Red Limit Freeway

by John Dechancie

  “No, son. You alone in the universe have been singled out.”

  “Why do you think that is?” I asked while swinging the rig around yet again.

  “The gods are capricious.”

  “Thank you, O Oracle.”

  “I used to know an O’Oracle. Shamus O’Oracle. Owned a bar in Pittsburgh.”

  We followed the bouncing ball. Either Carl’s estimations of its speed were wrong or the balloon was gaining energy from the encounter; because we couldn’t keep up with it. Nothing but hazy air stood between us and the cylinders, which came into sight about ten minutes later. The balloon had done its job, having gobbled up the barrier all the way to the edge of the dome of airlessness maintained by the force fields surrounding the portal. The Green Balloon was nowhere to be seen, though. Either it had faded away or had gone on through the aperture, which immediately brought up a question: Had it, if the latter were true, interfered with the force field or, God forfend, with the portal machinery itself? But now was not the time to pose the question, let alone answer it. The cylinders were there, as was the aperture they created, and we shot through with nothing on our screens to indicate that anyone had a mind to follow.

  Sam’s reaction to what greeted us on the other side of the portal was something like, “Wha—? Huh???!!”

  I immediately forgot all about the Green Balloon.

  It took a while for what we were seeing to sink in. We had ingressed onto a limitless, mathematically level plain, its surface shiny and metallic, suffused with a pale blue tinge. The sky was a glory of stars bejeweling curtains of luminous gas. A spectacular globular cluster hung a few degrees off the zenith. Rivers of dark dust carved their courses in the firmament. The terrain was flat, impossibly flat. Not a rock, not a rill broke the uniformity, not a rise or a dip, however slight. It was the biggest billiard ball in the universe.

  But all of that was the least of it. Sam had gasped for another reason.

  There was no road under us.

  Rather, the surface was one big road.

  “Sam?” I said casually. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Son, I’m speechless. In all my years on the Skyway, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “But where’s the road?” I said.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. We may be on it, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There may be some way to sense it—except I’ve tried everything already and I’m damned if I can see it.”

  “Are you scanning anything out there?” I asked.

  “Nothing, absolutely nothing. I can’t make a good guess as m how far away the horizon is.”

  After thinking a moment, I said, “Take a fix on a star up uhcad. Maintain our course that way. I don’t think I’ve drifted too much since we ingressed.”

  “Got one.”

  “You have the conn.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  “I’m going to assume there is a road under us, even though we may not be able to detect it—not a road, I guess, but a way. A direction to go in.”

  “Good idea. Hey, what’s this? A dome, for pity’s sake.” A “dome” is the faint microwave image that betrays the presence of a portal’s force field shell. The cylinders themselves don’t give off any electromagnetic radiation that’s easily detectable at a distance, and they reflect none.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Thirty degrees to port.”

  It was unusual to find a portal so near an ingress point; however, this was hardly an average stretch of Skyway.

  I got on the horn.

  “People, we’ve detected a portal very near here. I’m for shooting it. Like to get off this bowling ball as soon as possible. What say you all?”

  Everybody said let’s get off this bowling ball, like, immediately.

  “Follow me,” I ordered.

  Sam made the turn. I eased back into the captain chair for a short rest. We had been on the road for only a few hours, but I was a trifle tired. Getting old.

  “I’ll be switched. Another one.”

  “Portal?” I asked.

  “Yup. And another. They’re popping up over the horizon. Well, now at least I can get a fix … let’s see. You may be interested to know that the heavenly body we presently inhabit o it little over five thousand kilometers in diameter.”

  “Pretty big,” I mused. “And covered with portals. Interesting. But let’s go ahead and shoot this near one, per our plan.”

  “Our plan? Wait, let me put stronger sneer quotes around that. Our ‘plan’?”

  “Such as it is. Roland, what do you think we have here? Any ideas?”

  “Some fairly definite ones,” Roland answered. “Remember all those Roadbugs we saw coming here?”

