Red Limit Freeway

Chapter 7

"You know, I may have made a big mistake," I said to Sean after we had retreated to the rear of the shed.

"Perhaps in Darla's case, yes. After all, no one saw her being abducted. She may have gone off with Baker of her own free will. I don't really know her."

I nodded. "You'd think I would by now, but I don't, not really. She might have." I thought it over, then shook my head. "No, dammit. Maybe at some other point in her life, but not now. Not here. It's hard to explain."

"Who can explain a woman?"

"No, no. It's got nothing to do with that. It's just―"

"Baker fancies himself a ladies' man. And I'll have to admit he does attract more than his share." He smiled wanly and shrugged. "Some have it and some don't."

"Be that as it may. But we're sure about Winnie. We know they've got her."

I snorted. "That may've been a case of petnapping."

"Hard to say what a logger lad will do when in his cups, but I don't think so."

"Neither do I," I said, "but I'm beginning to have my doubts about Moore's hand in all this. Might just be I did him an injustice."

Sean shook his head emphatically. "That's categorically impossible. He's the devil's own field representative, that one, and he deserves everything he's gotten."

"Geof and Fat Timmy―they work for Moore, do his bidding?"

"Most of the time, when they're not stealing farm equipment or foraging in other people's vegetable plots. For a price, they'll do anything for anybody, but Moore's their chief client."

I sighed. "Anyone else in there?"

"The blinds are drawn, but I heard someone in the front room fumbling about. Probably Dim Willie Benson, Baker's hired man."

"Dim Willie?"

"He's a bit dim. Harmless boy, when he's not drinking."

Fat Timmy, Dim Willie… This place was driving me crazy. "I take it Baker doesn't have a lifecompanion."

"Baker?" He laughed. "Not the sort. Besides, women are scarce goods on Talltree. Don't know if you noticed―"

"I did, I did."

"They do come, but they never seem to stay." He heaved a sigh of lamentation, staring off into the night. "Funny thing."

I leaned against the shed and brooded.

Sean came out of his reverie. "What's the game, Jake?"

Someone banged against something out in the yard.

"Jake?" came a sharp whisper.

"Over here," I said.

John stepped cautiously over to us. "Oh, there you are." Liam and Roland followed him.

"What's going on?" Roland wanted to know.

"Got me," I said.

After a pause, John asked, "Where's Darla?"

"In there," I said. "With some guy."

"With some guy," John repeated emptily.

Roland said, "You mean…?"

"Her business," I said. I straightened up. "Look, when exactly did you notice that Darla was gone? Was it before or after Winnie was abducted?"

"Well," John said, "it was more or less around the same time. I came downstairs when I found no one in the room, went outside to find Roland. I heard shouting―"

"Okay," I said, "then she didn't know that Winnie was missing, and she still doesn't, I guess. Thing is, it's strange that she'd go off like that."

"I agree," Roland said.

"Well, hell." I zipped up my jacket against the chill. "This may be indelicate as all hell, but I'm going to ask Darla if she knows something or if she saw anything." I scratched my head and shrugged.

We all trooped to the farmhouse.

As we rounded the side, we heard glass shattering, followed by a dull thud.

I pulled my gun and ran around to the front door. It was unlocked and ajar. I kicked it open, dove through the doorway, hit the floor, and rolled once, coming up into a crouch.

"Hi, Jake."

Darla was standing by the open door to the back room, holding the jagged-edged handle to what had probably been a water pitcher. A huge man lay sprawled at her feet, his head festooned with shards of crockery.

"Hi," I said, straightening up. I walked into the bedroom.

Tommy Baker was draped over the bed, out cold. His shirt was off and his trousers were bunched around his ankles. She had taken care of him silently — probably a quick chop to the base of the neck. Caught with his proverbial pants down.

"This one wanted to rape me," Darla said, nodding toward Baker as she slipped into the legs of her jumpsuit. "But I convinced him that we'd have more fun if he untied me. He was the second one who wanted a little action tonight."

"Moore?"

"Yes. Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind so much, but I didn't like his attitude."

"Ah."

"I bit him where it hurts a whole lot. There's some question as to his ever having progeny. I wanted to kick him, but my legs were tied to the bedposts."

"I see."

And I could just imagine Darla at the door, smiling and breathtakingly nude, inviting poor Dim Willie in to join the festivities.

I turned around to find the men grouped around the doorway, gaping.

"Hi, gang," Darla said.

"Hello," John said.

"Winnie's missing," I said.

"No she isn't." Darla zipped up the front of her jumpsuit. She went over to the bed and knelt beside it, looking under.

