Starrigger

5

"You have no cause to feel bad," Sam comforted me as we raced toward the tollbooths. "You did what you could. You tried. I was a little worried about how the Roadbug would react to that missile."

"I know. So was I," I said. "I shouldn't have done it. It was useless, and I knew it. I didn't have the right to risk Darla's and Cheetah's lives."

"I would have done the same," Darla said quietly.

"Thanks, Darla. Still…"

"Oh, c'mon, son. Mona knew the risk. She knew there's only one rule of this road: "Thou shall not close the road, nor interrupt traffic on any section thereof!' And she knew the Roadbugs enforce it to the letter."

"What right do they have to enforce anything?" I countered angrily. "Who the hell are they, anyway?"

Sam didn't answer, because there was no answer. Chalk up another mystery. Two theories were currently in vogue. The Roadbugs were either machines created by the Roadbuilders themselves, or they were vehicles whose unseen drivers wanted to keep the roads clear for their own purposes. Personally, I was for the latter theory. All indications were that the Skyway was millions of years old, and machines ― no matter how advanced ― just don't function that long… or so it seemed to me. But if there were flesh-and-blood beings inside those bug cars, they hadn't shown themselves yet, and I doubted they ever would.

The cylinders were all around, and we felt their persistent grabbing. The aperture swallowed us.

The next planet was a big one, a high-G world, as the sign before the tollbooths had warned, but going in an instant from.3 to 1.45 G was more than a little rough. The planet's acceleration sucked us down into our seats. I groaned and tried to straighten my spine, now turned rubber.

"Whuff!" Darla slumped in her seat. Cheetah bore up stoically.

"Jesus, even I can feel it," Sam said. "Somehow."

We arrived on a vast savannah of dry grass and bare patches of dust rolling out endlessly. Stunted trees dotted the plain. To our right and far away, a herd of bulky animals loped behind shimmering curtains of heat. The sun was low to our left, but bore down arduously. The sky was blue, slapped with watery brushstrokes of bright haze. Migration trails intersected the road. At one point, a dry-wash had undercut the highway itself, leaving exposed and suspended the five-meter-thick slab of metal roadbed. The gap was not great, and the road had no need to drop a supporting stanchion, as it could do when necessary. How it did such things was but another puzzle.

Great black birds, if birds they were, wheeled in the bald-white sky near the sun, searching. No prey or carrion was evident. Here and there along the side of the road were high mounds of powdery earth ― warrens? hives? There were no signs of human habitation, though the planet was on the lists for colonization. The place did not look inviting. To settle such a world would be to resign oneself to the sorry fact that doing anything would require half again as much effort as on a 1G world: lifting a load of firewood, hefting an axe, mounting a flight of stairs. But humans had adapted to harsher conditions on many worlds. I imagined what future generations of this world would look like ― short, swarthy, powerfully muscled, fond of khaki, glued into their wide-brimmed bush hats, opinionated, sure of themselves, proud. Perhaps. Diversity was sure to be the rule as human beings spread among the stars, and the differences might one day become more than cultural. Organisms are products of their environment, and when environments diverge…

The road shot ahead, unswerving, pointing to a low black band that rimmed the horizon. Mountains.

"What's the name" of this place?" I asked. "What do the maps say?"

"Goliath," Sam said.

"Ah."

We drove for a while, until I realized how ravenously hungry

I was.

"Anyone for eats?"

"Me!" piped Darla.

"Soup's on!"

We went back to the galley and fixed a quick brunch: ham-salad sandwiches, giant kosher deli pickles from New Zion ("Ham salad and kosher pickles?" Darla wondered. "We'll be struck dead." "Eat fast!" I said), potato salad, cherry yogurt, all fresh from the cooler. I had stocked up back on TC–I, shortly before hitting the road. We ate heartily.

I stopped in the middle of a mouthful of pickle. "How boorish of me. I forgot about Cheetah."

"Don't worry, she's okay ― and that's not her real name."

"Huh? Darla, she can't eat human food. The polypeptides are all wrong."

"She brought her own. Go look."

I went forward, and sure enough there was Cheetah, munching wombat salad, or whatever it was, little green shoots with pink pulpy heads. I went back.

"When did she have time to ―?"

