“On th’ lam, hunh?” I folded up my nonfunctioning .45 in its tackle, made sure the .375 in my pocket wasn’t pointin’ at anything I wasn’t willin’ t’lose, an’ ushered .the Freenies out the front door, Win lockin’ up behind us.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I get the feeling somehow that he might have been in politics, except that he feels like an excop, and I should recognize the symptoms. Something really horrible seems to have happened to him back in the States, and he won’t talk much about his past. Mysterious.”
I snorted. “After this, I ain’t gonna talk about my past anymore. Nobody back home’d believe it—say, where we goin’?”
We’d walked along the springy-surfaced driveway to the street. I was about t’step down onto its golf-green paving when Win did an abrupt left-face, grabbin’ me by the sleeve, tnakin’ me stumble over the Freenies.
“You don’t want to go out there,” said the detective.
I pointed helplessly toward the hacienda directly across from us. “Why in Ochskahrt’s name not?”
MM MM Mmmmmm!
Somethin’ vaguely mechanical blurred past at about two hundred klicks an hour, another cornin’ along the other way the very next instant.
I think they were hovercraft.
“I get th’ point!” I told him, tryin’ t’stop shakin’ as I followed along the rubber sidewalk toward the comer.
“Nobody quite believes Will Sanders, either.” Win continued our previous conversation. “He stayed with Clarissa and me the first couple weeks he was here, and one night, in his cups—he was in pretty rough condition at the time— he claimed to be the only person ever to make it to the Confederacy without benefit of the Probability Broach.”
“Besides me.”
“Besides nobody—this ‘spatiotemporal displacement,’ you say it’s accompanied by a bluish flash?” I nodded, following him into what looked for all the world like a roadside bus-stop. We rode an escalator down. “Obviously, a variation on the P’wheet-Thorens Broach. But Will’s story is that he became so miserable Stateside, he began daydreaming, visualizing a society personally ideal to him until it became more real, in every detail, than the world he lived in—and he was here!" The investigator shook his close-cropped head. “For all he knows, his body’s still over there, curled up in the corner of a padded cell, sucking its thumb.”
The stairs carried us into a brightly-lit arcade lined with shops an’ stands, past yet another flight leadin’ further downward. There was scaffoldin’ an’ big sheetsa hangin’ polyethylene. “They buildin’ a subway down there or somethin’?”
We both looked over a little kiosk in the middle of the mall—roach-clips, hash-pipes, cokespoons, cigarette lighters, an’ snuff-boxes. “Or something—they’re digging below the subway for the new Interworld Terminal. Somebody there’ll be regular commercial traffic between here and the States.”
Glancin’ at the display, I said, “Gonna be a helluva surprise t’Phyliis Schlafley an’ the DEA!” I could see it now: some kinda floodlighted archway with the iegend "Abandon Sanity, All Ye Who Enter."
Win bought a bottle from a vending machine. The Freenies an’ I rode with him across the underground shoppin’ center an’ up to the other side of the street. I’d been thinkin’: “Naturally,” I said t’Win’s broad back as we exited at ground level, “Sanders’ pipe-dreams included a paira beautiful chicks t’make life interestin’.”
He turned. “Those women are his life, Bemie. Like Bronco Billy of yore, he’s who he wants to be, and whatever that is, he’s certainly paid the price.”
A brief hike found us at a twelve-foot hole in an adobe fortress with enormous oaken doors. 623 Genet Place. The passageway opened on a jungled courtyard. Mary-Elizabeth Sanders met us by the pool.
“Win!” She grabbed the gumshoe by his prominent ears an’ kissed him on the nose. Easy t’do, since she was a couple inches taller’n he was.
He reddened. “Awww...”
Mary-Beth was somethin’. Smoooooth, about thirty, shoulder-length curly hair that mighta been describable as “mousey-brown” on anybody else. She was slender, long-legged, with slim, capable hands an’ sea-green eyes. She wore a clingy, coppery little somethin’ that went down to her ankles an’ seemed t’evaporate here an’ there just for effect—that, an’ a perpetual kinda secret smile.
I shook her hand, blood suddenly poundin’ in m’veins, watched her get acquainted with Larry, Moe, an’ Curly, then straighten back t’five-foot-nine an’ park us at the table, askin’ about drinks.
