Starrigger

6

When i came to, Darla was passing from casualty to casualty, doing what she could with the paraphenalia in the medicine kit. Most of us had moderate-to-severe lacerations. One man, a thin, ascetic blond fellow, had sustained a deep gash that had nearly taken off his foot at the ankle. He also had puncture wounds to the chest. For the leg, Darla improvised a tourniquet out of cloth and a screwdriver. The Afro and I had gotten off easiest, me with slash and puncture wounds to the lower extremities, he with the same plus stab wounds in the arm. We were a sorry lot. Blood ran in bright rivulets over the deck. Darla got to me last.

"Things that attack you all have leg fetishes," she said. "Well, I'm a liberal in such matters," I said. "We're short on everything. How long till we make Maxwellville?"

"About two hours," Sam answered, "But that's on straight road. Those mountains look treacherous. The map says the grade reaches forty-five degrees on some slopes. Also, there's one hell of a shitstorm brewing antisunward."

I looked. Thunderheads were stacking up on a grim-looking horizon. Masses of heated air had risen all day to an icy altitude, and now were returning with a vengeance, reincarnated as rain-swollen clouds, black with fury.

"Looks nasty, all right. Could be twisters in there. Which way is it moving?"

"I've been scanning for the last ten minutes. It's heading toward us on a slant from left to right as we look at it. If we can get to those hills in time, we should miss most of it."

"That's good news. Switch on the afterburners."

"Show me where the switch is. I'll do my best, though. I just hope she holds together."

"Why? Problems?"

"You're not going to ask why I took my time getting down to you back there?"

I heaved a sigh. "No, Sam, I wasn't. I figure you had a damn good reason. Of course, if you didn't, I will take a flex-torque wrench to you with exquisite artistry."

"I had trouble starting up, and I stalled out twice on the bridge."

"That doesn't sound good. In fact, I don't like that at all." I still felt sort of giddy. "I'm not going to think about that today. I am going to sit here quietly and have the nervous breakdown that's owed me. Thank you. Good-bye." I closed my eyes.

"Just wanted to tell you," came a voice at my ear. I turned my head. It was Sukuma-Tayler, squatting by my seat. His face was strained, his lower lip quivering. "Awfully sorry… damned shame to have involved you in all this. My fault…." Abruptly, he broke down and sobbed. When he had composed himself somewhat, he blubbered, "I'm responsible for their deaths."

"No. You've fallen into the same trap many have ― not being totally prepared for alien unknowns. The sameness of the Skyway can lull you into a false sense of security. Many have perished because of it."

"The Guidebook," he said, voice tightened with regret, "I… I should have known! I had it, I read it." He shook his head helplessly. "But on the other side of these mountains, where the settlements are, the ecology is radically different. I covered those sections very thoroughly! I simply neglected the other aspects of the planet."

"As I said, a common fault. We didn't bother to check the planet banks at all before we barged in here. But, we all learn, and with a little luck, we live."

"My friends weren't so lucky."

"They won't be the last you'll lose to a new planet. It's a dangerous universe, John."

"Yes, I know. We have lost others, before." He was silent for a moment, then went back to find a place to sit in the crowded cab.

We rode along in silence until the sky grew dark and the first drops of rain spattered on the forward viewport. It wasn't long before it came whipping down in force, driven by a gale-force wind coming from two points off the starboard bow. We were doing around 150 meters per second, and the rig buffeted and shook and kept yawing to the left as Sam fought to keep it on course. Pink sheets of lightning ripped through the gathering gloom above.

The lower parts of my legs were on fire, as was a large area of my left thigh. I had thought that I could handle the pain for a while, but exactly whom was I kidding? I told Darla to load up the tickler with an upper-downer cocktail: a 1 mg solution of hydromorphone with 5 mg of amphetamine sulfate thrown in to keep me alert.

"And no pharmacology lectures, please."

"I'll do it if you can keep this rig on the road."

"Sam, give me the wheel."

I took the control bars in hand.

Outside, thunder walked across the plain in big, earth-shivering steps. The forward port was a solid film of wind-flattened water, distorting the view ahead. The gale grew stronger; the light kept fading until visibility dropped close to zero. I flicked on the headbeams, then focused the spotlight on the road. For good measure, the yellow fogcutters went on too. The lights helped, but visibility was still marginal. It was not blackness out there as much as it was murk, a ghastly greenish drizzle that glowed with a strange diffused light. I looked up and saw it was coming from the sky. It was a twister sky.