"I never did get around to explaining why she's here, did I? And you never asked, either. That's what I like about you, Jake; you never question, never complain. You go along with the flow, except when you're pushed. Anyway, when you called I was talking to her, and she said that her 'time' was drawing near. I took it to mean the end of her life, but she wouldn't elaborate. I could sense that she was unhappy. Desperately so."

"She certainly wasn't being treated well at the motel," I said. "As a matter of fact, the pustulant little bedsore who ran the place was―"

"I know. I knew by the way he talked to her." She took a bite of sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. "Cheetah had told me that none of her people had ever left the planet ― 'pass through the great trees at the edge of the sky' is the way they think of the portals ― and that one day, before the end of her time, she would like to be the first."

"Seems to me I've seen her kind off-world."

"Right, but she doesn't realize that." Darla turned the notion over in her mind. "No, on second thought, she meant her clan, not her species. I told you how attached they are to their families."

"Got you."

"So, when I got the call, I asked her to come with us. That simply. I've had second thoughts about it since, of course. I really don't have the foggiest notion what to do with her. I was thinking vaguely of finding a home for her ― but, practical brain that you are, you pointed out the problem of biochemical incompatibility."

"It's not insurmountable," I said. "Her new family, whoever they might be, would have to invest in a biomolecular synthesizer and program it to produce suitable protein material for her. We all know it's a bother to eat the glop, especially when it's not textured and flavor-rendered properly ― any human traveling outside Terran space knows it ― but she might survive, with a little love, and a lot of Hothouse-brand ketchup."

Darla showed concern. "I hope you're right. I've already gotten attached to her. She's so warm, open…. By the way, you're high in her pantheon of Great Beings. You saved her from a beating, and she's eternally grateful."

I polished my fingernails on my shirt. "Well, all in a hero's day, you know. Rescuing fair maidens, screaming like a banshee upon being bitten by a nasty ol' bug, faulting, almost getting my ass shot off because I had to play it proud instead of safe. I should have backed away from Wilkes' table."

"That's you, Jake. Dumb, but proud!"

"I thank you. But you were telling me about Cheetah and how she got here."

"Didn't I finish? Oh, yes. I told her she was welcome to come along with us, and while I was packing she disappeared. By the time I finished, she returned with an armful of fruit and such. I stowed the stuff in my bag, and…"

"She knows biochemistry?"

"Huh? No, certainly not. Maybe she's taken journeys before. Perhaps her tribe migrated now and then. I don't know."

"I thought they stuck pretty much to their home turf." "Then, I don't know how she knew to bring food. But I'll ask her."

I drained the last of my coffee. It was of a good bean, grown on Nuova Colombia. "You also mentioned something about Cheetah's real name. How did she get tagged with the handle of a fictional Terran chimpanzee?"

"That's what the motel people called her." She raised an ironical eyebrow. "Cute, what? Fit in with the theme, I guess. You know, it's amazing how popular those Burroughs books still are after ― what is it, going on two hundred years? Anyway, her proper moniker is Winwah-hah-wee-wahwee. She told me it means Soft-Green-is-the-Place-Where-She-Sleeps. At least, that's my rendition of it. Her translation was a bit garbled."

"Okay, then, 'Winnie' it is, now and forevermore. I got up and stretched. The kinks were gradually working out.

"There's one more thing," Darla said.

"About Chee ― I mean, about Winnie?"

"Yes. It was something about you and Sam. She said she was confused at first about Sam, about exactly what he was, until she realized that he was… well, that his spirit permeated the rig, if you follow me. Then she said she sensed something about you. Something she didn't like."

I shrugged. "Oh, well. A man who's hated by children and cute furry animals can't be all bad." '

"Don't be silly. She loves you ― I told you that. No, it's something concerning you. Something about what happened to you or what will happen…. I can't say for sure."

"Premonition?"

She chewed on her lip. "No." She shook her head. "No, forget about the 'happen' stuff. She didn't use those words. It wasn't a prediction, a precognitive intuition or anything. It was just something 'around' you. That's how she put it. The only thing coherent I could get out of her was that she didn't like your jacket because it smelled bad."

I sniffed my underarms. "Well, I guess if your friends can't tell you, who can?"

She rolled her eyes. "Jake."

