Darkness fell and the rain continued. I was on the lookout for flash flooding. Sheets of water sluiced over the roadway as we splashed our way through and upward, climbing slowly, following a torturous path into the steepest part of the range. The grade neared forty degrees on some stretches, and the rollers were polarized to maximum grab. It was barely enough. The slip-factor was approaching pi radians on some of the drive rollers. Translation: they were going round and round and we weren't getting anywhere.
Everyone tried to catch some sleep, found places to wedge into so as not to be thrown around. Darla got the most seriously wounded man bedded down in the bunk, and shot him up with analgesics. I asked her how he was doing, and she told me the sooner we got to Maxwellville, the better. I could have guessed; he had lost a lot of blood. Privately, I didn't think he'd make it.
Sukuma-Tayler came up to sit in the shotgun seat, declaring he couldn't find room enough to stretch out. Besides, he wasn't sleepy. Winnie was huddled underneath the dash on his side. He accidentally poked her, and she jumped. The Afro apologized.
"Sorry! Sorry!" Winnie answered, apologizing for being in the way, I guess. If she were representative of her race, how could such an unaggressive species survive for long? I thought of the jungle-clearing project. Indeed, they were not surviving.
"Uh… we were never properly introduced," Sukuma-Tayler said. "I didn't realize he could talk. She? Oh. Eridani, isn't she?"
"Yes. Winnie, meet John."
"Hello!"
"How do you do, Winnie."
She curled up and went back to sleep.
The grade steepened, curled to the left in a hairpin turn. A temporary river greeted us. The drive rollers spun, then dug into roadway.
"Makes one wonder, doesn't it… about the Skyway," John said.
"Concerning?"
"Well, for one thing, why most people bother to travel the road between apertures, instead of flying."
"Couple of reasons," I told him. "One, no one's been able to make air travel cheaper than ground transportation, even after all these years. It'll always be that way, I think. It's a matter of physics. Two, an aircraft has to be designed with certain factors in mind, like a planet's air pressure, gravity, etcetera. Going from planet to planet poses some problems. I've seen some variable airfoil designs, but they're all clumsy and impractical. And useless when you hit an airless stretch. Of course, you could taxi through those, but that strikes me as silly. Then, of course, there's antigravity."
"Hm. Which is one with the perpetual motion machine, eh?"
"As far as anybody knows. Nobody's cracked the problem to any appreciable degree. Oh, you always hear that some race, somewhere, has developed true antigravity. But I've never seen such a vehicle on any pan of Skyway. Even the Roadbugs run on rollers."
"You'd think that somebody would have done it by now."
"Yes, it does seem inevitable, somehow. But there must be monumental problems in the way."
"But there are air routes between planets. Correct?".
"Yeah, we riggers have some competition, but the routes are limited." I chuckled derisively. "I'd like to see a flyboy get through a place like Wind Tunnel."
"A planet?"
"Alpha Mansae II. Gales up to two hundred meters per second, dust storms that blanket the planet."
The big man was impressed. "Sounds dangerous, even in one of these juggernauts."
"It is."
The slope-meter was tilting to fifty degrees. I couldn't believe it myself, and I'd seen everything.
"Good God," the Afro breathed as we looked straight up into a bottomless pit of black sky.
The rollers spun frantically, then finally grabbed onto something, and we went over the crest and onto a relatively level area.
"Then again," I said, breathing easier, "there might be something to be said for flying."
"Another point," Sukuma-Tayler went on. It was obvious this gabbing made him feel better. "Granted that with highspeed ground vehicles it's only a matter of an hour or two between arrival point and the next jump ― on every planet but this one, it seems. But my question is, why didn't they place the ingress points and egress apertures ― I mean the ones that take you to the next planet ― closer together? You could put the double-back portal far enough away to prevent any knotting-up of space-time, which is, I take it, why the portals must have so much distance between them. That way, you could nip from planet to planet without much driving at all. You'd only have to go some distance to use the double-back portal."
"I can't explain to you," I answered, "why you need big chunks of normal space-time between ingress points and portals, as well as between portals, even though an ingress point is just a piece of empty road that you materialize on ― but I can tell you that the reason is a bunch of Greek symbols and lots of numbers. And it's all very theoretical. Hold on!" Another monstrous grade loomed ahead. We started to climb. Suddenly, warning lights flashed behind us, and a horn sounded. An old-fashioned, ancient automobile horn. I hugged the shoulder, and the little bugger passed us, shooting up the hill as quick as you please. It was a very strange vehicle, to match the sound of the horn. The horn went:
Dah-dah-dah D A H!
And the vehicle, from what I could discern out in the liquid darkness, was a mid-twentieth-century American automobile, which in its day had been powered by an internal combustion engine, fueled by either alcohol or a fractional distillate of petroleum, I forget which. The color was a deep red and the finish was glossy.
"An apparition," Sukuma-Tayler said.
"I hope that thing stops in Maxwellville. Those look like pneumatic rollers… tires, really, but I just can't believe that they are. Anyway, you were saying?"
"Hm? Oh, nothing. Nothing."
We rode in silence for a time, inching up the hill.
Abruptly he said, "Jake McGraw!" It was an epiphany of some sort.
"That's me," I said, perplexed.
"It just came to me. I've heard of you! Yes, I remember the name." He smiled. "You must forgive me, old man. Blurting out like that. But you must know you're something of a legend on the Skyway."
"I am, eh?"
"You are the Jake McGraw, aren't you?"
"I'm the only one I know of."
"Of course. Yes. But… meeting you like this… well, it simply isn't… I mean, one thinks of Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas, heroic figures. And you seem…" He winced. "Oh, my. I didn't put that quite the way I wanted to."