The cop said to me, “How can I help you, General?”
“I need to rent a car. Personal business. But I’m not in this TWD thing, apparently.”
He nodded. “For a citizen to drive on a guideway, he has to waive his Thirty-eighth Amendment right of freedom from satellite tracking.”
I snorted. “What idiot would waive that right?” Even tracking off-duty soldiers’ dog-tag chips had been curtailed years ago.
He shrugged. “Every idiot who wants autodrive commuting. Which is all of us. Anyway, no waiver, no rental. And it takes a day to register in the database, sir.”
I sighed. If you sell poison cheap enough, democracy will find suicide an irresistible bargain. “I have to be in Pennsylvania tonight.”
The Hertz girl looked up. “I’m allowed to rent you a manual drive with no tracker. But you can only drive back roads. And the mobile recharge coverage costs extra, because nobody knows where you are.”
I smiled. “Actually, I’d prefer that.” But looking old and shabby didn’t make me an easy mark. “And I’ll decline the extra coverage.”
Her jaw dropped. “Nobody declines the mobile recharge coverage.”
“I do.”
She pointed at my wrist ’Puter. “If that’s not registered, I’m required to offer to rent you a temporary, so you can access the net.”
“And the temporary has a tracker?” I shook my head. “Just the car, thanks.”
She shrugged, then sighed, and a contract form appeared on her flatscreen. “Thumb here, here, and here.”
Four hours later, I sat behind the wheel of my rental car as it rolled to a silent stop on a dirt road somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania.
The car slightly changed the whine it had been reciting for the past twenty miles. “My motive batteries are now fully depleted, except for emergency flasher power. If you have not already arrived at a charging station, mobile recharge is on the way. If you do not have prepaid mobile recharge service, you may purchase it on the net. Thank you for choosing Hertz.” The car shut down, and its flashing dash light turned from amber to red but kept winking.
I slammed my palms against the wheel, then exhaled and eyed the unconnected ’Puter on my wrist. I slid the door back manually, stepped out into the road, and surveyed my situation, hands on hips.
The country I could see was forested and silent but for insect drone. The only hints of the hand of man beyond the road itself were weathered, cut stumps amid the second-growth trees. I kicked a tire, cursed the car, cursed 2067 Earth, cursed the Hertz girl, and, finally and most appropriately, cursed my own stubborn stupidity.
According to the Navex, before it went Benedict Arnold on me with the rest of the car, the backside of my destination was just over the rise to my front, two hundred yards away. I stripped off my sport jacket, rolled up my shirtsleeves, lifted the first of my packages out of my duffel, then locked my duffel in the car.
Then I sighed and hiked up and over the rise. As predicted, a hundred yards past the rise’s crest, dull in the late slant of early-evening sun, I came to a locked metal farm gate astride the road, flanked by three-strand wire fencing. A metal sign on the gate read “National Historic Site. Authorized access only.”
I sighed, stepped to the gate, and swung a leg over.
A shadow flickered across my shoulders and forearms, then a tin voice above me said, “Halt and be recognized.”
NINETEEN
I FROZE ASTRIDE THE GATE.
A surveillance ’bot whirred around to face me, a dragonfly with a six-foot Plasteel wingspan.
Unlike a county-mountie surveillance ’bot, the turret on this one, which followed my every twitch, in unison with the ’bot’s optic sensors, mounted a six-barrel micro-gun in place of a nonlethal dazer.
A voice boomed from the ’bot’s speaker. “Get off the fence, raise your hands, then back away twenty feet.”
I did.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m invited for dinner.”
Pause.
“Why didn’t you come to the front gate?”
“I had to rent a manual-drive car, so I couldn’t use the guideway. The car ran out of juice back over the hill.” I jerked my thumb back down the road. “You can check.”
“Who are you?”
“Lieutenant General Jason Wander. My ID’s in the car.”
Pause.
It seemed neighborly to fill the silence. “I declined the mobile recharge coverage.”
The ’bot’s turret whined, and I heard the microgun’s safety click off. “Nobody declines the mobile recharge coverage.”
The ’bot hovered, I sweated, and my upraised arms grew heavy.
During the pause, I could hear my interrogator breathe through his open mike, and his voice came through faintly. “Yes, ma’am. That’s who he claims to be. The car checks out, a rental… completely discharged.”
Pause.
“He says he declined it, ma’am.”
Another pause.
“Yes, ma’am. Only an idiot.”
My interrogator sighed, more loudly, then spoke to me. “She says it can only be you, General.” The ’bot’s safety clicked back on. “Sit tight, sir. A tilt-wing will be out to pick you up in three minutes. We’ll tow your vehicle in and charge it. Welcome to Eisenhower Farm.”
TWENTY
ON THE APPROACH TO EISENHOWER FARM, the tilt-wing overflew the pastoral hills that had once run with the blood of the Battle of Gettysburg. Eisenhower bought the farm during his presidency, as a retirement place, because he had been a soldier and the land overlooked the ghosts of Lee’s lines along Seminary Ridge. The Eisenhowers passed the farm to the National Park Service in 1967, a century ago, and ten acres had been retransferred a few years back, by act of Congress, to the two least likely cohabiting VIPs on Earth.
Margaret Irons and Nat Cobb stood arm in arm, heads down against the tilt-wing’s downwash, as I ran to them, stooped beneath the thumping props. The tilt-wing lifted, returning to whatever secret place the Secret Service kept it in, and the gale and roar faded.
Maggie was the first of them I got to, slender as wire, no taller than my shoulder, with hair that clung in ermine ringlets against her mahogany skin. She hugged me, and only gingerly did I hug back, keeping one eye on her Secret Service detail. A former president is a former president, after all.
Nat Cobb, my boss since before the Battle of Ganymede, was as thin as Maggie and as pale as the snows of his Maine birthplace. His sparse hair was clipped in a retired four-star’s brush, as white as his female companion’s. He patted my back. “Good to see you, Jason.”
Like many people who saw through Virtulenses, Nat said that to remind new acquaintances that
