'Sorry. Do you have a proper name?'
'Does a duck quack? Never mind, you couldn't pronounce it.' Arthur turned around. 'What do you want?'
'How do you get out of this place?'
Arthur pointed off to the right. 'Just follow that green line across the floor there. It'll take you to an exit tunnel.'
'That line there?'
'Is there another one? Yes, that line there, dearie.'
'And that's the way out?'
Pensively, Arthur rubbed the underside of his snout. '`Well, let's see. Exit tunnel. Exit. Hmmm. Now, the last time I looked, I thought for sure the word exit meant a way out.'
I gritted my teeth. 'I wanted your assurance that we weren't going to be tricked. Stupid of me to ask, I suppose.'
'Do I look so untrustworthy?'
'Frankly, yes.'
'My, aren't we paranoid. I think I'll leave in a huff.' And he did.
Shaking my head, I watched him disappear into the halfdarkness. 'He's supposed to be a composite of all our personalities. What I want to know is, which one of us is the smartass?'
Darla laughed. 'Funny, but I can see a lot of your sardonic humor in him, Jake.'
'Me?' I yelped. 'You've got to be kidding.'
'Actually, it does make sense that he would have an effeminate personality.'
'Well, it doesn't make any damn sense to me at all.'
Lori had been thinking. 'Do you think John and Roland and the rest will be okay?'
'Who knows,' I said. I rubbed my jaw. 'But I know one thing. I know we're being manipulated.'
'How so?' Darla asked.
'What Arthur said about seeming untrustworthy. Actually, I lied. He appears to be anything but a danger. It's hard to take him seriously at all. He's a cartoon figure, a big, gangling improbability, with a seriocomic personality. And look at Prime. He's everything a superbeing should be-wise, kind and gentle. But think of it. He could take any shape. He's not a being. He's a tool. At least that body is. The persona he's presenting seems a little too tailormade, too contrived.'
Darla nodded. 'I know what you mean. He seems to be bending over backward to make us feel safe, to convince us of his good intentions.'
'Precisely,' I said. 'And that tactic backfired on me from the very start. Just the way I am, I guess.'
'Me, too.' Darla sat in the shotgun seat and brooded. Presently she said, 'But what do they want from us?'
'Maybe the part about wanting us to join the Culmination is true,' I said. 'However, I don't intend to stick around long enough to find out whether it is.' I pushed the start button, and the engine turned over.
'Are we leaving?'
'Not just yet. I want to check out this escape route first. Then we'll see about provisions. If we can pilfer some food, we'll be set to leave at a moment's notice. Everyone strap in.'
I rolled the rig across the smooth floor of the garage, following the solid green line Arthur had pointed out. It led straight toward a clutch of vehicles, then arched to the left. It took us past some more exotic machinery, skirted another maintenance bay, bent to the right and proceeded into darker regions of the garage. I turned on the forward lights. The line weaved among stacks of crates and containers, tall gantries hulking in the shadows behind them. Presently we came to a clear area. The walls of the chamber narrowed, feeding us into a tunnel and complete darkness. The tunnel floor sloped downward for a stretch, then leveled off. I slowed down, feeling cautious and a little edgy. The fear of getting lost again began to gnaw. The line ended, but the tunnel continued for a length until the headbeams showed what at first looked like a dead end, which turned out to be the floor swooping up sharply, too sharply, I thought, and braked. But something was wrong; there came a sudden surge of speed. The rig got sucked into the mouth of the tube and shot upward, propelled along like a shell inside the barrel of a fieldpiece. The angle wasn't as steep as that of the pedestrian escalators, but it was a thrilling trip up, too thrilling, because I was convinced that this time we'd blundered into something we couldn't get out of-maybe this was a missile firing tube, or a catapult that launched aircraft. Imagine our embarrassment when we got to the top.
But it was okay. The ramp leveled off sharply and we could see daylight-the tunnel's end. The invisible force set us loose, and we rolled out into bright late-afternoon sun, traveling a gray-green, two-lane highway.
I pulled off the road and let the engine idle. We were among low grassy hills. A stand of trees fringed a rise to the right, and an arrangement of rounded pink boulders sat off the mad on the other side. Through the rearview parabolic mirror I could see Emerald City atop its escarpment. No other structures lay in sight, but the view was limited by the terrain.
'Now,' I said, sitting back. 'How do we get back inside?'
'Forget it,' Carl said disdainfully. 'Who needs that fairy palace?'
'You can't complain about the food,' I said. 'And it looks like we could go a long time between meals out here.'
'We'll figure something out,' Carl said with haughty confidence.
'You think we can forage? Or do you figure to hunt small game?'
'Huh? Hey, I don't know, but we'll get by somehow.'
'Sure. I'm feeling pangs already. Darla, what do we have left back there?'
'Some crackers, I think. Half a bag of walnuts.' She thought. 'A can of beef consommes… and a rotten apple.'
I looked at Carl.
He shrugged off my stare. 'Okay, okay. So we'll get hungry. But the sooner we get through that portal, the sooner we get back to where we can find food.'
I said, 'Bruce, calculate the most efficient route to that master portal and give me an ETA, assuming nonstop driving and an average speed of about 130 kilometers per hour.'
'Forty-six-point-two-five hours, Jake.'
'So,' I said, 'it's two days if I don't sleep or if I teach you guys to pilot this rig, and that's assuming Skyway cruising speed, or near it, anyway. I don't think we can average more than eighty klicks an hour over alien road.'
'Eighty klicks?' Carl said incredulously. 'That's… what? Only around fifty miles an hour! This rig can hit two hundred or I'm a monkey's uncle.'
'It can do over that,' I said, 'on a high-speed road like the Skyway. But I'm talking average speed, Carl. That's different. And this is little more than a back country road.'
'Yeah, I know,' Carl grumbled. 'Shit. We can still make it, though.'
'Maybe, if we have to. But I'm not ready to leave just yet.'
'Right, right. I'm sorry. We gotta get Sam back, I know.' I studied Carl for a moment. The scared kid inside him was peeping through. He was farther from home than any of us.
I looked back at the tunnel, which exited from the base of a steep hill. 'Well, we can't go down the up-ramp, that's for sure. Bruce, can we get back to the Skyway using these secondary roads?'
'No, Jake, there's no connection.'
'You can't get there from here.' I sighed. 'That's odd. Can we go off-road?'
'Perhaps, Jake. The maps are not so detailed that I can make that judgment with any degree of authoritativeness.'
'Damn. I don't want to go overland, but that through-the-mountain bit seems like the only way into the city by road.'
'And who's to say,' Darla added, 'whether they'll lift up the mountain and let us in again?'
'Right. So I guess we cruise around a little and see if we can find some nice little rabbits who'll let us conk them over the head.'
I was hungry: I'd just picked at breakfast, which seemed like days ago, and Darla's quickie lunch had
