# 1 switched on the inflatable's engine, and the boat mumbled its way toward the nearest cargo drop. The drop was bigger than the boat, a bulging floating cylinder, its bow and sides studded with sturdy tow rings.
Sailors #2 and #3 were fighting with the weather balloon.
They let it go, and it rushed suddenly upward, uncoiling length after length of thin cable with a savage hiss.
"Okay," said #1. He hooked the end of the cable to a series of clips on the back of Laura's life jacket. "You want to hold your knees up and in, with your arms," he told her.
"Also keep your head well down and your jaw clenched. You don't want your neck to whiplash, see, or your teeth to clack.
When you feel the aircraft snag this cable, you're gonna go up in a real hurry. So just uncoil, let your legs go. Like a parachute drop."
"I didn't know it would be like this!" Laura said anxiously.
"Parachuting! I don't know how to do that!"
"Yeah," said #2 impatiently, "but you've seen it, on television."
"A skyhook is just the same as a para-drop, only in reverse," said sailor #1 helpfully. He steered them to the bow of the first cargo bulk. "What do you suppose this one is?"
"New missile consignment," said #2.
"No, man, it's the new chow. Refrigerator drop."
"No way. That one's the fridge, over there." He turned to
Laura. "Didn't you hear a word I said? Grab your legs!"
"I-" It hit her like a car wreck. A sudden terrific jerk, as if the skyhook wanted to yank the bones from her flesh. She soared upward as if fired by a cannon, arms and knee joints wrenched and burning.
Her vision went black, the blood of acceleration draining to her feet. She was helpless, close to fainting, wind tearing furiously at her clothes. She began to twist, blue world flopping and spinning around her like an unlimited carousel.
Suspended in space, she felt a sudden roaring sense of mystic ecstasy. Sublime terror, helpless awe: Sinbad yanked up by the roc of Madagascar. East of Africa. Below her, blue bed sheet of turning sea: toy boats, toy minds...
A shadow fell across her. Mighty buzz of propellers, the whine of a whirling pulley. Then she was up and inside it, in the belly of the plane. Underlit splash of daylight: stenciled boxes, crates, a spiderwebbing of steel bracing cord. An interior crane arm plucked at her cable, swung her neatly across from the cargo bay, and plunked her onto the deck.
She lay there bruised and gasping.
Then the bay doors banged shut and pitch darkness fell.
She felt speed hit the plane. Now that it had her, it was climbing, putting its nose up and pouring energy into conti- nental flight.
She was in a flying black cavern smelling of plastic and oiled tarpaulin and the sharp primal aroma of African dust. It was dark as the inside of a thermos.
She yelled. "Lights, come on!" Nothing. She heard her words echo.
She was alone. This plane had no crew. It was a giant drone, a robot.
She managed to fumble blindly out of the life jacket. She tried variants of the lighting command. She asked for general systems help, in English and Japanese. Nothing. She was cargo-no one listened to cargo.
It began to grow cold. And the air grew thin.
She was freezing. After days in the unchanging air of the sub the cold bit her like electricity. She huddled in her tinfoil survival gear. She pulled the drawstring sleeves and trouser cuffs over her hands and feet. She put her foiled hands before her face: too dark to see them, even an inch away. She covered her face with her hands and breathed into them. Icy puffs of thin Himalayan air. She curled into a ball, shivering.
Isolation and blackness and the distant trembling hum of motors.
Landing woke her. The butterfly touchdown of cybernetic precision. Then, half an hour of timeless anxiety as heat crept into the cabin and dread crept into her. Had they forgotten about her? Was she misplaced now? A computer screwup in some F.A.C.T. datafile? An annoying detail that would be shot and buried .. .
Creak of bay doors. White-hot light poured in. A rush, a stink of dust and fuel.
The rumble and squeak of boarding stairs. Clomp of booted feet. A man looked in, a sunburned blond European in a khaki uniform. His shirt was blackened with sweat down both sides. He spotted her where she crouched beside a tarpaulined mass of cargo.
"Come on," he told her. He waved at her with one arm. .
There was a little snout of metal in his clenched fist,, part of a flexible snaky thing strapped to his forearm. It had a barrel. It was a submachine gun.
"Come on," he repeated.
Laura stood up. "Who are you? Where is this?"
"No questions." He shook his head, bored. "Now."
He marched her down into superheated, desiccating air.
She was in a desert airport.. Dust-heavy, heat-shimmered runways, low whitewashed blockhouse with a faded wind sock, a tricolor flag hanging limply: red, gold, and green.
Huge white aircraft hangar in the distance, pale and barnlike, a distant angry whine of jets.
There was a van waiting, a paddy wagon, painted white like a bakery truck. Thick lugged tires, wire-reinforced win- dows, heavy iron bumpers.
Two black policemen opened the back of the van. They wore khaki shorts, ribbed knee-high socks, dark glasses, billy clubs, holstered pistols with rows of lead-tipped bullets. The two cops were sweating and expressionless, faces blank, radiating careless menace, calloused hands on their clubs.
She climbed into the van. Doors slammed and locked. She was alone and afraid. The rooftop metal was too hot to touch and the rubber-covered floor stank of blood and fear-sweat and a nauseating reek of dried urine.
People had died in here. Laura knew it suddenly, she could feel the presence of their dying. like a weight on her heart.
Death, beaten and bleeding, here on these filthy rubber mats.
The engine started- and the wagon lurched into movement, and she fell.
After a while, she mustered courage and looked out the wire-netted window. .
Flaming heat, flashbulb glare of sun, and dust. Round adobe huts-not even real adobe, just dried red mud-with ramshackle verandahs of plastic and tin. Filthy stretched rags throwing patches of shade. Trickles of smoke. The little domed huts were crowded thick as acne, an almighty slum stretching up slopes, down slopes, through gullies and trash heaps, as far as she could see. In the remote distance, a row of smokestacks gushed raw filth into the cloudless sky. A
smelter? A refinery?
She could see people. None of them moved: they crouched stunned, torpid as lizards, in the shade of doorways and tent flaps. She could sense enormous invisible crowds of them, waiting in hot shadows for evening, for whatever passed for coolness in this godforsaken place. There were patches of raw night soil in certain crooked alleys, hard yellow sunbaked
'human shit, with vast explosive hordes of African flies. The flies were fierce and filthy and as big as beetles.
No paving. No ditches, no plumbing, no power. She saw a few klaxon speakers mounted on poles in the midst of the thickest slums. One rose over a fetid coffeehouse, a cobbled superhovel of plastic and crating. There were men in front of it, dozens of them, squatting on their haunches in the shade and drinking from ancient glass pop bottles and playing peb- ble games in the pitted dirt. Over their heads, the klaxon emitted a steady squawking rant in a language she couldn't recognize.
The men looked up as the van went past, guardedly, mo- tionless. Their clothes were caked with filth. And they were
American clothes: ragged souvenir T-shirts and checkered polyester pants and thick-heeled vinyl dance shoes decades out of, fashion and laced with bits of wire. They wore long turbans of bright quilted rag.
The van drove on, crunching through potholes, kicking up a miasma of dust. Her bladder was bursting. She relieved herself in a corner of the truck, the one that smelled worst.