day or two but I'll be okay. Two hundred yeahs of dodgin' storms wit' no sweat at all, and I run into dat baby here and lose my traction! It just tore me loose and spun me around and I come to here. I been t'ru almost as bad but never woist."
"Lucky it did happen, if you're not seriously hurt. I'm with a group from the other side. We're over here doing work, but one of our party can get you over there if he wants to."
"Is he one o' us?"
"Yes, but don't count on that meaning anything. Still, I have a suspicion that you're going to have to be with us a while if you're going over at all. I sense another hand bringing you to us at this time. Come on—you game for a little ride?"
The pixie looked disgustedly around the roof. "Well, I sure could use a better neighborhood."
* * *
"And now the company numbers six," Poquah noted. The Imir seemed far more relaxed than previously and much more self-confident. He even seemed slightly better disposed toward Macore, making the rest of them wonder if the little thief had slipped the elf something when they were out. "Providence will send us the seventh in due course. Then it will be up to us to finish this matter."
"I thought the Rules didn't apply here," Joe noted. "I mean, why do we need seven?"
"The Rules in general do not apply, except to us personally of course," the Imir continued. "But seven is a mystical number with some power, as you must know. Seven would be good, even if we are not limited to that number."
"It can be at the crap tables, yeah, but you can crap out with that same seven, too," the pixie added.
"Is that so unlike life?" the Imir asked.
The pixie was standing on the top of the television set eyeing Poquah critically. She wasn't used to seeing other fairy races any more than the humans of Earth were. "He looks like Leonard Nimoy," she commented.
"Too short," Marge responded in a whisper.
"I should know from short?"
It was a good point, well beyond argument. Poquah, if he heard the exchange, ignored it, but turned to the pixie. "You understand that there will be no transportation until, and unless, we complete our mission? All travels have stopped until then."
"Yeah, I get it. I ain't got nothin' better to do anyways, so I might as well string along. Besoides, if dis really is de end of de woild t'ing, what's the difference anyhow?"
"I admire practicality," the Imir commented.
Joe and Macore looked blank as they found themselves cut out of the pixie's end of the conversation. Tiana, to her surprise, discovered that she could hear the pixie, although the accent was bad enough she couldn't make a lot of sense out of the dialogue.
With all of them now present, though, Poquah thought that this was a good time for a general briefing, and they sat around Joe's room and listened to him.
"It was expected that we would eventually have to transport a number of people and equipment, and we did not wish to be dependent on motels and other such public places. As a result, we had shipped here a purchase Master Ruddygore made some time ago for his own personal convenience when in this country. It is a masterpiece of comfort and practicality and is very well disguised. It will serve not only as accommodations but as a mobile headquarters."
"This why you need a truck driver?" Joe asked him.
"Yes. I, too, am capable of driving it in a pinch, but I would rather not do so unless there is some compelling reason for it. I am comfortable with its operation but not comfortable on and around the highways of this place. It will be quite effective, with the van, in which I am much more comfortable, being used for local transport when needed."
"Why go from here, though?" Marge asked him. "I assume our destination is California."
"It is indeed. However, as the pixie told you, this is the only safe and secure landing spot in North America with an access to good roads and modem conveniences, for a variety of complex reasons not worth going into right now. Also, the truck is on record with a real interstate trucking line, and so any checks run on it will show that it is legitimate and has reason to be in the areas it will be. This is more credible if we actually make a run from some distant point.
"We will be entering a hostile area in more ways than one. The Baron already has a substantial following, including many of the wealthy and influential. Politicians and corporate presidents get as gravely ill as the common folk, after all, and as desperate. It is a mistake to think of this as a month-old operation that began with Dacaro's arrival. It is not. The Baron has been building this up for over two and a half years now, and that is a lot of time in a media-oriented society."
"I understand the dangers from the Baron and his lackeys," Tiana said, "but you seem to indicate it's not as simple as all that."
"It is not. In addition to his followers and supporters, public and private, he has been very good to a county that is economically one of the most depressed in the West since the logging boom ended. A lot of money is being dropped there—enough so that, even with his backers, he needed the gold from the Master's vaults to pay off the balance of his mortgage. He has, however, adopted a clever, even fiendish, method of assuming control. His substantial following that is on and around the land all registered to vote, and those politicians who did not accept his authority were then recalled and thrown from office, to be replaced with the Baron's people. His cult controls the political levers of the towns nearest his holdings, and some of county government as well."
"Surely he can't be that pervasive," Marge said disbelievingly. "I mean, maybe it's not a heavily populated county, but it hasn't been a long time, either."
"There is opposition, yes, but this technique has worked before with other religious cults and it works now. It is a flaw in the American system which can be exploited by ones with the following and resources to do so. Local governments control power, water, sewage, police, fire, and all the other services people depend on. They set the tax standards and the tax rates. An irate citizen might have his well inspected and condemned by the county, making his land worthless. There is condemnation and eminent domain. A business picketed by and not patronized by a large mass of people will fail. It is immoral, unethical, and absolutely legal. He is doing nothing that others have not accomplished before him, only he is doing it far faster and far more efficiently. The Baron does his homework well and he is brilliant and analytical. The attempt at foreclosing on him was our doing, of course, and our last legal gasp, as it were, although he'll be tied up in court for years."
