While we waited, Carl and I gave the women a hand. We packed all the trash into plastic sacks, which we set out neatly on the floor of the garage. Maybe Arthur took out the garbage around here. Then we swept the place out, vacuumed, scrubbed, and generally tidied up. When the trailer was finished, we set ourselves to straightening up the cab and aftcabin, gleaning five more sacks of crap. I was surprised by the amount that had accumulated. But thirteen beings in a confined space produce quite a mess.
'Well, at least it smells a lot better,' Darla said.
I sniffed. 'Yeah, the dirty-sock odor is gone. I still get a whiff of our lumberjack friends, though.'
Darla rolled her eyes. 'Oh, those two, antiperspirant is a scarce commodity on Talltree.'
'Or maybe sweat is plentiful.' I sat down in seat. 'Bruce, how's it coming?'
'Situation still anomalous. There is a great deal of data.'
'Uh-huh.'
'I've located a congruence.'
Apparently the driver's
'Huh?'
'Just now. I've found a section of the Ten-an Maze.'
'My God.'
'Now I have all of the Terran Maze located. Yes. Yes. And here is the Expanded Confinement Maze. Reticulan Maze, Ryxx Maze, Beta Hydran Maze, and the rest of known Skyway routes.'
'Now,' I said, 'your next job is to find Microcosmos.'
'Microcosmos? Can you please define that?'
'The name of this world. You should have data on it in storage.'
'Understood… searching… found. Yes, a section of Skyway is here. However, I see no indication of a portal.'
'If you can find Microcosmos on the master map, there might be one indicated on the reverse face of the planet. Okay. What I want you to do is chart a route from Terran Maze to here, working backward. It won't be necessary to have a visual route layout. Just keep a tally of lefts and rights. That will be our way home.'
'Understood,' Bruce said. 'Beginning job now.'
I turned sideways and looked back at Darla, Lori, and Carl. 'Well, we know a few things. For one, we know that the Skyway isn't infinite. I don't know how many gigabytes the complete map takes up, but it's a finite number.'
'It has an end,' Darla said. 'We knew that, didn't we?'
'I think we're talking about a circle here. No beginning, no end. If your hunch is right, we can get off this platter and get back on the Skyway.'
Bruce said, 'Jake?'
'Yeah?'
'The new maps are a bit unusual in that they show some routes marked in a different manner from the rest. Comparing these with the data placed in storage by the previous supervisor program='
'Sam.'
'Yes, that was its informal designation. Comparing these with Sam's data, I would say these are Roadbug service roads.'
'Sounds like it,' I told him.
'If these roads can be utilized, the route would be much more direct.'
'No doubt,' I said. 'That's how we got here. But I don't know if we can go back that way. In fact, without Carl's car, I'm sure we can't.'
'Then I will disregard them.'
'Lunch, anyone?' Darla said. 'I've whipped up something out of what was left of the rations.'
'You're on.'
We ate. The fare was a shade downscale from what Prime could offer, but somehow it felt good to have a meal in the truck again. Which was strange, since we had been on Microcosmos slightly less than twenty-four hours. My sense of time was completely out of whack. It seemed as if we'd been here a good deal longer. I thought about it, and decided it must have been the dream. The dream had spanned billions of years and unthinkable distances, and I had a lingering sense of having traversed those vast times and spaces.
Bruce finally completed his task. It had taken him two hours.
'Display the planetary layout of Microcosmos,' I instructed him.
And there it was on the screen. It looked as though most of the prominent features were indicated, and I had a hunch we could depend on these maps to be accurate and comprehensive. There were other roads besides the ingress stretch of Skyway: They meandered across the terrain, some deadending near buildings and complexes, others going all the way to the rim. I searched out an efficient route to the edge of the planet.
'I wonder what you do here?' Carl asked. 'Fall off the world?'
'I wonder.' I eyed a thin ribbon of highway that seemed to have its start near Emerald City. 'This looks interesting. But how do we get from Emerald City to the beginning of the road?'
'Beats me,' Carl said.
'Okay, Bruce. Let's see the other side of the coin.'
'I understand the metaphor.'
Carl jumped. 'Holy hell, is that a portal?'
'That's our back door.' I laughed.
But it wasn't your average portal array. Bruce displayed the cylinder count: 216 of them, arranged in haphazard patterns, shot through with odd twistings of road. It looked like a connect-the-dots puzzle that an eight-eyed alien had given up an. Four major highways, converging from the points of the compass, fed into the spaghetti like mess of roads at the middle.
'This is interesting,' I said. 'There's almost no end to the various ways you could weave in and through there. Might mean that from here you could go almost anywhere in the Skyway system.'
'But how do you know which way to zig and zag?' Lori asked, peering over my shoulder.
'Very simple,' Bruce said.
'I'll bet,' I scoffed. Then I shrugged. 'Really?'
'Yes, Jake. Each section of the master map is numbered in binary. There is a table provided. Look-this is just a portion of it. Now, as you see, this is basically a hexadecimal core of a multidimensional, multivariable table, in which each.cylinder is given a number. Passages through and among various cylinders are given in a number sequence con gsponding to the cylinders involved. These sequences in turn correspond to the map section numbers. Now, as you can see, this is a very complex array, and processing could be hampered by core storage limitations, but by batching separate passes and by converting the data to a packed-decimal format in working storage, it should be possible to-'
'Wait a minute,' I said. I couldn't make anything out of the flurry of numbers on the screen. 'Are you saying that if I gave you x section of Skyway as a destination, you could tell me what combination of cylinders to shoot in order to make the jump there?'
'Yes, Jake, that is what I am saying. It would merely be a table lookup function.'
I sat back and whistled. 'Then that `way home' you spent two hours charting-that wasn't a way home at all. That was the way we came.'
'Yes, I'm afraid so,' Bruce said. 'One could take that route, of course, but the transit time back to Ten-an Maze would be, assuming conventional speed averages and taking into account rest and maintenance stops, something on the order of thirty thousand Standard Years.'
10
'The long way home,' I said.
'Indeed,' Bruce said calmly. 'However, as I have said, we have a much more efficient route at our disposal.'