  “Yeah, and I think I know what you’re driving at.”

  “It all adds up. Access to this place was barred to all traffic but the Bugs. We get through by a fluke and find something completely different from every Skyway planet we’ve seen. It’s obvious that the road with the barrier was a service road. And this…” He swept his arm out expansively.

  “This,” I finished for him, “must be the Garage Planet of the Roadbugs.”

  17

  Or a garage planet,” Roland went on. “One of many in a vast network servicing the whole Skyway system.”

  “With a web of service roads connecting them,” I said. “Stands to reason.”

  “I wonder if this is the main garage for the Milky Way—do you think?”

  “Maybe,” I answered, “if we’re still in the Milky Way.” Roland looked through the forward port at the sky. “No telling where we are, but if we’re still in our galaxy, we may be very near the galactic nucleus.”

  “Let’s hope not too near. A galactic-core black hole throws out a lot of hard radiation.”

  “If you’re worried,” Sam said, “the counters are absolutely silent. Not even cosmic-ray background. Either, we’ve got equipment failure—which would contradict what I’m reading—or this planet has radiation shielding.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Wonder what it means?”

  “Imagine a radiation shield covering a whole planet,” Roland marveled. “And one that can stop high-energy particles, too.” He shook his head. “But why? What needs to be protected here?”

  “Maybe the fact that we’re in a different region of the galaxy is something to do with it,” I suggested. Then I shrugged. “Who knows? And who cares, for that matter?” I folded my arms, snuggled into the seat and closed my eyes. “I’m going to try to catch a wink or two.”

  “You do that,” Sam said cheerily. “Nothing to eyeball out here anyway. Best to let me handle it.”

  So I did for about the next ten minutes. I didn’t sleep, though. The matter of what happened to the Green Balloon reasserted itself, and I realized something. The technology of Carl’s automobile was at least equal to if not greater than the technology of the Roadbuilders. This was nothing less than a revelation. Such a state of affairs was unprecedented in the known sections of the Skyway. The technological achievements of the Roadbuilders were generally thought to be unequalled in the universe. No one had any hard evidence in support of the notion, but there was an intuitive feel of truth to it. The portals were impossible constructs, yet they existed. It was difficult to conceive that the race who had created them had not had mastery of the basic forces of the universe.

  Fact: Cruising along behind us was an artifact, a machine, which had neutralized a Roadbuilder security mechanism. Fact: The owner, or supposed owner, of this artifact was a twenty-year-old human being who claimed to have been born on Earth over one hundred and fifty years ago, and who also claimed to have been shanghaied by some sort of time-traveling extraterrestrial spacecraft.

  Fact: The artifact was in the form of an antiquated vehicle, specifically that of a 1957 Chevrolet Impala (!).

  Supposition: The occupants of the extraterrestrial spacecraft had built the artifact according to its present owner�
�s specifications and quite possibly at his behest. (Carl had said only that “aliens” had built his automobile, but based on what Carl had implied, the inference that his captors had built it for him was easy enough to draw, unless I was misremembering.)

  Item: Carl talked, acted, and appeared to be who and what he said he was: an American of the twentieth century displaced in time and space. (Not a fact, but a series of observations.) Hypothesis: Carl was kidnapped by the Roadbuilders. But to what end? Insufficient data.

  Hypothesis: Carl was abducted by beings who had no direct access to the Skyway and who had developed interstellar space travel.

  Why? To check out the Skyway.

  Why did they bag Carl? They needed a spy. Huh?

  This was getting me nowhere. Obviously a long talk with Carl was in order. Until then …

  Something out there against the star-field … black shapes outlined in glowing gas …

  Sam swung us hard to starboard before I could grab back the controls.

  “You saw it too, huh?”

  “Yeah! Jesus.”

  We had been approaching the portal array from the side. You ought not to do that sort of thing.

  “Well,” I said, “we’re off the beaten path, if there is one.”

  “Now we know that Roadbugs don’t need roads,” Roland lamented.

