Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (10 page)

He
heard the drivers returning, and crouched down behind the gyro, half-covering
himself with a sheet. Heavy footsteps came to the back of the truck; then the
tailgate squeaked up. The doors closed with a clang, and he was locked in with
four bodies in a black and freezing coffin.

The
blackness took him by surprise; he hadn't counted on it, and for a moment he
fought down a rising wave of panic. In spite of the sheets he began shivering
with cold. He heard the driver rev up the motor, and the truck gave a lurch and
began moving.

There
were three stops, the last one accompanied by the noise of the exit-gate
swinging open. Then they were rolling . . . outside.

He
waited until his teeth were chattering with cold, and he was certain the truck
was on open Throughway. Then he groped forward in the darkness until his hand
touched the gyro mount. The gyro was one of the air-driven
Robling
types, very simple, very reliable, the flywheel driven by a tiny stream of air
impinging on the peripheral turbine blades. Once it was in motion, very little
energy was needed to keep the heavy rotor turning at a high enough speed to
stabilize the truck. The flywheel and turbine blades were shielded, but
directly under the pressure nozzle there was a slot to let the air out. The air
stream produced the hum, and Alexander felt around the rim of the turbine
casing until he felt the cool steady jet.

He
moved his fingertip up gingerly until he felt the turbine blades nick the tip
of his fingernail like a buzz saw. Then he pulled one of the toilet paper
rollers out of his pocket.

Wrapping his hand carefully
in one of the plastic sheets, he

rammed
the metal roller up against the spinning
turbine.

There
was a shower of hot sparks, and the turbine screamed and shuddered. The metal
rod began to heat up as the turbine blades ground down the soft metal.
Suddenly the whole
Iruck
bucked and lurched, throwing him down onto
the stretchers; the flywheel dropped below critical stability
RPM,
and the truck
tipped
and fell
over on one side with a long skidding crash, wrenching the doors open and
dumping three corpses out on top of him on the ground.

There
were curses from the cab, and the drivers piled out. "
Musta
been the gyro. What in hell went wrong with it?"

"Oh, my God.
Look at the stiffs all over the place."

"Never
mind the stiffs, what happened to the gyro? Where's the flashlight?"
Together the drivers shoved the corpses and Alexander unceremoniously out of
the way and crawled into the truck with the flash. Neither one noticed that one
of the corpses had coveralls on.

There
were headlights coming down the road, and Alexander slid hastily into the
shadow of the truck as the car roared by. Then he crouched low and ran over to
the shoulder of the road. He slithered down into a drainage ditch as two more
cars approached, slowed, and stopped.

He knew he was on
Wahanakee
Drive, but he didn't know where. There were apartment buildings nearby, and now
people were running down the road toward the wrecked truck. In the distance he
heard the first faint rising whine of a siren.

Alexander
hurried down the drainage ditch, then climbed up and crossed the highway as the
steady trickle of people grew into a crowd and jammed the traffic, their voices
rising on the excitement. He walked slowly away, fighting the urge to run,
staying out of the way of people who kept hurrying clown to the road, expecting
at any moment that the drivers would discover what had happened to their gyro
and begin to wonder how four naked corpses had managed to wreck it so
completely.

He was out.

He
found an apartment building with the door wide open, the tenants out on the
highway sharing in the excitement. He picked up the lobby phone, dialed a
suburban Chicago number. Three long rings, and then a woman's voice said,
"Hello?"

"BJP"

"Yes.
Who is this?" "This is Harvey."

There
was a moment's silence, then a cool, deliberate answer. "Oh . . ."

"Listen
to me, BJ," he said urgently. "This is very important. I'm over on
Wahanakee
Drive, at the Kingston Apartments. Can you pick
me up at the parking lot by the north entrance?"

"Can't
you take a cab over?" The voice was distant, noncommittal.

"No," he said,
"I can't. I'm in trouble."

"I'll
be right over." There was a click, and Alexander put the phone back on the
hook. He wiped his prints off it and then walked out of the back exit into the
parking lot. He could hear more sirens on the highway, and a police 'copter
roared overhead, sliding down toward the wrecked truck. It was only a matter of
time, now, he realized, whether BJ got to him before the police did.

Harvey
Alexander knew Chicago, at least suburban Chicago, fairly well, having spent
three of his Christmas vacations here during his West Point days, courting his
now ex-wife, Betty Jean Wright. From her apartment to this part of
Wahanakee
Drive was about twenty minutes, he estimated, if
the driver was in a hurry. He hoped the police would start searching the
buildings before throwing up road blocks. That might give him time enough.

If they blocked the roads it would be bad,
but it seemed more likely that the people at Kelley would make a thorough
search inside the hospital before assuming that he had gotten through their
foolproof security system.

He smiled wryly to himself. Amazing how
natural it was for a man who developed a security system to assume it was
foolproof.

Still,
the Kelley would certainly notify the police and the DIA about him as soon as
they heard of the wrecked truck. And he didn't want to get BJ in trouble with
the police and DIA, smashed-up marriage or no.