Win remembered.the wine. “August,” he offered, “a very good month.”
She crinkled prettily around the eyes an’ went for a corkscrew. Win peeled back the foil an’ started on the wirin’. “Shit!” He shook his hand.
“Trouble?” The Freenies trundled up concernedly.
“I’ve got this little mole here”—he pointed between his left ring-finger and pinky—“that gets in the way a lot. Been meaning to get Clarissa to take it off. She’s a doctor— Healer, they say here—did I mention that?”
“I got the impression. Want me t’do that?”
“Thanks, Bernie. I’ll go dig up Will. Should be in his shop.”
I fumbled with the Burgundy, wishing the past few days’d scoured less hide offa my hands. Suddenly, Color whipped the bottle outa my fingers impatiently an’ wormed a little green tentacle neatly into the cork. There was a squeak, a pop!, an’ a hissss as th’ sparklin’ wine began t’exhale. “’Least I know somethin' you little clowns’re good for.” “Wow! I couldn’t have done that better myself!”
I started at the silvery voice behind me an’ turned— jumpin’ up in abrupt politeness. A small lithe figure was cornin’ across the patio-tile, her dark brown eyes an’ tip-tilted nose just visible in the lowerin’ dusk.
“I’m Fran—you're Bernie. Introduce me to your colorful associates.” She was maybe four or five years younger’n her sister, five or six inches shorter, with waist-length bu-tery-blond hair. Where Mary-Beth ran t’sinusoidals, Frances Melanie (nee Kendall) Sanders was almost boyish—in a manner stimulatin’ nothin' but pruriently heterosexual thoughts. Careful, Bernard, ’least till y’findouthow straight this Sanders fella can shoot!
I bowed theatrically t’cover nervousness an’ a multitude of other sins. “These here are Color, Charm, an’ Spin ... they’re aliens,” i finished, realizin’ as I did it how stupid that sounded. “What d’you do?”
“I teach Intuitive Mechanics at Laporte University, Limited.”
“Gotcha—what’s ‘Intuitive Mechanics’?” I started peelin’ a cigar, almost offered her one, but caught m’self just in time.
“That’s a discipline sort of overlapping psychology, philosophy, and mechanical engineering,” she explained. “During the War Against the Czar, somebody in Alaska noticed that the Eskimos seem inherently inclined toward engine-repair and so on, without any cultural background to account for it easily.”
“Kenyans an’ bush-flyin’.” I nodded, tryin’ t’redeem m’reputation for intelligent communication. If all Confederate women were like this, I was gonna be in a messa trouble with m’best gal Georgie.
“Exactly. Well, they found the explanation in the Eskimo attitude toward sculpture...”
“Right! There’s an animal locked up inside that rock somewhere—just cut off everything that don’t look like a walrus!”
She laughed. “Now we’ve got it down to a science, sort of—at least to a constellation of aesthetic values we can teach to almost anyone who wants to learn.”
“Bravo!” I lit my cigar. “And what do y’do in your spare time?”
“Design, build, and race sport-hovercraft with my sister and husband. Mary-Beth’s the hot pilot in the family, although she isn’t a Kenyan. We won the Greenland Invitational last year. What do you do, Bernie?”
I felt around for signs of dizziness, then said, “I’m a time-traveler.”
“Isn’t everybody, these days?”
/>
My aplomb got salvaged by three figures emergin’ through tropical foliage at the rear of the patio. Win, Mary-Beth, an’ a sizable stocky fella in epauletted khaki, exclaiming, “It’s darker than a tax-collector’s soul out here! How about some photons?”
Everybody chuckled, as if at a family joke.
Fran responded suddenly by whipping a pistol-shape from the holster on the left thigh of her maroon velvet coveralls. Goddamn gun, I thought fleetingly, was almost as big as she—
Ssssspakkk!
Whirlin’ on her toes, hair flyin’, she’d aimed at a corner of the courtyard. A pinpoint of hell-fire leapt across to a Hawaiian torch planted between a pair of mimosas. The wick caught.
Ssspakk! Sspak!
On an’ on she fired, pirouetting gracefully till a good half-dozen decorative flames softly illuminated the night. I looked up from where I was cowerin’—in spirit if not in th’ flesh—under the table with the Freenies. No one else’d flinched, not even when a white-hot bolt’d crisped its way between Win an’ our host.
