Red Limit Freeway

by John Dechancie

  That pouch of his was roomy. He was training a small handweapon on me. It could have been a dart-thrower—which would have passed unnoticed by the scanners upstairs.

  “I have no wish to use this dishonorrrable device on you, Jake-frriend,” Twrrrll told me. “But I will do so if you act dishonorrrably.”

  I backed away toward the other wall. The second Reticulan crossed the room and began patrolling a wide section of floor. He would eventually corner me and make me vulnerable to the net if I did not attack: But as I would have to close with him to do any damage he’d surely net me that way, too. I needed a second weapon. I sidled away toward the pile of junk against the far wall, glancing over every few steps to see if a likely object was available. I saw a long piece of light structural metal, probably aluminum, bent in the middle and jagged at one end. I sidestepped to the right and picked it up. The alien eyed me impassively as always, but I thought I detected a slight change of posture reflecting a rethinking of his strategy.

  I thought a bit, too. I realized that most of the first Reticulan’s attacks as well as those of my present opponent had been directed at nonvital parts of my body. With a shudder I realized why. The object had been to wound me, saving me for the final honor of the vivisection table. And that had been my advantage. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have won the first round.

  And there was plenty of doubt about my winning this one unless I could put that advantage to good use.

  I continued sidestepping to the right as he backed me closer to the far corner. I let him approach; turning slightly to begin backstepping, took two steps toward the corner, then sprang forward suddenly off one foot. He cocked the net hand back, ready to throw, but saw the jagged end of the aluminum rod coming up to snag it, and held back. I closed with him, swiping at his face and chest with the cutting tool. I backed him off for a few steps. Then he stooped under and tried a slashing cut at my upper thigh. I barely avoided it and swung at his forearm, triggering the cutting tool but missing him. The end of the tool left a brilliant trail in the semidarkness.

  He backstepped twice, then lunged, feinted with the dagger, took three steps to my left and snapped the net like a whip at my legs, the end of it wrapping neatly around my left calf. I whirled away to unwind myself, but not before he yanked and jerked me off my feet. I fell on my side and rolled, losing a grip on the aluminum rod. I pivoted on my knees to find it, reached for it, but by that time he was above me. The damp, sticky shroud of the net enveloped me. With a life of its own it contracted instantly, covering me like warm taffy. I struggled and tried to rise, pushing out with my arms and stretching the fabric of the net. It turned resilient and pulled back, contracting like a muscle. I felt a burning pain at the back of my knee, yelled, and collapsed. I flopped over and strained to get the cutting tool away from my face. Triggering it, I slashed at the net, made a small hole and poked my arm through. I brought the tool up to the alien’s face. He was bending over me inserting the knifeblade carefully through the webbing in order surgically to cut the tendons of my legs. He ducked the tool, grabbing my forearm near the elbow, his grip monstrously strong. I twisted my arm and swung the end of the tool in wicked little swipes at his face, the tool-end flaring brightly. I grabbed a handful of net and yanked. His knife made a long slit in the fabric. I got my left leg out and kicked up, driving my heel into his eyes. He fell back, trying to keep a grip on my arm, but I twisted away, reached over, and, with the tool sputtering and burning, described a long curving line along the length of his torso. I rolled away, got to my knees and hacked at the netting. My other leg came free and I rose, gathering the sticky mass of the net about me as I ran to the other side of the room.

  It took some doing, but I got free. My hands, face, and clothes were covered with stickum. The alien was lying supine but slowly started to rise. I rushed back, but he was on his knees by the time I got to him. I waded in, swinging the flaring end of the tool at his face. He struggled to his feet, one hand pressed to the carbonized gash in the chitin of his thorax and abdomen. Frothy pink fluid leaked from the wound. He fended off the tool with the knife, poking at my wrist and forearm. I backed him into the far corner, hacking at him, the tool-end flaming continuously. He bumped into a cylindrical machine component, stepped to the left, banged his crown against an overhead pipe, and bent his head. I swung for his neck, missed, and nicked a vertical tube to my left. The tube sputtered and hissed. I backed away—just in time—as a stream of hot yellow liquid spurted from it, shooting across the room in a low arc. The alien used the interruption to get out of the piping and lope toward the front of the room. I ducked under the stream of stuff, feeling stray drops of it land burningly on my back, and went after him. I caught him good across the back, opening up another seared-edged wound. He stopped, whirled, and slashed blindly at me. I ducked and came up with the tool, inscribing another gash along his torso that cut across the first wound, curved around, and intersected it again. I backed away, got my weight on one foot, and sprang at him again. The alien was doubled over in pain. I rushed at him, tried to get his neck in the guiding clamp. He ducked out and knocked the tool aside with his forearm. I swung low and nicked his right thigh, stepped away from his quick swipe at my face, went in again, and made a crosswise incision in his chest. The chitin of his torso cracked open and fell away in jagged pieces. Inside was a conglomeration of mechanical-looking organs that began spilling out into the Reticulan’s hands. Things that looked like clear plastic tubing wriggled out, severed ends leaking rosy ichor. A mass of orange gelatinous goo oozed forth along with a writhing charm-bracelet of odd polyhedral organs. Pink froth puddled on the floor. I brought the tool down and struck his crossed arms. The mass of his insides fell with a splat to the floor. He dropped the black-bladed knife.