"Sorry. But it's all a little vague, isn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose. But she seemed so sure."

"What she probably sensed was the lingering aura of my life of libertinage and debauchery."

Darla giggled. "You mean your life of fantasizing. I happen to know that you're just this side of a monk in such matters. You haven't even tried to kiss me."

"I haven't? Well…" I took her shoulders and pulled her. toward me, planted on those full pouting lips an unmonkish kiss of journeyman quality. She kissed back after the first fraction of a second. (I think I surprised her.) We continued in this fashion for some time.,

When things had gone as far as they could under present circumstances, we parted. Darla commenced a straightening-up ritual: smoothed her hair, adjusted her clothing, checked the state of her lip gloss in the warped reflection of a shiny; sugar canister. Her face was perenially made-up, perfectly, even at the worst of times. There was a certain composure about her, a kind of coolness ― which attracted me, I must, admit. Note: cool, not cold. Self-possessed. Well, there was no nonsense about her (not to say no sense of humor), no wasted motions, no false moves, no hesitations. I felt her incapable of uttering something even remotely insipid. The controlling factor was not intellectual, but was more in the way of being worldly, knowing, aware, hip, if you will, to use an archaic term. She was a veteran of the Skyway, but there wasn't a rollermark on her. I couldn't guess how old she was; anywhere from nineteen to thirty. But a special native wisdom sparkled in eyes that had seen more than they told. To use another hoary Terran colloquialism: she had been around. Yes, she had.

"I hate to break up anything momentous, kids," Sam discreetly announced over the aft-cabin speaker, "but there's something up ahead."

I went forward. We were continuing our race for the mountain range, which now hove over the horizon as a brown-gray mass with an intermittent edge of white. Snow-tipped peaks. They looked like mounds of day-old pudding, whipped-cream toppings gone stale and dried.

A vehicle, an old bus, was pulled off the road ahead, and it seemed to be experiencing mechanical problems. A group of people were gathered near the off-road side.

As we drew up I braked instinctively, as I usually do when I spot a breakdown; however, recent events had spooked me to the point where I considered passing them by. But no. One of the stranded passengers waved pleadingly ― a bearded black man who wore a loose robe that smacked of the sacerdotal ― and I pulled completely off the pavement at a prudent distance download, across one of those spontaneous bridges that spanned a deep dry-wash.

"Well, let's get a whiff of the stuff they call air here," I said reluctantly. "It's supposed to be rated EN-1B, which is as close as you can get. Sam, were those people wearing respirators or anything?"

"No, but take a nasal inhaler of CO;. You could hyperventilate under extreme exertion. There are a few in the glove box, I think."

The pumps sucked the good air out and let the bad come in. Mark you, Earth people: there is nothing like the first breath of alien atmosphere, no matter how near to Terran normal it is. The weird odors are most unsettling. Strange trace gases never meant for human olfactory systems tiptoe across your nasal membranes in spiked shoes. At best, you gag and choke and cough. At worst, you swoon and wake up with an assist mask slapped over your face, if you're lucky. But the atmosphere of Goliath wasn't all that' bad. It carried a whiff of iodine on a stench of decayed fruit, a strange combination to say the least, but the fruity smell masked the medicinal one enough to make it bearable. There wasn't a fruit tree in sight. On the bad side, there was a trace of a nose-tickling element, an irritant of some sort that kitchy-kooed the sinuses maddeningly close to the sneeze-point without getting them over the hump. But… I guess you get used to anything. In fact, the longer I breathed the stuff, the less I noticed its noxious qualities. There was good oxygen here to be sure, though at pressure a bit too high. Maybe ― mind you, just maybe ― a person could get to like running this sort of soup through his lungs.

The air I could live with; the heat was another matter. I wasn't ready for it, even after Hothouse. I sprang the hatch, and it was like opening an oven door. Talk about dry heat versus humid heat, and the misery indices of both didn't apply here. It was punking HOT and that's all there was to it. The heat smothered me, the planet strained my arches, and the sun began to pan-fry my skin in a sauce of sudden sweat.

"Darla! Throw me your brolly, please. Hurry!"

She did, and I popped it open and put it up against the smoldering sky.

