Sam slapped me on the shoulder. "Let's go see if Gil Tomasso is home. I hope his heart is strong."
Gil's heart was plenty strong, but he fainted when he saw Sam.
Our next few months weren't very busy. It was just a matter of laying low and waiting for the paradoxical crease in our universe to work itself out. Right now my double was on our farm back on Vishnu. On or about the fourth day of April, he would pick up a small shipment of astronomical equipment from an importer on Barnard's III and set off on a trip to deliver his cargo to Chandrasekhar Deep Space Observatory on a planet called Uraniborg. He would never deliver that equipment.
Actually, that was wrong. We would deliver it for him, more or less on schedule, and, we would do that when my double disappeared through a potluck portal on Seven Suns Interchange.
I had a duty to perform as soon as possible, though. I had to get rid of the cube. I still had it. (Was there a single person who coveted it now? Depends on what now means.)
Darla said that I had given the cube to a member of the Colonial Assembly by the name of Marcia Miller. She said I had simply walked into her office and plopped the cube down on the assemblywoman's desk.
I disguised myself, borrowed Gil's four-roller, got on the Skyway and drove to Einstein, the capital planet.
The Assembly Office Building was big and neoclassical and cost too much money, just like every other governmental barn in the cosmos. I strode down a carpeted, marble-walled corridor, looking at nameplates on doors. Most of the names were eastern European, a few oriental, one or two or three Anglo-Saxon.
"The Honorable Marcia B. Miller, Member of the Assembly," I read aloud, then opened the heavy blond wooden door.
There was a human receptionist, a young woman. I smiled as I stepped past her desk.
She looked up from her console and did a double take. "Kamrada? Sir? Do you have an appointment?"
"Honey, I've had an appointment for ten billion years."
"Sir, you can't go in there!"
I was through the inner door before she could extricate herself from her huge work station. I clucked at the lack of security in the place.
An annoyed Marcia Miller looked up from the screen she was reading. "Who the devil are you?"
"Does the name Daria Vance Petrovsky mean anything to you?"
Her face tightened, then slowly relaxed.
"Marcia, I'm sorry!" the receptionist wailed. "I've called Security!"
"No! No, cancel the call."
"But-"
Miller rose from her desk, still looking at me. "It's okay, Barb. Cancel the call."
Mystified, Barb retreated, closing the door.
Miller sat back down. "Of course I know of Daria Vance Petrovsky. Why shouldn't I recognize the name of the lifecompanion of a high-ranking Militia officer?"
"One who is a subversive and a fugitive from justice?"
"That is none of my-"
"Listen," I said, "I'll make this short. You'll think I'm a crank at first, but in time you'll. know I'm not. I'm Jake McGraw, and I've lived what most people dream. I've driven to the end of the Skyway and met the Roadbuilders. They gave me a map. Here it is." I drew the cube out and held it in my hand. "It's the key to the Skyway system. You'll be hearing about it, and me. Roadbuzz, road yarns, stories, rumors. They're all true. You'll hear my name spoken in bars and roadhouses. They'll say I drove into the fireball of the birthing universe, and they'll be right. It's true, and I even got a bit of a sunburn doing it. Everything they'll say about me will be true-so damn true it'll drive you crazy. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you this map, and I won't be doing you a favor. What you'll have to do is see that the dissident network protects Darla-Daria-at all costs. She is the key to this whole affair. Exactly how, I can't say. But you must do all in your power to protect her."
She began to lose patience, and I silenced her. "I know all about the dissident network," I went on, "and I know all about your involvement in it. Don't worry, I was told this office is debugged. It makes no difference if it isn't. I'm just a crank, right? So, forget it. Here." I dropped the cube on her desk. "Happy birthday, honey."
And then I left. The security guard at the front entrance smiled at me on my way out.
It was a pleasant few months. Gil Tomasso was a gracious host, and then Red Shaunnessey offered to put us up, so we drove over there. Sam and I passed the time repairing the trailer. John recuperated from his burns, and Zoya fell in love with Sam. It was inevitable, I thought. I remembered how well they had hit it off thirty years ago.
But eventually it became time to perform another duty, one I both dreaded and craved.
The trailer was fixed. I climbed in, and Sam saw me off.
"Do you know where?" he asked. "Exactly?"
"No, but there are only a few places on the starslab where hikers can hope to get a ride."
"True. Well, good luck."
"There's no such thing, Sam."
I found her on a planet called Monteleone. She was standing in front of a Stop-N-Shop on the Colonial highway, looking very pickupable. She was wearing her silver Allclyme survival suit and stood with her backpack parked at her feet.
She was beautiful, young, thin, unpregnant, and I was a total stranger to her.
I slid back the port. "You look like you're going somewhere," I said.
But she knew who I was. In fact, she was here for the specific purpose of getting picked up by me. I had acquired a shadow two days back, a blue-seater driven by a dark-haired young man. One of Darla's dissident comrades, probably. The dissidents were probably very confused by now, because they were getting conflicting reports that made it look as though I could be in two places at one time. They were also following my double. But I made it easier to follow me. And so I had swung by this Stop-N-Shop a few times over the past few days. And sure enough…
"Matter of fact, I am," Darla said, picking up her pack. "Are you going where I'm going?"
"Where is that?"
"To the other side of T-Maze. Here, there… everywhere." She smiled, and my heart melted.
"Sure. Hop aboard."
There was nothing strange about it. It was something I had to do. I had to meet Darla, for we had never been properly introduced. And she had to fall in love with me, because she said that she had, once, a long time ago, but I never remembered it, because I wasn't around at the time. It makes sense to me.
We drove around, not aimlessly, just unhurriedly. We toured Hydran Maze, then came back, spent some time on a park planet, camping out in the trailer.
Darla met "Sam" for the first time. "Sam" was the result of my dad's fiddling with the Wang A.I. He tuned up its personality programming and gave it a voice that pretty much could pass for Sam's former computer voice (which never sounded like Sam himself). It was a pretty good approximation-it spooked me. Mostly, the computer kept quiet.
We fell in love. I don't know where we were when we first made love. "Sam" was driving. You ought to try this sometime.
There was one planet… it was green, and it looked like Earth (but not really; they never do), and the sky was scrubbed so squeaky clean that sunlight just slid right down it, spilling into the clearing of a forest of quasioaks and maybe-maples and making the fuzzy seedpods on the tops of tall weeds look like a cloud of ectoplasm at the tip of a magic wand-or halos on angels-steeping the grass and trees and Darla and me and our love in the light of a faraway star, a warmth and a power that has lasted five billion years and will last five billion more. It was a nice place to eat a picnic lunch. And there were motels-cheap ones (I was just about broke), the kind that have the state-of-the-art entertainment gear and beds that squeak and smell of mildew and faintly, ever so faintly, of urine. And have bad water. And a broken ice machine. And a robot desk clerk that nearly pokes your eye out when it hands you the lock pipette. If I had a nickel for every one of those I've stayed in, I could go back to 1964 and spend them. But we made do, and made love. Mostly we kept to the truck, and kept on the road.