"Winnie, honey? Come on out. Jake's here." She reached and pulled. "Hell, no wonder she didn't come out. This leash is all tangled. There you go."

Winnie crawled out from under the bed. There was a dog collar around her neck. The leash dragged after her. She saw me, ran and leaped at me, nearly knocking me over. She crushed my chest in a frantic hug.

"Whoa, baby. It's okay," I told her. "It's over." She buried her face in my shoulder.

"Are you all right?" Roland asked Darla.

"Sure, though it'll be a while before I'll want to see male genitalia again."

"You don't have to go into details," I said, "but… "

"But you want details. That's the lot of the victim. Moore jumped me back at the hotel, and we were just into the preliminaries when I nearly bit through one of his testicles. Nobody wanted much to do with me after that. Except Tommy, here."

She scowled at me. "I was stupid. I should have gone along with Moore. He almost killed me. He picked up an ax―but his men stopped him. They wouldn't have been able to, except that the pain was a little too much for him."

"I should imagine," John said.

"They led him away and that was the last I saw of him. They kept me tied up like that for hours. Every once in a while, some cretin would come in to paw and slobber over me, but that was the extent of it. Then they brought me here."

She sat on a chair and pulled on her high black boots. "I'm okay, really," she said.

"When did they bring you here?" I asked, setting Winnie down.

"About two hours ago. It took a while for Tommy to work up his nerve. He had strict orders not to fool with me."

From the front room came the sound of Sam's key beeping. I went in and found it on the kitchen table. Dim Willie had probably been fiddling with it and had inadvertently set off the beacon. I briefly filled Sam in on the situation and told him to come in over the main road. Everyone came out of the bedroom.

"I wonder why they kept this with you," I said to Darla. "Didn't they know it could have been sending a homing signal?"

"I didn't know it was here. The last time I saw it, it was lying on the dresser in Moore's room. I bet Willie picked it up when Tommy and he came to get me."

"Dumb," I said.

Darla shot a look at Sean. "Are all the men here as stupid as these two and the rest of Moore's brood?"

Sean winced. "Quite possibly."

"What I want to know, Jake, is how you got Geof Brandon down the hole in the outhouse," Liam said.

"Yes," Fitzgore said, his face screwed up in intense curiosity. "How the devil did you do that?"

We spent the next day holed up at Sean and Liam's farm. The place belonged to Sean. His wife had left him, you see, and… but that's another story. (They were called "wives" here; the Outworlds were rather socially retrograde in many respects.) Anyway, Sam was at some backwoods garage getting his stabilizer foil repaired and the spare roller put on, but we were in contact. Meanwhile, the Home Guard, or whatever the hell they were called, was looking for me. I was a material witness and possible suspect in the homicide of a defecting Colonial Authority official, Dr. Van Wyck Vance. The murder allegedly occurred on board the Laputa, which, by the way, had come through the pirate attack with moderate casualties despite sustaining heavy damage. The news reports made no mention of the fate of Mr. Wilkes or of his possible bearing on the case. Beautiful. However, the cops were of two minds about the whole matter. Some were on Captain Pendergast's payroll and some―the local ones, mainly―weren't. Muddying the whole business and making everyone nervous about just how to proceed was Pendergast's involvement in all this. There he was, running antigeronics, which nominally were controlled substances even here. The operation was an open secret, but a trial or investigation would have opened up several cans of worms and nobody wanted to do that. Meanwhile… everyone, I mean everyone, knew exactly what the hell was going on beneath all the pretexts and posturing. They knew about the Roadmap and about Winnie, and the cops really didn't know how they felt about all that.

Moore was raising a stink about the loss of his property. Claimed he was just doing his civic duty in detaining me. But why had he sequestered me in a shack in the woods? Why had he not immediately contacted the authorities? Well, er, um.

There were numerous meetings in the woods among various parties. Sean's friends in the Guard agreed not to arrest me just yet and sat on a warrant sworn out on Seahome. Jurisdictional disputes flared. The "Get Jake" faction tried a local magistrate, but he was taking the waters at a spa on some resort planet. Gout, you know. (They had diseases here that hadn't been seen for centuries back in Terran Maze.) More meetings in the woods. Old Zack tried to put a lien against Sam, but to do that he had to dispatch a flunky in a fast roadster to the capital planet. But there he got ensnarled in red tape, and by the time the papers were processed, we were… But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sam was for making a break for the nearest portal, guns blazing. I had a hard time, but I talked him out of it, pointing out that we had pretty much run that stratagem into the ground. Frankly, I was getting a little tired of it. I wanted to settle this. We had grounds for filing numerous charges against Pendergast, Moore, and―if he was alive―Wilkes: Abduction, Illegal Detention, Criminal Assault, Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse (they had it on the books), Criminal Conspiracy, and, as a nice little fillip, Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor (Lori's drinking). You name it, we could file it. Also, we had a dandy civil case against the shipping company that owned the Laputa and an absolutely open-and-shut one against the outfit that ran the Bandersnatch and a bunch of other businesses (a.k.a. Zack Moore). All of this was on the advice and counsel of a backwoods lawyer by the name of Hollingsworth, a stocky, barrel-shaped fellow with mutton-chop sideburns down to his shoulders. He drank gin straight from the bottle from the time he woke to the time he passed out in the evening. He also ran a chicken farm.

