Fantasy & Science Fiction – October 1973
(1973)*
Randall Garrett
The hiss and glare of the infrabeam, cutting through the moonlit darkness a few centimeters from my head, would have made me jerk aside if I hadn't been ready for it. The beam cut into an evergreen four meters behind me; the dark exploded off in a gout of steam and flame, filling the air with a heady, spicy gust of partially burnt, partially vaporized resin from the Monterey pine that the beam had slashed.
I stayed motionless behind my rock, wishing to hell I were somewhere else. My left cheek was warm and tingling from the side radiation of the beam.
If you've never seen any infrared laser beam more powerful than an ordinary handgun, you may be wondering about that flash of light and heat. IR is invisible and inaudible, as any fool knows. Sure. But what the fools don't take into account is that an infrared laser beam of sufficient power to cut through trees and melt stone throws out a devil of a lot more energy than a handgun.
A handgun can kill a man because the IR radiation, in a beam eight millimeters in diameter, chars the surface and cooks the flesh to a depth of better than twenty centimeters. But that doesn't take much power.
The beast that was firing at me was a semiportable projector, massing better than a hundred kilos, with all kinds of power behind it. The infrared coming out of the damned thing had enough joules pushing it to heat the air in its path to instant visibility.
And unless the men operating that semiportable had floaters on it—an unlikely possibility—they weren't going to be able to move it too quickly.
In the sudden darkness that followed the glare of the beam, I rolled away from my boulder to a clump of smaller rocks some four meters away. I just barely made it. The semiportable hissed and glared again, superheating the air and blazing off the boulder I had just deserted, splashing molten minerals all over the place. The rock cracked violently from the internal stresses caused by the sudden influx of unbearable heat.
The glare died, leaving only a floating fingernail of moon to illuminate the brush-filled landscape.
I rolled again. A second semiportable opened up almost immediately from a position some fifteen meters to the left of the first, slapping that boulder with another dose of high-energy heat radiation. They had had me spotted all right.
When the incandescence died, I rolled farther away. No need to be quiet; the rustling of my movements was drowned out by the splitting of breaking rock and the crackling of burning wood. It was a good thing that this was January and the rains had soaked the area; otherwise, Mission Canyon would soon be in a blaze that would threaten Santa Barbara and points south—maybe all the way to Los Angeles if those semi portables had kept smashing away in a summer forest Los Padres National Forest was noted for its ability to blaze up dangerously if the season was right But the chuckleheads behind those heavy-duty lasers had thwarted themselves. They'd spotted me with an infrared detector and had then proceeded to make enough high-temperature radiation centers in the neighborhood to drown out my feeble output completely.
Yo, ho, ho. I lobbed half my grenades and my communicator over behind the boulder they were firing at the communicator had a two-second time switch on it, and when it landed behind that nearly red-hot rock, it began screaming for help.
Of course, their own communicators picked it up, and this time, not one or two, but three semiportables hit it as one.
The boulder dissolved in a hellish splash of lava, and the grenades went off with a tremendous roar.
I felt the detonation, but I didn't see it; by that time I was rolling down a forty-five degree slope toward the bottom of the shallow gulch nearby, putting plenty of earth and rock between myself and the explosion. Even so, the supersonic vibrations of the shock wave from the polarized detonate was enough to addle my brain for a few seconds, and it must have really jarred my opponents.
The cold shock of the water running through the bottom of the ravine brought me out of my daze with a snap. Water at five degrees Celsius is not too comfortable as a bath, even if only your face and hands get it. The thermal watetproof coverall I was wearing protected the rest of my body.
I pushed myself erect and started slogging down the bed of Mission Creek toward Santa Barbara. I hadn't left any footprints getting away from my boulder, and I didn't intend to leave any now. The rocky bottom of Mission Creek was difficult to navigate, but I wouldn't have left much trace on it if it had been dry,' and the icy water would wash away anything I left behind now.
I must have walked a full half kilometer before I began to feel the bruises that my roll down that rocky slope had imprinted on my body, but by the time I had precariously navigated the two-plus kilometers to where my own car was parked, I felt as though someone had massaged me, far from gently, with a couple of one-kolo single-jack hammers.