I walked slowly across the bridge, stopping momentarily to inspect one of the piers the roadbed had dropped down into the gully to carry its weight over. I didn't risk bending over very far, feeling stiff and top-heavy. I got no clue as to how trick had been done, and continued on across the bridge.

I was met by the black man. He was on the light-skinned side, tall, round-shouldered, very thin. A big, long-fingered hand enveloped mine.

"Hello! Decent of you to stop. Didn't think you would. I'm John Sukuma-Tayler." His accent was British, his manner ami able. After I told him my first name only, he said, "Awful place to have broken down. The heat's about done us in. Reminds me a bit too much of Africa. I lived in Europe most of my life, and liked it."

"Why did you leave?" I said, a little too bluntly. I was hot!

He took it as humor. "Sometimes I wonder!" He chuckled.

"Sorry. I didn't mean it the way it sounded."

"Don't fret about it. Some of our people are on the verge of biting each other's heads off. The heat's getting to all of us. We're in quite a pickle. Do you think we could prevail upon you to lend a hand?"

"Sure. What's up."

We began walking back to the bus, which was up on its service jacks, precariously so. The bus was an old clunker, but in its day it had been built for speed and taking sharp curve and had a ground-effect flange all the way around it, which made it difficult to get underneath. The built-in jacks were barely adequate, especially in this gravity. Anyone crawlingi under would be taking a chance of having several tons of low slung vehicle squat on his chest. To preclude this eventuality, several of the passengers were shoring up the edges of the flange near the jacks with plastic bags filled with earth. The dirt was being shoveled from a nearby conical mound, one of many that punctuated the plain. No large rocksLwere handy for the job. The work was progressing slowly.

"All I can tell you," Sukuma-Tayler said with a helpless spread of his arms, "is that it quit, just like that. Powered down and stopped, here in the middle of nowhere. A few of our people have some mechanical aptitude, but no one's really got a look yet. We tore out some seats and tried to get to the engine from the inside, but the bolts holding the shielding wouldn't budge, and we have no power tools."

'Too bad. That's how you get to the guts of this thing. Going underneath might not do you any good. But, it depends on what's ailing it."

"Thought as much. The engine monitoring readouts are still operative, but they don't say much. To me, that is."

"Let me take a look," I said. "While I'm at it, I'd suggest you get those sandbags out from under the GE flange and put them under the frame bracings. If she goes down, that flange will just crinkle."

The big man furrowed his brow. "You know, you're absolutely right." He shook his head wearily. "Ignorance is so handicapping! Especially with machines."

"Can be deadly, too." I dragged myself toward the hatch.

The verniers told me nothing, being little better than idiot lights. Nothing in the way of plasma diagnostic systems, even though the vehicle had been a commercial carrier.

Sukuma-Tayler eased his lanky frame inside and sat next tome.

"Anything?" he asked hopefully.

"No, not much. It looks like you have full power going through the radio-frequency breakdown stage, but other than that, I can't tell anything from these readouts. Does she turn over?"

"Yes, but the engine just won't catch."

"Uh-huh. Well, that could be anything. If it's loss of plasma confinement, that could be pretty hairy. I couldn't do anything here."

"I was afraid of that," Sukuma-Tayler said ruefully.

"You're lucky in one sense. These old vans are among the few Earth-built buggies still on Skyway. My rig's alien-manufactured, but built to Terran specifications and design, so I'm fairly familiar with this kind of hardware. However, I'm really not a mechanic. It takes an expert."

"Anything you can do, Jake, would be appreciated."

"Well, I'll give it a try." I mopped my brow with an already damp sleeve. "I can't remember, though, whether these old buses use an occluded-gas ion source. If so, you need a pinch of titanium in with the fuel. Otherwise, you get neutral particles flying all over the place between pulses. I forget whether they do or not. What kind of fuel are you using?"

"High-test. Deuterium-tritium."

"Yeah, I thought so. My rig runs on double deuce. Newer design."

"Ah."

"When did you fill up last?"

The Afro scratched his beard. "You know, I really can't remember. These things run forever, it seems."

Continuing my train of thought, I got out my circuit-test gauge. "Got a screwdriver?"

Sukuma-Tayler yelled for a screwdriver, and one of the passengers, a young Oriental man, brought him one. I took it and unbolted the instrument panel, slid it out, and looked for the fuel readout leads. I found them and tested them. Of course.

