Out of This World

Chapter Fifteen

Amy found herself seated in the exact center of the aircar, between Susan Nguyen and Lieutenant Drummond. The sound of the engines was not the same as any car or plane she had ridden before; it was a steady whine, and it took a few moments before she could adjust to it and block it out.

Drummond was obviously back on familiar ground-so to speak, since they were cruising about eight feet up. He was leaning back, relaxed and smiling. His injured leg was stretched out, the foot under the seat in front of him, while the other leg was bent, knee out to the side. His blond hair was matted with blood, and Amy wondered what had happened to his helmet. He had had a helmet before, she was certain.

Then she realized where she had seen him with his helmet on-stepping out of the Ruthless in her back yard. He had been the first to emerge from the ship.

Despite his wounds, he looked a lot happier now than he had then-and why not? He was on his way home.

Amy wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t know where she was headed.

She hoped it was home.

* * * *

The richness of telepathic contact was so wonderful, after the long drought on Earth and in Shadow’s realm, that Prossie was tempted to just lean back in her seat and let the whine of the aircar’s engine shut out distractions while she soaked in impressions-but she knew she couldn’t do that. She had duties to attend to.

She sent a wordless status report to Carrie, back at Base One-Carrie and the family were always her first concern, of course, whatever her official orders might be. And Carrie would keep the higher-ups in the military hierarchy informed and happy, anyway, so that was all right.

Then there were plans to be made here on Psi Cass Two. They would need a ship, to get everybody back to Base One as soon as possible. That barbarian who called himself Raven, and his bodyguard Stoddard, and the rest of them, she supposed they would all be unspeakably valuable to Imperial Intelligence; Shadow was a top concern, and this was the first time a group of friendly natives from that universe had ever been found.

At least, as far as Prossie knew, it was, and as far as she was concerned that was definitive-if any telepath knew it, now that she was back in normal space and in contact with the family, she would know it, on some deep unconscious level. And if anyone who ever came anywhere near a telepath knew it, or if anyone a telepath contacted from a distance knew it, then the suspicion would leak through.

The telepaths all knew things they didn’t know they knew, things that had registered deep in the back of the mind, far below consciousness-it was one of the more useful side-effects of their talent, really.

It was also one that they tried not to let normals know about. Prossie wasn’t going to tell anyone that she knew how important these people were; she would let her superiors tell her how important they were.

And not just Shadow’s people; the Earth people were potentially valuable, too. An entire new universe, with its own science-even if much of it didn’t work here in the real world, that still had to be valuable.

Not that Under-Secretary Bascombe thought so. He thought the Earth people were barbarians.

Prossie knew better; she hadn’t snooped deeply, but even a light brush showed her that their minds were rich, sophisticated, crammed with a wealth of stories and information. She couldn’t even understand much of what she found in there-especially when she tried this Susan Nguyen, whose background was so different from the others, and who had spent her early childhood speaking an utterly alien language.

Raven and company, on the other hand, were barbarians. Oh, they had their own culture, with plenty of elaboration and ritual, and their wizards had a great deal of esoteric knowledge about their “magic,” but they had the singlemindedness and ethnocentricity typical of primitives.

She conveyed all that to Carrie, in mental shorthand.

But then she turned her attention to the governor in Town-Psi Cass Two had only one settlement, and nobody had bothered to think up a fancy name for it yet.

A ship. They needed a ship. And Captain Cahn held a special commission as emissary to Earth that, despite what he had told Raven, gave him plenipotentiary powers.

And there were all those people still stuck out in the desert.

She had some arguing to do, to speed things along.

* * * *

Raven watched the vehicle depart. No single part of it touched the sand beneath, and yet these people denied the reality of magic?

What else was their science but another magic?

Yet deny it they did, always and vehemently. It was a curious thing indeed.

Would that the more ordinary, commonplace magic functioned in this hellish realm wherein he had found refuge! Alas, he knew from the reports of his compatriots and their spies that it did not and could not; the currents of power that wizards tapped did not flow here, those lines of the web Shadow had strung did not reach here, in this so-called Milky Empire.

