Paradox Alley

10

"The long way home," I said.

"Indeed," Bruce said calmly. "However, as I have said, we have a much more efficient route at our disposal."

"If we can shoot that portal without getting smeared. Looks pretty tricky."

"It may require computer-assisted driving, if not complete computer control."

I sat back and sighed. "No one needs us humans anymore. Think you can handle it, Bruce?"

"I am not sure. I am not a machine chauvinist. The task may very well call for the sort of hand-eye coordination and intuitive timing that only human beings possess."

I smiled. "Well, thank you, Bruce. Are you just saying that because you're programmed to avoid bruising our poor little egos, or do you really feel that way?"

"I'm sorry, Jake. That question is a little ambiguous, and would be very difficult to answer."

"Probably right. Okay, Bruce, you did a very good job."

"Thank you, Jake. It has been a pleasure working with you."

I turned in my seat. "Well, gang? What do you want to do now?"

"Let's go," Darla said. "We have the map." Then her shoulders slumped. "Sorry, Jake. Forgot about Sam. I wasn't thinking."

"We're short on some things, too," I said. "No provisions. We're okay on fuel, but I'm reading low lubrication levels here, and we need coolant, water-"

"Sounds like it'd be a short trip back," Carl said. "Maybe we could get along on next to nothing."

I shook my head. "You're forgetting the trip to the portal over alien terrain. Not only that-something tells me we have miles to go before we sleep. I have some unfinished business back home. Things to do. Trouble is, don't know what to do about maintenance. Unless…" I looked out at the garage.

And I saw Arthur shuffling toward us through the gloom. He waved and came over to the driver's side port.

I thumbed a toggle and the port hissed back into its slot. "Hi, Arthur!" I said brightly. "Say hello to Bruce, here." I slapped the dash. "You two should have something in common."

"Pleased to meet you," Bruce said.

"Hello, Brucie." Arthur poked his dog-nose snout into the cab. "What are you all up to?"

"Housecleaning," I told him. "Getting things shipshape for a quick getaway."

Arthur smiled, the corners of his mouth turning up to reveal smooth rounded teeth. The funnel-shaped ears elevated as he did so. "Good thing I locked up the silverware. Are you leaving soon?"

"Well, no," I said. "I don't think so. There's a little matter of something that was stolen from me. Couple of things, actually."

The ears drooped. "Really? What was stolen?"

"An Artificial Intelligence module belonging to this vehicle's on-board computer. It was quite an advanced type, and its name was Sam. Know anything about it?"

Arthur was a little miffed. "I certainly do not. I hope you don't think I swiped it. Wouldn't think of it."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to imply an accusation. It's just that I don't have a long list of suspects."

Arthur nodded. "I see what you mean. But I really can't help you. I'm sorry it happened."

"I intend to speak to Prime about it."

"Oh, well, of course you should," Arthur said with a sincere nod of his ungainly head. "I hope things get straightened out." His sloping forehead furrowed. "You said a couple of things were stolen."

"Yeah. One of them I really can't complain about, since I never wanted the thing in the first place. The Black Cube. Know what it is?"

"The Origin Experiment. I know it by name, but that's about all I know. I just work here."

I grunted.

"You're very upset about this, aren't you?" Arthur said sympathetically. "I'm really very sorry."

"I appreciate your concern."

"Well, it's my job to see to your general comfort and welfare." Arthur stepped back and looked the rig over. "Nice truck," he said.

"Thanks," I said.

"Are you people coming upstairs soon?"

"Eventually," I told him. "How are the others doing?"

"Oh, they're having fun. You missed a nice lunch, too."

"Sorry, but we were occupied. Was Prime there?"

"Actually, no," Arthur said. "He's attending to some pressing business."

"Will he be at dinner?"

"No, he won't. I was told to give you his regrets and inform you that he wouldn't be dining with you tonight. Busy, busy, and all that."

"Busy, busy?"

"Sorry."

"Sounds like a convenient excuse."

Arthur shrugged noncommittally.

"I know," I said. "You just work here." "Room and board, no salary," Arthur said.

I snorted, then remembered I was talking to a robot. "Right." I looked around. "Any way to get some service in this garage?"

"What do you need?"

"General scheduled-maintenance stuff."

"Well," Arthur said, "I'm no mechanic, but if you just wheel the truck into one of the maintenance bays, I'm sure you can get what you want."

"Where?"

