Starrigger

'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?'

'Urn… spooky. Yes.'

The others were waiting for us on me other side of the road. It had been a long trek, and we still had a piece to go until we made the harbor, or so we'd been told.

'Trouble, ja?' one elderly woman with a German accent had asked us. 'Vehicle break down?'

'Uh, yes. Tell me, is it true mat there's no way back to the Terran Maze from here?'

She laughed, showing a gold incisor. The sight of it threw me until I figured out what it was. When had dentists given up that peculiar technique? A century ago? Two?

'Oh, nein, nein, new, kamrada, no, no, no.' Apparently it was a damn silly question. 'Gott, no,' she said, still laughing. 'Impossible. You take wrong portal, ja? Make mistake.'

'Yeah, I guess we did. Thanks.'

'You go down zere,' she said, pointing south. 'Zey vill haf boat comink, ja? Ferryboat.'

'Thanks. Are you taking the ferry also?'

'Ja, ve alzo.' She anticipated my next question. 'Ve stay up here till boat is comink,' she went on, waving with disdain toward the lower end of the island. 'Too much people. Aliens.'

Her lifecompanion smiled at me. He was a little older, bald, and wore eye-lenses… glasses, spectacles. We left them chuckling to each other, as if they'd now heard everything. Walking away, I reflected on the fact that there seemed to be a lot of middle-aged and older types around. Antigeronics hard to get here? Gold teeth, spectacles ? okay, things were primitive, but what about the vehicles?

'Jake!' It was John, calling to me across the road. 'The women want a privy call. Must find some cover, you know.'

'Right.'

'Someone's coming,' Roland said, pointing to the western causeway.

'Sam!'

'No, a roadster… two.'

I shaded my eyes and looked. Two green dots were heading toward us. Reticulans, right on schedule.

I practically threw Roland across the road. We needed cover fast, but there was nothing in sight but a slight rise a good minute's run down the sand. I yelled for everyone to run like hell, and they did with no questions asked. They were learning.

Flattened in the sand just over the top of the rise, I watched two insect-green roadsters cruise across the island and come to a stop at the edge of the eastern beach. The lead vehicle was the one with the trailer, and the backup was more like a limo, bigger, with an extra rear seat, plus plenty of aft storage. The shadowy figures behind the tinted ports in the rear didn't look like Reticulans, but I couldn't tell if they were humans or not. Both vehicles pulled off the road, probably to talk things over. After a minute or so, they crossed the Skyway and headed north, perhaps following our distinctive tire tracks. Were they? No, that trail skirting the beach was well-traveled. Our trace should have been obscured by then. When they saw the submerged roadway, it was fifty-fifty that they'd head north. Still…

When they were out of sight, I got up and brushed the sand from my chest. I was now shiftless and jackedess, having left my brown leather second skin in the Chevy, along with Pe-trovsky's pistol. Force of habit had