There was less than a quarter mile from the main gate, but that distance might as well have been a light-year or two. The jam of robots had ceased moving a long time ago.
But then something of a small miracle happened…
There was a commotion behind them. They turned to see a line of Earth Police making its way down the alley. Noted for recruiting the largest individuals in the Empire, the EP served as the Planet’s premier security force. Few things stood in their way when they got the call to duty. No surprise, they had a solution to the blockade of ‘bots.
The captain of the rank simply directed a levitation beam at the swarm of robots. Causing the tin cans to rise about ten feet off the ground, he created a tunnel of sorts for his policemen to walk through. When the column passed by, Erx and Berx simply pulled their helmet visors down and fell in behind the group.
Before anyone noticed, they had marched the final block and a half to the stadium entrance and right through the main gate itself.
At that point the two Earth Policemen in front of them turned and realized what the explorers were up to.
These gigantic creatures lifted Erx and Berx up off their feet and literally threw them out of the line. They landed hard into the crowd jammed around the gate, knocking over a dozen people at least.
But it didn’t matter.
They were in.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
Hunter looked up from his control panel and thought about the question for a moment. This might have been the first time since leaving Fools 6 that someone had asked him what he wanted.
“Sure I want to do it,” he replied. “Why not?”
Calandrx smiled. “I’m glad you’re still sounding positive about it. That’s a good sign.”
“Think that if you want,” Hunter said. “But to tell you the truth, I’d do just about anything to get out of here.”
They were in the subsubbasement of the Earth Race arena, locked inside one of the tiny, concrete vessel bays that made up the holding area for the contest’s participants. Hunter was sitting in his cockpit; Calandrx was lording over a bottle of slow-ship wine. One of thirteen compartments that ran off a circular hallway that held an air tube in its center, this had been their home for the past six days. It was cool, damp, musty — not the best conditions for Hunter’s flying machine. It also seemed to be quite haunted. Even though they were sealed in, they were periodically assaulted by the most ghostly howling, outright screaming, and the sounds of a woman wailing, all of it coming from somewhere deep in the walls.
It was a very strange place, but they had no choice except to be here. True, the regulations for the Earth Race took up an entire nanodisk of memory, much of it written in the archaic language that few people on Earth even understood anymore. But some of the rules were clear. One said that all pilots had to remain unseen in the six days before the race (thus the Emperor’s “symbolic” week off). Another said the racers had to be sequestered here, with their handlers, five stories below the earth, in the ‘combs, while preparing for the competition. No surprise, Hunter’s star-crashn’ glow had faded quickly in this place.
No one had seen them since they’d been interned here. Hunter had spent the time listening to Calandrx’s war stories and getting an education on the Empire’s military history, all while checking, rechecking, and then triple-checking every one of his machine’s critical flight systems. This had kept him busy; there were many adjustments to be made to his craft after the skewing it had experienced while jumping into and out of the twenty and six.
It also kept his mind off of who might be doing all of the howling and screaming and wailing.
“You always hear the good buzz about this contest,” Calandrx was telling him now. “But I know guys who started off stinking of boldness, yet by the time they launched, flew the race and crossed the finish line… well, let’s just say they were different people. That transdimensional stuff had scrambled their brains a bit. I know it did mine.”
Hunter went back to testing his control panel lights. “If you really thought you could talk me out of this, I wish you’d done it six days ago. Then we could have avoided this hole in the ground altogether.”
“To the contrary, my friend,” Calandrx said with a sigh. “If you decided not to run this race, my life would return to its old boring ways. Reading my books, lighting my candles. Everyone needs a change now and then.”
Hunter looked about the dank compartment. “But is this really the change you were looking for? I mean, this place gives me the creeps.”
“Yes, I think they do that on purpose,” Calandrx said knowingly. “At least they did back when I ran the race. It’s their way of introducing you to the madness to come.”
Hunter reattached his light screen. “Well, judging from what you’ve told me about this whole affair, I don’t doubt that a bit.”
Over the past few days, Calandrx also had relayed everything he knew about the history of the Earth Race. It was fascinating in an odd kind of way. During its first century, the race was exactly what its name implied: a contest to find out which of the Empire’s starfighter pilots could fly around the globe at the fastest speed possible without having his aircraft disintegrate around him. In those early years, no money was offered in the winner’s prize; there was no promise of homes or promotions or assignments to the most desirable posts in the Empire. The winner got an aluminum medal, a blessing from the Emperor, and that was it.
By its second century, the citizens had decided this was way too boring. The perks were increased, money was introduced as part of the first prize, and the winner was declared by the Emperor to be a Very Fortunate by law. The race pilots also were allowed to modify their aircraft after the discovery of a “nonrule” in the race’s regulations in about the year 7074. This created a sprint in technology among the participants that led to some mind-boggling speeds and finish times.
Over the past century, the race had evolved even farther. The idea was still to go around the planet as fast as possible. But several decades before, the twist of the interdimensional obstacle course had been added. The twenty-five-thousand-mile race was still basically the same; it’s just that now, along the way, the competing pilots had to fly certain legs of it inside the thirteenth dimension, a place appropriately nicknamed “Bad Dream.”
The interdimensional portals for this were articulated in the form of huge blue screens that came up fast and at unpredictable locations along the race course. The racers knew only that there would be three screens in all. What happened to them after they punched through one and gained the one-three was totally unpredictable. Nothing was stable inside Bad Dream; it was a mirror dimension ruled entirely by antilogic. Painful memories usually prevailed, though. It was possible for race pilots to refight some long-forgotten battle or to relive parts of their lives while traveling within. Even parts of previous lives could be dredged up. Or so it appeared. Though what happened inside the thirteen was usually wiped from the pilot’s memory as soon as he punched out, some racers carried bits of their experience out with them.
Calandrx certainly had. In one of his punch-ins, he’d been jolted back to his first ever combat mission, an action against the fierce Ajax Tri-System pirates that had left everyone in Calandrx’s unit dead except himself. In the weird world of the thirteen, he’d had to dogfight the pirates all over again, in space, at what his brain considered faster-than-normal speed, all while his colleagues were dying around him in extremely slow motion. Thus their every cry had echoed through his headphones, and he’d heard every one of their last breaths again. And his three other punch-ins weren’t much better. To this day Calandrx maintained the only reason he won the race was that his interdimensional forays were actually milder than those of his fellow pilots, giving him the microsecond advantage needed to streak across the finish line just ahead of the pack.