I fired up the engine, and Arthur waved me across the garage and into a narrow channel lined with banks of machinery. I squeezed into the space and parked, scramming the engine. Almost immediately, things began to happen. We heard whirring and clicking, then a steady hum. Suddenly, a many-segmented mechanical arm, bright and glittering, snaked across the forward port, its business end bristling with strange tools and attachments. Of and by itself, the forward cowling unfolded and flew back, exposing the engine. The tool head hovered for a moment, rotating its attachments until an appropriate one was centered, then dipped out of sight. More arms appeared, busying themselves here and about. Brightly colored tubes wriggled out and attached themselves to valves and petcocks.

Bruce's voice was vaguely troubled. "Jake, I don't quite know what is happening."

"We're getting super service," I said.

More arms shot into view, all crisscrossing but never touching, each going about its task with blurring speed. Zip, snap, click, bang. Sparks flew, tiny wisps of steam trailed off, vapors rose amid a writhing tangle of mad mechanical appendages.

It was over in less than a minute. Everything retracted, the cowling slammed shut, a deep gong sounded. And there was silence.

I checked all the readouts. The fuel tanks were full. Lubrication and coolant levels were maximum, the water tanks were brimming, all batteries showed a full charge.

"All systems A-O.K., Jake," Bruce pronounced.

"Looks like," I said.

"I wonder if they give free dishes," Carl said.

"Maybe this is the elusive place that gives green stampswhatever the hell they are… or were." I pulled out of the maintenance bay, wheeled out onto the floor of the garage, and parked. Arthur started walking toward us.

"You guys want to go back upstairs?" I said.

"Let's stay in the truck tonight," Darla said.

"Yeah, let's," Carl seconded.

Lori nodded, and I said, "Okay."

"It's all the same to me," was Arthur's response. "Less bodies to look after. Have fun." He turned to leave.

"Hey, Art?" I called after him. "Er… Arthur."

He halted, looking back over his narrow shoulder. "Arthur I can put up with," he said with weary tolerance. "Art is a little too much."

"Sorry. Do you have a proper name?"

"Does a duck quack? Never mind, you couldn't pronounce it." Arthur turned around. "What do you want?"

"How do you get out of this place?"

Arthur pointed off to the right. "Just follow that green line across the floor there. It'll take you to an exit tunnel."

"That line there?"

"Is there another one? Yes, that line there, dearie."

"And that's the way out?"

Pensively, Arthur rubbed the underside of his snout. "`Well, let's see. Exit tunnel. Exit. Hmmm. Now, the last time I looked, I thought for sure the word exit meant a way out."

I gritted my teeth. "I wanted your assurance that we weren't going to be tricked. Stupid of me to ask, I suppose."

"Do I look so untrustworthy?"

"Frankly, yes."

"My, aren't we paranoid. I think I'll leave in a huff." And he did.

Shaking my head, I watched him disappear into the halfdarkness. "He's supposed to be a composite of all our personalities. What I want to know is, which one of us is the smartass?"

Darla laughed. "Funny, but I can see a lot of your sardonic humor in him, Jake."

"Me?" I yelped. "You've got to be kidding."

"Actually, it does make sense that he would have an effeminate personality."

"Well, it doesn't make any damn sense to me at all."

Lori had been thinking. "Do you think John and Roland and the rest will be okay?"

"Who knows," I said. I rubbed my jaw. "But I know one thing. I know we're being manipulated."

"How so?" Darla asked.

"What Arthur said about seeming untrustworthy. Actually, I lied. He appears to be anything but a danger. It's hard to take him seriously at all. He's a cartoon figure, a big, gangling improbability, with a seriocomic personality. And look at Prime. He's everything a superbeing should be-wise, kind and gentle. But think of it. He could take any shape. He's not a being. He's a tool. At least that body is. The persona he's presenting seems a little too tailormade, too contrived."

Darla nodded. "I know what you mean. He seems to be bending over backward to make us feel safe, to convince us of his good intentions."

"Precisely," I said. "And that tactic backfired on me from the very start. Just the way I am, I guess."

"Me, too." Darla sat in the shotgun seat and brooded. Presently she said, "But what do they want from us?"

"Maybe the part about wanting us to join the Culmination is true," I said. "However, I don't intend to stick around long enough to find out whether it is." I pushed the start button, and the engine turned over.

"Are we leaving?"

