Starman Jones (3 page)

He wished for a light, but its lack did not bother him much. He knew this country, every slope, almost every tree. He stayed high, working along the hillside, until he reached the exit ring where the trains jumped the gap, and there he came out on the road used by the ring road’s maintenance crews. He sat down and put on his shoes.

The maintenance road was no more than a track cut through trees; it was suited to tractor treads but not to wheels. But it led down across the gap and up to where the ring road disappeared in the runnel through the far ridge. He followed it, making good time in the born mountaineer’s easy, loose-jointed walk.

Seventy minutes later, he was across the gap and passing under the entrance ring. He went on until he was near the ring that marked the black entrance to the tunnel. He stopped at what he judged to be a safe distance and considered his chances.

The ridge was high, else the rings would have been built in a cut rather than a tunnel. He had often hunted on it and knew that it would take two hours to climb it—in daylight. But the maintenance road ran right through the hill, under the rings. If he followed it, he could go through in ten or fifteen minutes.

Max had never been through the ridge. Legally it was trespass—not that that bothered him, he was trespassing now. Occasionally a hog or a wild animal would wander into the tunnel and be trapped there when a train hurtled through. They died, instantly and without a scratch. Once Max had spotted the carcass of a fox just inside the tunnel and had ducked in and salvaged it. There were no marks on it, but when he skinned it he found that it was a mass of tiny hemorrhages. Several years earlier, a man had been caught inside; the maintenance crew brought out the body.

The tunnel was larger than the rings but no larger than necessary to permit the projectile to ride ahead of its own reflected shock wave. Anything alive in the tunnel could not avoid the wave; that unbearable thunderclap, painful at a distance, was so loaded with energy as to be quick death close up.

But Max did not want to climb the ridge; he went over the evening schedule of trains in his mind. The
Tomahawk
was the one he had watched at sundown; the
Javelin
he had heard while he was hiding in the barn. The
Assegai
must have gone by quite a while ago though he didn’t remember hearing it; that left only the midnight
Cleaver.
He then looked at the sky.

Venus had set, of course, but he was surprised to see Mars still in the west. The Moon had not risen. Let’s see—full moon was last Wednesday. Surely…

The answer he got seemed wrong, so he checked himself by taking a careful eyesight of Vega and compared it with what the Big Dipper told him. Then he whistled softly—despite everything that had happened it was only ten o’clock, give or take five minutes; the stars could not be wrong. In which case, the
Assegai
was not due for another three-quarters of an hour. Except for the faint chance of a special train, he had plenty of time.

He headed into the tunnel. He had not gone fifty yards before he began to be sorry and a bit panicky; it was as dark as a sealed coffin. But the going was much easier as the bore was lined to permit smooth shock-wave reflections. He had been on his way several minutes, feeling each step but hurrying, when his eyes, adjusting to complete darkness, made out a faint grey circle far ahead. He broke into a trot and then into a dead run as his fear of the place piled up.

He reached the far end with throat burned dry and heart laboring; there he plunged downhill regardless of the sudden roughening of his path as he left the tunnel and hit the maintenance track. He did not slow up until he stood under stilt supports so high that the ring above looked small. There he stood still and fought to catch his breath.

He was slammed forward and knocked off his feet.

He picked himself up groggily, eventually remembered where he was and realized that he had been knocked cold. There was blood on one cheek and his hands and elbows were raw. It was not until he noticed these that he realized what had happened; a train had passed right over him.

It had not been close enough to kill, but it had been close enough to blast him off his feet. It could not have been the
Assegai;
he looked again at the stars and confirmed it. No, it must have been a special—and he had beaten it out of the tunnel by about a minute.

He began to shake and it was minutes before he pulled himself together, after which he started down the maintenance road as fast as his bruised body could manage. Presently, he became aware of an odd fact; the night was silent.

But night is never silent. His ears, tuned from babyhood to the sounds and signs of his hills, should have heard an endless pattern of little night noises—wind in the leaves, the scurrying of his small cousins, tree frogs, calls of insects, owls.

