“This is no road in Ireland,” whispered Polly.
“We’d better turn back—” Crane said.
“McArdle?”
“At least he’s a man. Here, we could find anything.”
“True on the last. But, McArdle, I wonder…”
They were saved further argument. Crane glanced at his watch. “If McArdle was still following us he would have been up on us by now. Let’s face it, Polly. We have the map — the half that gives ingress to the Map Country from the east — and McArdle doesn’t. We were following that map and we came here. He won’t.”
“That’s his hard luck.” Polly stared ahead, trying to see over the brow of the hill flanking the curving road. “All right.” She frowned. “But what’s that up ahead?”
Crane looked. At first he thought it was a brewed up tank; then he recognized it as the wreck of a truck.
“That’ll be Colla,” he said flatly.
“Well—” Polly took a breath and started the car. “We’re here. So let’s do some of the things we said we’d do when we started out on this.”
Crane realized, as they rolled forward slowly, that events hadn’t panned out as they’d expected. His whole entry into the Map Country had been as different as he could have imagined. But then, difference, strangeness, the very breath of the unknown — all these were implicit in the present precarious situation. He waited as the car pulled up beside the shattered truck.
Liam had spoken the truth. Three suitcases lay on the splintered wooden floor in the back. They were scratched and blackened, as though subjected to heat, and when they were opened some of the diamonds within must have been burned. But the remaining flashed a stunning sparkle of light in the sunlit air.
“Cripes!” Polly said, flabbergasted.
“Remember, you’re a lady, Polly. And sling the cases into the boot. Remember, they’ll have cost me a cool hundred thousand.”
“Mercenary, blood-sucking capitalist,” Polly said. They both knew the infantile line of back-chat was covering the fear that made them want to drive screaming from this spot.
Crane took one quick look around the cab. There was no sign of Colla.
“Now look, Polly. We can’t go on. It’d be madness. So okay. We’ve found the Map Country.
And it isn’t as we expected. We’re pretty sure we’ll be killed. Let’s get out.”
“What about Allan?”
“He’s been gone five years, Polly. You’ve grown accustomed to thinking of him as dead, Why try to change that now? And, anyway,” Crane finished with a brutal directness that sought to cover the flaws in this new argument, “he is probably dead now. Like Colla.”
A set look of stubbornness fixed itself on Polly’s face and Crane sighed and felt an impending and unpreventable disaster. But to his surprise, she said: “And you?”
“I’ve discovered there is more to worry about in life than a map or map-hunting. So I wanted to reenter the Map Country. I don’t think I can help Adele now. I feel badly about that; but to me it seems an unshakable truth. So I’m here. Now all I want to do is get the hell out of it.”
Polly gave a strangled laugh. “Maybe that’s an impossibility. Maybe we got to hell in it, already.”
“Maybe. Come on—”
“No, Rolley. I’m sorry. Look, you can walk back to the mist line and walk out safely by yourself if you must. But the sun is shining and there is no immediate sign of danger, it all looks quite and peaceful — and I feel rebellious. I came here to find Allan. I can’t turn around now, now I’m almost there, wherever he is, just because—”
“Because you might get killed?”
She made a face. “It’s not quite like that.” She stood beside him in the dust of the road, stirring patterns with her toe. The countryside lay around them, still and peaceful, charming, restful.
“Anyway, I’m going on for a little.”
She looked determined. She was determined.
Remembering his first encounter with her, Crane did not try to argue any more. A leather satchel lay in the dust of the road and he bent to pick it up. Grenades. He remembered Liam speaking of them. Oh, well, he had used them before and had a good throwing arm. He put his arm through the shoulder strap and adjusted the satchel so that it rested comfortably on his left hip. The weight there and the purpose contained in the satchel reminded him with a vivid stab of memory of the regimental grenade-throwing competitions. He’d always managed to do adequately in practice and competition; but the memory of the times he’d used grenades live against those terrorists remained most strongly — his range and accuracy had gone up by over fifty percent then. But he’d never taken to it as he had sharpshooting; effective — but messy — grenades. His fingers were fumbling with the stiff leather of the strap and the corroded metal of the buckle when Polly screamed.
He looked up fast.
A memory of his childhood rushed back. He felt bleakly exposed.
Across the grassland angling towards the road, sprung apparently from nowhere, rushed a shining, fire-breathing, many-armed clanking monster.
His childhood remembrance had not played him false, then. Maybe the distant fire and smoke and towers he had seen as a child were not visible now — they must be on the far side of this fantastic country, accessible if you held the other portion of the torn master map — but the monsters were real enough. Real, and clanking and flailing prehensile arms — real, and charging straight for him.
There were two of them. Critically, with the experience of the years and his training in antitank techniques draining away much of that enervating supernatural fear, he recognized the tank tracks, the prehensile jointed arms and the tentacular coiling arms, the ruddy flare of some inner power source vomiting through venturi-styled exhausts, the low-domed turret-type excresence riding the main body of the vehicle, and he could rationalize the whole into a vehicle of war, made by — and then smart rationalization broke down. These charging tanks had never been made by the hand of man.
His own hand reached for and found the familiar pineapple feel of a grenade, an old World War Two Mills Thirty Six, and his brain was in the middle of wondering if the thing would still work as his body went through the motions of pin extraction, of checking and of hurling with muscle wrenching force. Then he was diving into the car and Polly’s foot was pressing the accelerator to the floor and the engine was threshing in agony as the tires spun.
“Come on, you brute!” Polly was yelling.
Crane remembered his father and the way the big old red tourer had roared with spinning tires. He sweated. The grenade fell beautifully.
The leading tank reared to one side like a hamstrung horse, a track blasted from a sprocket wheel and flailing into smaller and smaller whippings as it coiled around the driver. The banging sound of metal on metal reached him clearly over the Austin’s engine noise. Bad design, Crane thought fleetingly, as he watched the second clanking monster gain with every yard.
For a few seconds it was touch and go.
Then the gallant Austin showed her speed and the clanking and fire-vomiting venturis lagged, faltered, and dropped away.
“That was a near thing,” Polly said quite calmly. She held onto the wheel and her trim body was firm and without a tremor. She’d probably had the shakes when Crane had been jumping about outside.
“Too near.” He looked back through the leering eye of the smashed back window. The clanking monster was still coming on along the white ribbon of road. The sun struck errant gleams of gold from its hide. For the first time he realized the things had been painted red, a bright, garish, out-of-place vermilion daubed against the serene rolling green countryside. The red dot followed on remorselessly along the winding white road.