We made known our intentions to proceed against the aforementioned parties. Nervous laughter from the other side. Surely you jest, they said. Try us, we said. Grumble, grumble. Well, they came back, what about the minor you transported across planetary boundaries? And we said; what about your child labor laws? Okay, they're consistently flouted, but do we really want to get into that? Child labor laws? they said. What child labor laws? Oh. Those child labor laws. No, we don't want to get into that.

"Why do they bother to pass laws around here," I asked Hollingsworth, "if nobody's interested in enforcing them?"

"Are you joking?" he said, pointing to his shelves of leatherbound legal tomes. "What would lawyers use to line the walls of their studies if we didn't pass any legislation? Have you priced wallpaper recently?"

The legal shadowboxing went on for two days, at which point the cops got fed up. Listen, they said to me. We will be looking in this direction. You take your truck and your friends and your funny-looking monkey and head in that direction. And don't stop till you… well, just don't stop.

I said fine. I gave the order: Make all preparations for getting under way. Aye aye, skipper. But first I had to deal with Sean and Liam.

"What do you mean you're coming with us?" I asked innocently.

"We've talked it over, Liam and I have. We'd like to join your expedition, if you'll have us."

"Well, look. You two are great drinking buddies, and you're good men to have in a fight, and if it were up to me―"

"We'll pull our weight, Jake, make no mistake about that. We're already outfitted for the trip. Liam and I were planning to vacate this fairyland very shortly on our own. We had our sights on a newly discovered planet that just got listed for colonization―not that we care about lists, mind you―"

"But why would you want to leave this beautiful place?" I asked him, gesturing toward the neat little intensive-agriculture plots and the brightly painted buildings. "This is nice!"

Sean heaved a sigh. "Since Dierdre buggered off, it's palled on me. Besides, the bank owns all the equipment. The note is rather large, and the payments have become a burden." He swung his legs up to rest on the rail of the front porch and teetered back on the chair. "Ah, Dierdre, Dierdre," he said wistfully.

"Have a drink, Sean," Hollingsworth said, passing him the gin bottle.

"There's another problem," I said. "We're already crowded in the truck."

"Hey, that's no problem," Carl put in. "They can ride in the back seat of my Chevy."

"Chevy?" Liam said, looking around for someone to explain.

"We have a vehicle, Jake," Sean said after having guzzled approximately one-sixth of the liter of gin.

"You do?" I said. "Well, it's a free road."

"But we don't want to go if you don't want us to," Sean told me.

"What the bloody hell's a Chevy?" Liam persisted.

"Sean, it's not that. It's just-"

"Of course you can come with us," Susan gushed, sitting down in Sean's lap and running her hand through Sean's tangle of red-orange hair. "You big hairy hunks―both of you."

Sean's eyes gleamed, and he laughed. "That's the spirit!"

"Jake, I'm surprised at you," Susan said. "Why can't they tag along if they want to?"

"Look, I didn't say―"

"The more the merrier, I say," Roland muttered. "What exactly is your problem, Jake?"

"Problem? I don't have a punking problem."

I stomped off the porch and went around to the back where Sam was parked. Sometimes these people got to me. One thing I don't like is being cast as the villain of the piece. What the hell did they think this was going to be, a picnic?

I climbed into the cab.

"What's up?" Sam said.

"Let's get out of here," I grumbled. "Leave the whole goddamn bunch of them."

"Now, now. You know you can't."

"Honest to God, sometimes…"

"How many times have I told you not to pick up starhikers?"

"Dammit, Sam, don't you start on me, too!"

"Easy' son. "

I sat in the driver's seat, fuming, until Susan came over, climbed up, and sat in my lap.

"Jake, I'm sorry." She kissed me tenderly and smiled. "I didn't know you were sensitive. You're always so strong―"

"Me? You're kidding."

She didn't argue. Presently, the temperature in the cab rose.

"In case you're wondering," Sam said, "I have my eye turned off."

