The stars shifted suddenly. Then again. And again. Each time, a single star up ahead grew brighter, and with a few more jumps it stood out as a tiny disk against the spattering of glowing points around it.
"Looks awfully familiar," Arthur said suspiciously. He shook his head. "Couldn't be. But it's the right spectral type. Let's see if we can resolve a planet or two."
Delicately, Arthur palpated the face of the box, which, I had come to believe, was some sort of direct interface or link between the ship's instrumentation and Arthur's powerful robot brain.
I scanned the star swarm around us. To our rear, the swarm thickened, congealing along a long milky band of luminescence shot through with dark clouds. I searched left and right, trying to pick out constellations.
"You won't believe this," Arthur said. "But guess where we are."
"That's Sol over there," I said. "The sun. Earth's sun."
"You just earned your astronomy merit badge, kid."
15
"I'm going home," Carl said, awestruck. "I'm really going home."
"Hold on, dearie," Arthur cautioned. "We know where we are, but not when we are. This could be Earth in one million A.D., or B.C., for that matter, or any time in between. So don't get your hopes up. That was a completely blind jump we made. The chances of our winding up here at all were approximately infinity to one." Arthur shook his head. "Amazing. If I'd aimed for here, I never would have made it. Not in one jump, anyway. To've done it with any degree of accuracy and safety, fifty would have been more like it."
"Any way of finding out when we are?" I asked.
"Well, several. I could clock the rate of a few known pulsars and get a fairly good idea of the galactic epoch we're in… if I had a few known pulsars to look at. Trouble is, I don't have much in storage about Terran astronomy, not anything like what I'd need to make those calculations."
"I thought you knew everything, Arthur," Darla said. "How much do you know about Terran astronomy?" Arthur countered.
"Not a whole lot."
"Well, there you are. Neither does this ship, although there's a lot of general astronomical data in its memory. Maybe the ship's computer can come up with something. Offhand, I'd say there's a good chance we're in the general time frame you people came from, give or take a few thousand years. I do know a few constellations; and they're not at all distorted."
"One way to find out for sure," I said.
"How?"
"Let's go to Earth and take a look at it."
"That idea makes me a little nervous," Arthur said. "Don't like to go mucking about where I don't belong. But…" He swung his ugly dog head around and gave me his grimacing, nonhuman approximation of a smile. "What the hell, eh? We have nothing to lose but our lives."
"'That's the spirit, Arthur," I told him.
"Spare me the cliches."
It took Arthur twelve hours to dodge and weave his way through the solar system, which wasn't bad time, considering that we traveled nearly two billion kilometers. In fact, I thought it was great time, but Arthur said it wasn't, giving the excuse that he had to take it easy in the midst of great gravitational stress. I don't know what he was talking about, because we didn't see any planets on the way in, not even Jupiter. And not one asteroid. But I don't know much about space. I like something firm under my feet.
We spent the time in the truck, sleeping, eating the great gobs of food that the factory people had given us, and talking. "Have you considered what you might find when we get to Earth?" I asked Carl.
"Yeah," he said, grinning. "Hot dogs, the L.A. Dodgers, cars that run on gasoline, movies, girls…"
Lori folded her arms and shot daggers at him. "Have you thought of anything else?" I said.
He shrugged. "Like what?"
I really didn't know how to tell him. "I guess it depends on when we arrive."
"When? I don't get you."
I tried another tack. "What about Lori?"
"Oh, I've thought about that."Carl pulled her over to him and hugged her with one arm. "We've decided. We're getting married."
Lori smiled winsomely. "Yeah," she said.
"Going to be complicated."
"How so?" Carl asked, frowning.
"Well, remember. Lori's time of origin is almost two hundred years in the future. There're a few adjustments she's going to have to make."
"I know," Lori said. "Imagine having to worry about tooth decay." She made a face.
"Yeah, tooth decay, and other bothersome things. But more than that, Carl, you're going to have to establish some kind of identity for Lori. Some sort of fictitious but convincing background for her. You can't very well go around telling everybody that she's from another planet."
"Why not?" He waited for my look of incredulity, then chuckled. "Yeah, I know. Nobody's ever going to believe my story. I'd get laughed out of the country. Or they'd lock me up and throw away the key."
"Right. Don't even try. And that car stays here."
"Hey… wait a minute. That car would back up my story all the way! Yeah! Why didn't I think of that?"
"Hold it, Carl."
"Let 'em laugh at my story. I'll just fire a Tasmanian Devil at 'em and let 'em see how funny it all is. Hell, I'm taking the car."
"Carl, it won't work."
"Why not? Forget it, Jake. It's my car, and I'm taking it with me."
I stared at him for a moment. "Carl, how old are you? You've never told me."
"Nineteen."
"Really? I thought you were a little older than that. You look it."
"I got used to telling people I was twenty-one. But after that year I spent driving around in outer space, I must look like I'm fifty."
"You never went into that period of your life, either. What did you do out there on the road?"
"Nothing. I'd stay in motels. Eat. Drive around a little. Sleep in the car. I stayed with a g-uh, a friend for a couple weeks. Then I thought of getting a job, but I didn't have any papers. So I kept driving around."
"Did the Militia give you any trouble?"
"I was stopped once, for not having a proper license plate. But I gave the cop two gold coins, and she let me off with a warning."
Our stalwart law enforcement personnel. "I'm surprised you were only stopped once."
"They chased me several times. But all the cops ever got was a lot of dust in their teeth."
I nodded. I knew that car very well. "What did you do for money?"
"I found all these gold coins in the trunk. I guess Prime put them there."
I didn't know how to go about telling him that I didn't think Prime had done it.
Earth.
I hadn't seen it in more than thirty years. It hung in space beneath us looking like a huge blue and white marble, its land masses faint brown texturings beneath a gauze-wrapping of cloud. Day was breaking over the Philippines, and the swirling gray fingers of a tropical depression hovered over New Guinea. Early morning sun glared off the bright blue islandfreckled Pacific.
We made our entry into the atmosphere somewhere in the vicinity of Wake Island, I think. We swept over the Hawaiians at a screaming Mach 12, then decelerated rapidly, following a flight path that hewed fairly close to the Tropic of Cancer, if I remembered my Terran geography.
We now had a fairly good idea what time frame we had jumped into. The ship had tracked numerous artificial satellites in orbit about the Earth, but not the profusion of my day. No power satellites, no geosynchronous space colonies, no activity in and about the moon. No space traffic whatsoever. We were obviously somewhere in the middle to late twentieth century, the dawn of the age of space travel. I had warned Arthur not to make a dead-on approach to the western coast of the United States. I did remember my Terran history, and these were very paranoid times. Carl agreed. Arthur said he didn't know whether the ship was radar-transparent, because in the era in which the ship was built, no one worried about prehistoric technologies like radar. There was a chance that alarms were already going off all over the place. So we scared the shit out of Mexico, hung a right at the tip of the Baja peninsula, and headed north following the coast and flying low.