"I found your problem," I said, pushing the panel back. Naturally, it didn't want to fit back the way it had been. I shoved, got nowhere.

"You did?" He was shocked and relieved.

"Yeah. You're out of fuel."

"What! You're joking."

"No. The fuel-level readout was shorted."

The big man slapped his forehead. "I'll be damned. After all that mucking about―" He leaned out the hatch and yelled, "People! Stop what you're doing. Our friend here has exposed us as the fools that we are." He turned back to me. "So sorry to have troubled you, old man. What classic boneheadedness!"

"It can… uhhh!… happen to anybody. Gimme a hand with this, will you?" '

We shoved the panel back in. The screwholes, contrary negative entities that they are, did not line up. I handed him the screws, and he looked at them blankly.

"I was meaning to ask," I said offhandedly. "Are you some sort of religious group?"

He beamed. "Yes! We're Teleologists. Church of Teleological Pantheism. You've heard of us?"

A man with pride in his faith is to be admired. "No."

"Uh. Well, that's what we are, and we're supposed to be settling this planet. We were en. route to Maxwellville."

We stepped outside. There were about seven people in the party besides the Afro, whom I presumed to be the leader. Four of them were women, and all were of various races. I took one man for an Australian Abo. "Not many of you for a colony, are you?"

"We're an advance party. More will be following shortly. We're branching off from a community on Khadija, and eventually we hope to siphon everybody there to Goliath. Our presence on Khadija is… well, resented."

"I see. You plan to homestead?"

"We hope to," Sukuma-Tayler told me as we watched his people unstack the sandbags and empty them. "Actually, we have a land grant from the―"

Yelling from the direction of the conical mound interrupted him. We turned and looked. One man who had been shoveling dirt was down on the ground not far from the mound. He was struggling with something that apparently had gotten hold of him. His partner was beating whatever it was with a shovel. We rushed ― I gimped ― over to them.

The thing was a half-meter-long segmented animal with what looked like a shiny metallic carapace. It had crablike claws, but there were more than two pincers on each. The three elements were positioned for grasping. The beastie had the screaming man's ankle in a tight grip. Even more startling was the sight of the animal hefting a shiny, sharp blade in the other claw, using it to jab its victim's calf with rapid, vicious up-and-down strokes. The man with the shovel gave up whacking the thing with the flat of the spade and used the edge like a chopper. After several strokes, he cut the creature in two. The front half fought on. Several people had run up, and we all made a grab for it at once. We tore the thing apart like a boiled lobster. I saw another man, the Abo, come away with the blade-wielding forelimb, at the price of an oozing crimson slash across his palm.

I came up with a smaller side appendage, and examined it. What looked like small pieces of hammered, copper-colored metal were draped over the animal's soft, rubbery skin. Miniature armor. As a matter of fact, the metal looked very much like copper, perhaps with a slight leavening of tin. Bronze. The armor was attached with a sticky black gum, which was revealed when I pried the plates away from the leg. The skin was dun-colored and soft. I stood there scrutinizing it, absorbed.

"More of them!"

I looked up. More creatures had emerged from the mound while we were wrestling with me first. They were popping out of the top of the mound like blobs of lava from a volcano, wriggling down the steep sides, some of them running madly in circles, others getting a fix on us and charging, blades flashing in the sun. In an instant, there were hundreds of them all over the place.

We backed away toward the bus. I burned one who came toward us in a banzai charge, weapon whirling, pure hate in those black pin-dot eyes. That left two charges in the squib. More of them came at us. I shot two of them and stamped a third into the dirt, but not before he knifed me in the ankle and nicked my left shin with an armored pincer. I picked up his weapon. It was a sword ― no other word for it ― irregular in shape and crudely wrought, like the armor, but it held an edge to be reckoned with. The ankle wound began to pang.

The creatures were fast. They had already cut off our escape route to the bus and uproad to the bridge. We could only retreat parallel to the highway.

"We seemed to have disturbed their nest," Sukuma-Tayler observed dryly.

"You mean their barracks, don't you?"

We ran. Individual attacks broke off for the moment. They kept pace with us as we drew away, but when I looked back I was amazed to see them mustering into ranks for what looked like an organized pursuit.

