'Um, I think we're going to take off.'
And we did.
Oh, did we take off.
The planet dropped away from us. Our acceleration must have been a hundred Gs. We felt nothing. We heard nothing.
'Sam, are you registering any airspeed at all?'
'None. 'Course, that can't be.'
'Maybe, if there's some kind of force field around us. Can you see a slipstream or contrail behind us?'
'Yup, you're right, there is.'
Presently, the sky darkened and the curve of the planet appeared. Ahead was star-sprinkled blackness. We were in space, just like that.
'Incredible,' Yuri murmured. 'Absolutely…'
As distance increased, the visually-induced sensation of speed abated. We floated above the planet for a while, banking to the right. The still mammoth but slowly dwindling orange disk of the world below heaved full into the starboard ports. Then the terminator line came over the horizon and swept past. We were heading for the dark side and away from the sun.
Roland's face was transfixed with delight. His grin drew a crescent from ear to ear and he was giggling like a three-year-old child on his first merry-go-round. His Oriental eyes were narrowed to curved slits. He looked absolutely insane.
'Spaceship!' he burbled, then laughed maniacally.
'Yeah, neat,' I said. 'Jesus Christ, Roland, take it easy.'
Everyone else was silent and awed to the very marrow.
The planet waned to a thin bright crescent and dropped away behind. Oblivious to the laws of physics as they are commonly understood, our magic disk, our spaceship, whisked us at unimaginable speeds into deep space. We were like meat on a serving dish. The planet crept to the stern, dwindling fast, and by the time I could get it on the rearview screens it had been reduced to a tiny scratch against the dark wall of night. Gone.
'Sam, can you get any kind of estimation of our speed?'
'Trying,' he said. A moment went by, then he went on, 'You wouldn't believe it. I can't believe it. We're accelerating so fast I can't even give you numbers. Call it umpteen million klicks per second and still accelerating.'
'Carl,' I said, 'did your flying saucer look anything like this?'
'Nah, but I bet it went as fast.'
'I'll have to try for star readings now,' Sam said.
The illusion of speed was gone now that there weren't any points of reference. But even the stars, what little of them there were, seemed to be shifting like distant scenic features as we flew past. If Sam's readings were to be believed, we would be out of the local solar system and into interstellar space in a matter of a few hours, a day at the most.
'By Christ,' was all Sean could say, staring out the port. 'By Christ.'
'Well, gang,' I said, 'what do you make of this?'
'If Bugs can fly,' Carl wondered, 'why do they run on the road?'
'Good question,' I said. 'But I never doubted that Bugs could do anything they wanted to do. They probably keep to the Skyway for their own good reasons. Which are… who knows?'
'The stars,' Yuri said, leaning forward in his seat and looking out the front port.
The stars ahead were taking on a violet-blue cast, and in an area directly in line with our path, they were disappearing.
'We're approaching lightspeed,' Yuri said. He sighed and leaned back, shaking his' head, his expression troubled. 'I may be losing my mind.'
'Hang on for a while,' I said, but I knew what he meant. There is only so much wonderment the human mind can absorb before it just takes a cab. This journey had been one long assault on the limits of endurance.
'Anybody have any speculation?' I asked, 'on where they're taking us, and why?'
'I think we've pretty much run that subject into the ground over the past month,' Susan answered. 'Haven't we? I mean, first we thought they were taking us to Bug jail, then back to T-Maze, then to the Roadbuilders, and now… God, who could possibly guess? What would the Roadbuilders be doing off the road?'
John said, 'I think at this point we have to dispose of all the common assumptions made about the Skyway and whoever created it. None of the usual explanations ever made any sense anyway.'
'Exactly,' Yuri said. 'It's always been taken for granted that the Skyway is an artifact of some long-vanished civilization. But just think about it. Here we have a road system that actually goes nowhere. There are no ruins of cities along it, nothing that would indicate that the road was ever used by those who built it. There were always the patrol vehicles?but now we know they're not vehicles at all but actual beings of some kind. Jake said it best, I think, when he likened them to civil servants. The Bugs were created to keep the road passable and relatively safe… for us. I've always believed that the Skyway was built for the express purpose of providing a way to bridge the fantastic distances separating the intelligent races of the universe. And for no other purpose.'
'But why are we now off the road?' John asked.
Yuri shrugged. 'We all saw that road crew spin up a new cylinder.'
John nodded. 'Of course. It's still under construction.'
'We're on a detour,' Susan put in.
'Very good, Susan,' Yuri said, smiling.
John's brow knitted and he put a long-fingered hand to one side of his face, massaging it. 'So confusing,' he muttered. 'See here. You just said that the Skyway doesn't go anywhere. But we've just spent a month on Red Limit Freeway. I don't know where in God's name we're going, but we're surely going somewhere, and it bloody well seems to me that Red Limit Freeway was built for the express purpose of taking us there.'
Yuri sat forward and propped his chin up on his fists, his eyebrows twitching perplexedly. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, it does seem that way, doesn't it? You're absolutely right, John, and I have to confess that it undermines my theory.' He sat up sharply and pounded a fist into his thigh. 'But dammit, if the Roadbuilders wanted people to be following a prescribed path, why the devil didn't they make that path abundantly clear? Why the blind alleys, the cul-de-sacs, the obscurity, the whole tangled mess of it all?' As he spoke, the accumulated frustration and stress of the past two years and the boredom and uncertainty of the past four weeks rose from whatever place it is where such things cook and stew under pressure until they have to be released. 'Dammit all, I've spent half my life trying to understand one basic thing, trying to find some sort of clue, struggling to shed a single ray of light on a single overriding question and it's been like butting and butting my head against the roadbed itself. Sometimes I think I've been a fool?but that's of little importance. It was my choice?I made it and I must live with it. But the question still remains, dammit. It won't go away.' He crashed a fist into the armrest, his voice erupting to a shout. 'If the goddamn fucking Roadbuilders had wanted us to follow their fucking road?' He began pounding the armrest in cadence. '?why the bloody fucking HELL didn't they give us a fucking MAP!'
The last thwack on the armrest nearly broke it.
After a pregnant pause, Sam began to laugh. And that set us all off.
Yuri looked around at us, his eyes wide. Then he collapsed inside, spent, the redness in his face quickly turning from anger to embarrassment. He fell back in his seat in total helplessness and started to laugh, too.
We spent at least two full minutes laughing ourselves silly.
We began sobering up when we realized that Yuri had dovetailed into crying. Zoya got up, stood behind him, and began massaging his shoulders, stroking his tousled hair.
Yuri wiped his eyes on his filthy, tattered sleeve. 'Forgive me,' he said, his voice choked with remorse. 'My friends… you must… forgive me.'
'Nothing to forgive, Yuri,' I said. 'You were entitled to that, and it was just about time you collected.'
'Still, I must apologize for the outburst…' He managed a smile. 'And the language.'
'You won't find any virgin ears around here,' Susan said, 'so don't worry about that.' She thought a moment. 'Of course, I've never tried it that way.'
This set us off again and this time Yuri's laugh was unadulterated mirth.
When we had sobered up again, Sean got up from the deck, straightened his black turtleneck, and thumped
