Roland bent over the weapons panel. 'I have it set up here. It might be best to lure the things away from the road. There's the chance Sam might get in the way.'
'Looks like suitable terrain up ahead,' I said.
The creases had been smoothed out of the land. The road ran straight over a world-sized tabletop landscaped in cropped grass. This part of the planet had the look of extra space set aside for expansion. It was raw and undeveloped. The portal was ahead, its hundreds of black cylinders taking form out of the gray mist of distance. They looked like impossibly tall skyscrapers, a ghost city on the plains.
I veered off the road and onto the turf. It was smooth going; we hit only an occasional bump. The TD followed. Roland said, 'There is the chance that when the two devils meet, there'll be a terrific explosion.'
'You don't know for sure?'
'It's never been done before, so there's no way of knowing.'
'You guys are timeless and eternal. Why can't you look into the future and see?'
'We did,' Roland said, 'but it has to happen first.'
'Huh? Whaddya mean?'
'Well, if we knew what happens when one of these things meets another, then there'd be no reason to try it and see. In which case, when we looked into the future, we wouldn't find out anything. Would we?'
'Oh.'
There are some days when it's useless to argue. This was one of them.
'Well,' Roland said, 'here goes nothing… and I don't mean that in the phenomenological sense.'
He jabbed a switch, and a gout of orange fire leaped out from the underside of the Chevy, immediately coalescing into a twin of the phenomenon that was showing as a fuzzy purple splotch on the aiming device of the weapons board. The new devil rotated in place for a second, revving itself up and emitting a howl the likes of which are not heard in places where mortals dwell. Then it shot forward.
I yelled, 'Go get 'im, boy!'
Roland said, 'I'd suggest getting well away from them.'
I was already doing that enthusiastically, heading back for the road. When we got there, Sam was nowhere in sight. I slowed, stopping completely when I got back on the pavement. I looked back through the rear window.
'I gotta see what happens,' I said.
The devils met. They appeared to absorb each other, blending into one cyclonic cloud that stood still but rotated twice as fast. Then something began to happen at its center. The writhing shadows faded, supplanted by an ever-brightening star of white-hot intensity. The nova grew and grew until it was impossible to look at. I shut my eyes, then opened them again as the light began to fade. The star collapsed in on itself as the whole structure fell apart into streamers of fire, swirling about the dimming nucleus. Then, slowly, the Devil began to reform, finally solidifying into a cloud twice as big as either of the originals, this one darker in color. It wasn't stable. Parts of it kept radiating away in flaming auras, and chunks of energy flew off constantly, dissipating into the air.
'It's not going to last long,' Roland said. 'The resulting explosion might wreck the planet.'
I whacked my forehead. 'Great idea you had there, Roland. When you looked into the future, was there any future at all?'
Roland rubbed his chin. 'I think what we have to do is give it something to focus all its destructive force on. Something almost indestructible that will absorb most of the devil's energy before being destroyed.'
'Not the Chevy,' I said, hoping against hope.
'I'm afraid so.'
So I turned Carl's magical horseless carriage around and steered for the gates of Hell itself.
The devil met us halfway. The boiling cloud enveloped us, and we baked in radiation until the windows darkened and cut most of it off. It was like sitting in the middle of a nuclear fireball.
I said, 'I presume you have a way of getting us out of this.'
'We'll have to leave the car,' Roland said, putting a hand on my shoulder. 'Get ready,'
It got awfully hot inside the Chevy. Very hot. The seat was beginning to burn the backs of my legs when Roland slapped my shoulder.
'Now,' he said. 'Get up and walk.'
I did. The car was gone. We were walking down a country road. It was dusk, late, winter. The road was red and cold, lined with the dried stalks of last summer's weeds. There was a bare-limbed forest off to the right, to the left a meadow of browned grass with half-buried smooth gray stones sticking up here and there. The sky was gray. It was Pennsylvania.;
'Very nice,' Roland said. 'But a little too cold for comfort.'
A chill wind blew through my jacket. Brown leaves lay trampled in the gravel underfoot. The sun was an orange smear behind the clouds on the horizon. There was the smell of an early spring in the air. The call of a blue jay came from the hills beyond the meadow as the wind stirred the tall brown weeds.
'You've never walked a specific part of the Substratum,' Roland said, 'just your wants and desires. It's endless, you know. Not like the `real' universe, which has limits. But you can walk the real one, too.'
'Yeah? Isn't this Earth? It looks like it to me.'
'Maybe, but it's probably a generalization of many places that you knew at one time.'
'You may be right. This looks like Pennsylvania, but not any specific part that I remember.'
We continued walking. For some reason, I felt obliged to keep moving. The air was pure and I filled my lungs with it. 'This is great,' I said, 'but I want to get back to Sam.'
'We have all the time we need,' Roland said. 'Don't worry. Find the road you want. If this isn't the one, find another.'
I found roads, all right. Roads that led through places I didn't want to see, let alone spend a weekend in. It seemed as though we walked for days.
We came to a wide highway of silver metal sweeping over a plain of blue rock. I looked up and down it. I didn't know where it came from or where it was going.
'Roland, where the hell are we?' 'Don't know. Find another road.'
I found more. None of them were of any earthly use to me. I found another, and it was fine, except that it didn't go anywhere I wanted to go. Another, and I left immediately.
'I give up,' I said.
'What about over here?'
It looked promising, so I followed it, and it turned into something that looked like the Skyway, but not much, so I changed it, and it looked a little closer. Then, all of a sudden, I understood how to do it and we were there, back on Microcosmos, and the truck was braking hard behind us. We moved to the shoulder. Sam brought the rig to a crackling stop and popped the hatch.
'What happened?' he asked as I climbed up the mounting ladder and got in. He got up and gave me the driver's seat.
I turned around to see Roland walking away, looking back, waving: 'Good luck, Jake. Stay well,' he called.
I watched him go. He didn't disappear. He just kept walking.
'I wonder if he'll be all right,' I said, closing the hatch.
'Who?' Sam asked.
'Roland.'
'What made you think of him?'
'What made me- Are you telling me you didn't see him?'
'Didn't see anybody out there but you.'
'But he's right over-'
He was gone. Or was that moving dot out there him? The sun was low, and I couldn't tell.
'Never mind,' I said.
27