Something whizzed past me.

I heard a scream and looked back. A black woman was. down, clutching the back of her head. We doubled back, and I bent over her. The projectile had left a bloody indentation in her scalp. I saw something shiny nearby and picked it up; it was a grape-size lump of copper. At closer range the girl would have been seriously injured. As it was, she was knocked silly. I looked out over the sea of crawling metal for the source of the barrage. From what I could make out, they were firing at us by means of a slingshot device operated by three creatures. Two took either end of a long elastic band of black material, probably a variant of the armor adhesive, while a third stretched the middle back about three meters. The release velocity was enough to make it a potent weapon.

Another ball buzzed by my ear. The artillery was advancing, leapfrogging forward after each shot. I helped carry the semiconscious girl back and away. There was no cover except for other nest-cones. The heat was beyond sapping me now; it was draining away my strength. The others looked to be on the verge of collapse, none of them sweating now, all body fluids leached through pores and evaporated. They had been out too long. I still had sweat in me, but the tap was full open. A floating sense of unreality came over me. I was hyperventilating.

Sam was just now turning around.

The infantry charged. They overtook us easily, hobbled as we were with the girl. By the time we brought her around and got her shakily to her feet, they were on us. The girl went down again.

No one had a working firearm, but we made do with what we had: both spades, a jack crank, a wrench, and an assortment of odd tools. I whacked at them with the parasol until it flew to pieces, then used my size-eleven Colonial Militia fatigue boots on them, wishing I'd worn my high boots that day. None of us fared very well. A man to my right went down, then another woman. I saw Sukuma-Tayler kick at the things until one grabbed him by the shoe and began hacking at his leg. He yelled, turned, and ran with the creature hanging on to him. He tried to kick it off, then went down and wrestled with it.

The creatures were swarming over the first injured woman. She was screaming hideously, but nobody could get to her. I tried to move forward, kicking at them, sending dozens of the bastards flying, but I couldn't make headway. One crawled up my leg from behind and I felt a searing pain in my thigh. I tore the animal off and threw it. I stumbled back over a partially buried length of metal, probably a tent pole. Not taking time to wonder who had had the misfortune to pitch camp in this crawling hell, I pulled it up and started to swing at them with it, with little effect except to keep them at a distance or knock weapons from their claws. I backed and swung, backed and swung, not having time to look up to see where Sam was. I heard him coming.

Finally, the offensive broke off on my section of front and I looked up. Sam was coming across the bridge, crunching and popping his way over a seething carpet of armor. It sounded as if he were running over a pile of eggs and scrap metal.

Something slithered through my legs. It was a mound-creature, but it had come from behind me. I whirled around. To our rear lay another army. Something about them looked slightly different, and I hoped they were from another hive, with any luck a hostile neighbor. It looked as though they were, because our attackers broke off completely and retreated a short distance, waiting for the first wave of shock troops from the other side to pass us by and reach them. We stood there in the middle of everything, watching the suicide squad from the challengers throw themselves at the front lines. They were quickly dispatched ― torn apart and left to jerk their lives out in the sand. Theses token charges seemed to be overtures to a major offensive. Heroic? Stupid? Maybe they had a purpose.

There were five of us left. Three bodies lay out in the writhing mass of armor.

"Everybody!" I yelled. "Stand still!"

As soon as I said it, the eastern army attacked. We stood there like log piers in a rushing river. A few stopped to sniff at my legs before charging ahead.

Sam was advancing toward us, passing through the battle line. Darla popped the hatch and aimed her gun at the ground.

"Hold it!" I shouted. "Friendly troops!" I motioned for the survivors to follow me as I picked my way gingerly through the flow of advancing soldiers. I finally reached the cab and climbed in, assisted by Darla. I slid the driver's seat back and helped the others inside. Sukuma-Tayler was the last, and I was surprised to see him alive. I shoved the seat forward, fell into it, and sealed the cab.

Sam was driving. We wheeled around and made for the road. My head lolled up against the viewport.

I saw a severed human leg being dragged away.

One of the women got hysterical, but Darla soon had her under control with a shot of something suitable from the tickler. The woman slumped over and groaned.

The hyperventilation subsided and my head was clear once more, but I closed my eyes and couldn't open them again.