By brutal logic he concluded correctly that he could not hear—“deef as a post”—the shock wave had left him deaf. But there was no way to help it, so he went on; it did not occur to him to return home. At the bottom of this draw, where the stilts were nearly three hundred feet high, the maintenance road crossed a farm road. He turned down hill onto it, having accomplished his first purpose of getting into territory where Montgomery would be less likely to look for him. He was in another watershed now; although still only a few miles from home, nevertheless by going through the ridge he had put himself into a different neighborhood.

He continued downhill for a couple of hours. The road was hardly more than a cart track but it was easier than the maintenance road. Somewhere below, when the hills gave way to the valley where the “foreigners” lived, he would find the freight highway that paralleled the ring road on the route to Earthport—Earthport being his destination although he had only foggy plans as to what he would do when he got there.

The Moon was behind him now and he made good time. A rabbit hopped onto the road ahead, sat up and stared, then skittered away. Seeing it, he regretted not having brought along his squirrel gun. Sure, it was worn out and not worth much and lately it had gotten harder and harder to buy the slugs thrown by the obsolete little weapon—but rabbit in the pot right now would go mighty nice, mighty nice! He realized that he was not only weary but terribly hungry. He had just picked at his supper and it looked like he’d breakfast on his upper lip.

Shortly, his attention was distracted from hunger to a ringing in his ears, a ringing that got distressingly worse. He shook his head and pounded his ears but it did not help; he had to make up his mind to ignore it. After another half mile or so he suddenly noticed that he could hear himself walking. He stopped dead, then clapped his hands together. He could hear them smack, cutting through the phantom ringing. With a lighter heart he went on.

At last, he came out on a shoulder that overlooked the broad valley. In the moonlight, he could make out the sweep of the freight highway leading southwest and could detect, he thought, its fluorescent traffic guide lines. He hurried on down.

He was nearing the highway and could hear the rush of passing freighters when he spotted a light ahead. He approached it cautiously, determined that it was neither vehicle nor farm house. Closer approach showed it to be a small open fire, visible from uphill but shielded from the highway by a shoulder of limestone. A man was squatting over it, stirring the contents of a can resting on rocks over the fire.

Max crept nearer until he was looking down into the hobo jungle. He got a whiff of the stew and his mouth watered. Caught between hunger and a hill-man’s ingrown distrust of “foreigners,” he lay still and stared. Presently, the man set the can off the fire and called out, “Well, don’t hide there! Come on down.”

Max was too startled to answer. The man added, “Come on down into the light. I won’t fetch it up to you.”

Max got to his feet and shuffled down into the circle of firelight. The man looked up. “Howdy. Draw up a chair.”

“Howdy.” Max sat down across the fire from the tramp. He was not even as well dressed as Max and he needed a shave. Nevertheless, he wore his rags with a jaunty air and handled himself with a sparrow’s cockiness.

The man continued to stir the mess in the can then spooned out a sample, blew on it, and tasted it. “About right,” he announced. “Four-day mulligan, just getting ripe. Find yourself a dish.” He got up and picked over a pile of smaller cans behind him, selected one. Max hesitated, then did the same, settling on one that had once contained coffee and appeared not to have been used since. His host served him a liberal portion of stew, then handed him a spoon. Max looked at it.

“If you don’t trust the last man who used it,” the man said reasonably, “hold it in the fire, then wipe it. Me, I don’t worry. If a bug bites me, he dies horribly.” Max took the advice, holding the spoon in the flames until the handle became too hot, then wiped it on his shirt.

The stew was good and his hunger made it superlative. The gravy was thick, there were vegetables and unidentified meat. Max didn’t bother his head about the pedigrees of the materials; he simply enjoyed it. After a while his host said, “Seconds?”

“Huh? Sure. Thanks!”

The second can of stew filled him up and spread through his tissues a warm glow of well-being. He stretched lazily, enjoying his fatigue. “Feel better?” the man asked.

“Gee, yes. Thanks.”

“By the way, you can call me Sam.”

“Oh, my name is Max.”

“Glad to know you, Max.”

Max waited before raising a point that had been bothering him. “Uh, Sam? How did you know I was there? Did you hear me?”

