Susan gasped. John took it silently. Roland was preoccupied with the instrument panel.
"If you have a gun," I went on, "I'd advise you to pull it on me right now. The portal's coming up."
Outlined in faint zodiacal light at the horizon, the cylinders were rising above the ice like dark angels on Judgment Day.
"Let me say this," I continued. "I wouldn't shoot this portal if I thought it'd be suicide. You can believe me or not. Take it for what it's worth, but I wouldn't do it if I thought there was no chance of getting back."
Roland looked at me. "Of course, Jake. Everybody knows you'll get back ― if you believe the road yams."
"I'm grounding my belief in firmer evidence than beerhall bullshit. Again, take it for what it's worth, but I intend to get back from the other side. In fact, I know I will."
"How do you know?" John asked.
"Can't explain right now. I just know."
John looked at me intently. "Jake, I'm asking you to reconsider."
"Sorry, John. Put a gun to my head and I'll stop. I don't particularly want to shoot a potluck portal, but I will if no one stops me." It sounded crazy even to me.
Susan was quietly sobbing in the back seat.
"Threatening one's driver," Roland said acerbically, "at a little under Mach point seven strikes me as slightly absurd." He turned to John. "Can't you see that Jake's in the Plan?"
I caught quick glimpses of John's face in the lights of the panel as I shifted my eyes fleetingly from the road. Rare to see a man confronted with a literal test of his religious beliefs. John shook his head. "Roland, it isn't simply a matter of―"
"Oh, come on, John," Roland said, impatient with his leader's recent behavior, or so it sounded. "How can you be so myopic? We're in Jake's Plan, he's in ours. You can't deny that there's some kind of linkage here. Can you?"
"Maybe," John said, eyes belying his words. "Possibly." He gave up. "God, I don't know. I really don't know what to do."
"I do," Roland said emphatically. "It's obvious. No matter what we do, our paths and Jake's seem to cross. I say we let Jake take the lead. It's clear his Plan is informing ours." Darla was pounding me on the shoulder. "Look out!"
A dark pool lay across the road. I braked hard, but it was useless. In no time we shot across the spontaneous bridge over a geothermal depression and were back on solid ice again. "Sorry, Jake. False alarm." "No, keep watching. I need four eyes." Roland was bent over the scanner again. Suddenly he spun around and peered back through the oval rear window. "Merte. I should have been watching. He's back there!"
In the rearview mirror I saw the interceptor's headbeams grow.
"Jake? Are you okay?" No time to answer. I mashed the accelerator. "I've got something on the scanner!" Roland stabbed finger at the fire-control board. Green and red lights flickered. "Come on, George, whoever the hell you are!"
George didn't respond. Something smacked into the rear of the car with a dull thud. I couldn't see the interceptor's lights. A dark mass covered the rear window. I knew what it was, having been on the receiving end of a tackyball before. Adhezosfero. Now the sticky mess was crawling all over the back of the vehicle, fusing and bubbling, forming an unbreakable molecular bond with the metal of the hull. Though it was close to absolute zero outside, the thing wouldn't freeze, its chemical reactions providing heat long enough to do the job. Petrovsky was feeding us slack now until the bond formed. Then he'd start reeling us in.
"What happened to the antimissile system?" Roland wanted to know. "Probably read the approach as a slow projectile," I said. "Tackyball shells are fired from a mortar. Didn't worry George any." But I was worried. I kept the pedal flattened, hoping to unspool all of Petrovsky's tether line before the bond firmed up, but the boys and girls at Militia R&D had been putting in overtime. This one bonded in a few seconds. A sharp jerk, and that was it. The Russian had us hooked.
"Roland, this thing must have some beam weapons," I said. "Find 'em!"
"I'm looking, Jake. But these designations are in another language."
"The language is archaic American. Read 'em off to me!" "Okay. Tell me what 'Sic 'im, Fido' means." "Spell it!" He did, and I stopped him in the middle of it. "Christ Almighty! It must mean attack or fire or something.
Hit it!"