Shortly thereafter, Sam confirmed my suspicions.

"Jake, I've got something pretty scary on the scanners."

Twister?"

"Well, if it is, it's the grandpappy of mem all. The electrostatic potential is in the gigavolt region. It's a monster."

"Jesus, Sam, where is it?"

"Oh, it's paralleling us about a klick off starboard."

"Oh."

"You'd better hurry, son."

"Yes, sir.*'

I floored the son of a bitch.

"Everybody hang on!" Sam yelled.

The warning didn't come in time, for right then I lost the roadway and we hit dirt with a bang, vibrated through a staccato series of bumps, then whumped into something big that splattered the viewport with mud. Whatever it was didn't stop us, but it took several seconds for the washers to clear the view.

"Sam! Find the road for me!"

A final volley of bumps and we were back on the road. I straightened the rig out and eased off on the throttle.

"There you are," Sam said calmly. "Now, do you want to use the thermal-imaging glasses, or do you want to keep us entertained?"

"Okay, okay. Damn things give me headaches." I brought the contraption down and shoved my face into it. A fuzzy 3-D scan of the view ahead in pretty, dappled colors showed the road in deep purple, with ambiguous edges. Also muddying me picture were false echoes from the rain itself ― but it was an improvement.

"What did we hit back there?" Sam asked.

"One of those miserable land-crab mounds, probably. And I hope the bank turns down their loan to build a new one. Any more data on the twister?"

"Time for your shot, Mr. McGraw." It was Darla whispering in my ear.

I started to roll up my sleeve. She shook her head.

"Uh-uh."

"What? Woman, do you expect me to drop my pants in the middle of a howling tempest?"

"Now, Mr. McGraw, you know how'we deal with uncooperative patients. Drop 'em or it's the rubber room."

"Sam, take over."

He did, and I did, and she did.

"Ow. Damn it. Whoever named that thing a tickler?"

"About the twister," Sam went on. "Jake, I don't know what this thing is, but it looks like we can outrun it. Its periphery is moving at about half our speed."

"That's pretty fast for a twister."

"It's more than a twister. It's a funnel cloud of some kind, but it analyzes as something qualitatively different from a garden-variety Kansas tornado."

"Aunty Em! Aunty Em!" I screamed in my best falsetto.

"You always were a strange boy."

We skirted the storm for a few dozen more kilometers before we reached the foothills. The wind subsided, but the rain still fell in torrents. It was dusk now, and the sky was a hell of red-orange clouds. Visibility improved. The road bore steadily upward, snaking through the steep foothills, but it did so in a very curious and inefficient manner. On this section of the Skyway, the road lay across the mounting terrain like a carelessly dropped ribbon, twisting painfully into complicated figures, doubling back on itself, following a route laid out by.a surveyor under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. The roadway climbed grades that were much too steep, banked crazily on slopes that it should have cut into, arced over dizzying peaks it should have tunneled through. It was a civil engineer's nightmare. There were only two explanations. Either the Road-builders had scrupulously avoided disturbing the contour of the land, perhaps out of conservationist convictions, to the detriment of the highway's viability as a passable route… or the road had been built so long ago that the mountains had sprung up under it. This latter theory involved the notion that the road had the ability to adjust, to conform, to make a way for itself as slow but persistent geological forces changed the lay of the land over eons ― to grow, in effect, for it would need to lengthen itself to wend its way through these erupting crags. Since it was apparent by phenomena like spontaneous bridge-building that the Skyway was not an inert slab of material but some sort of ongoing process, it wasn't hard to imagine the roadway having some astonishing capacity to feel its way over a changing terrain and nestle itself in as comfortably as it could. In this case, it didn't look very comfortable at all. It could span a crevice or a sharp dip, but it could not excavate, nor could it tunnel.

Darkness fell and the rain continued. I was on the lookout for flash flooding. Sheets of water sluiced over the roadway as we splashed our way through and upward, climbing slowly, following a torturous path into the steepest part of the range. The grade neared forty degrees on some stretches, and the rollers were polarized to maximum grab. It was barely enough. The slip-factor was approaching pi radians on some of the drive rollers. Translation: they were going round and round and we weren't getting anywhere.

