"Maybe," I said. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about portals lately… the Skyway, the cylinders, how the whole system works. Never really gave it much thought before."
"Everyone takes the Skyway for granted," John said. "Simply part of the landscape."
"We can't be so complacent," Roland said ruefully.
"Right," I agreed.
"If I never see this damn road again…" Susan grumbled, shaking her head.
"l'm in sympathy with that," John said. "I think we're all road-weary at this point!" He chuckled. "Except for Jake, perhaps. Do starriggers ever get tired of traveling Jake?"
"You bet―but after a few years, you just get numb. Most of the time, though, I like it. I like the road."
The commit markers were coming up. Here, they were just white-painted metal posts on either side of the roadway. The Roadbuilders hadn't put them there―it was up to local inhabitants to mark the point beyond which it was unsafe to stop. Back in Terran Maze, and in most mazes I'd been in, the markers were more elaborate―flashing lights, holograms, and such.
I checked over the instruments; Everything looked fine.
And just as I shifted my eyes to check the yellow warning tag it began flashing red.
"Jake," Sam said quietly.
"I see it. Too late to stop. Damn."
"What a time for it."
"Trouble, Jake?" John wanted to know.
"A little. We'll be okay, though."
I hoped fervently. The flashing red didn't mean the roller was going sugar on us―suffering an instantaneous crystallization that could turn the supertraction tread into white congealed powder―but it did mean it could go at any moment. Maybe now, maybe two days from now; there was no way to predict.
We were past the commit-markers and racing for the first pair of cylinders. The safe corridor, a narrow land bounded by two solid white lines, rolled out at us. Cross over either of those lines and you've had it. The rig shuddered and groaned, caught in the delicately balanced gravitational stresses around us.
"Keep her steady, Jake," Sam warned, "and be ready for a sudden jump to the right."
The rig shook and buffeted us in our seats.
"This is a rough one," Sam commented. "Just our luck."
I felt the tug of an unseen hand, dragging the rig to the left. I corrected, and suddenly the hand let go, sending us precipitously in the opposite direction. But I was a veteran at this; I hadn't overcorrected, overreacted. This portal was a bit hairy but I had seen worse. If only the roller would hold. The cylinders marched by, a stately procession of dark monuments. Between them―I knew but couldn't look―the view of the terrain was refracted into crazy, funhouse-mirror images, work of the powerful gravitational fields.
Ahead was the aperture itself, a fuzzy patch of nothingness straddling the road. We shot straight into it.
Chapter 2
We got through.
The ailing roller was still intact, but the flashing red warning stayed on. I shut off the holo array. Then I lowered our speed to 50 km/hr, took my crash helmet down from the rack behind the seat and put it on. I rarely wear it, though I should. The bulky thing is more than a safety helmet; it has submicron chips in it for just about everything-CPUs, communications, short-range scanning, even encephalo-teleoperator circuitry, though I never did buy the rest of the hookup. I prefer to operate machinery hands-on. The thought of just sitting there, steering the rig on a whim and an alpha wave makes me a little nervous.
We had arrived on a world that didn't look much like Winnie's jungle home, and I was beginning to think that her Itinerary Poem contained some misinformation, until the Skyway plunged from the high plateau we were on into a series of hairpin turns, winding its way down a range of heavily forested mountains. I worried about the roller all the way, taking the curves at a crawl, not wanting to juice up the traction to high grab and aggravate the condition of the bad one. At full charge and maximum traction, I could have roared down there at 80 km/hr, had I a wild hair up my fundamental aperture.
The forestation was luxuriant, but not tropical. The trees looked vaguely Earthlike from a distance, but the foliage was radically different, and the colors varied from deep turquoise to brilliant aquamarine, with lots of stray pinks and reds mixed in. The effect on the eyes was slightly disturbing, colors shimmering and shifting as the retinal cells vacillated over what wavelengths to take first.
I didn't have much time to look. The curves were getting dicey, and I bad my hands full. Everyone else gaped out the ports, marveling at the strange palette of colors.
I did notice that the trees were enormous, with thick straight trunks shooting up as high as a hundred meters.
"Great logging country," Sam said.
"I hope there are loggers," Susan said," and I hope they have restaurants to eat in, with clean restrooms, and I hope the food is good, and I hope there's a place to stay with nice big beds, and―" She broke off and sighed. "Don't mind me."
"We could all do with a break, Suzie," John commiserated.
Lori yelled something from the back.
"What was that, Lorelei?" John called.
"I said I have to piss so bad my back teeth are swimmin'!"
"Hey, Carl―" I began, then realized something. "Hey! What the hell is your last name, anyway?"
"Chapin."
"Oh. Why. don't you let Lori up and let her use the… oh, hell. Suzie'?"
Suzie started to unstrap. "Sure."
I slowed down almost to a stop while Susan went back to make sure Lori didn't re-bang her head on the way to the john. Chapin came up front, as there was no privacy back there.
He had joined our group rather recently; lastnight, in fact. Since that time he'd kept pretty much to himself, when not keeping an eye on Lori. I didn't know if anyone really knew who he was, or why he was with us. For that matter, I was not completely straight on the facts myself.
The trip across Splash had taken most of the day, and the trek across Snowball and Nothing-to-See had eaten up the rest of it. Everyone had been trying to get some sleep, and there had been little conversation. What there had been, Carl had not participated in beyond pleasantries, except when cussing out Lori.
"About time you were formally introduced to everyone, Carl. Don't you think? Have you met everyone?"
"I remember you from somewhere," he said to me wryly.
I smiled. "And I seem to have a distinct recollection of stealing your buggy."
"Oh, my God, that car," John remembered, slapping his forehead and rolling his eyes. "Where in the name of all that's unholy did you get that thing?"
"That's John Sukuma-Tayler," I said. "John, meet Carl Chapin."
"Hello. A little belated, but nice to meet you."
"Don't get up. Nice to meet you, too, John. And… it's a little late, but thanks for the help last night."
"You're very welcome. But Roland, here, was responsible for engineering it."
Roland unstrapped, got up, and took Chapin's hand. "Roland Yee. It's a pleasure. Where the hell did you get that car?"
Chapin laughed. "I get asked that a lot. I bought it from a custom vehicle manufacturer."
"Alien, I suppose."
"Yeah."
"Who?" Roland asked pointedly.
"Well…"
"The technology was fantastic. You couldn't have gotten it from any known race on the Skyway." Roland's tone was a trifle accusing.
"Roland," John interjected, "I think you're being a bit―"
"I'm sorry," Roland was quick to go on. "It's just that our whole experience with your vehicle was… well, disconcerting to say the least."
John nodded. "To say the very least."
"I can imagine," Chapin said, "but you shouldn't go around stealing things that don't belong to you."
"I stole it, Carl," I said. "They were kidnapped."