"Lizard?" I raised an eyebrow.
"I come by it honestly. You'll find out."
"I think I already have."
"Just eat your sandwich," she said. "You're getting skinny." And then she climbed forward and back into her pilot's seat. Ted smiled hopefully, but she just jerked her thumb rearward and paid him no further attention.
He sighed and came back, and strapped himself into the chair where she had been sitting. "Whew!" he whispered. "I remember her. She bumped into the Titanic once and sank it."
"Oh, I don't know. I think she's terrific!" I didn't think she had heard me, but the tips of her ears turned pink. At least, I think they did.
Ted merely grunted, curled up sideways in his seat and went to sleep.
I finished my sandwich and spent the rest of the trip thinking about a tall spiky anomaly at fifty-nine hundred angstroms. I wished I had a terminal so I could study the data first hand instead of in my memory. Something about the millipedes' behaviorsomething so obvious I couldn't see it-was staring me right in the face. It was frustrating as hell-because I couldn't not think about it! It was a bright red vision, a blood-colored room with a table in the middle, and sitting on the table, a cage full of skittering active millipedes. Why? I leaned my head against the window and studied the clouds and thought about rose-colored glasses.
The chopper banked then and the sun flashed in my eyes, leaving a brilliant afterimage. I put my hand over my eyes, closed them and watched the pulsating blob of chemical activity on my retinas. It was white and yellow for a while, then it was crimson and it looked like a star-I decided it was Chtorr, and wanted to blow it up. After a while, it started turning blue and faded away, leaving me with only its memory and another dozen questions about the possible origin of the Chtorran invasion. I also had a niggling suspicion about something. More than ever, I wanted to get back to a terminal.
The chopper banked again and I realized we were coming in toward Denver. And Major Tirelli was about to demonstrate a "stop and drop."
She'd brought us straight over the Rockies without bothering with a descending glide path-and now that we were over the city there wasn't room for one, at least not without a long swing over eastern Colorado to shake off ten kilometers of altitude. So instead, she cut in the rotors, baffled the jets down and let us fall. The technique had been developed eight years earlier, but never used; the army had wanted a way to boost men and supplies quickly over enemy territory, never coming low enough to be in range of their portable ground-to-air missiles. It was one more thing to be grateful to the Pakistan war for. Even if your nerves forgave you for such a landing, your stomach never would.
"Wow," gasped Ted when he realized what she was doing; we'd been dropping for several decades, even though my watch insisted it was only two and a half minutes. "Either she's a real hot shot, or somebody wants to see us in an awful hurry."
"Both," she called from up front. She was downchecking the auto-monitor.
Ted looked embarrassed; he hadn't realized she could hear us. She got on the radio then to warn them we were dropping in. "Stapleton, this is Tirelli. Clear the dime-I've got that high-pri cargo and I'm putting it right where I said I would."
A male voice answered immediately. "Negative, Tirelli. Your priority's been double-upped. They need the chopper for some brass. Veer off and drop it next door on Lowry. There's a truck waiting for you on north zero-six."
"Oh, hell," she said. But she began cutting in the jets, firing short bursts to bring us around and slow our descent. The deceleration was sideways. And bumpy.
"By the way," added the radio. "Tag your auto-monitor for inspection. We lost some of our remote metering just before you voiced in."
"Naw, that was me. I was downchecking."
"Damn it, Liz! You're not supposed to do that in the air."
"Relax, Jackie. You had me on your scopes. I saw the beeper. You didn't need the telemetry or the inertial probe anymore. And I'm in a hurry."
"Liz, those systems are for your safety-"
"Right. And worth every penny of it." She grinned. "I can't talk anymore, Jackie. I'm gonna drop this thing." She switched off the voice circuit. The auto-monitor continued to flash.
"Uh," I said, "maybe I don't understand-"
"You're right," she cut me off. "You don't." Without taking her eyes off her controls, she explained, "The excuse I gave him was a blind. What I'm really doing is cutting the control monitors. I don't want him knowing I'm not using noise abatement-it takes too much power from the engines."
"Oh," I said. "But what about the people below?"
"I try not to think about them," she said. And then added, "Would you rather be a considerate spot of red jelly on the runway-or rude and in one piece?"
"I see your point." I shut up.
"Besides," she continued, "anyone who lives that close to an airport deserves it-especially now, when half the city is empty." The copter was caught by a crossdraft then and we slid sideways. For a moment I thought she'd miscalculated and we were going to miss the runway, but she did nothing to correct our descent. Then I caught sight of the truck and realized that she'd even outthought the wind. We were being blown toward our landing spot.
A moment later we touched ground easily. It was the last easy thing in Denver. Even before the jets whined down to a stop, a ramp was slammed into place and the door was being pulled open.
It popped outward with a whoosh of pressurized air and slid sideways. Almost immediately, a hawk-nosed major with red face and beady eyes was barking into the cabin, "All right, Liz, where are the-"
And then he caught sight of me and Ted. "Who're you?" he demanded. He didn't wait for an answer, but snapped at Major Tirelli, "Dammit, Liz, there wasn't supposed to be any deadheading on this flight!" He was wearing a Sony Hear-Muff with wire mike attached. "Hold a minute," he said into it.
"We're not deadheading," Ted said. He blinked at us, annoyed.
Ted poked me. "Show him the orders."
"Orders? What orders?" To the mike: "Stand by. I think we got a foul-up."
I pulled the papers out of my jacket pocket and passed them over. He took them impatiently and scanned them with a growing frown. Behind him, two middle-aged privates, obviously tapped for the job of carrying the specimen cases, peered at us with the usual mixture of curiosity and boredom.
"What the hell," he muttered. "This is a bloody nuisance. Which one are you?"
"I'm McCarthy, that's Jackson."
"Right. McCarthy. I'll remember you." He handed our orders back. "Okay, grab your cases and lug them down to that cruiser." He turned and ducked out. "You two are dismissed. They sent their own flunkies." He had all the charm of a drill press.
Ted and I exchanged a glance, shrugged and reached for the boxes. Major Tirelli finished her power-down, locked the console, and squeezed past us toward the door.
As we stumbled down the ramp after her, I noticed that the two privates had parked themselves in the V.I.P. seats of the wagon, leaving the service seats for us. The major-already I disliked him-was standing by the hood, talking to an unseen someone. "Yeah, that must be it.... Well, find someplace to bed them down until we can figure out what to do with them-I don't care where.... What? ... I don't know. They look like it. Wait, I'll find out for sure." He glowered over at us. "Are you boys fairies?"
"Oh, honey!" Ted gushed at him. "When are you going to learn? The word is faggot! Don't they teach you anything at those fancy eastern schools?" Before I could react or step away, Ted had hooked his arm through mine. "Jimmy, we've got a lot of consciousness-raising to do here."