Joe couldn't help smiling in admiration. "So your folks put the squeeze on him and he paid off with gold stolen from Ruddygore's own vaults. He must have loved that touch." He paused a moment. "Lord! Is this man incredible!"
The pixie, following all this, looked around the room. "And a group of bums like dose in dis room is gonna take on and beat dis guy? You're all nuts!"
The Imir repeated the comment verbatim for the benefit of the humans, who only nodded somewhat in agreement. Poquah, however, was not about to grant the point.
"We are not as insane as we might seem, madam," he replied. "First, the magic powers that Boquillas depends upon and which awe his followers and associates are nothing strange to us, nor are we without some such powers ourselves. Second, be reminded that Boquillas himself has great knowledge but no powers of his own—those were stripped from him. The rest around him, with one exception, are Earth psychics of limited abilities and almost no training. I could dispense with them one on one without even straining, and probably even Marge could do so if they tried anything against her. No, Dacaro is the only real threat, the only one we cannot match. Remove Dacaro and we, not they, have the balan
ce of power."
"Yeah, but that's the trick, isn't it?" Joe noted. "I mean, Ruddygore could take him out, and so could most real powerful wizards, but he's blocked any of them from coming. He is, on Earth, what Ruddygore or one of the Council would be in Husaquahr. The most powerful with no real competition."
"Let us assume, for the moment, that we could take out Dacaro," Marge put in. "It still isn't any piece of cake. Sure, we'd have the power, assuming old gloomy here survives the battle, but there's more kinds of power than magic. What are we talking about? A hundred people? A thousand? Ten thousand?"
"I fear your last estimate is closer to the mark," Poquah told them.
"Okay—ten thousand, plus a government in his hip pocket, right? The cops with their guns, the followers with who knows what? And demons—the verse said something about demons, too. Even Ruddygore had to run from a demon and got pretty banged up in the process if I remember." She looked over at the little thief. "You've been pretty silent on this, Macore. I'd expect you to be the first one to object to all this."
The thief shrugged. "There's a plan. He knows most of it, I know most of it, and you all don't know any of it. It isn't perfect, but it's good, very good. Some little details we have yet to figure out, but they'll come. Look—forget Dacaro for now. Otherwise, it's the same kind of problems I face all the time as a master thief. We have to case the joint, as it were, until we know all its ins-and-outs and all its little quirks and traps. In the end, it's a puzzle, just as Ruddygore's vault was a puzzle. Before we act, I'm going to solve most of that puzzle." He looked sheepishly at Poquah. "We are going to solve most of that puzzle. You never get a hundred percent solution, but that's what makes a master thief different from a puzzle fan—or a dead thief. A little improvisation as you go. We're being handed the elements; we'll put 'em together. See, that was why Ruddygore was so insistent that we get to the Oracle."
"But we do not understand the messages," Tiana pointed out.
"I think we will, now that I've seen our pixie and had the rhyme explained to me, but that wasn't the point. See, what the Oracle told us was that this was a test, as Poquah said. It's not the inevitable end, just a possible end of the world. The big point of the Oracle's verse was that this was a puzzle that could be solved. I think we can do it. We've beaten the Baron twice before."
"Yeah, with Ruddygore," Joe commented sourly. "Not on our own. Seems to me that Dacaro made mincemeat of all of us all by himself."
"No!" said Poquah sharply. "You and Marge got the idea for escaping from the demon with the Lamp and made it happen. It was Macore who freed you from Esmerada's prisons, and Joe who managed, with Marge's help, to figure a way to escape from the Baron's prisons and contact us. It was Joe's quick thinking that ruined the Baron's takeover plans for Morikay. We have beaten the Baron before when he had full powers—and that meant the Master to finish him off. Now he is without powers even we possess. His brilliance remains, but so do the basic elements that defeated him in the past, his overconfidence and his arrogance. I have no knowledge of the future, but in the end I will wager that his personality is the key to his undoing."
"Well." Joe sighed. "You're betting all our lives on it." "And all the lives in both this world and the other," Marge added.
Chapter 13
Of Power, Primitives,
And Partial Planning
If I had heard that as many devils would set on me in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I should nonetheless have ridden there.
—Martin Luther
THE TRUCK WAS EVERYTHING POQUAH HAD SAID IT WAS and more. Outside, it looked like any other transcontinental eighteen-wheeler, complete with a sleeper in the cab, and it was the latest in large truck technology. The ubiquitous CB radio, however, had an additional channel that was not a broadcast channel at all, but rode the power lines back from the cab to the trailer and served as an effective two-way intercom which would override any signals the radio was receiving or putting out.
Anyone who opened the back of the trailer and looked inside would see a large number of stacked cartons of nicely labeled products. Indeed, you could take down a box at random and open it and remove its contents—if you liked tacky plaster statues and pink flamingoes, that is. The truck appeared packed all the way to the back, but it was not. The effect was not created by any wizard's spell, to tip off anyone who might have the power, but by a classy stage magician's device that was purely mechanical and purely mathematics and physics, but it was convincing and effective.