  I took him apart. First the arms. Then one leg. He toppled over and I methodically cut him into pieces like the overgrown lobster that he was. It took several minutes.

  When I was done, I looked up to find the room filling with smoke. The far side of the room was in flames and steaming liquid covered the floor.

  I looked toward the door. Twrrrll was coming toward me, knife in hand. I ran into a cloud of smoke and fumes, covering my nose and mouth, and sweeping ahead with the flaming cutting tool. I circled blindly, ran into a wall, felt my way along it, found the doorway, and ran through.

  13

  It wasn’t long before I met other souls down in that technological inferno. A fire brigade rushed past me dressed in fireproof suits, carrying equipment. They gave me puzzled glances, but did not stop.

  I smiled and waved, limping toward the stairwell they had poured out from. I was hurt, though not mortally. The hamstring muscles of my left leg had been butchered a bit, but not completely severed. My right thigh had taken a puncture wound, and that was really hurting. I reached the stairwell and began to climb, but Nogon in bright uniforms—security guards, it turned out—met me before I’d gotten very far up. They took me into custody.

  The hour that followed is a little vague in my mind. I was led back through the basement and into an express elevator. We ascended for an hour, it seemed. We alighted onto an office floor, and there I was bound with itchy leatherlike handcuffs and plopped into a chair in a dark office. Motions were made which indicated that I was not to leave. Two guards were posted. The others rushed out, closing and locking the door. I sat there in a daze for about ten minutes. Then the other security people returned and led me to a different office, sat me down, and went out again. This happened twice more. At that point I began to blank out.

  I believe I was taken to some sort of infirmary, but little was done. Doctors—if they were doctors—looked me over and decided I wasn’t worth bothering with. I felt basically okay. I just wanted to draw a curtain over my mind and forget. But the stickum all over me and the image of quivering mandibles wouldn’t go away. And the sight of intestines that looked like children’s plastic building blocks spilling from the body of a creature whose passing glance would
stop a child’s heart. And the smell of turpentine and almonds. At some point Susan showed up. She ran her hand gently over my forehead. She was crying. “Oh, Jake,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” I asked calmly. Then I came out of it. “Susan,” I said, and it all seemed like a dream. “Suzie. My God, Suzie.”

  I stood up. Susan buried her face into my filthy jacket and sobbed.

  Her voice muffled, she wailed something.

  “…my fault, it’s my fault…” was all I could hear.

  “No, no,” I said.

  She cried some more then lifted her face up. She looked as if she’d been crying for hours. Had it been hours since I came up from the depths?

  “Poor Tivi,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “How can I ever…”

  She hid her face again and trembled against me.

  “There, there.”

  I actually said, There, there.

  There was more moving around. Ragna came out of what was apparently some official’s office, into the anteroom where Susan and I were sitting.

  “The distinguished individual to whom I have just been speaking,” he informed us solemnly, “is wishing to be gazing upon you in person as we are discussing this matter.”

  We went into a lavish office that looked more like a bedroom. The Nogon individual was dressed in cerise robes of a crepe material and reclined on a divan like some improbable satrap. His manner was perfunctory, if not downright insulting. He and Ragna exchanged words. We stood by.

  In all, five minutes’ worth of words were exchanged, and at the end of it the official spat out a phrase that was surely an insult, got up, and flounced out through another door.

  “Why are we being blamed?” I asked Ragna. “And what did he say to you?”

  “He is calling me what most of our race are calling us, in so many words, that we are people who are fornicating with creatures that have no eyes—which is to be saying animals who are living in caves. And we are not being blamed, so much, anyway. They are caring nothing for Tivi. A fire, though, to them is frightening stuff, which is understandable—which is serving them right for living in these dumps, by gosh, the bastardly rats. It is all strictly in the nature of being bullshit.”

  I still didn’t understand, but didn’t ask for further elaboration. It was all, I was sure, very difficult to be explaining.

  We went home.

  The Ahgirr medics fixed me up fine, and while I was recuperating, the techs fixed the trailer for us. No one breathed a word about Tivi’s death. The Ahgirr, it seemed, didn’t have funerals. What was done with the remains was left unspoken as well.

  Nothing was said or done which in any way would have led us to believe that we were being held to blame. Tivi’s husband Ugar came to us and said that Tivi had died in the performance of her duty as a scientist. That was all he said.

  There was a ceremony, however, which we humans all attended. The entire community gathered in a huge central chamber and sat on the cool stone floor in silence for a full hour or more. Then they all got up and left to go about their daily tasks.

  I spent two days languishing in Ragna and his wife’s suite, staring at the polished granite wall of a bedchamber, seeing strange things swarming in the grainy surface. Tivi’s face, Susan’s, Darla’s, my father’s. Scenes from my life, too, darkly and through a glass smudged with forgetfulness.

  Gradually, I came out of whatever state I was in and in a week I was more or less back to normal.