“Plasma gun,” the dangerous little southpaw chimed, slapping it back in its scabbard. “Lawrence Shiva, the first off the line. Pretty neat, hunh?”
“Ummh—what woulda happened if you’d missed?”
“At this setting?” She grinned. “Probably have burned right through the house. But I never miss.”
“I believe it! I believe it!”
“You’d better,” Win suggested. “Bernie, this is Will Sanders. Will, meet Captain Bernard M. Gruenblum and the Ganymedian delegates.”
“Sounds like a rock-band.” Sanders offered a firm good-natured handclasp. “Hope you like barbecued unicorn— we’ve enough of it for my militia company. Beth, we’re too late with the corkscrew, honey. Want some Burgundy?”
The only thing not neighborly and expansive about Will Sanders was his eyes. They were haunted. Found m’self wonderin’ what they’d been like before he’d spent five years in his personal idea of Paradise.
I noticed with surprise that insteada the ubiquitous gun, he wore a slim, deadly-lookin’ eighteen-inch blade gleamin’ on each hip, with a hand-fillin’ grip an’ double guards. As he sat, he laid ’em on the table. Tryin’ not t’think too psychoanalytically, I asked about the weapons.
“These?” The gunsmith musta read m’mind; he glanced at both his women an’ winked. “As Sigmund Freud once observed, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Actually, I’ve a number of pet handguns—hazard of the profession—but occasionally I like carrying raw steel to remind myself of an important lesson.”
“So?” Win seemed interested, too.
“Sure. The blade’s an extension of the hand, the agent— no pun intended—of my will. Most people understand this immediately of edged weapons, granting them—not altogether inappropriately—a mystique which properly is due the man behind them.
“The trick—and few are subtle or sophisticated enough to master it—is to see that this is equally true of the gun. By implication, of all machines.”
“Don’t seem that mysterious t’me, Cap’n.”
“Then you’re an exception, friend. And fortunate, because inherent in this iesson’ is the end, not only to common pistolphobia, but to neo-Luddism and every other idiot yearning for the good old days—in short, to savagery. It’s the beginning of civilization.”
I shook my head. “I’d hate t’trust m’life to a paira shish-kebab skewers. Gimme a roscoe any time—th’ pen ain’t the only thing mightier’n the sword.”
Win laughed. “You haven’t seen him work out with these things—inside of five yards, you’re better off surrendering, roscoe or not!”
With a little alien “help” I eventually explained my current predicament to Sanders, on the theory—Win’s—that Will’s volunteer hooligans mighta seen somethin’ of Georgie on one of their outings.
“I’ve already put out several other lines of inquiry,” the detective added. “Olongo’s office; Nahuatl in Cheyenne; I thought you—”
“Sorry, Win.” Dinner finished, an’ the dishes cleared into a table-slot leadin’ god-knows-where; the ’smith had my .45 in little pieces, his junior wife kibitzin’ over his shoulder. Mary-Beth poured coffee, not excludin’ the Freenies, an’ joined the investigator an’ me in a little nicotine poisonin’.
“Today’s militia business,” Will growled, “was all indoors. Some goddamned fool from Baltimore’s traveling from company to company soliciting for an aircraft carrier. Submersible!”
“The aircraft or the carrier?” Win asked.
“Both. Which reminds me, are you still shuttling back and forth to Pentagonland, playing James Bond?”
Win drew on his cigar. “Someday our homeworld’s going to be liberated.”
“It’s a Free System,” the gunsmith replied. “I don’t know why you bother. The right wing’s only interested in making people miserable—for their own good! You take a little guy in a raincoat whose only touch of human warmth is pornography or prostitution: what kind of creep would deny him even that?
“And the left? How they love to be losers, as long as it’s romantically. Win, you can’t sell laissez-faire on the basis of its successes—there’s no romance in that. Nor can you defeat collectivism on its record of failures, numerous though they may be. Hell, by listing them, you just make it all that much more attractive! You’re wasting your time.” He looked at Fran an’ Mary-Beth; the temperature seemed t’rise ten degrees. “I’m happy here, and I don’t give a microscopic damn whether I ever see the United States of America-with-a-K again, or anybody in it!”