Susan giggled, then reinserted her tongue into my mouth.

"Hi! Oh, excuse me."

We turned to see Darla walking away. Susan looked at me, some complex feminine emotion taking form inside her head. "Do you―?" she began, then looked away and chewed her lip.

I what, Suzie?"

"Nothing," she said in a lost little voice. Suddenly, she threw her arms around my neck. "Let's sleep in the aft-cabin tonight."

"We have lots of work to do, Suzie."

"Don't you think I'm going to help? After."

"Sure."

Then she hugged me, kissed me on the ear, and said, "I love you, Jake."

And I thought, uh-oh.

We laid in provisions for a long journey. Sean and Liam emptied their larder and packed the trailer with lots of good stuff: homemade preserves, smoked meats, pickles, sausage, old-fashioned canned foods, barrels of potatoes, flour, jars of home-grown herbs and spices, a few cases of hotpak dinners―"We keep those for when we've drunk too much to be able to stand at the stove," Liam said, "but not enough to've lost our appetites"―and cases and cases of beer. They brewed their own, and it was pretty good, if you like your beer dark and syrupy with a 20 percent alcohol content. They threw in all the tools and equipment they owned, some clothes, and about two long tons of camping and survival gear. Even some firewood.

Then we all went out with Winnie and gathered food for her. She taught us to recognize several varieties of fruit and vegetable and root. With everyone helping, we laid in what looked like a year's supply. Through Darla, she told us it wasn't necessary to bring this much; she could find more food on the way. I said it couldn't hurt, secretly doubting that we'd be lucky enough to chance upon another planet that could provide suitable food for any of us.

Before we turned in, we planned our itinerary, trying to coordinate Winnie's maps and her Itinerary Poem with what Sean and Liam could supply in the way of knowledge about the rest of the Outworlds. Darla had been busy translating for the last two days.

"It just goes on and on," she said. "I must have fifty stanzas by now."

"Winnie obviously knows where she's going," John observed.

"As near as we can tell," Roland said, "we hit five more Outworld planets before we exit this maze."

"And not a moment too soon," I said. "In other words, we'll be shooting a potluck portal at that point."

"Right."

"Sean, does this jibe with what you know?"

Sean nodded. "Seems to, though Winnie's descriptions of the planets are rather sketchy."

"The inevitable difficulties," Darla said, "inherent in secondhand translations. The poem is in Winnie's language, which is very different structurally from most human languages. I know only a few word-clusters-there really are no 'words' per se―so Winnie helps by giving me a running translation in English, which she doesn't know as well as Spanish, which she doesn't know well at all. Then I have to make some sense out of it." She took a sip of dark beer and shook her head ruefully. "I'm probably making plenty of mistakes. It's mostly guesswork."

"Under the circumstances," John said, "you're doing a fine job, Darla."

"Thank you."

I reached over and patted Winnie's head. "Smart girl," I said.

Winnie took my hand, jumped up, walked across the table, and plopped down in my lap. She threw her arms around me and hugged, grimace-grinning with her eyes shut tight.

"Affectionate little darling, isn't she?" Sean said.

"Yes, she is," I said. I nuzzled her long floppy ear. "Have you ever noticed that she smells good all the time? Like she's wearing perfume."

"Which is more than you can say for most sentient beings," Sean said.

"Yeah. Anyway, getting back to this…"

"Look here, Jake," Roland said. "This is the Galactic Beltway running through the Orion arm of the galaxy. You see where it cuts across here to the Perseus arm? That's where we have to pick it up."

"How do we know when we reach that point?"

"Well, we won't know." Roland put down his pencil and scratched his head, then smoothed his shock of straight black hair. "That's what's hard about all this. There really is no way of closely correlating the maps and the Itinerary Poem. The Poem is just a long set of directions. Go ten kilometers, turn Ieft, you can't miss it―that sort of thing. By following the itinerary, we'll have a hard time knowing exactly where we are on the galactic map, unless we can make astronomical observations."

"Well," I said, "there's a load of astronomical equipment in the truck, if somebody knows or can figure out how to use the stuff."

"Unfortunately," Roland said, "my knowledge of astronomy is largely theoretical." He tapped the pencil against the waxedwood tabletop. "And spotty at best."

"Did you find anything in that crate of book-pipettes?"

"Not a whole lot. They're mostly monographs and journals. Rarified stuff, pages and pages of equations. But I did find one useful bit of information. The Local Group is associated with a metacluster, and the Milky Way is on the outskirts of it. The nucleus is a galactic cluster in the constellation Virgo."