Everyone tried to catch some sleep, found places to wedge into so as not to be thrown around. Darla got the most seriously wounded man bedded down in the bunk, and shot him up with analgesics. I asked her how he was doing, and she told me the sooner we got to Maxwellville, the better. I could have guessed; he had lost a lot of blood. Privately, I didn't think he'd make it.

Sukuma-Tayler came up to sit in the shotgun seat, declaring he couldn't find room enough to stretch out. Besides, he wasn't sleepy. Winnie was huddled underneath the dash on his side. He accidentally poked her, and she jumped. The Afro apologized.

"Sorry! Sorry!" Winnie answered, apologizing for being in the way, I guess. If she were representative of her race, how could such an unaggressive species survive for long? I thought of the jungle-clearing project. Indeed, they were not surviving.

"Uh… we were never properly introduced," Sukuma-Tayler said. "I didn't realize he could talk. She? Oh. Eridani, isn't she?"

"Yes. Winnie, meet John."

"Hello!"

"How do you do, Winnie."

She curled up and went back to sleep.

The grade steepened, curled to the left in a hairpin turn. A temporary river greeted us. The drive rollers spun, then dug into roadway.

"Makes one wonder, doesn't it… about the Skyway," John said.

"Concerning?"

"Well, for one thing, why most people bother to travel the road between apertures, instead of flying."

"Couple of reasons," I told him. "One, no one's been able to make air travel cheaper than ground transportation, even after all these years. It'll always be that way, I think. It's a matter of physics. Two, an aircraft has to be designed with certain factors in mind, like a planet's air pressure, gravity, etcetera. Going from planet to planet poses some problems. I've seen some variable airfoil designs, but they're all clumsy and impractical. And useless when you hit an airless stretch. Of course, you could taxi through those, but that strikes me as silly. Then, of course, there's antigravity."

"Hm. Which is one with the perpetual motion machine, eh?"

"As far as anybody knows. Nobody's cracked the problem to any appreciable degree. Oh, you always hear that some race, somewhere, has developed true antigravity. But I've never seen such a vehicle on any pan of Skyway. Even the Roadbugs run on rollers."

"You'd think that somebody would have done it by now."

"Yes, it does seem inevitable, somehow. But there must be monumental problems in the way."

"But there are air routes between planets. Correct?".

"Yeah, we riggers have some competition, but the routes are limited." I chuckled derisively. "I'd like to see a flyboy get through a place like Wind Tunnel."

"A planet?"

"Alpha Mansae II. Gales up to two hundred meters per second, dust storms that blanket the planet."

The big man was impressed. "Sounds dangerous, even in one of these juggernauts."

"It is."

The slope-meter was tilting to fifty degrees. I couldn't believe it myself, and I'd seen everything.

"Good God," the Afro breathed as we looked straight up into a bottomless pit of black sky.

The rollers spun frantically, then finally grabbed onto something, and we went over the crest and onto a relatively level area.

"Then again," I said, breathing easier, "there might be something to be said for flying."

"Another point," Sukuma-Tayler went on. It was obvious this gabbing made him feel better. "Granted that with highspeed ground vehicles it's only a matter of an hour or two between arrival point and the next jump ― on every planet but this one, it seems. But my question is, why didn't they place the ingress points and egress apertures ― I mean the ones that take you to the next planet ― closer together? You could put the double-back portal far enough away to prevent any knotting-up of space-time, which is, I take it, why the portals must have so much distance between them. That way, you could nip from planet to planet without much driving at all. You'd only have to go some distance to use the double-back portal."

"I can't explain to you," I answered, "why you need big chunks of normal space-time between ingress points and portals, as well as between portals, even though an ingress point is just a piece of empty road that you materialize on ― but I can tell you that the reason is a bunch of Greek symbols and lots of numbers. And it's all very theoretical. Hold on!" Another monstrous grade loomed ahead. We started to climb. Suddenly, warning lights flashed behind us, and a horn sounded. An old-fashioned, ancient automobile horn. I hugged the shoulder, and the little bugger passed us, shooting up the hill as quick as you please. It was a very strange vehicle, to match the sound of the horn. The horn went:

Dah-dah-dah D A H!

And the vehicle, from what I could discern out in the liquid darkness, was a mid-twentieth-century American automobile, which in its day had been powered by an internal combustion engine, fueled by either alcohol or a fractional distillate of petroleum, I forget which. The color was a deep red and the finish was glossy.

