As the sun set behind the distant, snow-topped mountains, we drove over a worn, plastic road to get as close as we could to the rocket port. We parked the van next to the barbed ribbon-wire fence surrounding the field. I used the needle rifle to put out the few flood lights in the area so that no one could see us.
We waited.
Nikki tried out the controls and took the van up ten feet—still below the ground clutter which would keep us hidden from the radar—then went through a few maneuvers to get the hang of things. My stomach stayed on the ground somewhere below us then jumped into my throat as I heard, in the distance, the crackling thunder of rocket engines becoming super-hot. The boom carried through the night as the sky in the direction of the rocket port glowed red. I sat back in my seat and tried to relax, muttering, “She knows what she’s doing. She knows what she’s doing. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Do you know what you’re doing,” I asked.
“Relax. Here we go.”
We took off at a speed that I hadn’t imagined possible. Not black-out acceleration, perhaps, but certainly fast enough to put permanent wrinkles into the side of my skin facing the seat. Nikki had certainly changed the computers’ programs, I reflected in what I was sure would prove to be the last moments of my life.
As we rose, Nikki guided the van toward the rocket field and kept the cloud of vapor the rocket was riding on between us and the radar installation of the port. “Fantastic,” she laughed.
“Want to follow the rocket a ways?”
“Sure,” I said hoping my voice didn’t betray my sheer terror.
We hurtled upward.
After a bit, though, I started to get into the spirit of things. The only sound was the wash of the air past the van. We were still alive. Nikki really did know what she was doing. We were still alive. The van had stayed together. We were still alive.
It was fantastic.
“Will we remain hidden?” I asked after a bit.
“Should. Sometimes the radar here in Denver has ghosts anyway. They won’t think much of it as long as we’re matching speed with the rocket. That isn’t hard.” She whispered something to the computer and we speeded up a bit more. “Unbelievable,” she said.
We arched upward with the rocket, following its plumed path toward the south. The sky above us turned jet black and the stars became sharp points of light; we saw a second sunset which looked almost like a rainbow framing over the mountains to the West of us. It became more than a little hard to breathe.
“I’d like to race the rocket, but we’d only have space to inhale at the top of its path,” she explained. Her voice sounded thin because of the lack of air in the van. “They leave the atmosphere at the top of their ballistic arch.”
Fortunately when the rocket’s booster dropped on parachutes, we followed it down, falling back into nighttime, dropping in free fall until the wind caught the chutes of the booster so that we could slow our descent. My stomach again felt as if it had made a left turn while the rest of us traveled to the right. Once the free fall had ended, I settled down and enjoyed—as much as possible—the sight of the ocean racing up to meet us. “We ought to get an altimeter so we can keep from smashing into the ground,” Nikki said.
I opened my eyes and watched the twinkling lights from the shore as they danced in the ocean in front of us. “Won’t the radar pick us up?” I asked.
“Yeah. But they won’t recognize us as a moving thing. We’ll be part of the waves at this height.”
The moon rose so we could see the water clearly in its yellow glow. Nikki pushed the van’s accelerator pedal and we hurtled toward the shore, then slowed, skimmed over the beach for several hundred meters, hopped a weedy hedge, and parked under a tall, gnarled palm tree.
After sitting for a few minutes looking out over the ocean, we climbed from the van, kicked off our shoes, and walked hand-in-hand in the gentle surf of the Gulf. The moon rose higher and lit the white sand of the beach as a cool, gentle breeze blew in from the sea. Almost an hour later we were again in the van. I fell asleep almost instantly in the reclining seat that was beginning to seem like home. (And, no, there were no romantic going ons… Nikki and I were on a strictly brother/sister relationship. Despite my tries at incest.) I don’t think Nikki slept any that night. She and the two computers whispered and plotted and made lists of things they would be needing for a project that would have had me wide awake had I known what kind of scheme the three of them were hatching.
Chapter 8
The morning sun woke me. In the distance, sea gulls were squawking while the waves added a low hissing rise and fall to the din of the birds.
I sat up and inspected the bright, white sand that stretched into the deep blue green of the ocean, sprinkled with splotches of turquoise that were the shallows. Waves formed in the deep water and chased themselves to the shore where they sputtered their energy in a roll of hissing, white foam, only to be dragged back from the sand and swallowed up by the next incoming wave.
Directly in front of me Nikki abruptly rose up out of the water like some ancient goddess, rivulets of water streaming down her firm, dark arms and thighs as she wadded ashore. A pink T-shirt clung tightly to her body in a way that might have been obscene on almost any woman but Nikki. Somehow, her demeanor always made her seem innocent—even though her speech and dress often argued otherwise. I pulled my tongue back into my mouth.
After she had dried off and wrapped a towel around her curves, my next task was pushing my eyes back into their sockets. Then we had a picnic lunch in the shade of the palm trees around our van.
After a polite amount of small talk, Nikki eased into telling me what she and my computers had been discussing the night before, “Phil” she said around a huge bit of reconstituted dinosteak,
“did you ever want to travel into space? Maybe even explore space?”
“Sure. And be a cowboy, and a fireman, and a policeman. Instead, I got a nice calm job where everyone’s trying to kill me.”
“No really.”
“Sure, I’ve always wanted to travel into space. Yeah. I even tried to save up money to buy a trip once. And I enjoyed last night’s ride—except for not being able to breathe. Why?”
Silence. Nikki seemed to be studying her sandwich.
If I had had any sense, I would have gotten up and run away right there. And maybe drowned myself for good measure. But Nikki is like a flame to a moth. Rather than fleeing, I fluttered closer and proceeded to get singed.
“I was thinking,” she munched,” that we could take that van into space if we—”
“Woe, there. You must be kidding.”
“No, really.”
“Nikki, there’s no way that—”
“Now listen. You’ve got the power from the flywheel generator to run all kinds of life-support equipment. The van can accelerate with a constant speed… It doesn’t need fuel… And the computers can be programmed—in fact are…I took the liberty last night—for Earth orbit. All we need is a couple of suits and some gear. We could—”
“That’s crazy. Too dangerous,” I popped open a can of pop and toyed with the idea of hiding inside it.
“Phil, things aren’t exactly safe here on the ground for us.”
“Right. But what would we gain in space?”
“That’s just it. They’d never think of looking for you on… Oh, say the moon.”
She said that a bit too casually. I felt a cold chill dance up and down my spine. “The moon?” I asked, knowing I didn’t want to hear what was coming.