One entered or left the soundproofed inner sanctum only by a concealed trapdoor with small steps that came down from the bottom or from an emergency exit reached by ladder through the top. Neither was obvious, even when staring straight at them.
Once inside, even though it was a crawl for them all to get underneath, there was an air-conditioned and effective small apartment, with a master bedroom and associated smaller bedroom with bunk beds, and a combined living and dining room area with kitchenette and minor conveniences, including a refrigerator and a microwave. Water was supplied by a tank on top and was the only thing that needed refilling at regular intervals. The power source was self-contained and apparently did not need refilling or maintenance, but it was not obvious and they did not inquire much about it. Joe guessed it was nuclear, and he really didn't want to know for sure.
The trailer had the logo of Maximillian Express on it, which was a well-known and quite standard cross-country hauler. The logo was bannerlike, gold on blue and rectangular, and proved to be an ingenious one-way mirror. Those inside could see out as if it were dark glass, but it looked like painted metal to anyone outside, even right up close—and it was high enough to discourage anyone getting that close.
All iron and steel sources had been replaced, shielded, or covered. The larder was well stocked, and everything worked. There was one addition of which Poquah was particularly proud. It was over near the smaller bedroom entrance, but had a full view of the main area. It was, in effect, a long but thin marble bathtub, although it had only an interconnection to an outside fixture for a water source.
"I realized that Tiana would have unique needs," the Imir explained. "We cannot, of course, carry that much water, but with a length of hose and the small hand-cranked pump we have aboard we can fill it from any tap or even a river, lake, or stream. It empties onto the roadway, as, I fear, does the water closet."
"I think it is wonderful!" Tiana cried, and kissed the Imir. Poquah, looking both embarrassed and uncomfortable, turned to Joe.
"Do you think you can drive it?"
"Oh, sure. It's easier than what I'm used to and that was pretty good. Give me ten miles and I'll take it down an alley with two inches clearance."
"Very well. All of the permits have been secured, and the weight has been calculated to match the manifest and be within all legal limits."
"They still on that stupid fifty-five speed limit?"
"I'm afraid so, but you have detection devices there and much of our travel will be through areas of light enforcement. Just don't get carried away. I will follow in the van, matching your speed. Communicate with me by radio only when you must, as there is no way to know who is listening. I prefer, when we are going, that one of the two ladies ride in the cab, so that there will always be reports of a male and a female up there. Anyone inside the trailer should enter or exit only when cleared to do so by the driver over the intercom. Macore will ride with me in the van, and we will share the facilities inside. Clear?"
Marge saluted. "Clear, mon capitan! Let us march or die!"
At approximately nine o'clock in the evening, with everything including the route and plan squared away, they left the motel for the last time and Joe pulled the rig out onto the highway.
It was far easier than the van, he found, almost as if he'd never quit driving. There was some special set of reflexes you developed as a trucker that never seemed to fade, like riding a bicycle. Through double clutching and sixteen gears, what was a complex mystery
to most drivers was second nature to him.
It occurred to him that the first part of the journey was almost a ritual completion of the run he'd been on when Ruddygore had intervened, westbound late at night on I-10 heading toward El Paso—only this time he'd make it, and beyond.
He tried to determine just where that mysterious cutoff was, but he couldn't do it. This country all looked alike, even more so at night, and he was well past the point before he finally gave up. Somewhere along here, too, he was supposed to have smashed up and died in the wreck. He still didn't know if the accident had been allowed to happen, or, if not, just what had happened to his old truck.
Joe stopped once just outside El Paso while he and Macore went into a carryout place that was open all night and bought some dinner for themselves and Poquah, whose diet was not that far off from that of humans'. Inside the trailer, it was a matter of thawing, but not cooking, some fish and other such stuff for Tiana. Gimlet seemed perfectly happy gorging on some jar honey, which would last her a year at her size and weight, and Marge took only occasional fruit juices, having eaten well of the stuff only Kauris consumed and needing no more for a while.
It was, of course, pretty boring, but that was only to be expected. At least Tiana, dried out, could ride for a time with Joe, and Marge then took advantage of the view if nothing else when the mermaid grew tired or had a need for water. Gimlet had little desire to come out, even though she was able to ride almost anywhere, keeping to her instinctual requirement to stay very close to her food supply.
They made good time and Joe really enjoyed it; but, at about an hour after sunrise, he made for a truck-stop lot, pulled in a little away from any other trucks, and decided to call it a day—or night, as the case might be. Marge was already asleep, and those who ate normal food used the truck-stop restaurant. Tiana went, too, finding that she had no trouble with salads. Although cooked food didn't really appeal to her, she had decided to eat with them occasionally, just for the company. There was nothing in her constitution that prevented cooked food from going down and doing the job; it was just that she had somewhat the same reaction to it that her companions did to seeing her eat a raw fish, head and all.
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