But there were tens of thousands of people in the natural bowl; from ground level it would be impossible to pick out just two. He jumped up onto the stage, now vacant, and studied the crowd intensely. But again, sheer numbers and the growing darkness worked against him.
The two Solar Guards had disappeared.
With their plans changed, they slept under the plane's wing that night, wrapped together in a borrowed blanket, holding each other tight.
Hunter was surprised that he was actually tired; for some reason he didn't think he would get tired here, in this crazy fantasyland. But after studying the strange night sky for a few minutes, and thinking about the ramifications of spotting the two Solar Guards earlier, he drifted off into a deep slumber. He awoke only once during the night, this to find that Annie had taken off all her clothes and was now pressed against him as tightly as she'd been back in Adventure Land.
Hunter smiled for what seemed to be the first time in eons, then went back to sleep.
When they awoke in the morning, they were surrounded by hundreds of sleeping kids who had also taken advantage of the landing field as a good place to spend the night. Hunter hated to do it, but he woke most of them by starting the very noisy engine on the Jenny. They all politely moved out of his way as he and a very sleepy Annie took off again.
He flew low and slow, scanning the road full of departing concertgoers in hope of spotting the two Solar Guards again. But it was no use. There were just too many people down there. Plus, he couldn't imagine the pair of SG thugs wanting to mix with the young flower children — or they with them.
After a while Hunter just gave up and climbed in altitude. He finally turned east and lay on the throttle. That the Solar Guards were also looking for the Mad Russian was a very disturbing development. It could only mean that they knew the ancient Communist was the only person left in the Galaxy who could actually foil their plans of manipulating the Big Generator.
This only increased the pressure Hunter was already carrying. There was no alternative: he had to find the Mad Russian before they did.
They returned to the airfield on the edge of New York City.
Annie was full of questions on the ride home, yelling them back to Hunter every half minute or so. But he was reluctant to give her any answers. He certainly didn't want her mixed up in anything having to do with the Solar Guards.
She noticed the change in him, though. As soon as they landed, she told him he looked "permanently bummed." He apologized, trying to explain to her that his carefree trip here had now taken on a more sinister edge. And yes, that was enough to bum him out — permanently.
He had to find the next ticket booth and move on. He didn't want to leave Annie; he'd become very attached to her. But duty called. Where would the ticket booth be? In a city the size of this re-creation of old New York, there could be thousands of places. And his quadtrol wasn't much help.
But Hunter got an idea. He asked Annie to lead him to the biggest museums in the city. The search took most of the day, but they finally found a museum dedicated entirely to modern conveniences. Inside, they found a PC, one that accepted his thrice punched admission ticket. His hunch had been right. It was a ticket booth in disguise.
He typed his way past the security walls and up came the familiar questionnaire. He filled in all the fields, including the one about his hobbies. The old PC churned for what seemed like an hour before finally declaring itself ready. At last, everything was set for him to go. According to the English-language box in the comer of the screen, the next ride was called Land of the Lost.
He turned back to Annie. She was crying. Somehow she knew that none of this was real — not really real. And he remembered the message she'd given him at the end of the first attraction. But to take her with him now was out of the question. Even if she could go with him, it was way too dangerous.
Maybe that was the point…
So he took her in his arms, kissed her, and held her tight for a very long time.
Then, without her seeing him do so, he reached down and hit the Enter button.
6
He was falling.
Tumbling…
Out of control.
Hunter tried to get his wits about him, but it was hard to do. There was darkness all around. All he could see was an inky black sky above and very dark shadows below.
He'd spent so much time inside flying machines, his body could tell just how high he was by the thinness of the air and the sensation of the air pressure around him. Both of these indicators came to one dreadful conclusion now: he was about a mile high and dropping very, very fast.
What went wrong? Had he jumped to a moon that was no longer there? Or had it moved off its orbital plane for some reason? Or had this been a trap all along?
He began falling faster.
What could he do? He was the Wingman, but he didn't have wings. Flapping his arms would be a ridiculous way to spend his last few seconds of life. But he just couldn't go limp, either.
He managed to right himself somehow, which from his point of view, was body horizontal, head down. He was wearing his flight suit again, his boots, his crash helmet. He ripped open the front of his suit, allowing the air to collect underneath. This slowed his velocity, but only by a tiny fraction. So he would impact going thirty-one feet per second per second instead of Nature's well-established thirty-two?
What good was that?
All this fussing and physics took time, and before he knew it, he could see the ground, his splat spot in sight. But then something strange happened. What was below him was not rocks or hard ground or even water. He wasn't sure what the hell it was. But in the last instant before impact, he realized maybe it was actually… soft.
He hit a moment later. It felt like his spine had come right up out of his skin. But at the same time he knew that if he could think at all, the fall had not killed him. Not immediately anyway.
He hit hard on something soft — hit and kept on going. Down ten feet, fifteen, twenty. Finally he stopped burrowing and shot back up, all this happening in the span of a second or two. Next thing he knew, he was in the air again, fifty feet high and tumbling once more. He came back down, hit the surface hard again, bounced a second time, then finally came down for good.
Now it felt as if his heart was coming out of his throat. How could he have survived such a fall? And what the hell did he fall into?
He lay there for a full minute, waiting for his ticker to start beating normally again. Facedown, he had the taste of old cloth in his mouth. Finally lifting his head, he realized he was lying in a pile of cloth. Hundreds of separate pieces of it. Different colors. Different textures. But all just about the same size.
It was still dark out, but he managed to grab of few of these things and hold them up to his eyes.
Socks?
He grabbed another handful. This time, big ones, small ones, white ones, black ones. But they were indeed socks. Not the artificial pliable plastic type worn by the people in the Galaxy today. Rather these were the simple cloth foot covering used way back in Hunter's previous-previous life, back in the twentieth century.
How crazy was this?
He worked his way to the top of this pile and realized that his landing had not been such a miraculous event; he hadn't landed serendipitously into the only pile of these things on this new, very strange moon.