What power was it, then, that these machines used? A pretty puzzle, that; perhaps, were it solved, wizards of Elani and Valadrakul’s ilk could draw upon that same source. That was a thought for another day.

For the nonce, the need was to reach the heart of the Empire from this barren outpost, and there to find the portal back to Stormcrack.

And of course, to bring through the Empire’s men and machines, to do battle with that infernal Shadow that had fallen upon all the true lands.

Thus, to ride the machines, this aircar, and then some other-would it be as that other vehicle, in the realm named Earth?

Raven did not quail to face man or monster, with blade or less; he feared not death, as must needs come to all in the end. Still, at the memory of that ride his lips tightened.

He did not trust these machines, nor the men that built them!

* * * *

Pel’s digital watch was still not working. He had no way of telling, therefore, how long the aircar was gone.

It seemed like days. The sun-or rather, the star Psi Cassiopeia-vanished below the horizon not long after the vehicle departed, and the air cooled quickly. Darkness fell suddenly and more completely than the suburbanite Browns were accustomed to; there was no glow of streetlamps and headlights, but only the light of a few million stars.

The stars were brighter and more numerous than Pel ever remembered seeing before, even on trips to the country, but that still hardly made up for the lack of a moon.

The air temperature dropped with astonishing speed once full dark had arrived; where the sands had seemed cool in the heat of the day, they were quickly the warmest thing around.

That, Pel thought, explained why they had been cool in the first place-the sand held the heat far better than the air, which had turned downright chilly. Captain Cahn used his blaster to heat the rock face where the portal had been, just like Lieutenant Sulu in an old Star Trek episode, and the party huddled around it, but in fact the night air was not actually as cold as all that-at its worst, it didn’t approach freezing.

There was no food to be had, no supplies of any kind except the half-bottle of Pepsi that Smith had somehow hung onto throughout their adventures; there was nothing to do here, nowhere to go, no place worth exploring, just miles upon miles of empty sand and rock. The remaining travelers, whether from Earth, Terra, or Shadow’s realm, had little choice but sleep.

Pel was very glad they had eaten the pizza before venturing through the basement wall; that ensured that hunger, while real, was not a serious problem. Rachel did complain, when she was awake, about being thirsty, but she accepted the fact that there was nothing to drink. Captain Cahn was holding the Pepsi in reserve, doling it out in capfuls as he deemed appropriate. He was very cautious about it, and nobody came away satisfied.

The captain did allow Rachel more than her share, Pel had to admit.

At least there were no live monsters, nor even shadows that monsters might hide in. Their situation was not pleasant, but neither was it particularly frightening. Mostly, it was simply dark, dull, and boring, and just chilly enough to make sleep difficult.

Pel had the feeling, sometimes during the long wait, that he ought to be doing something. A storybook hero would be doing something-Captain Kirk, or Arnold Schwartzenegger, or Horatio Hornblower wouldn’t just sit and wait, would he?

But what could he do?

Besides, he wasn’t a hero. If this whole mess was someone’s great adventure, it probably wasn’t his. He didn’t feel like the star, but just a bit player. His role was to go along until he could get back home, out of the story entirely and back to real life.

Some time before dawn, when heating the rock didn’t seem to be doing much good any more, and maybe in part just because he was bored, Cahn set fire to the heap of dead monstrosities-that not only provided some warmth, but served as a beacon for any approaching rescue vehicles to home in on.

Unfortunately, it also stank horribly, making further sleep almost impossible.

The night seemed to drag on forever, but Pel suspected that it was really only five or six hours before Psi Cassiopeia again appeared on the eastern horizon. The star in question seemed to move considerably faster than Earth’s sun.

Or rather, he corrected himself, the planet he was on rotated more swiftly than Earth.

The planet he was on-somehow, the concept of being on another planet was more mind-boggling than being in an entirely different universe.

Were those stars up there really more numerous than what he’d seen from Earth? He had no way of being sure. He was quite certain, though, that he saw no familiar constellations. The familiar planets, Venus and Jupiter and Saturn, were nowhere to be seen; if the Psi Cassiopeia system had other planets, he didn’t see them, or at any rate he didn’t recognize them as planets.