"Not just yet. I want to check out this escape route first. Then we'll see about provisions. If we can pilfer some food, we'll be set to leave at a moment's notice. Everyone strap in."

I rolled the rig across the smooth floor of the garage, following the solid green line Arthur had pointed out. It led straight toward a clutch of vehicles, then arched to the left. It took us past some more exotic machinery, skirted another maintenance bay, bent to the right and proceeded into darker regions of the garage. I turned on the forward lights. The line weaved among stacks of crates and containers, tall gantries hulking in the shadows behind them. Presently we came to a clear area. The walls of the chamber narrowed, feeding us into a tunnel and complete darkness. The tunnel floor sloped downward for a stretch, then leveled off. I slowed down, feeling cautious and a little edgy. The fear of getting lost again began to gnaw. The line ended, but the tunnel continued for a length until the headbeams showed what at first looked like a dead end, which turned out to be the floor swooping up sharply, too sharply, I thought, and braked. But something was wrong; there came a sudden surge of speed. The rig got sucked into the mouth of the tube and shot upward, propelled along like a shell inside the barrel of a fieldpiece. The angle wasn't as steep as that of the pedestrian escalators, but it was a thrilling trip up, too thrilling, because I was convinced that this time we'd blundered into something we couldn't get out of-maybe this was a missile firing tube, or a catapult that launched aircraft. Imagine our embarrassment when we got to the top.

But it was okay. The ramp leveled off sharply and we could see daylight-the tunnel's end. The invisible force set us loose, and we rolled out into bright late-afternoon sun, traveling a gray-green, two-lane highway.

I pulled off the road and let the engine idle. We were among low grassy hills. A stand of trees fringed a rise to the right, and an arrangement of rounded pink boulders sat off the mad on the other side. Through the rearview parabolic mirror I could see Emerald City atop its escarpment. No other structures lay in sight, but the view was limited by the terrain.

"Now," I said, sitting back. "How do we get back inside?"

"Forget it," Carl said disdainfully. "Who needs that fairy palace?"

"You can't complain about the food," I said. "And it looks like we could go a long time between meals out here."

"We'll figure something out," Carl said with haughty confidence.

"You think we can forage? Or do you figure to hunt small game?"

"Huh? Hey, I don't know, but we'll get by somehow."

"Sure. I'm feeling pangs already. Darla, what do we have left back there?"

"Some crackers, I think. Half a bag of walnuts." She thought. "A can of beef consommes… and a rotten apple."

I looked at Carl.

He shrugged off my stare. "Okay, okay. So we'll get hungry. But the sooner we get through that portal, the sooner we get back to where we can find food."

I said, "Bruce, calculate the most efficient route to that master portal and give me an ETA, assuming nonstop driving and an average speed of about 130 kilometers per hour."

"Forty-six-point-two-five hours, Jake."

"So," I said, "it's two days if I don't sleep or if I teach you guys to pilot this rig, and that's assuming Skyway cruising speed, or near it, anyway. I don't think we can average more than eighty klicks an hour over alien road."

"Eighty klicks?" Carl said incredulously. "That's… what? Only around fifty miles an hour! This rig can hit two hundred or I'm a monkey's uncle."

"It can do over that," I said, "on a high-speed road like the Skyway. But I'm talking average speed, Carl. That's different. And this is little more than a back country road."

"Yeah, I know," Carl grumbled. "Shit. We can still make it, though."

"Maybe, if we have to. But I'm not ready to leave just yet."

"Right, right. I'm sorry. We gotta get Sam back, I know." I studied Carl for a moment. The scared kid inside him was peeping through. He was farther from home than any of us.

I looked back at the tunnel, which exited from the base of a steep hill. "Well, we can't go down the up-ramp, that's for sure. Bruce, can we get back to the Skyway using these secondary roads?"

"No, Jake, there's no connection."

"You can't get there from here." I sighed. "That's odd. Can we go off-road?"

"Perhaps, Jake. The maps are not so detailed that I can make that judgment with any degree of authoritativeness."

"Damn. I don't want to go overland, but that through-the-mountain bit seems like the only way into the city by road."

"And who's to say," Darla added, "whether they'll lift up the mountain and let us in again?"

"Right. So I guess we cruise around a little and see if we can find some nice little rabbits who'll let us conk them over the head."