  Three very busy days passed before we said good-bye to the Ahgirr. I supervised the final touches on the repair job. Ariadne got a facelift and a clean bill of health after extensive repairs. She was still magenta, but now she wore it well.

  In the middle of all this, I drew Sean aside. I had avoided doing this for as long as I could. I asked him about what I had seen in the caves.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, stroking his explosion of facial foliage. “Now, what exactly does your Snark look like?”

  “What do you mean, my Snark? Are there different varieties?”

  “As many as there are people who see them.”

  “I don’t understand. Was what I saw in the woods back on Talltree real or not?”

  “Hard to say. There are a number of theories. Not a shred of solid research has been done, but it’s thought that some types of vegetation on the planet produce hallucinogenic pollen.”

  “I see. So what I thought I saw was just brain static. Right?”

  “Hard to say. Did you look for tracks?”

  “No. I got conked right after I saw the thing.”

  “Well, it might have been real. That is to say, you could very well have seen something. Almost nothing’s known about Talltree, zoologically speaking.”

  “How do you account for its being here?”

  He shrugged his mountainous shoulders. “I don’t. But you could have seen a real creature back home, then had a delayed reaction here. It’s been known to happen.”

  “Yeah, hallucinogens are like that. Déjá vu experiences are pretty common.”

  “I’ve known some people who claim to be revisited by their Snarks every odd month or so. It’s like an imprinting process. An idee fixe, if you’ll forgive another Gallicism.”

  I scratched my face, shaking my head. “But it seemed so real.”

  “It can be that, m’lad.”

  “Yeah. One thing, though.”

  “Hm?”

  “You said the thing I saw wasn’t a Boojum.”

  “Sounded like a Snark to me.”

  “What would’ve happened if I had seen a Boojum?”

  “You wouldn’t be here to talk about it.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  Sam was lonely, parked as he was at the mouth of the cavecity, so in and around other activities, I had made sure to go up and visit him. To pass the time, we ran a systems check on him, just to make sure that everything was working smoothly. We would do this now and then, debug and add a few new subroutines, erase useless files, that sort of thing. All seemed fine until I discovered that Sam’s absolute-timing circuit was two hours slow. No doubt about it. Sam was two hours behind all the other clocks in the rig: the one on the dash, the one on the microwave oven in the kitchenette, even my wristwatch, which I never wear. There were only two explanations. Either the timer had inexplicably shut down for two hours and started up again, or Sam had been shut down for the same amount of time.

  There is no direct way to turn Sam off, but if I wanted to, I would cut the power to his CPU and he’d be out like a light, just like any other computer. Of course, Sam would never permit anyone else but me to do it, but somebody working on him, on the rig, rather…

  Sam said, “So you figure if it happened, it happened at the repair garage back on Talltree.”

  “Can’t think of any other time when the opportunity would have arisen, except when Stinky worked on you back on Goliath.”

  “Well, surely Stinky’s above suspicion.”

  “Maybe.” I thought a moment. “Okay. Stinky worked all day on you, right? And that night, the Militia tried to break into the garage to search you.”

  “I don’t know who it was. I just got the hell out of there, fast.”

  “Yeah, which is kind of hard to figure, now that I think about it.”

  “How so?”

  “You say you crashed out of Stinky’s garage. Did you run into anyone?”

  “Nope. I rolled through a vacant lot, flattened a little shed, then found a side street, and rolled out of town. No one followed.”

  “If it was the Militia, I wonder why they didn’t,” I said.

  “Maybe it was that Petrovsky fellow, and an assistant or two.”

  I nodded. “Makes sense. I didn’t see Petrovsky at the Teelies’ ranch when the Militia raided it. He could have been leading the mission to search you.”

  “Could be.”

  Sitting in the shotgun seat in front of Sam’s diagnostic display, I tugged at my lower lip, pinching it between thu
mb and finger. “Though Petrovsky could have been in one of those flitterjets. Only two landed, as I remember. I can’t imagine him not personally commanding a major operation like that. So, he may have left the break-in attempt to his subordinates.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah,” I said, mulling it over. Presently I said, “Answer me this. Is there a chance you were shut down that night?”

  “How would they have done it?”

  “An electromagnetic pulse gun could have knocked you out that way.”

  “That would have knocked out everything, including the other clocks.”

  “Maybe some other way? Maybe you didn’t notice anything until the last second before they yanked the plug.”

  “Well, hell, I guess it’s possible,” Sam acquiesced, “but doesn’t it make more sense to suspect that something happened back on Talltree? There, they had all the opportunity in the world. You told them to go right into the main power junction to check for sand.”

  “I was trying like hell,” I said, “to avoid drawing the conclusion. Don’t like the implications of that. If they got to you back there and tampered with you, it was for a reason.”

  “To get control of me? I can assure you that I’m just as ornery as ever.”

  “No. Those backwoods bumblers wouldn’t know how to handle a major artificial intelligence. But they could have punked around with your auxiliary system software, maybe added a mole program.”

  “To what end?”

  “To get you to do something you wouldn’t be aware of doing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like leaving some kind of trace.”

  “Okay, I see what you’re driving at. Well, it’s easy enough to find out. Let me just read out how much main memory we’re currently using for system software and… Jesus Christ.”