(There had to be at least one other, he told himself, or this place couldn’t be Psi Cassiopeia Two, could it?)

The sun had only just cleared the horizon when its light glittered from something moving; Pel happened to be looking in the right direction, and let out a shriek at the sight.

Half a dozen drowsing people started, and a sudden babble arose.

Rachel screamed in terror, and Pel and Nancy rushed to comfort her.

“She was asleep before,” Nancy pointed out. “She didn’t see it.”

“It’s okay, Rae,” Pel told her. “That’s the magic car that’s going to get us out of here and take us back…” He stopped. He didn’t want to lie about that, to get her hopes up too high. “…And take us somewhere we can maybe get a ship that will take us home.”

“I wanna go home,” Rachel agreed. “I want Harvey.”

“Well, then, behave yourself, and we’ll do everything we can to get you home. It’s a long ride, I’m afraid…”

“Anything’s better than sitting out here freezing,” Nancy interrupted.

“Oh, for sure,” Pel agreed. “But three or four hours, or whatever it is, sitting in a car isn’t going to be much fun, either.”

A moment later, as the aircar slowed to a stop, he added, “And it isn’t that cold out here, anyway.”

“You’re wearing heavier clothes than I am,” Nancy retorted-accurately, Pel had to admit. His shirt was definitely warmer than the flimsy blouse Nancy had on.

He had also been willing to sit closer to the smoldering signal-fire than Nancy had-she had always been more sensitive to smells than he, and close in the stench was unbearable.

“Daddy,” Rachel asked, “are there more magic cars?” She pointed.

Pel turned, and saw that two more aircars were approaching, a blue one and another black one. His attention had been so focused on the first that he hadn’t noticed them before.

“I guess so, Rae,” he said.

Nancy frowned. “If they have more than one,” she said, “then why didn’t they send them all out here the first time? Why did we all have to spend the whole damn night out here freezing?”

Pel shrugged. “Ask him,” he said, pointing to the driver-who was not, Pel noticed, the same man who had picked up the first group.

Nancy did just that.

“Didn’t think of it, ma’am,” he replied. “Or, well, actually, you see, the first time we weren’t all that sure that the call was genuine, so we didn’t want to send everything we had out on a rabbit hunt. We didn’t have anything to go on but that telepath’s say-so, and we don’t have much truck with mutants out here, so we wanted to see she was on the level first. And then we needed Lennie to give us directions, so we had to wait until he got back…”

“There must have been something,” Nancy insisted.

The driver just shrugged. “I guess Lennie couldn’t think of anything, ma’am.”

The blue aircar was pulling up-it was smaller and sleeker, with a sort of central nosecone that made it resemble a Studebaker or an Edsel, rather than a Buick. Its color was a sort of robin’s-egg blue that really didn’t seem appropriate at all.

The other black one didn’t look like anything Pel had ever seen before. Unlike the first two, it had no brasswork; its trim was painted matte black. Its lines were simpler than the others, and its running lights were few and simple and all yellow. It had a rather nasty air about it that Pel didn’t care for; he hurried to load Nancy and Rachel into the back seat of the big one.

Lieutenant Godwin herded Valadrakul, Lampert, and Squire Donald into the middle seat, then took the front passenger seat himself.

Captain Cahn, Ted, and Raven boarded the little black aircar; the blue one took the others.

Pel saw the captain swig down the last trace of Pepsi, hardly more than a few drops, and then toss the empty onto the floor of the aircar before he climbed in.

“No luggage?” the driver of the Browns’ car called back. “You folks got everything?”

His answer was a muttered chorus of assent.

“All right, then,” the driver said. Engines whined, and one by one the three aircars lifted off, turned, and sped away. Pel took a final glance back at the faint column of smoke rising from the burning pile of dead Shadow-creatures, the odd bits of litter they had dropped here and there, and the endless rocks and sand.

That was one campsite he would remember, but would never miss.

