Wild Country

Chapter Fifty-Six

The planners of Wild Country Safari had chosen the site with great care, placing Faro deceptively in a valley separated from sight of the Thrillkiller complex, two klicks away in the next valley. On topping that rise, a visitor saw only the clapboard structures and dusty streets of a frontier township, and guests were encouraged to dress appropriately. Its emotional impact was instant 1885. No automobiles or cycles were permitted past the underground parking facility; the stables and streets of Faro were redolent of horse muffins, not auto exhaust fumes. Guests rode the stagecoach from the parking facility into town, and the cavernous gift shop offered few items more modem than cactus candy. From clerks wearing gaiters, green eyeshades, and garters on their sleeves, you could buy good western garb, Pendleton shirts, and hand-tooled boots, or you could rent them. No beer in bulbs, no candy in wrappers, no Kleenex; you used a kerchief or your sleeve. To buy such stuff as cosmetics, cigarettes, and common drugstore items, you either went elsewhere or chose from the modest assortment at the mercantile shop. You could wear a Colt peacemaker on your hip so long as it was peacebonded with six empty chambers. Only security men, wearing stars of authority in their shirts, were allowed live ammo. Quantrill's muffled Chiller, its magazine crammed with twenty-four rounds of flashless seven-millimeter ammo, was not a thing he chose to wear openly. A spare magazine rested in the pocket of each boot top.

The memory of San Antonio Rose had been flawless. Faro's last chance to take a guest's money was the small, too neat Last Chance Saloon, nearest to the parking facility. Three blocks away across the tic-tac-toe street plan, on the way to the next valley, lay the Early Bird Saloon. The Long Branch occupied the entire center block of Faro, a shingled roof running completely around the building over its broad wooden porch. The many upstairs windows suggested dozens of sleeping rooms, and it was said that you could get your wick trimmed in some of those rooms by petticoated ladies.

It was also said that the meals at the Long Branch could, if you spent much time there, make you as fat as a forty-pound robin. The dinner fare ran to corn on the cob, succulent steaks the diameter of cantaloupe and almost as thick, sourdough biscuits with redeye gravy, and buttermilk in heavy pitchers. Some subtle manager had discovered that a meal like that could give casual gamblers a stronger sense of well-being than three shots of Old Sunny Brook.

Faro's staff spared no effort in keeping the place authentic, including the consumption of coal oil for lamps. The whole town exuded a faint odor of the stuff, reminiscent of diesel fuel and, along with wandering scorpions and rattlers, among the few real dangers in town. Faro's buried water mains were pressure-fed from a more modern installation, a valley and a century removed.

That modem complex lay sequestered in its own long valley, the two hotels and the clinic set mostly underground with huge central atriums like sinkholes walled with glass. At one end of the valley was a romantic, stuffy jumble of structures dubbed "Soho," five hundred meters square, built to resemble downtown London during the Battle of Britain in the year 1941. Its streets, hardly more than alleyways, were mostly cobbled, the buildings sprayed for the look of stone under a coal-smoke patina. Many of the upper windows were broken as if by concussion, some with proper little curtains sadly waving from them like forgotten flags of truce. Visitors entered and left Soho from only one street, Brewer, and were prevented from other exits — and from loss of the illusion — by blockades. Beyond the cordons one could see signs reading "UXB," suggesting an unexploded Nazi bomb, and rubble choking the streets with the acrid tang of cordite turning like knives in the nostrils. Now and then, from behind the barricades at a safe distance, one might see a hunk of masonry, topple from a cornice into the street below.

During daylight hours, Soho's guests could see music hall hijinks or an Agatha Christie play enacted by androids who never fluffed a line and, in a distinct improvement over live actors, gauged their curtain calls to the amount of applause. Or they could buy Harris tweeds, spats, or bowler hats in Soho's shops; devour steak and kidney pie until gout set in; get laid standing up by a delicious android with Eliza Doolittle's own accent and no compunctions about copping a feel; or get viciously insulted in a small philatelist's shop. All in all, patrons of Soho thought a hundred dollars a day was very reasonable for the experience, especially since it included a night's lodging — not that anybody got to sleep much. For one thing, there were the regular percussive announcements by an unseen Big Ben, which began each brief concerto with a catastrophic clatter as if someone were using its gears to grind plate-glass windows. It wasn't precisely authentic, but it added its own brand of charm. And then, of course, there was a good, safe war.