"An apparition," Sukuma-Tayler said.

"I hope that thing stops in Maxwellville. Those look like pneumatic rollers… tires, really, but I just can't believe that they are. Anyway, you were saying?"

"Hm? Oh, nothing. Nothing."

We rode in silence for a time, inching up the hill.

Abruptly he said, "Jake McGraw!" It was an epiphany of some sort.

"That's me," I said, perplexed.

"It just came to me. I've heard of you! Yes, I remember the name." He smiled. "You must forgive me, old man. Blurting out like that. But you must know you're something of a legend on the Skyway."

"I am, eh?"

"You are the Jake McGraw, aren't you?"

"I'm the only one I know of."

"Of course. Yes. But… meeting you like this… well, it simply isn't… I mean, one thinks of Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas, heroic figures. And you seem…" He winced. "Oh, my. I didn't put that quite the way I wanted to."

"And I seem like such an ordinary asswipe. Is that what you're telling me, John?"

He laughed. "Not quite. But the tales told about you are remarkable." He leaned over to me, mock-secretively. "I take it they're all ― how do Americans put it? ― 'tall tales'?"

"Depends on what tales you mean," I said in deadpan. "Now, the one about the sixteen women on Albion, that's purest truth. They all gave birth within the space of six days."

"That is one I'd like to hear." He looked at me slyly. "I assume you're joking, but maybe I'd better not assume." He laughed again, but sobered up quickly, the death of three friends choking off anything resembling good cheer.

Presently, he said, "It was your computer that started the association process. Then when I heard your… friend, there, say your name ― anyway, I noticed that the computer was extraordinarily human-sounding. Exactly how did he get that way? Terran machines can come close to mimicking a human personality, but yours is a different kettle of fish entirely."

"Sam is more than a computer," I said. "His core-logic contains a Vlathusian Entelechy Matrix. It's a component the size of your thumb."

"I've heard of them. The Vlathu keep the process a dark secret, don't they? Who was the impression taken from?"

"My father."

"I see."

It strikes most people as ghoulish. I think I know why, but I don't think of it.

"He died in an accident on Kappa Fornacis V. I brought his body to the Vlathu home planet, which, like Terra, isn't directly connected to the Skyway, and left it with their technicians. They kept it for almost a year. When I got it back, there were no incisions in the scalp, and the brain was intact. Then he was buried on Vishnu, on our farm."

Sam broke in. "You're talking about me like I wasn't here. Damned uncomfortable."

"Oh, I do beg your pardon," Sukuma-Tayler said. "Jake, do you mind if I ask him ―? There I go again. Sam. Would you mind answering some questions?"

"Go ahead," Sam said.

"How do you see yourself? By that I mean, what is your self-image in terms of a physical presence? Do you follow me?"

"I think I do. Well, it depends. Sometimes I think of myself as part of the rig, sometimes it seems as if I'm just riding in it. Most of the time I get a distinct impression of sitting right where you are, in the shotgun seat. No, don't get up. The feeling persists whether the seat's occupied or not."

Sukuma-Taylor put a finger to his chin. "That's very interesting. There's another question, but I really don't know how to―"

"You want to know what it feels like to die. Is that it?"

The Afro nodded.

"Damned if I know. I don't remember anything about the crash. I have been told since that the son of a bitch who hit me head-on was drunk and that he came through it alive. I don't think the Vlathu erased the memory, but I don't have it."

Sam's response plunged the Afro into deep thought.

Meanwhile, we had gained the top of the rise, and the rain was subsiding. Dark walls of rock lined the road; the Skyway had lucked into a natural pass. Just then, the headbeams dimmed, then came back to full voltage. The engine began complaining in a low, gravelly murmur.

"Jake, we have plasma instability," Sam announced.

"Not a moment too soon." I sighed. "I think it's all downhill from here. What are you reading?"

"Everything I'm getting says we have a kink-instability developing. Temperature dropping. Yeah, the longitudinal current in the plasma is 'way over the Kruskal limit. Wait, the backup coils are cutting in. Back to normal now… hold on. Just a minute. Hell, mere it goes again. Shut her down, Jake."

"How much power in the accumulators?"

"We're full up. We can get by on the auxiliary motor, as long as we've climbed our last hill."