When there was nothing left, the phenomenon dissipated, fading into the air. All that remained were smoking fragments in the sand. Thin smoke rose from where the tree had been.
I found that I'd been'' gripping the wheel very tightly. I relaxed and sat back.
After a long silence Roland said, "So that was Fido." "Yeah." I suppressed a shudder. The thing had really gotten to me. "Any ideas?"
Roland thought about it. "Energy matrix of some kind." What had gotten to me was the maniacal single-mindedness of the thing. True, its target had been only a tree, but I had the feeling it would have done the same job on anything in the known universe. Anything. And not stop till the job was done. "I take it that by 'matrix' you mean energy molded by some kind of stasis field?"
"Either that, or it was an unimaginable sort of life form." "Life form? Good God." Right then I admitted to myself that-this vehicle was giving me a good case of the leaping creeps.
"Actually," Roland said, "I don't have a clue as to what it might have been."
"Yeah." I had no idea either, and wanted to drop the subject. I got out of the car, a little unsteadily. Up and down the shore as well as inland, people and beings were clambering into their buggies and moving away. I didn't blame them. John, Susan,
Darla, and Winnie were lying prone in the sand, looking up at me with shocked bewilderment, except Winnie, who still had her head tucked under Darla's arm.
"Sorry, folks," I said. "Should have warned you, but we weren't expecting anything like" ― I motioned over my shoulder―"whatever the hell that was."
They all began to pick themselves up. I went back to inspect the rear of the car, where the storage compartment was. There's another term for this area, but it eluded me. Black clumps of solidified tackyball still clung to the metal, some to the back window. I hit them with the heel of my hand until they snapped off. It had been a big gamble, but I had banked on the possibility that the hull of this strange vehicle would not admit a permanent bond. I'd won. The stuff had bonded superficially, but wasn't up to taking a sudden shear stress. I wondered if we'd seen the end of the surprises-the car had in store.
I went around to me front again, stepping over the drawings Winnie had etched in the sand, now partially erased. From what I could see, the figures were vaguely spiral.
I got in behind the wheel. John was now sitting where Roland had been.
"Well," I said, "I guess we hang around here for a while." Right then I noticed something, cocking my ears. "Hey, isn't the motor running?" The engine idled so quietly it was hard to tell.
"I shut it off," John told me. "When you got out after we stopped, you didn't look like you were… I'm sorry, did I do something wrong?" He looked deflated. "Again?" he added dismally.
"No, no, I should have said something. It's just that there should be antitheft devices on this buggy. But I can't understand how the weapons were operating. Oh, I see." The key had a setting marked AUX. John hadn't turned it back all the way. "Hm. Wonder what happens if I try to start it again?" John didn't look as if he understood the implications. Against my better judgment, I turned the key.
The air was full of cats, big cats with fur that stood straight up, crackling with static charges that needled every square inch of my skin. I leaped out of the car, hit beach, and rolled. The effect stopped the instant I was out, but I felt scratchy and raw all over. I looked up to see the car come alive. With two quick, solid bangs, the doors slammed shut by themselves and the windows rolled up. In seconds the vehicle was locked up tight.
Only John and I had been inside. Presently, he came limping around the car, brushing sand from his bare chest. His hair was salted with sand as well, and he stopped to bend over and brush it out. I got slowly to my feet, wondering why I sometimes do the things I do. John came up to me.
"Jake?"
"Yes, John."
"I just want to say…" He groped for words. "You're the most unboring person I've ever met. I don't know how else to put it." He gimped off.
A left-handed compliment, or a right-fisted insult?
On second thought, I never do a damn thing. It keeps on happening to me.
12
I felt ambivalent about losing the Chevy. On one hand I was almost glad to be rid of the thing and its bottomless bag of unsettling surprises; on the other, I hate to walk, which is what we did. We hoofed it down to where the Goliath spur cut the island almost in two. Farther south the vehicle density was higher, and I figured that whatever was coming to fetch everyone off the island would come in there. I was right; there was a harbor of sorts three quarters of the way down the concave curve of the crescent on the eastern shore. (By now I knew my intuitive orientation had at least a chance of being right ― the sun was declining on the other side of the island now, and to me that was west. Strange that most planets do seem to rotate to the east.)
I stood looking westward, back along the stretch of road to the far shore and out along the causeway curving off into the snot-green sea. I thought I could see the causeway end out there, a few hundred meters beyond the ingress point.
"Roland, how far do you think it is from where we ingressed to where we stopped?"
He shaded his eyes against the sun and looked west, then glanced toward the near shore, then back. "Two klicks, maybe less."
"And what do you estimate our speed was when we shot through?"
"Mach point eight, but I wasn't looking."
"Neither was I, but that sounds good. So, we went from around two hundred fifty meters per second to zero in a little under two klicks. What's that work out to in Gs, eyeballs-out? Mind you, I didn't start braking immediately."
I could almost see the electrons flow. I had Roland down as either a natural lightning calculator or a microcalc implantee. At times ― just for seconds ― his eyes went cold and silicon-ish. He answered quickly. "Too many." He shook his head, puzzled. "It doesn't figure. Can't be right."
"That's what I thought, but it has to be right."
"But we didn't feel that kind of deceleration. Normal panic-stop Gs, yes, but…" He thought about it. "Which could only mean that our strange vehicle doesn't feel constrained by ordinary physical laws like conservation of momentum."
"Right, which is impossible, or so I'm told." I remembered something. "One thing ― I was in no shape to think about it at the time, but I felt a wave of heat hit me when I first got out of the car. At first I thought it was the sun, but it got cooler as I walked away from the car. Could've been my imagination―"
"No, you're right, the car was radiating heat for a while after we stopped. Very noticeable, but when I touched the hull, it was only slightly warm."
"A superradiator substance, probably, but that's not surprising, given the speeds it can hit in an atmosphere. Tell me this, d'you think the car could have been converting unspent momentum directly into heat?"
He shrugged. "Why not? I'm inclined to believe almost anything at this point."
I scratched my three-day growth of beard. "Yeah. Spooky, though, isn't it?"