“Many thanks.” He thought of Fritzy. “I’ve been rushed around by you. Now I think you owe me some answers. You said you could help me find Fritzy from Iran—what was the name?”
“Irunium. Yes, we can. But it’s no good charging at it like a bull at a gate. Sit back and try to relax and enjoy the scenery. You’re hurtling along an autostrada in a primrose high-powered, ultra-expensive and most luxurious car, headed for the sun, and wine. Live a little.”
Only because Margie Lipton sat driving with nonchalant skill was Prestin’s foul language halted and his fist dropped. He swallowed. “By God, Macklin! You’d better have a good explanation or I’ll push your teeth down your throat!”
“That’s better, Bob.” Macklin was not in the least put out. “Work up a head of adrenalin. You’re going to need it.”
“There’s a place,” Margie said.
Looking out, fuming, wanting to say hard, hurtful words, Preston saw the neat white and green roadside ristorante, a modern place geared to handle tourists on their way to sample the sunshine of the south.
He slumped back in the seat. All his anger meant only that he felt his guilt. If he could make things disappear, instead of just mislaying them as he had always thought, well, then, that would explain Fritzy’s disappearance, wouldn’t it? Crazy, he told himself, crazy. You can’t just make people vanish.…
But Fritzy had gone somewhere and Macklin said it was to a place called Irunium.
Abruptly the car leaped forward, jerking him further into the upholstery. He pushed himself up. Margie was fairly spanking the car along the road and Alec, beside him, was reaching down to a long box beneath his legs and taking out an express rifle.
“What is it?” Prestin demanded.
Macklin had turned and was leaning over the back of the seat, his face grave.
“We have bullet-proof rear glass, and the seats have armor-plate backing; but he can always get the tires, even with the flaps down.”
“Flaps down,” Margie said crisply, pulling a lever on the dashboard.
“What is it?” shouted Prestin. He turned and looked through the rear window.
All he could see on the long, straight white road was another car, a blood-red Lancia, streaking along about five hundred yards or so behind.
“See the Lancia? That’s the Contessa di Montevarchi and she has her Trugs with her. They’re out to get us.”
IV
The Chrysler V-8 engine began to howl a little under the hood, like a cradle of kittens mewling. Those kittens would turn into tiger cats if you opened the hood now. Prestin noticed that Margie’d had an all-synchromesh four-speed gearbox installed instead of the automatic transmission system—a decision with which he agreed. “I’ve had the engine tuned and monkeyed with no end. The Chrysler boys wouldn’t recognize it now,” she said lightly.
“You just leave that Lancia behind, my girl,” said Macklin. He did not appear worried. Prestin sweated.
Alec began to assemble his express rifle, screwing the oiled blue steel together methodically and squarely, obviously enjoying what he was doing as thread ran sweetly on thread.
Prestin swallowed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He turned back again to follow Macklin’s glance through the rear window.
The Lancia hung on, if anything a little larger, a little nearer.
“Perdita has a Lancia Flavia now, hasn’t she?” asked Margie of no one in particular. “Such peculiar tastes for one who is so noisy about her culture and her quality.”
Prestin recognized the symptoms—the use of the Contessa’s name, the comparison of cars—and he gently said, “Hasn’t the old Flavia got a Kugelfischer fuel injection system to boost b.h.p. output? I’m not too hot on cars, planes are more my line.”
“Yes.” Margie spoke shortly. “But she’ll have done things to her Lancia like I have to my Jensen. The cat!” she finished with a fine feline sparkle.
Macklin chuckled dryly. “You’ll do, Margie.”
Alec said heavily, “Has anyone checked the maps? We want to do this thing right. The Contessa will never fall for that tired old oil on the road gag.”
The air of conspiracy in the car deepened. Macklin reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a map which was folded open to show an unwinding road system heading south. “Hum,” he said thoughtfully. He put a finger down on the map, and Prestin leaned forward sideways to peer over his shoulder. “That’s where we are, folks. Any ideas?”
“The next one, Dave,” said Margie shortly. For the first time, Prestin saw her face fully; it was tanned and young, altogether lovely. She wore her brown-gold hair long and it sheened with a clean healthy sparkle. Beneath the emerald green cloak, she wore a white woolen evening gown, demure and somehow enticingly pure. A diamond bracelet glittered on her wrist above the short gauntlet of her driving glove.
Looking at her, a memory of Fritzy flashed unbidden into Prestin’s mind; perhaps Fritzy, one day, would attain the clear goddess-like maturity of Margie.
“They’re gaining on us,” Alec said. He leaned forward, the rifle between his knees. “Can’t you burn a few more miles an hour out of this old jalopy, Margie?”
“You want to stay in one piece, don’t you, apeneck?”
Margie held the car steadily and the speed only came into consciousness in the flickering passage of wayside constructions, trees, and cars traveling in the opposite direction. “I’m holding a little in reserve for the bend.”
“Good girl.” Macklin stubbed his finger forward on the mapped road. “Here’s the place. About four miles, Margie.” He chuckled. “It’s a good sharp bend.”
“Check.”
Alec sat back but Prestin kept looking at the map. Scattered over widely spaced intervals, a number of neat red crosses had been inked in.
“What are they, then?” he asked.
“The crosses? They’re all the nodal points we know of so far. Here’s the one where Fritzy went through—”
He pointed to a red cross just northwest of Rome.
“I suppose you were, what, ten thousand at the time?”
“Nothing like that. We were lowering down. I dunno. We could find out. But—but you mean people have disappeared through all those red crosses?”
Macklin laughed sourly. “No. Of course not. Some won’t be large enough. But any Porteur could put through whatever the nodal point would accept. You could. You could put a whole lot through, and you could make the nodal point accept a lot more than most, I’d guess.”
A shivery thought ghosted unpleasantly. “Suppose,” Prestin said, and swallowed, “suppose we hit a nodal point now?”
Margie laughed shortly.
Alec said, “I’m holding onto my gun, man!”
“If we do, Bob, then whoever you have selected may be Porteured through to Irunium,” said Macklin.
“Oh, no!”
Something hard and sharp went pinnngg! against the back of the car. Alec grunted and half lifted his rifle.
“Save it, Alec.” Macklin looked ahead through the windscreen. “If they’re using ordinary bullets they won’t hurt us at this distance—providing they don’t sneak one under the flaps and hit a tire.”
“There’s the bend ahead.” Margie sounded cool and calm.
“Make your play now, Margie—”
Prestin jerked his thoughts back from the red crosses representing nodal points—he wondered how Macklin had obtained that information—to the smooth flow of action about him. The Jensen accelerated smoothly, and dived full throttle for the approaching bend.