Once they were airborne, the driver announced, “I heard the other bunch came in real hungry, so I figured you didn’t have any food out here, and I brought shrewsburies.”

Godwin and Lampert brightened visibly; the others looked at each other, puzzled.

It must be food of some sort, obviously, but Pel had no idea what a shrewsbury might be.

Not that he and the others cared very much. They were ravenous, having had nothing to eat for at least half a day.

“They’re in the map box,” the driver said, pointing to what Pel would have called a glove compartment.

Godwin opened the indicated container and pulled out a stack of objects wrapped in foil-not, Pel noted, in plastic, the way most foods were back home. From the size and shape, Pel guessed that they were sandwiches of some kind.

Godwin took the top one off the pile, then turned around, stretching, and passed the rest to Lampert. Lampert gave one each to Valadrakul and Donald, kept one himself, and passed the remaining four to Pel.

“Last one’s mine,” the driver called.

Pel took a moment to peel back a corner of the foil on each packet and look the contents over. They were, indeed, sandwiches; he guessed that for some reason the Imperials called sandwiches “shrewsburies” instead. Maybe there hadn’t been an Earl of Sandwich in the Galactic Empire.

Or maybe this particular sort of sandwich was called a shrewsbury. The sandwiches, or shrewsburies, all appeared to be the same-white bread, yellow cheese, and a slab of pink lunchmeat, the exact nature of which was not clear.

The exact nature of the foil wasn’t clear, either, Pel realized; at first glance he had assumed it was aluminum, but it didn’t feel quite right.

Could it be tinfoil, perhaps? Some other details of the Galactic Empire seemed oddly old-fashioned; perhaps they still used tin, rather than aluminum, here. Or was their aluminum just processed differently, somehow? Could aluminum be different? Metallurgy wasn’t something Pel knew about.

Well, it didn’t matter. This was another universe, so why should the aluminum foil be the same?

Why should the sandwiches be the same, for that matter?

He didn’t know, and right now he didn’t much care. He handed one foil-wrapped sandwich to Nancy and one to Rachel, then handed one back to Lampert and unwrapped his own.

It was edible, but unexciting-there was no mayonnaise or other condiment, just bread, meat, and cheese, and the meat was bland-some sort of ham loaf, Pel decided.

A jug of lukewarm water was passed around, as well, and at the driver’s request the used foil was collected and passed back to the front.

“The stuff isn’t cheap, out here,” the driver explained. “We re- use the metal.”

Food and water improved Pel’s condition considerably. However, once the last crumb was gone, the ride was, as Pel had expected, very dull indeed.

Rachel was fascinated for perhaps six or seven minutes by the fact that they were flying, and stared intently out the window as she chewed on her sandwich. She climbed on Nancy’s lap for a better view, watching the sand and stone rush by below.

Around the eighth minute, the sandwich gone, she climbed back into her own seat and asked, for the first of what seemed like several hundred times, “When will we get there, Mommy?”

Pel sighed, and tried to ignore her.

He wished he had made a last visit to the impromptu latrine that had been established behind a rock. That particular discomfort at least served to distract him from Rachel’s restlessness.

She shifted, squirmed, leaned this way and that, climbed from her seat onto first her mother’s lap, and then her father’s, before being forcibly placed back where she belonged, with her seatbelt fastened securely.

(The seatbelts, Pel noticed with something approaching astonishment, had actual buckles-metal rings with a hinged central prong that went through a hole in the strap, just like the belt he happened to be wearing. He wondered why a civilization that had interstellar travel made do with anything so primitive.)

Perhaps an hour after they were picked up, Rachel announced, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Pel, secretly relieved, passed this information forward to Lampert, who passed it on to the driver.

A moment later the vehicle settled to the ground-a stretch of empty sand indistinguishable from where they had started, save that the outcroppings were more scattered, and veined with something grayish, instead of being entirely pure white.

“Five minutes,” the driver announced. “Stretch, do your business, whatever, but just five minutes and then we get airborne again.”

Five minutes was plenty. The bleak surroundings were hardly an invitation to do anything beyond the necessary. That out of the way, when they were moving once again Rachel curled up quietly and went to sleep.