  “Here’s a question,” Sam said. “How are we going to shoot a portal without a straight road for an approach path, a guide lane, commit markers, and the rest of it, when we can’t even see the cylinders?”

  “Carl’s instruments can probably handle it,” I said. “I hope. Let’s ask him.”

  I got on the horn and did.

  “No problem,” Carl said confidently. “This car has ways of detecting cylinders nobody else has.”

  The cylinders are tricky things to read. They suck up just about everything in the way of electromagnetic radiation and emit almost nothing that can be picked up without sensitive laboratory equipment. This side of the commit point, however, you can register small tidal stresses that can give you a fairly good idea of how to approach the portal. Personally, I don’t trust most commercial instrumentation. I have relied on instruments when weather conditions have dictated it, but in those instances the orientation signals from the commit markers had made things fairly easy. Here, there were no commit markers. I had never negotiated a portal on cylinder-scanning instruments alone.

  We sailed on into the starlit night for a while, discussing the ramifications of Carl’s automobile’s astonishing capabilities. Roland and John agreed that the car’s technology had to be a match for the Roadbuilders’.

  “But who could the manufacturers have been?” John said. “Some race in the Expanded Maze? The Ryxx, perhaps?”

  “The Ryxx have starships,” I said, “but rumor has it that they’re fusion-powered sub-lightspeed crafts.”

  “That would explain the time-traveling aspect of Carl’s story,” Roland said, “but if the Ryxx are limited to sub-lightspeed technology, they couldn’t have built Carl’s buggy.”

  “I would tend to think not, but there’s no way of knowing. Maybe faster-than-light travel is impossible, just like Einstein said. From what I know of recent work in theoretical physics; Relativity’s been taking quite a beating, but no one’s been able to deliver a knockout blow yet.”

  “Well, ‘beating’ may not be the appropriate word,” Roland said. “Most of the last century has been spent trying to reconcile Relativity with twistor theory and other such things. Actually—”

  “HANG ON!” Sam yelled.

  The rig veered sharply to the left, the G-forces nearly snapping my neck. Just as we were straightening out, a black shape shot across our bow, visible for the barest fraction of a second before it vanished into the half-light.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked after my heart had resumed beating.

  “A Roadbug,” Sam told me. “Doing around Mach three. Never seen one go quite that fast.”

  “Where the hell was he going? Holy smokes, that was close!”

  “I don’t know where he was going, but I do know he’s turning to come after us.”

  “Step on it, Sam.”

  “Will do.”

  “Jake, what was that thing?” It was Carl.

  I checked the rearview screen and saw three pairs of headlights maneuvering back into formation. “Sorry about the sudden course change, folks, but we almost got creamed by a Roadbug.”

  “Guess he wonders what the heck we’re doing here,” Carl said.

  “Very likely,” I answered. “I don’t think we can outrun him. Maybe we should stop and tell him we’re lost, act innocent.”

  “Could he know about what we did to the barrier? I suppose not, huh?”

  “Don’t see how, but I’m a little nervous about what he’ll do in any event.”

  “Me, too. He could just decide to zap us.”

  “Eventually, maybe, but he’ll conduct a quickie trial first, ask us how we got here.”

  “What’ll we say? Best get our stories coordinated.”

  “We’ll just say, ‘What barrier? We didn’t see any barrier!’ or words to that effect. In fact, let’s not say anything except that we’re lost and we had no idea this was a forbidden zone. Got it? Sean, Yuri—are you listening?”

  They were.

  “Is the Roadbug listening?” Sean asked pointedly.

  “Oh, God, who knows what they can do,” I said. “I’ve never heard one speak English, which means nothing. But I’m fairly sure even they can’t decipher cross-band frequency-shift scrambling based on random number generation unless they have the reassemble code.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Should we pull over then?” Carl asked. “He’s completed his turn … vectoring in on us now.”

  “I don’t see what choice we have,” I said. “Except… well…”

  “I could sic a Green Balloon on him.”

