He saluted and drove away.
I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I had to laugh. I had just traveled across three galactic arms only to find myself stuck in a suburb without a phone or a jeep. Maybe Ava was working late, maybe she was having dinner at a friend’s house, maybe she was spending the night in the girls’ dorm. She might arrive any minute or be gone all night.
The house was completely dark. I tried the door, but it was locked. For no real reason, I knocked again. No one answered. I walked to the edge of her front porch, sat, and waited. Time passed. Night turned to early morning.
By the time she finally arrived, the first streaks of sunlight showed in the sky. The car pulled into the driveway, stopped, and Ava climbed out of the passenger’s side. She started toward the front door, then she saw me and froze. A look of anger replaced her surprised expression.
Why did I come back? I asked myself when I spotted the silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat. I wished I hadn’t returned.
Ava and I stood staring at each other for a few seconds.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I told you I would come for you,” I said. I wished the driver had been a clone. I would have accused the bastard of being an infiltrator and performed his autopsy on the spot, but he was a natural-born.
She saw where I was staring, and said, “I’m sorry,” her voice as cold and hard as marble.
“I was only gone for a week,” I said, not feeling so much angry as sad. Anger might come later, but for now I felt a deep sense of loss. A strange numbness spread across my brain, and with it came feelings of helplessness.
“Harris, we need to talk,” she said, not trying to disguise the scene as anything other than how it looked.
“No, we don’t,” I said. I stepped off the porch and walked past the car, not even bothering to look inside.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
I did not answer her. I had no idea where I would go.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as I reached the end of her driveway.
“Yeah,” I said. I might have said, “Me, too,” but it would have been a lie. I was no longer sorry. Sadness had already turned to anger.
I reached the end of the block before I realized that I had no way of calling for a ride. I could have gone back and called the base from Ava’s house, but my pride would not allow it.
Ellery Doctorow lived a few miles away. I could have found my way to his house easily enough, but that pompous bastard was the last person I would go to for assistance. I would not give him the satisfaction.
Deciding that a good walk would give me time to think things through, I turned the corner and started down the hill. I wanted to be alone with my anger, so I walked.
Your perspective changes when you walk streets you’ve only driven in the past. Rises stretch into hills, and slopes become steeper. Seconds turn into minutes. It took me twenty minutes to reach the bottom of Norristown Heights, and Fort Sebastian was still twenty minutes away by car.
The air had a cool morning chill. Dew glistened on the grass. Cars passed me on the road every few seconds, speeding down streets that were nearly empty. I ran across a four-lane road, the nearest cars so far away that I could not hear their engines.
A few moments later, a Marine sped by in a jeep going at least eighty miles per hour. He spotted me, and his head turned to track me as he drove past.
I expected him simply to drive away, but he didn’t. The jeep did not screech to a halt, but the tires did squeal just a bit as the driver pulled a U-turn. He cut across several empty lanes, then drifted in my direction, pulling to the side of the road about ten feet ahead of me.
“General Harris?” He said my name as if it were a question.
“Yes,” I said.
“Colonel Hollingsworth sent me to pick you up, sir,” he said.
“Did he? Well, that’s excellent,” I said, remembering full well that the last thing I told Hollingsworth was that I would get myself back to base.
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.
It was possible. Ava might have called Hollingsworth and told him what happened. They did not know each other well, but they had run into each other a time or two, and she might have wanted to make sure I got back to Fort Sebastian safely. He might have decided to send a car even if she did not call. It wasn’t likely, but it could happen.
Instead of climbing into the rear of the jeep, as I might normally have done, I stepped into the passenger’s seat.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we pulled away.
“The colonel is waiting for you at Fort Sebastian, sir,” said the sergeant.
“Excellent,” I said. I spoke the words around a yawn. I’d just spent the entire evening standing outside Ava’s house. We headed south and east, the right general direction for Fort Sebastian, skirting downtown Norristown but still driving through other urban districts. My driver did not speak. I sensed an odd intensity in his focus.
I asked him a few questions, and his answers seemed right enough, but something about him, some indefinable quality, left an unpleasant impression. He was the kind of guy who can’t tell a joke because nothing he said could ever be funny. Here he sat, saying all the right things, and I had already decided that I did not like him.
“What is your name, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Lewis, sir,” he said. He sounded respectful enough, but he looked away from me as he answered and gave off a sense of disregard.
“Is that your first name or your last?” I asked.
“It’s my last name, sir. My first name is Kit …Kit Lewis,” he said.
“Well, Kit Lewis, you just missed the road to Fort Sebastian,” I said. We had actually passed the turn two miles back, but I decided to wait until we had passed any likely detours before mentioning it.
“A work crew is laying a cable on the main road, sir,” he explained. “The regular roads are closed.”
“Is that so?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. We need to take a service route.”
“I see,” I said. “It must be quite a project; this detour of yours is taking us pretty far out of the way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lewis shrugged his shoulders, then faked a laugh, and said, “Oh, we’re not going to Fort Sebastian, sir. Colonel Hollingsworth wants to meet you at the airfield.”
The road we were on would take us past the field, that much was true. “So he’s at the airfield? I could have sworn you said we were meeting at Fort Sebastian,” I said.
The sergeant responded with another nervous laugh. “Did I? I always do that, sir. I was thinking about Fort Sebastian when I meant to say we were meeting the colonel at the airfield, and I switched it around.” His voice was friendly, and he said all the right words.
It was a trap, of course. I had suspected it from the moment I saw the jeep. Stuck behind the wheel, though, he could not pull a gun on me. I had control of the situation.
We were driving at eighty miles per hour. A few miles ahead of us, the edge of the airfield was visible behind a row of small buildings. I pretended not to notice it. We passed two roads that wound around to the airfield. Lewis did not slow down as we reached the third. I doubted he would slow down at the fourth.
“How long have you been here, kid?” I asked.
“Six years, sir,” he said.
If this kid operated like the ones on St. Augustine, we’d find the real Kit Lewis’s body in a day or two. I wondered if he had been strangled, drowned, burned, or dissolved.
“I’m not asking how long Kit Lewis has been here,” I said. “I’m asking how long you have been here.”
“Three days,” he said, the friendly sheen missing from his voice. If he had a gun, he made no move to draw it. He did not need to worry about me. Traveling in a jeep at eighty miles per hour, I would not attack the driver.
The stalemate would last until we came to a stop. He might pull a gun at that point, but I doubted it. The kid showed no signs of fear. He clearly thought he could kill me anytime he wanted. I felt the same way about him. Only one of us could be right.