Pel found himself with no distractions at all, now. He stared out the windows.

The other two aircars were out of sight, presumably gone on ahead, and Pel wondered how the things navigated. The desert below all looked the same, to him.

Just as he thought that, of course, they sailed over a canyon, by far the most distinctive feature he had seen yet. That didn’t explain how the driver-or was he a pilot?-knew where to go, though. Pel regretted sitting in back, where he could see nothing of the controls.

This whole new world-whole new universe-was all so strange…

Pel paused, blinked, and looked down at the upholstery.

There wasn’t anything strange about that at all, he corrected himself. The brass-plated door handle and window crank were completely, utterly ordinary, if old- fashioned. Rachel was curled up asleep, fingers tangled in her hair, looking just as sweet as ever; Nancy, on the other side, was leaning against the glass, lost in her own thoughts, and she, too, was familiar.

But outside the car the sun was white, the horizon too near, the ground seven feet away, and instead of rolling over asphalt they were flying over an endless wilderness of lifeless sand.

It was the contrast of the strange and the familiar that was most troublesome, somehow.

For one thing, it made it all seem real. It wasn’t a dream, where everything was odd, nor a theme park, where everything was clean and plastic, nor any other sort of fantasy. It was like a visit to a foreign country, in a way-like his trip to Mexico a few years back, where the strange and the familiar had been mixed, where he had bought Coca-Cola with thousand-peso notes, where Mayan ruins had been built of stones no different from those in his own back yard, where the tropic light had been clear and golden, shining on Volkswagens and concrete-block walls as well as palm trees and sandy beaches.

Here the light was wrong, the air was wrong, the gravity itself was wrong; cars flew, and monsters emerged from the earth, but still the door-handles were cheap brass, probably plate, and there were little flip-top ashtrays in the armrests.

He didn’t like it at all. It was too real. In all his dreams, he had never once imagined cars with flip-top ashtrays in the armrests. In the science fiction books and stories he read no one ever mentioned flip-top ashtrays. If they mentioned ashtrays at all they were exotic devices of some sort, sucking away smoke and ash or evaporating cigarette butts in atomic disintegrators, not just dirty little metal dishes with chintzy lids that clicked open at the flick of a thumbnail.

Ashtrays-did that mean that the Galactic Empire had tobacco? There were no butts or ashes, so Pel could not be sure they actually were ashtrays at all, but that was certainly what they looked like.

How closely parallel to Earth was the Empire’s homeworld, anyway?

And did he really want to know?

No, he decided, he just wanted to get home. Silly Cat (originally Sylvester, but long since shortened) would be seriously upset by now, his food supply probably exhausted, though he could still get water from the toilet-if no one had put the seat down or closed the bathroom door tight.

That mundane little worry somehow made the whole thing worse.

Pel wished he could just dismiss this entire adventure as a dream, as his imagination running amok, even as outright insanity accompanied by hallucinations, but it all felt too real, too solid and detailed. He never worried about toilet seats in his dreams.

He stared out at the sand and rocks sliding by.

* * * *

It might be, Raven bethought himself, that he was become accustomed to the uncanny. Else, it might likewise be that this aircar, as it was, rode higher and more smoothly than the groundcar at Earth, and thus removed from him the worst of the sensations.

He watched the bare sands that flashed beneath, and listened warily to the mutterings of Captain Cahn, in the forward right-hand seat, as he spoke, seemingly to some familiar spirit. The driver of the vehicle said naught, but paid all his heed to his craft-and that as it should be, minding the speed at which they flew.

Beside him, the man called Ted Deranian, the advocate for hire, dozed fitfully, twitching occasionally. Raven glanced at him.

That poor fool still thought the waking world to be a dream; did he then take his dreams for truth? Was he now, perhaps, back in his home, his strange and frightening life untroubled by the common affairs of empires?

Raven smiled to himself at the thought.

* * * *

Pel only realized he had dozed off when he woke up; the whine of the aircar’s engine had changed.

