'You don't know.' Wilkes sighed. 'Oh, well. Come on, Jake. I want you to see this.' He rose and crooked his finger at me, walking over to the connecting door. He opened it and pointed.
I got up and walked over, robotlike. I looked into the room. My eyes were drawn first to the sight of Lori. She was naked, slumped in a chair in a far comer, under the wand's spell. Then my gaze drifted to the four Reticulans, Twrrrll among them. They were regarding me impassively, standing around a strange piece of furniture, made of black wrought iron, which looked like a cross between a table and a bed. The legs were fashioned into alien animal limbs, adorned with ornamental tracery exhibiting runic symbols. An elaborate headboard was executed in the same manner. Across the top of the table lay a network of troughs, not unlike the bottom of a roasting pan, with tributaries branching out to the edge and running off into gutters that would conduct blood, or any kind of body effluent, down to the foot of the bed, there to spill into two large copper pails. The pails were chased with more cryptic markings. To one side stood a much smaller table done in the same style, upon which lay an assortment of strange bladed instruments.
'Roadmap!' Wilkes whispered hoarsely into my ear. The electric tension flowed out of me and I went limp, swaying on my feet. 'The Reticulans have always been hunters, Jake.They never lost the impulse, as we did. It's still the driving thrust of their culture. Interesting, don't you think? Long ago they depleted their home planet of 'honorable game,' as they call it. Then they discovered the Skyway. You'd think fifty or sixty new planets would hold them for a while. But the Reticulans are an old race, Jake. One of me oldest on this part of the road. Very recently, a few hundred years ago, they took to hunting outside their maze. They're feared and hated everywhere, as well they should be.'
He craned his head around to whisper in my other ear. 'Can you imagine what it's like to be vivisected, Jake? That's how the Reticulans will honor you, their sacred quarry. Unless you hand over Winnie, in which case I might persuade them to let you loose for a little while longer. They probably consider it a challenge to track you without the mrrrllowharrr.'
He closed the hatch, then shoved me toward the chair. I sat down heavily.
'How much good will it do, Corey,' I asked, 'to tell you I don't know where she is?'
'None at all, I'm afraid,' Wilkes said airily. He got a cigarette from a gold case on the table and lit it, blew smoke at the ceiling. 'Your little girl friend says the same thing.'
'What did she say?'
'She says she hid Winnie up on the poop deck in an unused radio shack. She went back later and the animal was gone.'
'You don't believe her?'
'Yes, I do, but I can't believe both of you don't know.'
'Winnie may have got frightened at something and run.'
'Fine. Then Pendergast's people will find her eventually, and everything'll be wonderful. But I'm only giving you another hour, Jake. Then?'
'It's a big ship, Corey,' Vance said, fiddling with my newly bought revolver. 'Maybe we should give it a little more time.'
'Okay, two hours.' Wilkes threw up his arms. 'Hell, I'll wait all night. I'm easy to get along with. But
22
We waited.
Conversation was desultory. Vance and Darla sat at a table at the other end of the room, drinking coffee brought in by another of Wilkes' bodyguards. At various intervals they all popped pills to keep up their immunity from the wand's effect. Wilkes told me it was still on low power.
At one point, Darla came toward me, bearing a cup and saucer.
'No, Darla,' Wilkes told her.
She stopped. 'You said he was your guest,' she said sarcastically.
'Don't want you slipping him any tranqs.'
'Do you think I would?'
'I don't know, and don't care to take the chance. But I don't want to be inhospitable. I'll pour him a cup.' He got up and went to the table and did, then fetched it over to me. 'Enjoy, Jake.'
'Thank you.' I sipped it and found that it wasn't coffee but some kind of grain beverage, with a bitter aftertaste.
'Corey,' I said, 'there's one thing that's been bothering me since the start of this thing.'
'What's that?'
'Why didn't you just kill me?'
Wilkes looked over the newssheet he was reading. 'Good question. You can't say I haven't had plenty of opportunity.' He folded the sheet and put it aside, then went back to tapping on his lips with his fingers. 'This damned Paradox thing set me to thinking. If I just up and killed you, it very well could have turned out that nothing would have changed. You'd be dead, and the map would still be in circulation, brought back from the Great Beyond by the 'you' that never died. Paradox. Or maybe there's really no Paradox and somebody else brought the map back ? one of your religious friends, for instance. They could be in on the whole thing.'
'They're not,' Darla said emphatically.
Wilkes shook his head sadly. 'Another statement that I can't accept at face value. For all I know, they could be part of your dissident network. Maybe they brought the map back and pumped Jake's image up into a legend. Who knows? No, I came up with a plan of sorts. I had to nab you, and I wanted to wait until you shot a potluck to be certain you had the map. After all, none of the stories about you say exactly when you got it.'
'So you herded me through a potluck.'
'Right, and it wasn't pure luck that you chose the Splash portal. If you think back over all the options you had, you'll find there were few. You could have gone elsewhere, however, which is why the mrrrllowharrr was necessary.'
'Back at the motel ? you sent your crew to flush me out of there?'
'Yes, to keep you running. Knew you'd find a way to escape, and you did. You're slippery, Jake.' He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs in a compulsive, jerking movement. 'Anyway. I had to get that punking map, find out… no! First I had to find out if it even existed, then find out where it came from.' He looked uncomfortable. 'And I still don't know.'
'I'll tell you where it came from, Corey,' I said. 'You created it.'
'How so?'
'If you'd have let me alone, I never would have hid out in that motel, never would have met Winnie, etcetera, etcetera.'
He laughed. 'The irony hasn't escaped me. Believe me, I've thought about it. But what was I to do? Talk about having few options. No matter what I did seemed doomed from the start….' He trailed off and looked at the ceiling. 'Well, that's neither here nor there,' he added offhandedly.
After a pause, Vance said, 'I wish you'd finish that, Corey. I'm still in the dark as to how getting the map now will alter reality or in any way change the fact that the dissidents have it.' He got up from the table and walked over to Wilkes, stood over him, and said pointedly, 'I really wish we could clear that up once and for all.'
My head was beginning to congeal a little, but it had taken me the better part of an hour to think through what I said next. 'There's nothing to clear up. Van,' I blurted out. 'Can't you see that your little drug scheme is going right out the port?'
He slowly brought his eyes around to me. 'What do you mean?'
'He means to drive a wedge between us, Van,' Wilkes said mildly. 'Oldest trick in the book. Don't fall for it.'
'Suddenly I'm very interested in what he has to say. What exactly did you mean, Jake?'
'First, tell me a few things. How did you get in on this, and why?'
He was annoyed. 'Doesn't strike me as pertinent.'
