He stood near the middle of the field, testing the wind with a wet fingertip. There was a pretty good breeze coming in from the north, and he decided to tape a couple of pennies to his MTA boomerang to keep it from getting wind-whipped. That took only a minute, then he was ready.
He angled himself against the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and shook out his shoulder to loosen the muscle. He'd been considering lifting weights. The top throwers were all in good shape, and he could use a little more power in his arms. The balance was tricky. If you threw too soft, you didn't get any time aloft, and if you threw too hard, you could get a fast nosedive. But there were times when you needed a little more strength, like now, when the wind was gusting, and at his size, Tyrone didn't have any extra muscle. He didn't need to be Hercules or anything, but a little more mass wouldn't hurt.
He made his first throw, to check the angle of the blades and see how the taped coins balanced. The Indian Ocean glowed in a red blur as it spun but wobbled off-center and augured in too fast. He retrieved the 'rang and adjusted the angle on the blades by carefully bending them up. He moved the coin on the long arm in toward the angle a few millimeters, retaped it, then tried another throw.
Better, but still off a hair. Well, he could spend all day adjusting the thing, especially in gusty conditions, and it was close enough for practice.
He was on his seventh toss, having finally gotten above a minute for flights, which was about as good as he expected in the wind, when he heard Nadine yell at him.
"Yo, Ty!"
She came across the field, shrugged out of her backpack, and removed from it her own MTA, a long, L-shaped blue and white striped model. It was a Quark Synlin. He'd never seen one up close, but he'd seen holos, and he saw a couple at the tourney, from a distance, so he recognized it right off.
"Man, how'd you come by that? I thought Quark quit the business."
"He did, but there are a few still for sale. My mother told me if I could show her I could handle the top-of-the-line 'rang, she'd loan me the money for it. When I won the contest, she figured I was ready. It came air express this morning." She held it out. Tyrone took it from her as if it was a live baby, holding it carefully.
"How does it throw?"
"Dunno, I haven't had a chance yet. Why don't you give it a try?"
He blinked at her. "You need to be first, it's yours."
"No, go ahead. You're already warmed up."
"Yeah?"
"Sure."
He wet his finger, checked the wind.
She said, "Medium-hard, angle up fifty, don't lay over. Better to over-vertical. Five to ten into the wind."
He nodded. Set his stance. Took a good breath, reared back, and made the toss.
The big Quark zipped out about fifty meters before it started to make its turn, gained height — a lot of height, thirty, thirty-five meters — then started to shift from perp to flat. It bounced a couple of times on an updraft.
"Man, look at that!"
It was a beautiful flight, wind and all. It just seemed to hang there forever, and it finally came down within twenty meters of where he'd made the throw, slightly down field. He did an easy slap catch.
Tyrone didn't have his stopwatch, but Nadine had hers. "Two minutes fifty-one," she said. "Not bad."
"Yeah not bad! That beats my PR!" With that time, he would have beaten her at the tourney, too. Damn!
He looked at the boomerang, then smiled at Nadine. "Thanks." He handed it back to her. "Your turn. We've got like twenty minutes before the soccer geeks run us off."
"Time enough for two throws, you think?"
"You wish. " They both laughed.
Nadine was all right. Especially for a girl.
Chapter 15
Jay Gridley stood on a patch of high desert listening to the silence among the rocks and scrub growth. The sun was a blinding mallet, hammering everything beneath it into the dead ground. It looked like the middle of nowhere, and if you headed directly east, west, or south, you'd leave the U.S. and hit Mexico; from here, the nearest border was only a mile or three away.
Next to him, Saji stood, looking much more like a Native American than a Tibetan. He wore faded blue jeans, cowboy boots, a long-sleeved work shirt, and a white ten-gallon hat with a rattlesnake skin band around it.
"Smell the water?" Saji said.
Jay, dressed much like Saji, but with a shadier, wide-brimmed Mexican sombrero, shook his head. "All I smell is desert. Dust, sand, and baked rocks, that's it."
Indeed, every step they took kicked up more reddish brown dust, fine as talcum powder. It coated his boots and clothes, stung his eyes and nose, and made breathing hard. There was no wind, so at least the dust settled quickly. A very realistic scenario, and it was Saji's. Something like this was still beyond Jay's capabilities.
"Okay, let's see if we can cut some sign."
Jay shook his head. "How did you learn all this tracking stuff?"
Saji smiled his idiot's grin. "Jerry Pierce, a Navajo buddy of mine, is a Son of the Shadow Wolves. Tracker for the Border Patrol. He taught me about this, I taught him about the Middle Way."
"A Navajo Buddhist?"
"Why not? Buddhism doesn't get in the way of most other religious beliefs, at least not the ones that aren't militantly monotheistic. Come on."
The two of them walked carefully over the sandy ground. After a few yards, Saji said, "Stop. You see it?"
They were maybe ten feet from the edge of a steep drop-off, a cliff that went down sixty, seventy feet. "See what? The end of the world?"
"Nothing quite so dramatic. Right there in front of you."
Jay strained his eyes, staring at the ground. Here were three things: hardpan dirt, a single broken blade of pale green grass, and a weathered, dusty, reddish rock. The ground here wouldn't hold a track. "I don't see anything."
"Not anything?"
"Okay, fine, I see something. There's a patch of hard dirt, a rock, a piece of dead grass. That's it."
"Look around. Any other vegetation?"
Jay raised from his crouch, glanced at the area around him. "There's something looks like a creosote bush about ten yards that way." He moved toward the cliff edge, peered over it. Nothing growing down that way. "Nothing close. There's a big cactus way the hell over there. It's desolation row here."
"Okay, think about that for a minute."
"No offense, Saji, but if I could think for more than thirty seconds without going blank-stupid, I wouldn't need you!"
"Close your eyes, count your breath."
Jay sighed. He did as he was told. One… two… three… what… did… I… see…?
He opened his eyes. "The grass."
Saji nodded. "What about it?"
"It doesn't belong here. How did it get here? There's nothing else around like it."
"Good. Could it have blown here?"
Jay shook his head. "No wind. And if it had been here very long, it would have been dry as a bleached bone, but it's still green."
"Which means?"
"Something put it there. Maybe it fell out of a shoe or was stuck to somebody's pants leg."
"Very good. Now what?"
Jay considered it. Saji had told him, but he couldn't remember it. Okay, think logically, Jay. It was hard, but it wasn't like he had to do any major programming, just take the next small step. Which would be…?
"Spiral out, look for tracks in any dirt that will take them?"
"Good. Let's see it. Careful — you don't want to obliterate any sign."