Eve's reply, he thought, lacked warmth. Something had changed between them now. He couldn't say what he'd seen in her gaze during the past few days, but figured it had to be fear. Because he'd seen a bushel of it on her face as she'd stared out that window.
The diesel steadied to a softer thud after twenty seconds of Hutch's anxiety, and he eased them away without feeling the impact of Ba'al's scimitars again. Built for hovering and not for ramming, the vehicle could not have withstood many such collisions. Hutch was too busy to notice that Eve had rolled her window down slightly; was flicking her fingertips into the night breeze.
Eve's temptation was to insist that she be let out of the 'chuckwagon'. That, she was certain, she could not get away with. She had sprinkled her lust-message on the night air, and for now it would have to be enough. Later she could return alone in a chartered hovercraft to make her assignation. In the meantime she would research Russian boars, the better to make her alliance.
For the first time in her life Eve had faced a masculinity so full of clout that she had not dreamed of bending it to her will. Ba'al, the prince of hell, was not a thing you vied with; he was Something you paid homage to.
No one saw the long sensitive snout jerk up from the water, wriggling like the tip of an elephant's trunk, questing after the hoverbus. Ba'al remained indifferent to the dwindling thud and whirr, but was no longer indifferent to what he smelled. Unless his nostrils deceived him — and they rarely did — the noisy vehicle contained an oestrus female of his own breed. He had not happened across any females for over a year and the last had not been in oestrus, and had not been pleased at the size of her suitor. Any experienced female might suspect that, if the corkscrew-ridged penis of a standard feral Russian boar grew to nearly half a meter in length, then the organ of Ba'al would represent much too much of a good thing.
Hutch got the vehicle up to highway speeds once or twice, but at night in broken brush country he averaged scarcely half that pace. Ba'al, with a consuming curiosity and nothing better to do, followed at a distance-eating trot, undecided whether to risk the bangsticks of many men to satisfy his suspicions. In any case he could afford caution; he felt no compulsion but the urge of his scrotum.
CHAPTER 50
Quantrill was tempted to leave his damaged critic in the care of the Brubakers before leaving on his mission of prepayment, but hit on a better ploy. He hid the vacuum vial with a note of explanation in a light fixture of old Brubaker's office in Eureka; wrote a letter addressed to Mr. Brubaker in a fictitious town in Nevada; and gave the return address as Brubaker's own in Eureka. In the letter was only a note giving the location of ‘something of interest'. After mailing the letter, he told old Brubaker to check his returned mail carefully, if Quantrill himself did not return from his ride in the IEE delta. Anyway, if the letter went awry Brubaker would find the vial soon enough. Postwar incandescent bulbs seldom lasted a month before replacement.
Young Brubaker had fretted and sweated to copy the massive crates which had been offloaded from Japan and scheduled for one M. Chabrier of San Rafael Laboratories. The largest of the replacement crates contained a fast hovercycle. One of the others contained Ted Quantrill with weapons, heated bodysuit, rations for five days, and a ventilation slot fitted with a mass-motion sensor. When anything larger than — a wharf rat approached Quantrill's crate, Quantrill knew it.
Most of the other crates were, in fact, the originals with tunneling equipment of Japanese manufacture.
Carefully stacked in hoppers, battery pans, and in every unoccupied corner of those crates lay bags of granular material labeled 'desiccant'—moisture-absorbent chemical. Most dessicant's were harmless silicates. Old Brubaker had diverted the Japanese silicates in favor of a chemical so cheap it was employed as fertilizer: ammonium nitrate.
Like many a cheap substitute, ammonium nitrate had its side effects. It was fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate that once filled the hold of the freighter S. S. Grandcamp and, on the sixteenth of April 1947, blew the ship and most of Texas City, Texas halfway to Houston. Old Brubaker judged that four tons of it, confined in an underground lab, might well boost a hunk of the San Rafael desert halfway to Mars.
To Quantrill's dismay, his crate was lashed down on the aisle of the cargo bay in the IEE delta. Every time the cargo-master passed, Quantrill's motion sensor readied him for action. At least he was near enough to the cockpit to hear some of the conversation and in this way he gauged his progress.
Quantrill performed in-place calisthenics, read by the light of a pocket chemlamp, and felt the great airship respond to side winds as it slid toward Utah from Eureka. He heard the captain say they were maintaining one-fifty kph. groundspeed, and tried to place the voice. As a teen-ager, Quantrill had briefly served on the ill-fated delta Norway and had met men from other crews. The cargo master was 'Cole'; nothing to catch the tripwires of Quantrill's memory. But the captain, 'Steve', might be a man named Will Stevens. From the Cayley? The Santos-Dumont? one of the Norway's sister ships, anyway.
Quantrill's mission included leaving the crate to set a time-delay incendiary beneath the delta's gas cells.
He heard the interchanges between Steve and Cole. The two men chafed aloud against their masters, spoke of their kids and their ration coupons. These were not the enemy, in Quantrill's mind; these were innocent teamsters of Streamlined America. It no longer mattered to Quantrill whether he had met either of them before; it mattered very much that they would fall as flaming crisps from a gigantic midair incinerator, casual victims of Quantrill's vendetta. He felt an upwelling of joy to realize that he had decided of his own free will— free will! Thank you, Sanger—against destroying the delta.
Eight hours and a time-zone later, the stirlings changed their whispery songs as the delta descended.
Quantrill heard Steve's complaint, voiced to someone at the moorage: "Better get some floodlights set up, Chabrier. If you people don't get us a decent moorage, one of these days I'll put a strut through your roof. It'll be dark before we're snubbed down."
Quantrill ventured the private opinion that the lab would soon lack not only moorage, but roof as well. He sought handholds, waiting for a series of jolts, and silently praised the captain as he heard fondly remembered sounds; rasps of strut against concrete, creaks of a rigid spidery structure two hundred meters long as it became linked to the landing pad. It was a nice piece of work without mooring sockets.
Cole Riker inspected the strut anchors before hauling pallets to the cargo hatch and spoke briefly with Chabrier while directing the floodlights. Then as he rode down with the third pallet, Riker muttered, "That crazy Chabrier is either queer for me or he wants out of here mighty bad." A hand's breadth away, Quantrill stifled the urge to whisper an inane reply. Riker had told no one of Chabrier's pathetic attempts to befriend him, but after three meetings he began to suspect that he represented, to the Frenchman, some form of potential escape.
Quantrill's pallet thudded and jounced en route to the elevator. He heard a Gallic accent entwined with the cargomaster's, heard the same voice raised among those of cargo handlers in some oriental tongue.
This was a complication: what if he had to face down a crew without an interpreter? The goddamn Brubakers might've handed him a translating voder — but they'd briefed him on the Chinese staff and he hadn't thought of it either. Quantrill resolved to waste anyone who couldn't follow orders; the Sinolnd war was still too recent for him to harbor much pity for a Chinese national.