Roland did, and nothing happened.
"It has to have a target!" I screamed. "Find the aiming waddyacallit!"
"The what?"
The road behind lit up blue-white with the Russian's retrofire, and we slid forward in our seats. Roland and John hit the windscreen, and I took the padded steering column in the chest, but I kept my leg stiffened and drove the pedal down, finding new depths of power down there. My foot seemed to sink through the floorboards. The car lurched, then acceleration took us the other way, sending us sprawling back on the cushioned seat. I shot a look in the back. Susan, Darla, and Winnie were a tangle on the floor, Susan's bare foot sticking up comically.
A tug-of-war began, the interceptor's retro engines against the growling power of the Chevy's unfathomable motor. But the Russian had his moves down pat. He paid out line and let me pull, then cut retros and ate the slack up plus more, reeling me in like a deep-sea catch. He was out-maneuvering me and I knew it. And when he had us up close enough, he'd squirt us down with Durafoam under high pressure, spin us into an immobilizing cocoon ― one hell of an effective technique against even a vehicle that can outgun you, if you can get close enough. Roadbugs aside, when the cops want to snare you, they get down to business. No Roadbug would save us now.
I only had one countermove. The fish has sharp spines, so be careful where you touch. I considered the consequences for a second or two, then drove the brake pedal against the floor. The move caught the big man up short and he shot past us, dragging the slack length of the graphite whisker line along. It all happened very quickly. The invisible line pulled taut and yanked our ass-end around into a fishtail, but in the process the hardened glob of tackyball slid free from the back of the car. It was too late for Petrovsky. He lacked time or the presence of mind to cut the line free. His headbeams swung around to blind me, then continued the circuit into a wild spin. Something strange was happening at our end: I felt an unseen force fight against the fishtail, some kind of stabilizing inertial field. I was countersteering sharply, but it wouldn't have been enough. We were traveling broadside to the road, but something shoved us back. Petrovsky's vehicle kept spinning, trailing wisps of hot vapor from its rollers, cold gas from its yaw/antispin jets, but it was hopelessly out of control and went whirling off the roadbed, past the shoulder and onto the ice.
In the middle of it all we ghosted through a holo sign. The words were repeated cinematically over kilometers and were projected large enough to straddle the road. The Highway Department wanted no mistake.
WARNING;
UNEXPLORED PORTAL AHEAD!
POSSIBLE INTER-EPOCHAL JOURNEY
PROCEED AT OWN RISK
WARNING!
UNEXPLORED PORTAL…
The interceptor began to break up as it spun, wrapping itself in a deadly cat's cradle of the trailing line, the ultrastrong, superthin fiber slicing through hull metal like fine wire through cheese. Pieces flew in all directions, some skittering across the road into our path. I couldn't dodge them, too busy counter-counter-steering against the return fishtail to the left, again Being helped by the strange force. We straightened out, then re-rebounded to the right again, not as far this time, the oscillations damping with each cycle. A big chunk of stabilizer foil tumbled across the road, just missing us. I caught sight of the shapeless mass of tackyball bouncing along behind the cop car like a useless anchor dragged over frozen sea, its weight pulling the line into a lethal snarl. As I fought for control I saw the flashing red commit markers ahead. Blind spots, burned in by the cop car's intense headbeams, swam in front of my eyes, and I wasn't sure where road ended and ice field began. The interceptor was pacing us, spinning and sliding over close-to-frictionless surface, heading straight for the portal but wide of the commit markers. I finally regained control and found that we were on the shoulder near Petrovsky's vehicle, with our left rollers on the ice and the right marker dead in our path. I wheeled to the left as sharply as I dared. The interceptor was a rotating pile of junk now, throwing off pieces of itself with abandon…. Then it exploded, or seemed to, but I knew it was Petrovsky's ejection seat. He'd never make it, was too near the markers, doomed to be sucked in by the cylinders. Across the glossy hood of the Chevy, sudden highlights flared, reflections of Petrovsky's descent-rockets igniting. We shot past the right commit marker, missing it by a hair.