They were descending, sinking down into a sort of open-topped box, comprised of four concrete walls painted battleship gray. Pel could see two doors in the wall directly ahead. They were already below the tops of the walls by the time he was awake enough to understand what was happening, so he saw nothing of the surrounding structures except a quick glimpse of black and gray rooftops.

“Welcome to town, folks!” the driver called back over his shoulder.

“What do you call this place?” Pel called back.

“Town,” the driver replied, a bit embarrassed. “It’s the only one on the planet, so we haven’t bothered to give it a real name.”

“The only one on the planet?” Nancy asked, as she roused Rachel.

“’Fraid so.” With a bump, the aircar was down, and the engine’s whine died away suddenly.

Hesitantly, Pel pulled at the door-handle.

The door opened and he stepped out, then turned to take Rachel from her mother. When the three of them were out, he took a look around.

They were in a bare, featureless enclosure perhaps fifty feet by eighty, standing on coarse gravel near one corner, surrounded by blank gray walls. The two doors at one end were the only way in or out; the only colors anywhere were the blue aircar, resting in the opposite corner, and the various running lights. The dark hues were in sharp contrast to the bright, pale sky overhead.

The third aircar was in a third corner, but even as Pel first spotted it its engines came on, and it rose upward, into the brightness above.

A car door slammed; Pel started, and turned to see that Lampert was standing nearby, one hand on the door as he looked around.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” he said.

“No,” Pel agreed.

The driver slammed his own door, on the other side of the aircar, and called, “Okay, folks, right on in, through the door on the left, please!”

The passengers obeyed, shuffling across the gravel and through the door; a man in a purple uniform, not quite the same as those worn by the crew of the Ruthless, held it open for them. He said nothing as they trudged past.

Inside they found themselves in a large, windowless and mostly-bare room, concrete walls painted a dull peach color, the floor grey tile, the ceiling off-white. The only furnishings were two rows of white stone benches, and some red-print-on-white posters on the walls. There were four doors, counting the one they had just entered through, one centered in each wall. Light came from white glass globes that hung from the ceiling, looking very much like ordinary electric lights.

Pel would have expected fluorescent fixtures instead, but there were none, only the globes.

People were sitting on the benches-Stoddard, Ted, Smith, Soorn, and Mervyn. They had obviously not yet had a chance to clean themselves up; scabbed-over scratches were still in evidence, sand in their hair, uniforms wrinkled and frayed. Ted’s suit would probably never recover.

Stoddard looked up and smiled as the others trailed in; Soorn waved, and Smith called, “Hello! What kept you?”

Ted grinned foolishly and said nothing.

Mervyn ignored them all; he was leaning back against a wall with his eyes closed, and did not stir. Pel was unsure whether he was asleep or awake.

“Slow old bus,” Lampert replied. “How long have you guys been here?”

Smith shrugged. “Maybe ten minutes. They called in the captain and the nut in the velvet just before you people came in. The two of them, and that one-“ He pointed to Ted, who waved in reply. “-were here before we were. Don’t know how long.”

“The nut in the velvet” was obviously Raven. Pel hadn’t thought of him in those terms.

If that was how they saw Raven, Pel wondered how the crewmen saw him-the nut with the kid? It was probably something just that impersonal and unflattering.

The man in the purple uniform closed the door and stood silently against the wall. Nancy and Rachel settled cautiously onto an empty bench.

“Oh, I guess I got here about ten minutes before you,” Ted said to Smith. “I must say, this is the longest and most complicated dream I can ever remember having. I wonder if I have a lot of dreams like this, and I just don’t remember them when I’m awake?”

Smith grimaced, and turned slightly away from Ted. Pel felt his own stomach shift uneasily.

That sandwich had been some time ago, and he never had gotten enough to drink, but still, Pel knew that his discomfort wasn’t merely physical. It was Ted making him nervous. Ted was acting crazy-literally insane.

Well, Pel told himself, if they could just get him safely back home to Germantown, Maryland, it wouldn’t matter if he thought he had dreamed the whole thing.

Pel wished he could think of it as when instead of if.