My car was still parked where I'd left it, on Foothill Road near the Mission. It didn't look as though it had been disturbed or even noticed, but I got out my instrument pack and stayed in the shadows while I checked for a trap, while the fingernail moon slowly settled toward the horizon.
The car they had traced me by was one I had stolen on San Roque Road earlier in the evening. I'd driven it up the old Lauro Canyon Road toward South Portal and abandoned it to give them a clue. Clues leading up the canyon, I needed; clues leading back down, I didn't.
Everything seemed clear. I moved quietly, keeping in the'' shadows of the now moonless night. The air was chilly, and a fog was blowing in, bringing with it the aroma of the Pacific coast—salt and dead sea-things from the; beach.
I spent fifteen minutes circling in on the car, watching my instruments all the way except when I was eyeballing the terrain. Nothing. Safe as a stasis field.
Finally, I casually opened the door, climbed in, and hit the firing switch. Within five seconds, I had plenty of steam pressure; I eased her into gear and moved out. Nothing moved; nothing stirred;! nothing showed on my detectors. I was off and away. I headed west toward U,S. Freeway 101.
When I came to the on-ramp. I turned on the autoguide and let the Freeway Computer take over the control of the car. The FC took hold, and the car began moving north at a tightly controlled hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour.
I moved over to the right-hand seat and started shucking my coveralls. They had been damned useful out in the cold, wet woods, but they might look freaky elsewhere—like an Eskimo in parka and mukluks strolling into an expensive Virgin Islands hotel.
I put on a comfortable, conservative, royal blue tunic-and-kilt business suit, turned on the TV to a music program, leaned back and went to sleep. I felt that I deserved it.
"... AND NOW THE NEWS! A SPECIAL BULLETIN FROM SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, ISSUED BY THE ..."
The voice woke me up. I turned down the volume a little. A glance at the trip indicator told me I was well past Paso Robles, which meant I'd been napping more than an hour.
The voice of the newscaster continued in a more subdued tone.
"... o'clock this evening in a stolen car which was spotted by alert Santa Barbara police. For the past two days, this California town has been the center of an intensive search by U.N. Special Forces, with the aid of Federal, state, and local police, trying to locate and apprehend the alien being who stepped out of the first interstellar ship to return to Earth just five days ago."
Apprehend! Ferddrech! They wanted to kill me, pure and simple.
"The alien fled into the forest just south of the Santa Ynez mountains. After abandoning his car, he kept going on foot, but he was finally surrounded. He was ordered to surrender, but he fired back and was killed during the fire fight that ensued."
The newsman's face was replaced by a shot of the landing pad at Vandenberg Spaceport, where the pinnace from the Neil Armstrong was still standing where I'd set it down five days before.
"When the alien stepped out of the landing craft, it apparently used some sort of device to jam the electronic circuits in the television cameras, and so there is no record of what it looked like. Even eyewitness accounts of its appearance vary so widely that no description of the alien is possible."
I got a small chuckle out of that line. I had been wondering what excuse they'd give for not even looking at me when I came out of the hatch.
"Official sources," the newsie blithered on, "state that at this time it is impossible to determine the exact location of the Neil Armstrong. It did not go into an Earth orbit when the pinnace dropped from it, and the satellite tracking stations can get no fix. One high official has expressed doubt that the interstellar ship from which the pinnace was launched was actually the Neil Armstrong, strongly suggesting that it might be an alien ship."
The rest of the newscast was the usual blah, but I watched it because I hadn't yet picked up all the little nuances in the differences between this world and the one I had left. Five days is not quite long enough for that much reorientation, even with an expanded mind.
When the newscast was over, I relaxed and went back to sleep.
-
The alarm roared in my ears, snapping me out of sleep almost instantly. I started to slap the cutout plate, then stopped. I wanted to hear the warning. Ahead, a hologram sign told me that I was approaching the Silver Avenue turnoff, which was the one I had programmed for. I was headed into the southern part of San Francisco.
The warning came. The speaker said: "Warning One. You are approaching Silver Avenue, your programmed departure point from Speedway One Oh One. If you wish to reprogram, you have one minute from the signal tone. If net, you will be prepared to take manual control three minutes after the signal tone. PING!"
I slapped the cutout plate just to show the computer that I was awake and functioning. No need to wait for Warning Two, which would tell me that if I didn't take over manual control when the signal came, I would be detoured into a detention lot, where a cop would give me a ticket for ignoring the warning.