I was hungry: I'd just picked at breakfast, which seemed like days ago, and Darla's quickie lunch had vanished into the void. Nothing to be done about it now, though. And sitting here would accomplish less than nothing. So I eased back onto the road and brought the rig up to sight-seeing speed, just moseying along.

"They know where we are, of course," Darla said.

I nodded. "Of course. They've known our every move. But they haven't stopped us yet."

"Yes, but I'm still not ready to believe that Prime meant what he said about letting us leave any time we want to."

"Yeah, couple of things bother me about that," I said. "Consider all the stuff that's here. All those exotic vehicles, the wondrous gadgets, the technology. Just sitting around, waiting to be pilfered by disenchanted Culmination candidates."

"Maybe it's supposed to be pilfered," Darla suggested.

I thought about it. "Maybe. Haven't seen any signs of plundering, though."

"It may be we were the first ever to make it to the end of the Skyway."

"Gosh. Think of that."

Darla ruminated, then said, "You don't think anyone could get away with swiping anything from this place, do you?"

"Not for a moment. I can't believe the Culmination would let this stuff get dispersed anachronistically throughout all of spacetime. Most of it is from the far, far future. It would stick out like a sore thumb back where we come from. Talk about paradoxes."

"What about knowledge leaking out? All that data in the library. Taking back any of that would be anachronistic in itself."

"You have a point. Then, I guess, the knowledge doesn't leave here, either."

We looked at each other.

"I don't like the implications of that," Darla said worriedly. "Neither do I."

The sky was a pretty, purplish blue, appearing as if it had been colored in by crayon. The strange, artificial look probably had something to do with the atmosphere being a lot shallower here than it would be on a standard planet-or so I guessed-although it was deep enough to support a few puffy clouds. No doubt the weather was controlled. I wondered if it ever rained.

We rolled down a gradual grade and out onto flat grasslands. Structures came into view. Up ahead a side road diverged, leading to a featureless golden dome. Farther on another road branched off to a complex edifice that looked like a collision between a chemical plant and a Mogul palace.

"So many things…" Darla said out of a reverie.

"Like what?" I asked.

She sighed and shook her head. "So many unanswered questions. Little things, as well as big. Like, why isn't there any Skyway to the master portal?"

"To slow us down. Make us think twice about leaving. Or it's because this was such a pretty place, they didn't want to mess it up with new construction."

"All of the above," Darla said. "Or none of the above."

"You got it," I said. "Don't hold your breath for complete explanations. Mystery is the essence of life."

She rolled her eyes. "Let me write that down."

"Okay. It's M-Y-S-T-E-R- Huh? Why are you laughing?"

"Jake, you're getting more batty with every kilometer you drive."

"I'm being driven batty. I knew there was an explanation." For the next half hour we followed the road and saw the sights. There was plenty to look at. The vegetation changed; trees became more numerous, thickening to forest for a stretch, then thinning out a little to look like an orchard. More buildings in various architectural styles. There were other things, too, among which was a huge statue of a winged, four-legged animal resembling a gryphon, except that the head looked rather feline. The statue sat atop a cylindrical base and must have risen to more than sixty meters. An alien god-a mythical animal? Or was this the likeness of a once-extant sapient being? No telling. There were other monuments which gave the impression of being tombs or cenotaphs. One was a diamond-shaped mass of metal that stood balanced, impossibly, on one of its apexes, resting point to point with the tip of a pyramidal base. Another was a giant glass needle, a thin, tapering crystalline shaft that shot up over a hundred meters. There were obelisks, stelae, slabs, monoliths, and other masses, all of various geometrical shapes.

More buildings. One looked very familiar. In fact, we were shocked. I pulled off the road and stopped.

"The Taj Mahal!" Darla blurted.

And it was, if memory served. Though I'd been in India, I'd never laid eyes on it. But the Taj is one of those universal picture-postcard images that has engraved itself in the mass mind. No mistaking those serenely graceful turnip-top domes, the slender minarets, that classical symmetry and sense of proportion. In a word, beautiful.

"My God," Darla said, "what's it doing here?"

"Part of the collection," I said.

"Do you think there are more Terran artifacts here?"

"Possibly."

"Maybe it's just a replica."

"Maybe. Looks new, doesn't it? Probably restored or reconstructed."

I got us moving again. Farther along we came to an intersection. The other road was narrower but was made of the same blue-green material. I stopped, checking traffic. There was none, so I crossed and continued on.

I should have waited, because a few kilometers down the road I saw a blip on the rear scanner screen.