The main show was the London blitz, three nights a week, and it was a multimedia sensation to send the craven sprinting down Brewer Street for the exit. Two WCS pilots of Confederate Air Force vintage flew the pair of half-scale, twin-engined Heinkel bombers, which were invariably picked out by searchlights to reveal the swastikas gleaming on their skins. Because a scaled-down Beaufighter was murderously hard to fly and Hurricanes lacked pizazz, other pilots chased the Heinkels in five-eighths-scale Supermarine Spitfires. Particularly on moonlit evenings, the low moan of sirens, the drone of Heinkels, the hackle-raising howl of Spits in pursuit, and the hammer of distant machine-gun fire made you suspect a time warp. The dopplering whistle of bombs and the concussions made you damn near sure of it. The choreographed march of low-level pyrotechnic flak bursts and the "crash" of a Heinkel just out of sight, complete with fireball, compelled belief.

This kind of mock-up war was expensive, and much of its timing depended on computers. The hidden kilowatt-rated loudspeakers and pyrotechnic machines were so well placed that few people suspected the aircraft were scaled down, flying rather slowly and so low that only an occasional searchlight beam could be seen from Faro. The concussions, when anyone in Faro asked, were said to be blasting operations in a distant mine. In daylight, all this carefully staged flummery would not have fooled a real Londoner for a second, but at night Soho gave added spice to drinking tepid bitter beer in basement pubs or making love in a blacked-out upstairs room. For its sky-high rates, Soho got an astonishing amount of repeat business.

Up the valley from Soho, on the other side of the hotels, lay the complex of entertainment rides. The main and most obvious attraction was a sinister assemblage of rails and individual plastic-canopied delta bullets designed by LockLever. Someone, after emerging mush-kneed from his first ride in it. had called it the Thrillkiller. After that, he'd whispered, nothing else could be a thrill if you lived through it. The name had stuck. The Thrillkiller's track stretched most of the valley's length, dipping underground soon after its early initial kinks for its spiral loop, which gave the rider the distinct impression he was spinning inside a vast, dank storm sewer to hell. Hurtling upward from this dim-lit limbo, each little capsule left its maglev rails long enough to convince a passenger that he was flying — which he was, completing an arc of fifty meters before engaging the rails again.

The viewscreen of the little capsule was not entirely for show; after the brief free-fall arc and pulling two-gee sideloads during recovery, you were asked by the screen whether you would prefer to continue on the submach track or vault to the hypersonic track — essentially, a question of the high road or the low road. If you didn't opt for the high road, you took the low one by default. Most folks, by this time, had already begun to suspect that signing the release form had been their last mortal mistake and were holding on to the grips so fiercely that they could not have punched an instruction for love nor money. This earned them the relatively mild submach track, which accelerated its spade-shaped capsules to only 150 kilometers per hour on the long stretches. It returned its sweat-soaked victims to the starting point without any more terror than they might have sustained in… oh, say, losing the laser boost while on a jetliner and hearing the pilot burst into tears.

If you chose the hypersonic option, you would get back to the starting point just as soon as if you'd taken the low road — but you would traverse twice the distance. Your capsule found the high road by three seconds of automatic steam boost while climbing a steep incline, and instead of a controlled descent to the low road on rails, you left those rails in a free arc that carried you to another track, perched at dizzying height near the end of the valley. You then swept the edge of a low butte, pulling three gees in the turn, before augering wildly downward toward the high-velocity run.

The bald truth was that even by firewalling your control grip, you only achieved some 350 kilometers per hour, and that for only a brief moment before the automatics kicked maglev brakes on. But you achieved it while flashing past shrubs, past the parallel outbound track, and literally through one large fiberglass boulder that seemed to have rolled onto the track just a moment before for the express purpose of making marmalade of capsule and passenger alike. The aperture that opened through the boulder was controlled by pneumatics. They had never failed. Yet. But that's what release forms were for.

The Thrillkiller's tab was twenty dollars. Survivors of the hypersonic option tended to fall into two categories: those Jew who would pay fifty to do it again, not today of course, but someday; and the other ninety percent who would willingly have paid a thousand not to. Ever.

Nearer to the hotels were less ambitious entertainments, some designed for children, some for adults who wanted to be children for a time. The game of Copycat involved one very flexible android and a padded room; both the Haunted Mine and the Dee & Dee layout used robotic creatures of various shapes and were chiefly underground. More of these amusements were under study by WCS planners, and the fame of the place was growing. Already, plans were under way to extend the landing strip and to expand the hangar which, at present, could swallow tiny Heinkels and Spitfires, but not a delta dirigible.

The huge deltas whispered low over the prairie on regular runs, connecting the entertainment complex with Santa Fe and Dal Worth. Vacationing foreigners enjoyed the trip for its scenic value; high rollers enjoyed it because the leviathan delta provided a smooth platform for a "little game" en route, where some of those foreigners might be relieved of excess money. Felix Sorel was certain he would enjoy it because he could board a delta without showing anything more than a ticket, and could float away unseen above any posse that might be convened below in his honor.