Sam grinned. “No. But you were silhouetted against the sky. Don’t ever do that, lad, or it may be the last thing you do.”

Max twisted around and looked up at where he had lurked. Sure enough, Sam was right. He’d be dogged!

Sam added, “Traveled far?”

“Huh? Yeah, quite a piece.”

“Going far?”

“Uh, pretty far, I guess.”

Sam waited, then said, “Think your folks’ll miss you?”

“Huh? How did you know?”

“That you had run away from home? Well, you have, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have.”

“You looked beat when you dragged in here. Maybe it’s not too late to kill the goose before your bridges are burned. Think about it, kid. It’s rough on the road. I know.”

“Go back? I won’t ever go back!”

“As bad as that?”

Max stared into the fire. He needed badly to get his thoughts straight, even if it meant telling a foreigner his private affairs—and this soft-spoken stranger was easy to talk to. “See here, Sam, did you ever have a stepmother?”

“Eh? Can’t remember that I ever had any. The Central Jersey Development Center for State Children used to kiss me good night.”

“Oh.” Max blurted out his story with an occasional sympathetic question from Sam to straighten out its confusion. “So I lit out,” he concluded. “There wasn’t anything else to do. Was there?”

Sam pursed his lips. “I reckon not. This double stepfather of yours—he sounds like a mouse studying to be a rat. You’re well shut of him.”

“You don’t think they’ll try to find me and haul me back, do you?”

Sam stopped to put a piece of wood on the fire. “I am not sure about that.”

“Huh? Why not? I’m no use to him. He doesn’t like me. And Maw won’t care, not really. She may whine a bit, but she won’t turn her hand.”

“Well, there’s the farm.”

“The farm? I don’t care about that, not with Dad gone. Truthfully, it ain’t much. You break your back trying to make a crop. If the Food Conservation Act hadn’t forbidden owners to let farm land fall out of use, Dad would have quit farming long ago. It would take something like this government condemnation to make it possible to find anybody to take it off your hands.”

“That’s what I mean. This joker got your mother to sell it. Now my brand of law may not be much good, but it looks as if that money ought to come to you.”

“What? Oh, I don’t care about the money. I just want to get away from them.”

“Don’t talk that way about money; the powers-that-be will have you shut up for blasphemy. But it probably doesn’t matter how you feel, as I think Citizen Montgomery is going to want to see you awful bad.”

“Why?”

“Did your father leave a will?”

“No. Why? He didn’t have anything to leave but the farm.”

“I don’t know the ins and outs of your state laws, but it’s a sure thing that at least half of that farm belongs to you. Possibly your stepmother has only lifetime tenure in her half, with reversion to you when she dies. But it’s a certainty that she can’t grant a good deed without your signature. Along about time your county courthouse opens up tomorrow morning, the buyers are going to find that out. Then they’ll come high-tailing up, looking for her—and you. And ten minutes later this Montgomery hombre will start looking for you, if he hasn’t already.”

“Oh, me! If they find me, can they make me go back?”

“Don’t let them find you. You’ve made a good start.”

Max picked up his rucksack. “I guess I had better get moving. Thanks a lot, Sam. Maybe I can help you someday.”

“Sit down.”

“Look, I had better get as far away as I can.”

“Kid, you’re tired out and your judgment has slipped. How far can you walk tonight, the shape you’re in? Tomorrow morning, bright and early, well go down to the highway, follow it about a mile to the freighters’ restaurant south of here and catch the haulers as they come out from breakfast, feeling good. We’ll promote a ride and you’ll go farther in ten minutes than you could make all night.”

Max had to admit that he was tired, exhausted really, and Sam certainly knew more about these wrinkles than he did. Sam added, “Got a blanket in your bindle?”

“No. Just a shirt…and some books.”

“Books, eh? Read quite a bit myself, when I get a chance. May I see them?”

Somewhat reluctantly, Max got them out. Sam held them close to the fire and examined them. “Well, I’ll be a three-eyed Martian! Kid, do you know what you’ve got here?”

“Sure.”