"Wow!" Carl shouted. "It's shorting out the barrier!"
"Shorting out" was as good a way to put it as any. Gliding over the road, the sphere was cancelling the barrier phenomenon as it went, drawing tendrils of fire to itself, absorbing them. The barrier was breaking apart, disintegrating in a wild display of pyrotechnics. Walls of incandescence wavered and tumbled, wraiths of lambent flame leaped skyward, then exploded into multicolored shards. Fountains of sparks poured from midair to cascade onto the roadway. Geysers of energy erupted, arched prominences arose and dissipated. The show was accompanied by sharp cracks of thunder and the sizzle of powerful electrical discharges.
Transfixed, I watched. When the disturbance disappeared into the smog I looked ahead to find that Carl was moving forward. I looked at the forward scanner screen. The five blips were still holding position. The Chevy scooted down the road. When it was just about to fade into the smog, another Green Balloon birthed itself from the roof. Carl swung the car into a hasty U-turn, tires screeching, and roared back. I fired up the engine.
"Let's go, gang!" Carl yelled as he tore by. "That balloon was trying to tell us something!"
"Just follow the bouncing ball, folks," Sam said merrily.
I said, "These kinds of things really don't happen to other people, do they?"
"No, son. You alone in the universe have been singled out."
"Why do you think that is?" I asked while swinging the rig around yet again.
"The gods are capricious."
"Thank you, O Oracle."
"I used to know an O'Oracle. Shamus O'Oracle. Owned a bar in Pittsburgh."
We followed the bouncing ball. Either Carl's estimations of its speed were wrong or the balloon was gaining energy from the encounter, because we couldn't keep up with it. Nothing but hazy air stood between us and the cylinders, which came into sight about ten minutes later. The balloon had done its job, having gobbled up the barrier all the way to the edge of the dome of airlessness maintained by the force fields surrounding the portal. The Green Balloon was nowhere to be seen, though. Either it had faded away or had gone on through the aperture, which immediately brought up a question: Had it, if the latter were true, interfered with the force field or, God forfend, with the portal machinery itself? But now was not the time to pose the question, let alone answer it. The cylinders were there, as was the aperture they created, and we shot through with nothing on our screens to indicate that anyone had a mind to follow.
Sam's reaction to what greeted us on the other side of the portal was something like, "Wha―? Huh???!!"
I immediately forgot all about the Green Balloon.
It took a while for what we were seeing to sink in. We had ingressed onto a limitless, mathematically level plain, its surface shiny and metallic, suffused with a pale blue tinge. The sky was a glory of stars bejeweling curtains of luminous gas. A spectacular globular cluster hung a few degrees off the zenith. Rivers of dark dust carved their courses in the firmament. The terrain was flat, impossibly flat. Not a rock, not a rill broke the uniformity, not a rise or a dip, however slight. It was the biggest billiard ball in the universe.
But all of that was the least of it. Sam had gasped for another reason.
There was no road under us.
Rather, the surface was one big road.
"Sam?" I said casually. "Where the hell are we?"
"Son, I'm speechless. In all my years on the Skyway, I've never seen anything like it."
"But where's the road?" I said.
"Your guess is as good as mine. We may be on it, though."
"What do you mean?"
"There may be some way to sense it―except I've tried everything already and I'm damned if I can see it."
" Are you scanning anything out there?" I asked.
"Nothing, absolutely nothing. I can't make a good guess as to how far away the horizon is."
After thinking a moment, I said, "Take a fix on a star up ahead. Maintain our course that way. I don't think I've drifted too much since we ingressed."
"Got one."
"You have the conn."
"Aye, aye."
"I'm going to assume there is a road under us, even though we may not be able to detect it―not a road, I guess, but a way. A direction to go in."
"Good idea. Hey, what's this? A dome, for pity's sake."
A "dome" is the faint microwave image that betrays the presence of a portal's force field shell. The cylinders themselves don't give off any electromagnetic radiation that's easily detectable at a distance, and they reflect none.
"Where?" I said.
"Thirty degrees to port."
It was unusual to find a portal so near an ingress point; however, this was hardly an average stretch of Skyway.
I got on the horn.
"People, we've detected a portal very near here. I'm for shooting it. Like to get off this bowling ball as soon as possible. What say you all?"
Everybody said let's get off this bowling ball, like, immediately.
"Follow me," I ordered.
Sam made the turn. I eased back into the captain chair for a short rest. We had been on the road for only a few hours, but I was a trifle tired. Getting old.
"I'll be switched. Another one."
"Portal?" I asked.
"Yup. And another. They're popping up over the horizon. Well, now at least I can get a fix… let's see. You may be interested to know that the heavenly body we presently inhabit is a little over five thousand kilometers in diameter."
"Pretty big," I mused. "And covered with portals. Interesting. But let's go ahead and shoot this near one, per our plan."
"Our plan? Wait, let me put stronger sneer quotes around that. Our 'plan'? "
"Such as it is. Roland, what o you think we have here? Any ideas?"
"Some fairly definite ones," Roland answered. "Remember all those Roadbugs we saw coming here?"
"Yeah, and I think I know what you're driving at."
"It all adds up. Access to this place was barred to all traffic but the Bugs. We get through by a fluke and find something completely different from every Skyway planet we've seen. It's obvious that the road with the barrier was a service road. And this…" He swept his arm out expansively.
"This," I finished for him, "must be the Garage Planet of the Roadbugs."
Chapter 17
"Or a garage planet," Roland went on. "One of many in a vast network servicing the whole Skyway system."
"With a web of service roads connecting them," I said. "Stands to reason."
"I wonder if this is the main garage for the Milky Way―do you think?"
"Maybe," I answered, "if we're still in the Milky Way."
Roland looked through the forward port at the sky. "No telling where we are, but if we're still in our galaxy, we may be very near the galactic nucleus."
"Let's hope not too near. A galactic-core black hole throws out a lot of hard radiation."
"If you're worried," Sam said, "the counters are absolutely silent. Not even cosmic-ray background. Either we've got equipment failure―which would contradict what I'm reading―or this planet has radiation shielding."
"Interesting," I said. "Wonder what it means?"
"Imagine a radiation shield covering a whole planet," Roland marveled. "And one that can stop high-energy particles, too." He shook his head. "But why? What needs to be protected here?"
"Maybe the fact that we're in a different region of the galaxy has something to do with it," I suggested. Then I shrugged.
"Who knows? And who cares, for that matter?" I folded my arms, snuggled into the seat and closed my eyes. "I'm going to try to catch a wink or two."
"You do that," Sam said cheerily. "Nothing to eyeball out there anyway. Best to let me handle it."
So I did for about the next ten minutes. I didn't sleep, though. The matter of what happened to the Green Balloon reasserted itself, and I realized something. The technology of Carl's automobile was at least equal to if not greater than the technology of the Roadbuilders. This was nothing less than a revelation. Such a state of affairs was unprecedented in the known sections of the Skyway. The technological achievements of the Roadbuilders were generally thought to be unequalled in the universe. No one had any hard evidence in support of the notion, but there was an intuitive feel of truth to it. The portals were impossible constructs, yet they existed. It was difficult to conceive that the race who had created them had not had mastery of the basic forces of the universe.