He looked down, brooding into his pipe, and that haunted look came over him.
Which is where we’d started comparin’ Presidents an’ found out life’s more complicated than any of us’d imagined.
“Politicians!’’ Mary-Beth said with sudden vehemence. She’d turned out t’be a consulting ethicist, somewhere halfway between a judge an’ a pshrink, with a little rabbi thrown in for good measure. Shrewd, calm, an’ deep, she had a quick wit an’ a subtle sense of humor. This outburst seemed uncharacteristic.
She slapped the plain, no-nonsense .4I Whitney automatic at her waist. “Who cares, anyway? The only reason I know who’s President here is that he’s a friend of Win’s!” Fran grinned an’ nodded vigorously. Will smiled an’ turned his attention back to the Colt, the invisible bands of family so strong between the three of them it could be felt. Guess I’d hafta do m’poachin’ elsewhere.
“It’s important to everyone, in some ways,” Win answered a bit defensively. “Look at Gallatin: here, he was a President, leader of the Whiskey Rebellion. Where Will and Bernie and I come from, he was only Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of—”
“What?" I quacked.
“—the Treasury.”
“MuSta held their Cabinet meetin’s with little tin horns an’ floatin’—”
Mary-Beth blinked. “What are you trying to say, Captain Gruenblum?”
“That’s Bernie—an’ I’m try in’ t’say that my Rebellion wound up in a duel b’tween Washington an’ Gallatin. Albert lost, which is why they’d need a seance—you know, where ‘she who levitates is host’?”
“In my Whiskey Rebellion,” supplied Sanders, “Gallatin didn’t figure at all, except to calm down the rebellious Pennsylvanians.”
“Same here,” said Win.
“It’s a weird universe,” Fran added. “What’s that little spring right there for, sweetheart?”
“You can say that again,” I mumbled.
“Okay—what’s that little spring right there for, sweetWe were late gettin’ back. Will’d taken us downstairs. I’d expected t’do a lotta standin’ around while he “sputter-lathed” metal back onto my pitted firin’ pin. In fact, it took a whole three minutes. Then he insisted on impregnatin’ the surface of every part with chromium, imply in’ nastily that it might make up for my slovenly habits regardin’ corrosion. When he’d finished, the old Colt looked like stainless.
He test-fired it through a porthole into a tunnel under the patio. A camera at the other end showed a neat cloverleaf of bullet-holes in the plastic target.
“Okay, Doc, whaddo I owe ya?” I reached into my pocket. “For a friend of the guy who grub-staked me?” He fingered one of the empty hulls lyin’ on the bench beside the firin’ aperture. “Tell you what: these aren’t normal .45 cartridges, are they? I’d like a live one for my collection.” I polished battered nails on m’uniform shoulder. “.45I Detonics Magnum, a late twentieth-century retrofit. ’Bout three times the power of the original. Notice the custom eight-shot magazines? You’re welcome to as many rounds as pleases you.”
“One’ll do fine, thanks—you’re going to need the rest, the way it sounds.”
More Confederate glad-handery. I pondered that an’ lotsa other things as Win an’ I trudged home: Fran’s energetic enthusiasm—and her satiny skin. Mary-Beth’s well-oiled intelligence—and her willowy body. The philosophical absolutism—and whatever else—they shared with their husband. Musta been thinkin’ out loud by the time I got to: “Wonder what they do in the sack?”
Win chuckled. “You’ll never know, Bemie, nor will anyone else. They lead a very private life, those three. That’s the Confederacy in a nutshell: outgoing and introverted all at once. There’s a Tibetan lady in Clarissa’s bridge club with five husbands.”
“Sure,” I answered absently, “one too many for pinochle.”
In the Underground he showed me how t’send Olongo’s .375 back via a pneumatic “Bellamy Tube,” suggestin’ I include a .45 Magnum cartridge for the President's collection. I popped a round into the padded capsule, startin’ t’feel like the Lone Ranger. On the way out, we passed a drugstore advertisin’ heroin, LSD-25, cocaine, an’ Laetrile, two for the price of one—in platinum, gold, silver, an’ copper coinage... an’ plutonium certificates. I could see this freedom jazz was gonna take more gettin’ used to than I likely had in me.