“Nearly perfect,” Paula said. “Good job.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say perfect,” Terri said. “Some of the posters on the walls are really gross. Do men really like that kind of thing?”
We went inside. It was obvious that this place had been a whorehouse. Well, we would have somewhere comfortable to spend the night, and some food to go to bed on; and I hardly thought that the morals of the place would prove contagious on one night’s stay.
I spent the night in an immense four-poster surrounded by alternating mirrors and pictures of young women in too much makeup and an unlikely variety of costumes. We hadn’t bothered with getting power to the electric lights, and the sun was well down by the time I got to bed, so the shapes were very dim and shadowy.
The next day, about halfway through the morning and as we were winding up the spectacular valley that cut into the desert there, drawing nearer to Hot Springs, Iphwin said, “There’s an experiment I’m supposed to do—seeing if I can contact the Iphwin program from inside America. It doesn’t know whether anyone can call out, only that it can’t call in.
“What I’d like to do is make a call from a pay phone, at the next little town or gas station we come to. Everyone else, stay way back and watch real close. Be ready to lay down covering fire, or maybe to just dump and run, because it’s just possible that I will set off some kind of alarm or alert. My progenitor thinks it can keep me or almost-me in this event sequence, and we won’t be talking—just seeing if we can talk—on the first try.”
“How do you feel about trying it?” Terri asked.
He shrugged. “It’s what I exist for, isn’t it?”
“That’s not an answer to the question. Lots of people come into the world for a reason, but it’s not their reason, and they shouldn’t be controlled by it. And this is going to put you and us in danger. You know that one reason why the machine-Iphwin is willing to do this is that it will still get information even if it loses the whole expedition, and it can always just create another one and try it again.”
“What Terri is saying,” Paula added, “is that it’s Iphwin Prime’s game but it’s your ass.”
Iphwin nodded. “I understand that. But I also don’t have the processing power or speed to cope with what we might find in Santa Fe. And if we’re overwhelmed there it will be too late. It’s a gamble, no question about that; if it works and we don’t trip any alarms, then we have all kinds of backup. If it doesn’t work, we—or at least you—know we’re on our own, and we get away and stay off the nets.”
“And if it’s a complete disaster?” I asked.
“That’s the least likely possibility. Besides, even if I try, the real highest probability is no dial tone and no connection of any kind, and then we can stop worrying and wondering about the whole issue.”
Terri and I argued with him about it for a while, but Paula gradually came around to Iphwin’s point of view, and I think if we had a leader it was Paula. Esmé and Jesús didn’t say much but they tended to back Paula. An hour later it was about four firm votes for Iphwin’s trying to make that call, to two lukewarm ones for waiting or giving the idea up. When an old gas station with a visible pay phone on a pole popped up over one of the many long rises, we slowed to a stop, dropped Iphwin off, and drove about a hundred yards further up the road, to get to the top of a hill where taking off would be easier.
We all sat in the van, with a back window opened; I was appointed the official watcher. I saw Iphwin pick up the phone, apparently get a dial tone, and dial. There was a faint shimmer, but it could have been the heat or eyestrain.
He hung up the phone and ran straight for us. “Well, at least he remembers where the van is—that’s a good sign,” Jesús said. “He can’t be too different from—”
Iphwin bounded the last few steps and dove into the van through the sliding door. Something in the way he was moving made me slam it shut as soon as he was in. “Get us out of here!” he gasped.
Not pausing to ask what was wrong, Paula stood on the pedal and popped the clutch, and we shot off downhill like a missile. The thought did come to me that this was a very old vehicle with no maintenance other than the old untrustworthy oil we’d poured into every possible port that morning. But it held up just fine. The lumping motion from uneven permatires even seemed to be smaller today, maybe because they were evening out and maybe because I was getting used to it.
By the bottom of the hill we were moving at about eighty miles an hour, and we shot back up it never getting below sixty. The old van wasn’t built to do much more than that, but we were at least getting all the speed that it did have.
After two more long hills, Iphwin gasped out, “Any side road we can find would be a good idea,” and Paula took us down the first old ranch track that came up. We bumped and slammed along that at a slower speed until we were out of sight of the highway, made a couple more jogs, and found, after a few miles of driving past cattle skeletons partially covered by decayed hides, a gate that took us a few minutes to pry open. A few more miles brought us to an old county road that climbed up out of the valley.
On the way, Iphwin told us what had happened while he was on the phone. First of all, he had gotten right through, and his mechanical counterpart had told him that there was an enormous amount of random noise and decades-delayed messages coming out of the former United States, much of it addressed to servers that no longer existed. A sizable number of messages, mostly badly garbled, were from the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness in Santa Fe, so we had a better reason than ever to go there. “That was all good news. Then Billie Beard got on the line. Which means that she’s onto us. I don’t know if she can operate or do anything, here, and I don’t know if my progenitor can do anything to block her or at least keep her from figuring out where we are—but I didn’t want to stick around to find out, either.”
“Damn straight,” Paula said. “And a good thing.”
The county road was winding around in a narrow canyon, following a dry creek bed, and when it emerged into an open area, we were all startled for a moment.
“When do you suppose they built that?” Esmé asked, finally, in a strangled voice.
In front of us was a gigantic highway, four lanes, with no visible entrances or exits—the county road ran under it, under a bridge—and the whole thing was in beautiful condition. It glowed warmly in the morning sun, like the best friend you ever had.
“In the worlds I came from, that’s called an autobahn, and they only have them in the German Reich,” I said. “Built back before cars were self-driving. You needed several times as much room on the road with human reaction times, not to mention human error rates.”
Esmé grunted. “There’s no such thing in the worlds I came from.”
Paula nodded slowly and said, “I think I heard of something like this, as a proposal to link Moscow and Vladivostok, sometime in the next century—unless high-speed rail beat it out. Well. Imagine putting something like this way out in the desert here. But it seems to be going north to Santa Fe and it’s almost got to save us some time. Now how do we get up onto it?”
It turned out that when we went through the bridge to check on the other side, there was a “frontage road” that ran parallel to the huge highway; we followed that for a couple of miles till we came to a place where only a high curb and some dirt separated the two. By that time we knew the big road was called I-25, and that it went to Santa Fe, since it had distances to Santa Fe posted.