"Yeah, Carl?"
"We got company."
"We know. Sam spotted him. Are you and Lori locked inside the car?"
"You bet."
"Does he have anything that looks like a weapon?"
"He's too far away to yell. He's wearing a pressure suit, though."
"Pressure suit?"
"Same kind of protective suit. Armor, maybe? Looks like―Hey! He just took off. "
From out in the desert came the hollow whine-and-wail of jet exhaust. We all got up and filed out to the cab.
"He's got same kind of rocket backpack. Jesus Christ, just lake Commander Cody."
"Commander who?" I said when I got my headset on. "Where the hell is he?" I looked out over the desert to the right. A white dot floated against the hazy sky just above a butte about half a kilometer away. A cloud of dust was settling over the area where he had apparently launched himself.
"You see him?"
"Yeah. What did he do before he took off?"
"Nothing much. Looked like he was searching for something out there. Had some kind of weird equipment. Then he spotted us and blasted off. Took a good look at us first."
The white speck disappeared behind the butte.
"What do we do?" John asked.
"We wait," I said.
We waited, ten minutes. Then he returned, this time piloting a strange variant of a landjumper. He came across the desert at reckless speed, bouncing over rocks and rises, staying around five or ten meters off the ground. From the sound the craft made, I judged the engines to be of a rather primitive jet turbine design. The craft was big and bulky, but had room for at most two passengers and the driver.
"Have him covered, Sam?"
"I've got everything trained on him but missiles, of which we ain't got any."
He zoomed in, stopped, and hovered over a hollow between dunes, then set the craft gently down.
Instead of passengers, he was hauling a load of stuff―boxes, sacks, miscellaneous parcels. He picked up a sack and another thing that looked like an animal skin, and came toward us.
It was plain now that our visitor wasn't human. He… it was much too thin and the arms had two elbows. Generally humanoid, but the proportions were all wrong. It wore a white reflective suit with what looked like a backpack respirator. The helmet was covered with the same sort of cloth as the suit. We couldn't see a face behind the darkly tinted viewscreen. It stopped and looked the rig over, checked out the Chevy, then looked at us again. Apparently the rig seemed a bit intimidating. It went over to Carl, stooping to peer into the driver's side window. The creature was man-high, which had led us to mistake it for a human being at a distance.
Surprisingly, it greeted Carl with a raised right hand. I couldn't see if Carl returned the gesture. The creature then reached into one of the sacks and pulled out what looked like a folded piece of paper, which he unfolded and presented to Carl, pointing out various markings and lines.
"Hey, Carl."
"Yeah."
"What's he trying to sell you?"
"I think it's a roadmap."
Chapter 11
The beings who had colonized this maze were known by the general name of Nogon, but we came to know only a very special and unrepresentative group of them.
They lived in caves and called themselves the Ahgirr, a word which, in their liquid, gangly tongue, was roughly equivalent to The Keepers. Both an ethnic group and a quasi-religious sect, the Ahgirr preferred adhering to ancient ways and customs. Most of their race, both here and on their home planet, lived in huge high-tech arcologies, called faln, named after a giant plant that looks like a mushroom but isn't a fungus. The Ahgirr, however, loved their cave-communities, believing that creatures spawned from the earth should keep close to their origins. For all that, they didn't reject science and technology. No Luddites they, the Ahgirr, in their long history, had produced many of their race's most brilliant scientists. Hokar, the individual who picked us up and brought us in, was a geologist. He'd been out prospecting in the desert when he was surprised by the sight of vehicles on that little-used ingress spur. He saw we were in trouble and came immediately. The Ahgirr were like that―warm, friendly, outgoing… and very human. Their species was the closest to human that anyone, to my knowledge, had ever encountered on the Skyway. They were bipedal, mammalian, ten-digited, two-sexed, and breathed oxygen (Hokar's suit was merely a protection against bright sunlight, which his species couldn't tolerate). They had two eyes, one nose, one mouth, sparse body hair and lots of hair on the head―the whole bit. There were differences, though. You wouldn't mistake them for humans. They had joints in the wrong place. Their skins were translucent, and their odd circulatory systems gave them a distinct pinkish-purple cast. The eyes were huge and pink and structurally dissimilar to the human variety. Their long straight hair was the color and texture of corn silk. (Non Ahgirr―which meant, of course, the rest of the species―wore their hair in various styles. Coiffure was very important in distinguishing ethnic and nationality groups, of which there were many.) But after a while, it was hard not to think of the Ahgirr and their race as just an unusual variety of human beings.
The first task was to get Sam unstuck. The Ahgirr didn't have very much in the way of heavy equipment, but they put in a call (to a nearby faln complex, as we learned later), and an odd-looking towing vehicle came out by Skyway and did the job. We detached the trailer, and the towtruck hauled Sam over the desert to the mouth of the Ahgirr cave-community. Ariadne had to be left in the trailer, but Carl's buggy made the trip an its own power, which was a surprise to nobody. I was waiting for the thing to fly.
All interspecies communication up to this paint had been via the usual half-understood gestures and signing, but fortunately the Ahgirr were computer whizzes, and once they solved the problem of system compatibility, they waded right into Sam's language files―the dictionaries, word-processing programs, compilers, and such. In no time the Ahgirr were speaking to us in English that was completely understandable if a little fractured.
They gave us an apartment to stay in while the language barrier was being broken down. As it turned out, we stayed five weeks, and at no time did we feel as though we were wearing out our welcome. The Ahgirr were eager to make friends with beings similar to themselves. Word spread over the planet; we were something of a sensation.
The second task was to see about getting a new roller. That was going to be a problem. My rig was a bit unusual. It had been built to Terran specifications and design, but an alien outfit had manufactured it. I always had a hard time finding parts far it. Here, light-years away from Terran Maze, it might just be impossible. We were told that a few planets away there was a stretch of Skyway along which lay a number of used vehicle dealerships and salvage yards. We might try there. Carl and Roland volunteered to go and Hokar offered to act as guide. They were gone two days. Meanwhile, the rest of us set about the job of repairing the trailer. Fixing the buckled door wasn't so hard, but all the rear cameras and sensors had pretty much been totaled, which meant buying alien gear to replace them. And that meant a lot of fudging and jury-rigging. But we had to do it if we didn't want to be blind out our back side. We had to make a trip to a faln to buy parts.
Before we got around to that, Hokar, Roland, and Carl returned with an almost-new pair of rollers. A stroke of long-overdue luck.
"We scavanged through junkyard after junkyard," Roland said over dinner in our suite of rooms within the Ahgirr cave-city. "Nothing even remotely resembled the vehicles you usually see in Terran Maze or any of the contingent mazes. We were pretty discouraged, but Hokar said he was sure he remembered seeing vehicles similar to your rig, though not driven by humans. And sure enough-"