But her engines went dead before she got two hundred meters away. The long, black interceptor sank into the dust. There followed a horrible silence, save for the lugubrious gong-ing.
Presently, Mona transmitted. "Jake, tell them. Tell them I was helping you. Please!"
"Mona, I'm sorry." There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do.
"I don't want to die like this," she said, her voice cracking. "Killed by one of those bugs. Oh, God."
Almost without thinking, I fired the explosive bolts on the missile rack above the cab, activated one, and let it check out its target. When the green light blinked on the control board, I fired. An invisible arm snatched the thing and flung it aside. It exploded harmlessly out in me moonscape.
…bong…bong…bong…bong…
"Jake?" She seemed composed now, strangely calm.
"Yes, Mona?"
"We… we had some pretty good times, didn't we?"
"We did. Yes, we did, Mona."
One sob broke through the repose, but was quickly covered by a voice turned bitter. "It wouldn't even let me get a shot off, the bastard."
…bong.. bong.. bong.. BONG!
"Goodbye, Jake."
"Goodbye."
The flash seared my retinas, left purple spots chasing each other in front of me. When I could see again, the interceptor was gone. A blackened pit lay where it had been.
The Roadbug was already pulling away.
"OCCUPANTS OF COMMERCIAL TRANSPORT VEHICLE: YOU ARE FREE TO GO."
It left us sitting under a tiny red sun and a world of unspeakable beauty.
5
"You have no cause to feel bad," Sam comforted me as we raced toward the tollbooths. "You did what you could. You tried. I was a little worried about how the Roadbug would react to that missile."
"I know. So was I," I said. "I shouldn't have done it. It was useless, and I knew it. I didn't have the right to risk Darla's and Cheetah's lives."
"I would have done the same," Darla said quietly.
"Thanks, Darla. Still…"
"Oh, c'mon, son. Mona knew the risk. She knew there's only one rule of this road: "Thou shall not close the road, nor interrupt traffic on any section thereof!' And she knew the Roadbugs enforce it to the letter."
"What right do they have to enforce anything?" I countered angrily. "Who the hell are they, anyway?"
Sam didn't answer, because there was no answer. Chalk up another mystery. Two theories were currently in vogue. The Roadbugs were either machines created by the Roadbuilders themselves, or they were vehicles whose unseen drivers wanted to keep the roads clear for their own purposes. Personally, I was for the latter theory. All indications were that the Skyway was millions of years old, and machines ― no matter how advanced ― just don't function that long… or so it seemed to me. But if there were flesh-and-blood beings inside those bug cars, they hadn't shown themselves yet, and I doubted they ever would.
The cylinders were all around, and we felt their persistent grabbing. The aperture swallowed us.
The next planet was a big one, a high-G world, as the sign before the tollbooths had warned, but going in an instant from.3 to 1.45 G was more than a little rough. The planet's acceleration sucked us down into our seats. I groaned and tried to straighten my spine, now turned rubber.
"Whuff!" Darla slumped in her seat. Cheetah bore up stoically.
"Jesus, even I can feel it," Sam said. "Somehow."
We arrived on a vast savannah of dry grass and bare patches of dust rolling out endlessly. Stunted trees dotted the plain. To our right and far away, a herd of bulky animals loped behind shimmering curtains of heat. The sun was low to our left, but bore down arduously. The sky was blue, slapped with watery brushstrokes of bright haze. Migration trails intersected the road. At one point, a dry-wash had undercut the highway itself, leaving exposed and suspended the five-meter-thick slab of metal roadbed. The gap was not great, and the road had no need to drop a supporting stanchion, as it could do when necessary. How it did such things was but another puzzle.
Great black birds, if birds they were, wheeled in the bald-white sky near the sun, searching. No prey or carrion was evident. Here and there along the side of the road were high mounds of powdery earth ― warrens? hives? There were no signs of human habitation, though the planet was on the lists for colonization. The place did not look inviting. To settle such a world would be to resign oneself to the sorry fact that doing anything would require half again as much effort as on a 1G world: lifting a load of firewood, hefting an axe, mounting a flight of stairs. But humans had adapted to harsher conditions on many worlds. I imagined what future generations of this world would look like ― short, swarthy, powerfully muscled, fond of khaki, glued into their wide-brimmed bush hats, opinionated, sure of themselves, proud. Perhaps. Diversity was sure to be the rule as human beings spread among the stars, and the differences might one day become more than cultural. Organisms are products of their environment, and when environments diverge…
The road shot ahead, unswerving, pointing to a low black band that rimmed the horizon. Mountains.
"What's the name" of this place?" I asked. "What do the maps say?"
"Goliath," Sam said.
"Ah."
We drove for a while, until I realized how ravenously hungry
I was.
"Anyone for eats?"
"Me!" piped Darla.
"Soup's on!"
We went back to the galley and fixed a quick brunch: ham-salad sandwiches, giant kosher deli pickles from New Zion ("Ham salad and kosher pickles?" Darla wondered. "We'll be struck dead." "Eat fast!" I said), potato salad, cherry yogurt, all fresh from the cooler. I had stocked up back on TC–I, shortly before hitting the road. We ate heartily.
I stopped in the middle of a mouthful of pickle. "How boorish of me. I forgot about Cheetah."
"Don't worry, she's okay ― and that's not her real name."
"Huh? Darla, she can't eat human food. The polypeptides are all wrong."
"She brought her own. Go look."
I went forward, and sure enough there was Cheetah, munching wombat salad, or whatever it was, little green shoots with pink pulpy heads. I went back.
"When did she have time to ―?"
"I never did get around to explaining why she's here, did I? And you never asked, either. That's what I like about you, Jake; you never question, never complain. You go along with the flow, except when you're pushed. Anyway, when you called I was talking to her, and she said that her 'time' was drawing near. I took it to mean the end of her life, but she wouldn't elaborate. I could sense that she was unhappy. Desperately so."
"She certainly wasn't being treated well at the motel," I said. "As a matter of fact, the pustulant little bedsore who ran the place was―"
"I know. I knew by the way he talked to her." She took a bite of sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. "Cheetah had told me that none of her people had ever left the planet ― 'pass through the great trees at the edge of the sky' is the way they think of the portals ― and that one day, before the end of her time, she would like to be the first."
"Seems to me I've seen her kind off-world."
"Right, but she doesn't realize that." Darla turned the notion over in her mind. "No, on second thought, she meant her clan, not her species. I told you how attached they are to their families."
"Got you."
"So, when I got the call, I asked her to come with us. That simply. I've had second thoughts about it since, of course. I really don't have the foggiest notion what to do with her. I was thinking vaguely of finding a home for her ― but, practical brain that you are, you pointed out the problem of biochemical incompatibility."