  “The thought had occurred to me. Matter of fact, let’s do it.”

  “What about the risk of retaliation?” Sean said, sounding worried. I didn’t blame him one bit.

  “Sean,” I answered, “I’m the only person I know who’s had the monumental stupidity to fire on a Skyway Patrol vehicle. Did it quite recently, it so happens. There was no retaliation. They don’t have human motivations. Now, I’m not saying I can predict what this one’s going to do, but odds are he won’t smear us for taking a potshot at him. Besides, those balloons are so damned innocuous, he might not even recognize it as a weapon—unless it has an effect on him, in which case we can get away. Sound logical?”

  “Logical or not,” Carl said, “here goes. I’m going to drop way back so you guys don’t catch it.”

  The rearview screen showed another translucent green egg disgorging itself from the roof of Carl’s buggy. It drifted up und went off-screen.

  My eyes were beginning to adjust to the strange half-light and the even stranger surroundings. I could see the tops of cylinders blotting out the star-daubed sky on the horizon. They seemed to be everywhere, but none in proximity except the we we had dodged a moment ago. The surface under us continued in featureless uniformity. It was hard to focus on, but the more I looked at it the more it looked metallic and artificial. The whole place looked like an immense video studio, darkened and bare, surrounded with a painted cyclorama. The floor glowed an eerie violet-blue, like a white surface under ultraviolet light.

  The rear scanner showed a big blip approaching fast, and the readout had its speed at Mach 1.3 and decelerating. He’d be on us in twenty seconds. The balloon didn’t register at all. “Sam, give it all you got,” I said.

  “I’m givin’ it.”

  Suddenly, the blip started veering off. It swooped off to our left for a few seconds, then began wobbling, its speed dropping greatly. It appeared to be disoriented, unsure.

  “I think I can see him,” Roland said, peering through his port out into the twilight. “He’s pacing us. It’s as if he can�
��t see us. Remarkable.”

  From the rear came a dim greenish glow as Carl launched another balloon in the Roadbug’s general direction. I took my eyes from the scanner for a moment to watch it scoot outward. Carl was about three hundred meters behind us now.

  The blip drifted away from us, describing a meandering arc. Carl fired another balloon after it for good measure.

  “Carl, old pal, old buddy,” I said, “you have done what nobody in the known universe has ever managed to do. You told a Bug to go punk off.”

  “Yeah, get lost, ya asshole!”

  “Bugger off, Bug!” Sean contributed.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m for getting off this cue ball immediately. Let’s turn back toward that near portal and shoot the motherpunker right now. Carl, get yourself up here and take point so we… Oh hell.”

  Another blip was vectoring toward us from the left. No problem, really; Carl fired another balloon at it, producing almost the same effect. This Bug, however, didn’t drift off. It continued to close with us, albeit slowly, effectively blocking us from turning toward the portal. By that time the first Bug was cautiously approaching again, having seemed to recover control of itself. Carl fired again to the right, but this time the first Bug dropped back suddenly, apparently waiting for the balloon to drift out of range. We continued like this for several kilometers, running as hard as we could while keeping the Bugs at a safe distance. Either the Bugs did not have long-range weapons or were not using them for some reason. More blips appeared on our screens. Word seemed to have gotten out about us. The Bugs kept pace with us, paralleling our course but keeping at a prudent distance. Occasionally one would swoop in daringly near, then scamper away.

  “What do we do now?” Carl asked glumly.

  “Find a portal right quick,” I answered. “I get the feeling they’re herding us toward something, but I don’t see a portal in the direction we’re heading.”

  “Let’s change course then.”

  “Okay. Turn right forty-five degrees. Acknowledge.”

  “Right forty-five degrees, roger.”

  We turned and the Bugs followed us.

  “Well,” I said, “we’re heading toward a portal at generally the right angle. Carl, you’re going to have to take the lead sooner or later. We’ll need your instruments to shoot the hole.”