I drove around until I spotted a phone kiosk. I parked the car and walked back to the kiosk. I fed the phone a couple of coins, punched the information number and waited for the light signal on the screen. When it came, I punched for" "Dominguez" with the hope that the man I was looking for wasn't dead or simply gone from the area.
The list appeared on the screen. I looked for "Richard Heinrich" and found it. Had to be the same man; not many people named Dominguez with a pair of front handles like that. The phone number had changed, but the house address was the same.
I got my coins back, put them in again and punched the number—-and put my hand over the vision pickup.
A voice said, "Dominguez residence." I recognized the voice. "Sorry," I said. "Wrong number." I cut off and went back to my car.
Ten minutes' driving took me to the house on Folsom, on the south side of Bernal Hill, a plush residential district.
I parked the car half a block away and looked at the house. There were lights on, and I could see signs of movement through the heavy translucent panes of the windows. It seemed right; Dr. Dominguez was still up and lively at oh four hundred.
Well, hell, you cain't lose nothin' by tryin'.
I climbed out of the car, locked it and marched resolutely to the door of the house. I touched the announcer plate. After a moment, the most luscious—in fact, the only—blonde I had seen in years came on the screen in the door.
"Yes?" she asked sweetly.
"Would you tell Dr. Dominguez that Edward Chang would like to speak to him? He knew my father."
"One moment, Mr. Chang, I'll see." The screen blanked.
When it came on again, I got my first temporal displacement shock. Dominguez was still tough and hard-looking, and his eyes still had that sardonically humorous sparkle, but the lines in his face were more numerous and etched more deeply, and his handlebar mustache was gray. So were his sideburns. His eyes widened a trifle as he saw my face. "Edward Chang?"
"Yes, sir," I said. "I understand you knew my father."
"You're Terry Chang's kid?" The smile came back to his eyes.
"Yes, sir."
"I'd have known," he said. "You're an absolute replica of Terry. Come on in."
The door clicked softly and swung open. I entered a short hallway which was decorated by the blonde I had seen on the screen. ."Mr. Chang, come in," she said.
I had taken four paces forward when the voice behind me said, "Hold it, Mr. Chang. Don't move." I came to a neat military halt and clasped my hands behind my head.
"You have a nice voice, ma'am," I told the woman behind me. "I'll be real happy to obey any order you give."
"Did you notice that, Dorothy?" the voice said, ignoring me.
The blonde nodded curtly. "He began to come to a halt and raise his hands a fraction of a second before you spoke."
"Shucks, ma'am," I said, "that panel doesn't make much noise, but I heard it open."
"Interesting," said the voice. "Search him, Dorothy." Then, as the blonde came toward me, the voice added: "If you give Dorothy any trouble whatever, Mr. Chang, I will shoot you."
Dorothy began checking my clothing and body thoroughly. By the time she was through, she had checked every place a human being could carry anything larger than a pen.
"He's clean, Clara," she said.
"Clara," I said, "you can put away the stun pistol now."
"What makes you think I couldn't have blasted you dead?" said the cool Clara.
I turned slowly around to face her. The stun pistol was at her side, not pointing at me. One does not traditionally expect stunning blue-eyed redheads to be cool and calm, but this one was.
"Because you don't sound or look stupid enough to allow Dorothy to get that near the target of a deadly weapon, and she doesn't sound or look stupid enough to risk it," I said.
She grinned suddenly. "All right, let's go up and see the doctor."
We went out of the corridor, turned right and went up a flight of stairs, single file all the way. Dorothy opened a door and stood aside. I walked on into Dominguez' study.
"Mr. Chang, Doctor," Clara said. "He's clean."
Dominguez, sitting behind eighteen square feet of jet-black desk top, grinned up at me, but his words were for Clara. "If he shares anything with his father besides an almost identical face, I wouldn't bet on that. Terrance Chang could conceal an umbrella in his umbilicus." Then, to me: "Are you clean, boy?"
"I believe you." To the girls: "Leave us, my ladies, we have things to mutter over, I think."
"But—" was all Clara got out.
"Go, mi palomacita." he said gently, "and stand not upon the ceremony of thy going, but go."
They went.
...
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