His earphones crackled. "Rick here. How ya doin'? Over."
"Fine. Comfy. I reset the seat, over."
"How'd you do that?"
"I got out and stood in the stirrups and pulled the pin."
"You're not supposed to do that."
"Rick, listen. It's just you and me up here. Nobody's listening, nobody cares. I'm not gonna fall out of this thing. I'd have better luck falling out of a grocery cart."
Rick was silent a moment. "Don't he stupid, okay?" He clicked off.
Alex rode on, most of another long hour. It was all right. An hour with oxygen was never boring. He was trying to make the oxygen last, sipping at the tank bit by bit, but he knew the tank would be empty by the time he landed. After that, he was going to have to buy more oxygen somehow.
He was going to have to start buying stuff for the Troupe.
For all their rhetoric, Alex could see that this was the crux of the deal, as far .as he was concerned. The same unspoken bargain went for Juanita too, mostly. These people weren't hanging out with Juanita just because they really liked big chunky-hipped cyber-art-school grads. They liked Juanita because she bought them stuff, and looked after their numerous assorted needs. She was their patroness. And he, Alex, was on track to be next car in the gravy train.
For all that, though, there was the puzzling matter of Jerry Mulcahey. Troupe life all boiled down to Mulcahey in the end, because any Trouper who didn't fear, love, and worship the guy would obviously get their walking papers in short order. Alex still wasn't too sure about Mulcahey's real motives. Mulcahey was a genuinely twisted individual. Alex had been watching Mulcahey closely, and he was pretty sure of two things: (A) Mukahey was genuinely possessed of some kind of genius, and (B) Mulcahey didn't have much idea what the hell money was. When he and Juanita were face-to-face in public, Mulcahey would treat her with odd archaic courtliness: he let her sit down first at the campfire, he'd help her to her feet after, he wouldn't eat until she'd started eating, that sort of thing. Neither of them ever made a big deal of these silent little courtesies, but Mulcahey rarely missed a chance to do them.
And quite often, if some minor Troupe hassle came up, Mulcahey would let Juanita do all the talking for him. She'd get really animated and deeply into the topic, and he'd get really stone-faced and abstract and reserved. It was just as if he was letting her have his emotions for him. And the two of them clearly thrived on this arrangement. Every once in a while he would suddenly finish one of her sentences, and everyone else would flinch.
Mulcahey's weirdest symptoms happened when Juanita wasn't watching him at all. She'd be doing her version of some comely girl-thing, like maybe a big stretch-and-bend-over in her thin paper jumpsuit, Mulcahey would all of a sudden get this very highly flammable expression. Like he was a starving man and she was an expensive cordon bleu dinner and he was really trying to be careful, but it was ali he could do not to rip the tablecloth right off her and eat from the broken china on his hands and knees. The look would pass in a hurry, and Mulcahey would get his usual overcontrolled cigar-store-Indian face, but the look was definitely there all right, and it was not the kind of look that a man could fake.
Alex wasn't sure how all this was going to turn out for Juanita. She'd known this guy for at least a year now, and it was pretty damned odd for a man and woman who'd been lovers that long not to calm down some. Maybe they were calm now. In which case, the beginning must have been something pretty seriously strange.
Alex looked down across the landscape. No sign of the convoy. He'd left the convoy far hehind as he mulled things over. Time to turn around ~nd head back a bit.
As he wheeled the ultralight around, with sluggish machine-assisted caution, he passed the shoulder of ahiil. In the infrared, the highway-it happened to be a paved one-smoldered a bit with trapped day heat, but there was a lot of vivid heat on the far slope of that hill.
Alex stopped his maneuver and decided to check it out.
At first, be thought there was an entire army standing there in the road. At least a hundred people. Then he realized that most of the glowing patches of heat were standing on all fours. They were deer. No, goats.
Somebody had a herd of goats out on the highway.
Alex clicked open the radio channel. "Alex here," he said. "Rick, the road is full of goats, man, over."
"Copy, Alex. You see anybody?"
"Yeah-I think so. Kinda hard to tell from this heights Rick, why would anybody have a herd of goats out on the road in the middle of the night, over?"
"You got me beat, dude."
"Maybe they travel at night for better security, like we do."
"Are they moving?"
"No, man. Just sitting there."
"Those could be pharm goats, and they could be goat rustlers, just about to rendezvous with one of those meat-packing trucks out of the city."
"People do that? Rustle goats?"
"Some people do anything for money, dude." Alex heard Rick loudly smacking his wide-awake gum into the microphone. "Or maybe they're blockin' the road with goats on purpose, and they got an ambush set up in the brush, over."
Alex lifted his faceplate and looked out bare-eyed. Pretty hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like there was some pretty thick mesquite on both sides of the road. Good-sized mesquite, too, a couple of stories tall. You could have hidden a big tribe of Comanches in it.
"Maybe you better come up here, Rick."
"No way, man, you don't want to desert the rear of the convoy in a possible ambush situation."
"But you've got the gun, man."
"I'm not gonna shoot anybody, are you kidding? If these are real bandidos, we're gonna pull the hell back and call the Texas Rangers!"
"Right," Alex said. "'Death from above.' I kinda figured." He laughed.
"Look, Medicine Boy, I'll shoot if I have to. But if we just start blowing people away, out in the middle of nowhere without askin' any questions, then we're the ones who are gonna get stomped by the Rangers."
"Cut your motor and buzz 'em, get a good quiet look."
"Right," Alex said. "I get it."
He took several deep huffs of oxygen. It felt lovely. Then he discovered that the motor would not shut down. He couldn't override the controls. Oh well. It wasn't a loud motor, anyway.
He dropped down a dozen meters over the treetops and crossed the road at an angle, right to left. The goats didn't seem to notice, or care. He did, however, spot the intense infrared glow of some kind of smokeless electric heater at the edge of the mesquite trees. There were people there too-at least half a dozen. Standing up.
He opened the channel. "Alex here. I count about eighty goats and at least six guys standing by the brush. They're awake. I think they're cooking something, over."
"I don't like this, over."
"Me either. Man, you gotta be some kind of hard-ass to steal goats from people who'd raise goats in an awful goddamn place like this." Alex felt surprised at the sudden depth of his own anger. But hell-he himself herded goats. He'd developed a genuine class feeling for goat ranchers.
"Okay." Rick sighed. "Lemme see who's awake in the convoy.~~
Alex circled the herd, slowly. More glowing bipedal figures appeared, this time at the other side of the road.
"Greg says drop a flare and check it out," Rick reported.
"Right," Alex said.
He plucked one of the flares from its plastic clip-on mount on the right-hand strut. The flares were old and dusty and covered with military-issue stenciling in Cyrillic. He hadn't imagined them working too well, but at least they were simplicity itself to use.