He
remembered another parking lot behind the old Oak Park Country Club. Back in
'94, he had been a third-year man at the Point, captain of the chess and judo
teams, and lie had very matter-of-factly started to change a flat tire on her
father's new Electro two-wheeler which they had borrowed for the dance. He
hadn't understood the techniques for capsizing the car by cranking the gyro
around, and had tried to topple it with a borrowed jack. After much muttered
profanity and sweat he wound up with one end of the car high in the air and
began straining to make it fall over on one side so he could get at the wheel.
BJ doubled over and screamed with laughter, and the Competition, a physicist
from Chicago U., offered carefully baited suggestions in his sarcastic
midwestern
drawl.

He didn't remember the exact move and
countermove, but somehow BJ had talked the Competition into changing the tire,
with accompanying lecture on the scientific method and the principles of gyro
mechanics, while they quietly climbed into the Competition's British
four-wheeler and drove off. They ran the car out of gas somewhere along Lake
Michigan at four AM, and hitched a ride back on a milk truck, coming up the
front walk toward the anxious parents and sulking Competition at six-thirty,
and squelching all criticism and admonitions by announcing their engagement.

He
graduated from the Point the next year, three months early because of the
crash, and he and BJ got married the next day in the barbed-wire-enclosed
Church of the Redeemer in New York against the advice of parents, relatives,
and their own common sense.

The
crash . . . dirty, stinking, bloody crash . . . that knocked the whole world
face first into the dirt, knocked their marriage around, too. He saw BJ twice
in the first three years. The second time, when he had the two weeks leave they
had planned on for ten months, he was ordered back on active duty the second
day and sent to China because of the sudden Yangtze truce. BJ blew up then and
told him she was sick of it. He blamed her parents, and told her she was
selfish and childish and a lot of other stupid, angry things, and left.

When
he came back from China two and a half years later, she told him she was
divorcing him. The Competition, quickly switching his field of work from
physics to sociology, along with the more agile of the
intelligensia
of the country, had fallen into a cushy, high-stability-rating job in DEPCO,
the new Department of Economic and Psychological Control that had taken over
the shattered government while he was in China. The Competition had been most
attentive, and convincing. BJ married him as soon as the divorce papers came
through.

When
Alexander saw her some eight years later, on his way through Chicago to Mexico,
he learned that the second marriage had folded too. Of course any marriage
lasting over five years in those days was a minor miracle, but BJ was bitter
and disappointed about it. They got drunk together for old time's sake, but she
was all walled off by then, and there was nothing between them
any more
.

Now
he shivered in the cold night air, and wished he had stolen the guard's
underclothes as well as his coveralls. At least six sirens had come screaming
up
Wahanakee
Drive before he heard the crunch of
gravel at the parking lot entrance. He ducked down low behind a jack-balanced
Hydro 22. The car, a Volta sports model, kept inching along on its single
wheel, headlight on dim. He saw BJ had left the top down and the dashboard
lights on so he would recognize her. Over on the highway he could see the
search parties beginning to fan out through the grass and weeds along the
drainage ditch, flashlights winking.

He waited until the Volta was almost past
him, then tossed a handful* of gravel against the plastic side.

"Harvey?" The Volta stopped.

"Right here."
He glanced carefully around, and climbed in
the car, rocking it slightly on its single wheel.

"What's this about
your being in trouble?"

"I'll
tell you later. Do you know how to get out of here without running into any
police roadblocks?"

"Are all those cars
after you?"

"I
don't know. I think so. See, they're searching the ditches."

"There
was a truck on its side down there," BJ said. "They didn't stop me,
but I had to go very slowly, and I think the
olficer
routing traffic was looking into the cars as they went

!>
y
_;
<
"

"Well,"
Alexander said, "maybe I'd better get out and take my chances. You could
get into a lot of trouble if you were caught with me."

"Don't
be silly." She looked at him in the ill-fitting coveralls and laughed.
"What's it all about? What have you done?"

"I
just broke out of the George Kelley Hospital, for one thing."

BJ
stopped laughing.
"Out of the
Kelley?
But that's . . ." She looked again at the blue coveralls with K
stamped into
I
lie plastic. "Okay," she
said, and headed the car out of the parking lot. "Hold on."

Alexander
sat silently, watching her drive as she rolled through the Kingston
development, drove across the sidewalk, wove through a Playschool playground
and finally onto a golf course. It was one of the new ones with plastic grass
that would not wear out or divot, with plastic weeds and trees, the whole thing
a curious but ineffective camouflage for the huge meat-processing plant buried
beneath it. When they came off the golf course, she turned south onto an
old-fashioned road, obviously built in the days of four-wheeled cars, and
stepped the Volta up to about ninety. A moment or two later they merged into
traffic on one of the new speedways, where the Volta could cruise along at 200
with the rest of the traffic.

"This
way will take a little longer," she said, "but they'd have to get out
a state-wide alarm to cut us off now." She set the car on automatic,
letting the
photosight
follow the white lane strip,
and turned to face him.

"Now
what's all this about? What did
Üiey
have you in the Kelley for?"

"
Recoop
,"
Alexander said.

"You?
For
recoop
?
My God, Harvey."

He
told her about the Geiger alert at Wildwood, and how the suddenly-appearing DIA
unit suspected him of being involved in the theft, and put him under
polygraph. She let him talk until the whole story was out. All the bitterness
burst out suddenly, and he talked for quite a while before he had boiled off
enough rage to stop talking.