No one was on the street. That looked good but I figured someone might be hiding, waiting to nab us when we got into the open. We waited a moment. “Stay here,” I finally ordered Nikki. ”
I’ll pick you up in a minute.”
“No way,” she said and stepped out onto the street with me. I stood there a moment with two bags and the needle gun and decided it was useless to argue. A bag lady came around the corner a block away and looked at us.
“Come on,” I whispered and tugged Nikki in a brisk walk toward the van, somehow managing to resist the urge to run like a scared rabbit.
After enough lifetimes to make a cat feel lucky, we reached the van. We looked back. Now one was on the street. We eased away from the curb and drove down the street.
We hadn’t gone many blocks when the next problem appeared.
“I want to see you fly this thing,” Nikki announced.
I had seen it in Nikki’s face the first time I’d mentioned flying the van. It was that we’re-going-to-do-that-first-thing look. I new I might just as well have been trying to talk a Seeker out of using his joy circuit. Nikki wanted to fly. So Nikki was going to fly.
I tried to explain to her again about my experience with the two fighters that had tried to down my flying turkey.
But she refused to take “no” for an answer.
She had even figured out a safe way to fly without being detected by radar.
And what red-blooded man is going to not give in to anyone as beautiful as Nikki?
“Look, Phil,” she said. “This would be safe to do. The new rockets—which I was flying on as navigator before I got sacked—use powdered aluminum in their fuel to pep up their lift-off. The metal in the rocket’s exhaust messes up the radar.”
“Say no more,” I said. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out the possibilities there. “Just because it is possible doesn’t mean we’ll do it. That’s final,” I added, as forcefully as I could.
After stopping near the ruins of what must have once been a large home, we repainted the van (a nice pink—yes, Nikki picked it), changed the van’s license imprint, had a picnic, and tried to stay cool during the hot afternoon that’s so common in the thin air of the Denver area.
By the time night fell, Nikki knew the vehicle inside and out and had even done some reprogramming of the computers to make the van fly a bit more faster. And a bit more safely.
I hoped.
She was a navigator and knew what she was doing with the computers; but flying in a vehicle designed to hug the ground is not without its more terrifying—if challenging—aspects. My limited experience had suggested that white-knuckle flights are the norm in a flying van.
As the sun set behind the distant, snow-topped mountains, we drove over a worn, plastic road to get as close as we could to the rocket port. We parked the van next to the barbed ribbon-wire fence surrounding the field. I used the needle rifle to put out the few flood lights in the area so that no one could see us.
We waited.
Nikki tried out the controls and took the van up ten feet—still below the ground clutter which would keep us hidden from the radar—then went through a few maneuvers to get the hang of things. My stomach stayed on the ground somewhere below us then jumped into my throat as I heard, in the distance, the crackling thunder of rocket engines becoming super-hot. The boom carried through the night as the sky in the direction of the rocket port glowed red. I sat back in my seat and tried to relax, muttering, “She knows what she’s doing. She knows what she’s doing. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Do you know what you’re doing,” I asked.
“Relax. Here we go.”
We took off at a speed that I hadn’t imagined possible. Not black-out acceleration, perhaps, but certainly fast enough to put permanent wrinkles into the side of my skin facing the seat. Nikki had certainly changed the computers’ programs, I reflected in what I was sure would prove to be the last moments of my life.
As we rose, Nikki guided the van toward the rocket field and kept the cloud of vapor the rocket was riding on between us and the radar installation of the port. “Fantastic,” she laughed.
“Want to follow the rocket a ways?”
“Sure,” I said hoping my voice didn’t betray my sheer terror.
We hurtled upward.
After a bit, though, I started to get into the spirit of things. The only sound was the wash of the air past the van. We were still alive. Nikki really did know what she was doing. We were still alive. The van had stayed together. We were still alive.
It was fantastic.
“Will we remain hidden?” I asked after a bit.
“Should. Sometimes the radar here in Denver has ghosts anyway. They won’t think much of it as long as we’re matching speed with the rocket. That isn’t hard.” She whispered something to the computer and we speeded up a bit more. “Unbelievable,” she said.
We arched upward with the rocket, following its plumed path toward the south. The sky above us turned jet black and the stars became sharp points of light; we saw a second sunset which looked almost like a rainbow framing over the mountains to the West of us. It became more than a little hard to breathe.
“I’d like to race the rocket, but we’d only have space to inhale at the top of its path,” she explained. Her voice sounded thin because of the lack of air in the van. “They leave the atmosphere at the top of their ballistic arch.”
Fortunately when the rocket’s booster dropped on parachutes, we followed it down, falling back into nighttime, dropping in free fall until the wind caught the chutes of the booster so that we could slow our descent. My stomach again felt as if it had made a left turn while the rest of us traveled to the right. Once the free fall had ended, I settled down and enjoyed—as much as possible—the sight of the ocean racing up to meet us. “We ought to get an altimeter so we can keep from smashing into the ground,” Nikki said.
Very reassuring, I thought, closing my eyes and gritting my teeth until we finally stopped our fall. The wind whipped the chutes down into the Gulf of Mexico; we hovered over the water just off-shore from Texas.
I opened my eyes and watched the twinkling lights from the shore as they danced in the ocean in front of us. “Won’t the radar pick us up?” I asked.
“Yeah. But they won’t recognize us as a moving thing. We’ll be part of the waves at this height.”
The moon rose so we could see the water clearly in its yellow glow. Nikki pushed the van’s accelerator pedal and we hurtled toward the shore, then slowed, skimmed over the beach for several hundred meters, hopped a weedy hedge, and parked under a tall, gnarled palm tree.
After sitting for a few minutes looking out over the ocean, we climbed from the van, kicked off our shoes, and walked hand-in-hand in the gentle surf of the Gulf. The moon rose higher and lit the white sand of the beach as a cool, gentle breeze blew in from the sea. Almost an hour later we were again in the van. I fell asleep almost instantly in the reclining seat that was beginning to seem like home. (And, no, there were no romantic going ons… Nikki and I were on a strictly brother/sister relationship. Despite my tries at incest.) I don’t think Nikki slept any that night. She and the two computers whispered and plotted and made lists of things they would be needing for a project that would have had me wide awake had I known what kind of scheme the three of them were hatching.
Chapter 8
The morning sun woke me. In the distance, sea gulls were squawking while the waves added a low hissing rise and fall to the din of the birds.
I sat up and inspected the bright, white sand that stretched into the deep blue green of the ocean, sprinkled with splotches of turquoise that were the shallows. Waves formed in the deep water and chased themselves to the shore where they sputtered their energy in a roll of hissing, white foam, only to be dragged back from the sand and swallowed up by the next incoming wave.