"So," I said, scratching the fur, over the bony knot between Winnie's ears, which she loved to have done, "that may mean that the big road coming into Andromeda is Red Limit Freeway."

"I don't think so, Jake. If so, it means that the Local Group is isolated from the rest of the metacluster, with no access to the Intercluster Thruway. No, this has to be the Thruway going into Andromeda."

"Why don't we ask Winnie and make sure?" I said.

"Huh?"

"Instead of everybody trying to second-guess her, why don't we come right out and ask?"

Winnie looked at me expectantly.

"Winnie," I said, "can you draw more for us on this map?"

I took the drawing of the Local Group over and put it in front of us. "This one here. Can you show us something that's missing?"

She looked the map over for a moment, then reached out toward Roland. Roland handed her the pencil. Grasping it awkwardly, she scored a line coming in from the right, ending at the Greater Magellenic Cloud. She looked at it, chewing the end of the pencil thoughtfully. Then she continued the line through the cloud and beyond, ending it at the exact point where the "Transgalactic Extension" left the rim of the Milky Way.

"There's the Thruway," I said. "The Transgalactic Extension is part of it."

"Why did she leave it out?" Roland wondered.

"Not important," I said. "And I think I'm beginning to understand why it wasn't important. As John said the other night, this is a tourist itinerary. We're at the edge of the metacluster. We want to leave it, not go into it, so we won't need to bother with the Thruway." I reached out with one arm and gathered in all the papers. "All of this, this whole thing, is definitely not a road atlas of the universe. It's much too incomplete. These maps provide the traveler with a specific route to get to a specific place."

"And where is that?" John asked.

"Winnie?" I asked. "Where are we going?"

"Home."

"Yes, she keeps saying that." Roland frowned and crossed his arms. "What could she possibly mean?"

We left at dawn.

But not before I had the shock of seeing what Sean and Liam had been referring to as their "Skyway-worthy vehicle." Liam towed it out of a shed with the tractor.

It was a tiny roadster, beaten, dented, splotched with emulsicoat patching, and looking for all the world like an overgrown child's toy.

"Where's the key to wind it up?" I said.

"Very funny," Sean sneered. "But not very original."

"And what color is that?"

"Magenta."

I rolled my eyes heavenward.

It took a half-hour to start the thing. Then it ran at 25 percent of its rated power. Liam fiddled with the engine for another twenty minutes and coaxed it up to seventy-five.

"Good enough," Sean said. "We can stop somewhere and have it looked at."

"Yeah," I said.

Finally, we got going. It felt good to get back on the Skyway again. Give me the road any day, I thought. That black band rolling under me was freedom. I wanted no fetters, no encumbrances, no obligations. But of course I had them. My present situation was a trap, and the more I struggled, the more ensnared I became. I was acquiring people like an old wool sweater picks up lint. What did they want of me? What was my irresistible appeal? I didn't know about anyone else, but I was looking for a way home. I wanted to do nothing more than deliver my load and go back to the farm. Wouldn't see a soul for a year. I'd even sell my flat in town. Contrary to popular opinion, this starrigger had absolutely no intention to drive to the "beginning" of the universe or to the "end" of it either equally absurd notions. I wanted to tear up Winnie's maps, chuck the Black Cube out the port, and say to hell with it all. Then I'd go my own way, just me and Sam. Leave everyone to starhike it home.

Sure. Sure, Jake. You go ahead and do that.

I swore under my breath for two kilometers and felt better.

So preoccupied with my thoughts was I that I didn't notice the forest had given way to rolling plains in rather short order. The tops of the cylinders were edging over the horizon.

Suddenly, I thought of something, and slammed on the brakes. I pulled off the road and came to a sudden stop. The Chevy overshot me, pulling off to the shoulder a good distance ahead. As I climbed out of the cab, much to everyone's puzzlement, I saw Carl sticking his head out the window and looking back, equally baffled.

I walked back to the roaster, into which our beefy logger friends were packed like… like… well, like two beefy loggers inside a ridiculously small vehicle.

Sean slid back the dubiously air-tight port. "Trouble, Jake?"

"I have to ask this before I repress the event entirely. Just what the hell was that thing I saw in the woods… that Boojum or whatever you call it?"

Sean tugged at his anfractuous mustache. "Hard to say. Did it talk to you?"

"Yeah, it―" I straightened up. "Yeah, it sure did!"

"What did it say?"

"Well… it said, 'Good Gracious, dearie me!' Then it took off into the woods."

"I see." He stroked his beard, ruminating. Shaking his head slowly, he said, "Then that was no Boojum."

I would have strangled him right then if I had thought my hands would've fit around his fat neck.