somewhere outside. The light flooded the cab-a blinding actinic flash, a burst of transcendent radiance. I ducked my head, pushing my face into the soft leather of my jacket. Then I felt the wave of heat ebb, and looked up. The nothingness was gone…
… and we were on a road like no other I'd seen. It was wide as a dream, and silver-all silver-shining in the light of ten billion stars. It was a world of silver night under the most breathtaking sky of any planet in the universe, and the road ran straight and true through a pass between two black mountains silhouetted at the edge of the heavens, out there at the rim of infinity. I floored the pedal, and eons flowed beneath the rollers.
'You've found it, Jake,' Sean laughed. 'The Backtime Route.'
'I love it,' I said.
Strange omens streaked across the skies-comets, motes of fire. The cycles of the universe beat in phase, pulsing out the years, the centuries, the millennia, marking off the ending of things from the beginning of things, keeping a steady tempo.
I was looking out at all this. Sam wasn't. Ever the practical sort, he was checking instruments.
'Jesus, did we all get a dose,' he said. 'The dosimeter is way up. Not lethal, but we'd all better get some sulfahydrite in us.' He unstrapped and got up.
'Sam, get back to the trailer. See if-''
'That's where I'm going right now. Son, you've got to prepare yourself for the worst. You can't see most of the damage from your side. It's a mess back there.'
He left me to drive through time, which I did. I didn't think to ask Sam about Sean, and I didn't want to look back now. I just drove. And drove. It seemed like a long time. Then Sam returned.
'John's alive,' he said. 'Second-degree burns, concussion, but he's basically okay. Jake, Darla's not back there. She's just not in the trailer.'
I nodded. 'It was meant to be, Sam. From the beginning. Written in those stars out there.'
'No, no, you got it all wrong. It was my fault,' Sam said. 'Don't blame the stars. I-'
'No, Sam. I blame no one.'
He didn't know what to say. I didn't either. I just kept driving.
Presently I got the feeling that I had driven as far back as I wanted to go, as I needed to go. I needed a new road, so I tried to put the Skyway out there, but it was no go.
'You know where the Skyway is, Jake,' I heard Sean say. 'It's your home, the only.home you feel at home in, or on. Find it.'
I looked. I searched here and then there, this highway and that byway, high road and low, but none of them were it. I riffled through a million landscapes, seascapes, starscapes, one after another, flashing onto them, discarding them in one smooth mental notion. Universes flickered by. Roads diverged, and I took both of them.
Finally, I found it. The impossible Skyway, eternal mystery, as hard and as real as the doorjamb you stub your toe on-there it was, out there, whizzing by underneath the rollers. But I wasn't through changing worlds. I had one in mind, and I had certain chronological coordinates pinpointed, and I drove until I reached that world and that time.
'You surprise me, Jake,' Sean said. 'I think I know, but I don't think I like it.'
The world was Talltree, Sean's world.
Sam injected me with the tickler, then looked out. 'This place looks mighty familiar,' he said.
It was a forest world, the trees immensely tall, their foliage brightly and strangely colored.
'Well,' Sam said, 'with the Roadmap, we can get home from here.'
'I don't need the Roadmap,' I said.
It was near dark. The planet's sun, a bronze-colored star, had left pink and purple streaks along the horizon. A few kilometers farther down the road, a dirt trail intersected the highway, and I turned off and followed it. I had followed it before. But now I had to be careful, because my former self was here, my past self. I was now a time- traveling doppelganger, a ghost from the future. Perhaps from a future that never would be-if I had anything to do with it.
John was fine, really. He remembered nothing after the missile hit, but he could tell us this: he had started running toward the front of the trailer when my warning came, turned around and saw Darla still struggling with the lift crank. He yelled for her to get back; she started running, and that's when the missile hit. It blew off the back door and tore a huge hole in the left bulkhead, right where Darla had been standing. As it was, she must have been blown out of the trailer, or had fallen out. We had been traveling at a speed in excess of two hundred kilometers per hour. There was no question of her surviving, even if the blast had not killed her instantly.
I parked the rig in a clearing which I estimated to be about a kilometer from the Frumious Bandersnatch, Moore's inn and restaurant. I went back and inspected the damage, then went to the aft-cabin and rummaged for a change of clothes. There wasn't much, but I did find an old pullover sweater, a ratty thing with leather shoulder patches, and some blue jeans. Possibly Carl's.
I wanted a disguise, of sorts. I pulled out a knitted longshoreman's hat, this from under the cot, dust balls clinging to it. I looked and looked, and in the bottom of the clothes locker I found a pair of polarizing goggles-it makes the fuzzy nothingness of an aperture easier to see when shooting a portal. They're rather useless, really, because if you're not already dead on target by the time you can see the aperture, being able to pick it out isn't going to do you much good. But now these specs would suit my purposes nicely.
I chose a gun, a twelve-shot burner, from the ordnance locker.
'What are you up to?' Sam wanted to know.
'I'll be back in two hours. If I'm not back in four, you have the Roadmap.'
'Jake, I think you're insane.'
'Possibly. I'll be back, Sam.'
Arthur looked at me strangely. 'I can't imagine what you're up to.'
'I'm Master of Time and Space.'
Arthur slowly nodded. 'Uh-huh.' He looked to Sam for help.
He didn't get any. I went through the cab, climbed down the mounting ladder, sealed the door shut, jumped down and walked off into the woods.
I remembered these woods well, remembered well the cries, the noises, the night sounds. I heard them now. The first time had been a little frightening. More than that, I must confess. Some snarling horror had chased me-I got away, but never saw the thing. But that had been in deep woods, on a back trail. This was a good logging road, probably well traveled.
And I wasn't alone. I grew aware of Sean walking beside me.
'Ah, Jake. You've got the divvil in ye.' I said nothing.
'You'll be havin' to go to confession this Saturday, for sure.'
'I hate to be curt with a demigod, Sean, but punk off, okay?'
'Ah, Jake, Jake, Jake.' I left him behind.
It seemed a very short walk. It was dark now, but the warm lights of the Bandersnatch glowed ahead. I could hear sounds of partying. I stopped, hid behind a tree, and looked out over the parking lot. And there was the truck. My truck. This was the night, our first night on Talltree. Sam was in that truck, in his second incarnation, as an arrangement of magnetic impulses. What was he now?
I skirted the lot and went around back. There had been a window..
Someone was coming out the back door of the place.
Lori! And Carl! And Winnie, too. I ducked behind an immense tree trunk. They walked by, hand in hand. I leaned out and watched them. They stopped while Winnie examined a leafy bush. I stared at them. The old saw about staring at the back of someone's head proved true-Lori abruptly turned her head. I leaped back behind the tree, cursing myself, then remembered that it was dark and I was in semidisguise.
I remember that Lori and Winnie had gone off foraging for vegetation that Winnie could eat, but that had been earlier, if memory served. Later on in the evening, the three of them had been jumped and Winnie kidnapped. Well, if I could do what must be done, that would never happen. I went to the back window of the bar.
Just a look, just a peek. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Couldn't force myself to look at her. She was in there, drinking, having a good time, watching me go through the good-natured nonsense of the initiation rituals of the Brotherhood of the Boojum. She was probably stifling a giggle right now. Or had she gone upstairs by now? Or had Moore- already…
