At least you don’t try that twice.
So we were going to have to find a way to talk to the “boss man” without getting killed in the process. And we didn’t even know for sure who was out to get us. The world government? The energy cartel? Both? Neither?
We had our work cut out for us as we lifted off from the Moon.
“It’s strange,” Nikki said, ” I’m going to be glad to get back to Earth. But I feel a little sad about leaving.”
“Yeah,” I said, ” I feel that way, too. Guess it’s nice and safe here. Seeing the huge stack of anti-gravity rods the bots are churning up day in and day out is kind of exciting, too.”
“We’re getting enough rods to carry out some fantastic work if we ever get the time and manpower to do it,” Jake said. “Before long, we’re going to have to consider heading out to the asteroids. One chunk of an icy asteroid would take care of all our water needs on the Moon for some time if we attached rods to it and hauled it back.”
“Spoken like a true Spacer,” I said with a chuckle.
“The possibilities really are endless,” Nikki said.
“ If we can get Earth off our backs,” Jake said.
“The big ‘if’ again.”
The rover floated behind our van, working in tandem to our controls. We’d rigged up a tow bar between the vehicles which carried messages from our van’s computer to the one working computer looted from the Eratothenes Base and now mounted in the rover. This enabled it to follow our maneuvers—we hoped. If it came loose or the packaging came apart, there were enough rods aboard it to take off to the next galaxy. We were towing a lot of potential mayhem and destruction. I tried to think about other things.
We raced around the Moon twice and then started the jump through space. Many hours later, the beautiful blue and white of Earth swelled below our feet. We waited for the scheduled rocket flight that would be dropping into Houston. Our good luck continued as it was close enough to schedule for us to match its downward arch to Texas. After a few teeth wrenching changes of velocity, we were back off Galveston Island, hugging the waves as we skimmed toward land. By driving all night, we reached Jake’s surplus shop as the sun was rising. The worst thing that happened to us was that our vehicles picked up a few bullet holes when we had to drive between some feuding motorists. Fortunately no serious damage was done to us or our equipment.
Jake’s shop was intact and his nephew, Mark, in one piece. That was a relief. While Jake and Nikki hadn’t apparently been worried about anything happening to Mark, after the way the bag lady had found me, I had started to feel like we were facing supernatural foes.
Mark had done a good job. He’d sold off all of Nikki’s jewelry and the industrial laser and gotten some good prices for them. Even so, it hadn’t been quite enough to get him by so he’d also sold Jake’s antique sports car rather than any of the space gear. Though Jake had specifically ordered him to not sell any of the surplus gear (since we might be wanting it), I could see that Jake didn’t aim to have his car get less than priority treatment. I thought maybe I could sell tickets to the neighbors to see Jake turn Mark into a human pretzel, but to my disappointment, there was no such show.
After living in low gravity of the Moon for three months, just sitting on Earth was work. Even getting my eyelids back up when blinking took an effort. While we’d exercised in the tiny gym at our base, it didn’t take up all the slack for muscles gone soft. We felt like birds with their wings clipped; where before we’d been able to nearly fly over the landscape, now we walked with plodding steps or—in Jake’s case—dragged about on crutches.
In addition to physical problems, our mental problem was nearly as overwhelming as the heavy gravity. We had to figure out how to contact whoever was in charge of rubbing us out.
Of course we could have ignored them and lain low.
That had worked for the last three months. But if those who were concerned about the rods found that we were actually manufacturing them again, the search for us would probably be larger and less subtle than before. I didn’t care to spend every day of my existence wondering if the trash bots were about to cram me into the garbage truck or if the mail bot was really a hit man in disguise. Life in such a condition would slowly drive me mad.
Without the “slowly.”
And if they did locate us… Imagining a screaming fighter plane dropping a few barrels of napalm onto Jake’s happy store didn’t do much for me either. I had no desire to become a crispy critter.
“So how can we get to them before they get to us?” Nikki asked as we sat around the table munching on a small salad that Mark had prepared for us—apparently with an ax judging from the state of the vegetables in it.
“Perhaps we can turn the tables on them,” I said. ” It’d be hard, but if we planned it carefully, maybe we could trap whoever comes to get us.”
“That might work but it sounds pretty dangerous,” Nikki said.
“Yes, it will be that. The last person they sent after us was pretty effective.” I shuddered at the thought of the headless bag lady. The Russian salad dressing looked nauseatingly like blood; I decided to use the creamy. “We do have some tricks up our sleeves this time,” I finally said.
“While they think we’re on our own and probably all but out of money, we actually have Jake and quite a few resources thanks to the gear we brought back from the Moon.”
“Why don’t we get a decoy van set up?” Jake said. “We could buy another old shell like your van and—”
“Put the old numbers on it,” Nikki finished. “We could even convert it to anti-grav travel.”
“Yeah,” I said and munched for a moment on a piece of celery. ” If we had two vans instead of one, that would really throw them off.” The possibilities were looking like they could be shifted a bit more in our favor.
“Well, anyway, if we can get someone to come after us and then…”
One salad and several hours later, our plan had been pretty well formed. Our first step in this plan was to get a decoy van set up. We had too much equipment wired into the original van to sacrifice it, so we decided to barter for on old van to use as decoy. After trading an industrial laser we’d brought back in the rover, we were able to obtain a van to convert to a nearly identical copy of our old van. After that, Jake—who had a lot of skill at doing body work on cars—cut off the storage area he’d added to the top of our old van and filled in the bullet holes it had picked up on the road. Then we repainted them both so that the new van looked like the old one while my old, original one looked completely different.
In order to avoid attracting attention to Jake’s business, we decided to make contact with our enemies far away from Galveston. Since Denver had been the last place we’d been seen by them (we hoped), that seemed like a logical place to begin. We loaded up the two vans with special goodies and we followed a rocket from Houston back into Denver (this time we mimicked its whole ballistic arc by wearing space suits for the short trip into space).
Nikki chose to rode with me. Jake looked pretty disappointed but I didn’t feel bad enough to suggest that Nikki ride with him.
From the Denver rocket port, we headed back to Nikki and Craig’s condo since that seemed like the most likely spot to strike pay dirt in our search for our enemies.
I knew it was risky since it was entirely possible that the apartment had been booby trapped.
We gambled on the fact that the people we were facing seemed to be interested in doing things so that they appeared to be accidental or so that the person would vanish without a trace. That took the personal touch of someone like the “bag lady” pro we’d faced last time I’d been in the apartment. Too, since I’d been free so long, we figured that they would be concerned about interrogating me to be sure their weren’t other new loose ends they needed to cut off.